Video Games

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 9:34 pm

The sequel to Analogue: A Hate Story is out.
http://hateplus.com/

Ed · Post by Ed » Sat Sep 07, 2013 9:42 pm

Even if you really, really liked Analogue, I'd suggest waiting for a sale. I bought it day-of (and then ran headlong into "wasn't tested on Mac" problems and some not-awesome technical support) and finished it two days later--you can only play so much in a 12-hour period before it shuts you off, which was a neat mechanic, but the game, such as it is, isn't nearly as good as the first. The character writing is good, but the thematic work and the plot are teetering on incoherent and there are some attempted player-punch moments that end up just coming off as authorial capriciousness.

Big fan of Love's work, and if you liked Digital and Analogue it is probably still worth your time, but this is her weakest game to date.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 9:57 pm

Thanks for the tip, I wasn't sure whether to go for it and now I'll probably wait.

... There's an LP on SomethingAwful right now, maybe I'll just check that out instead.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... id=3566929

Ed · Post by Ed » Sat Sep 07, 2013 10:17 pm

There aren't really any meaningful choices this time around. An LP probably isn't a bad idea.

rampaging-poet · Post by **rampaging-poet** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 6:34 pm

I just got invaded for the first time in Dark Souls. I was farming rats and slimes in The Depths just after kindling the bonfire and couldn't rest at the bonfire when I got back. Unfortunately I never saw the invader. After walking back up to the entrance, down to the merchant, and finally to the boss, I still hadn't found him. I ended up disconnecting on him. Any idea where he could have been hiding?

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 12:20 am

Did you notice the name, by any chance?

There's an NPC invader named Kirk of Thorns who...will attack you three times in the game.

Otherwise? There's a lot of nooks and crannies there. He may have been around the butchers, he may have been in the castle-ish area overlooking the boss arena. He might have been around the Basilisks or up in the hallways.

I've had that happen in other parts. If anything, you could stay put in an area and wait for him to come find YOU. If it happens again, of course.

rampaging-poet · Post by **rampaging-poet** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 5:49 am

I didn't get a message telling me I was invaded, I just couldn't use the bonfire or leave the area. No name given. I didn't check by the basilisks, but I did check by the butchers near the entrance and I'd just come back from the part of the castle I didn't explicit check. Maybe he ended up there just after I left. I waited by the bonfire for a bit, but after looking around for about five or ten minutes we hadn't bumped into each other.

Internet research suggests the giant rat room is a popular PvP spot, but I didn't see him there when I passed. He might have been in the hallway outside it though - my giant rat is still alive. I'll definitely try waiting in a reasonably open area next time so I don't get boxed in when they find me.

icyshadowlord · Post by **icyshadowlord** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 6:59 am

Avoraciopoctules wrote:The sequel to Analogue: A Hate Story is out.
http://hateplus.com/

I never really understood the idea of the game, aside from "this society was a bunch of jerks, feel sorry for this girl". Anyone wanna enlighten me on it?

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 8:39 am

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Yeah, Embric is nice. Here's some more.

Exit Fate is a very good game with a fascinating custom battle system and suikoden-like wargame elements where you command armies of thousands.
http://site.scfworks.com/?page_id=10

Tales of the Drunken Paladin is a good game with some very interesting class designs and conversational scripting.
http://drunkenpaladin.com/

People have also used RPGmaker to make adventure games and platformers. Ogrebattle, are you interested in those?
Here's one: http://rpgmaker.net/games/4732/

Whoah, thanks! I had no idea you could do a platformer in RPG Maker!

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 9:19 pm

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/130 ... t?ref=live

Does this look like it will be any good?

Corsair114 · Post by **Corsair114** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 10:18 pm

Avoraciopoctules wrote:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/130 ... t?ref=live

Does this look like it will be any good?

They've certainly got an impressive collective resume. It'll be pretty, for sure. I think it's way too early to say whether or not it'll be good, though it's certainly got potential.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Sep 10, 2013 12:56 am

OgreBattle wrote: Whoah, thanks! I had no idea you could do a platformer in RPG Maker!

Not just with the basic tools available, you can't, however it does let you do advanced scripting with... Ruby or Perl or some other shiny stone. So by using the simple "make an animation in an easy layout, assign stats to things, set triggers" options of the RPGMaker Engine, you can make the process easier than making an entire game just in that language, but the actual "making it a platformer" is done using the scripting language.

So it's a herculean task, and I take my hat off to them for doing so.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Tue Sep 10, 2013 1:11 am

Now I'm feeling kinda curious just how much of that stuff can be found open-source. I've never gone further than NWN modules and intro HTML classes at university, so real coding is still an ominous unknown to me. But it would be nice to use something like one of the alternative battle engines I've seen in various RPGmaker games.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Sep 10, 2013 1:16 am

Yeah, I'd like to do a tactical battle map thing, but the ability to make it whole-cloth completely eludes me. I tried using a tactical-module for Ren'py (a dating sim engine, again with great flexibility if you're comfortable with the programming language of, in this case, Python), but that did not work. Seriously, how can you have a thing about dating Juiblex without having to obliterate the minions of your rival Orcus?

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Sep 10, 2013 9:44 am

At the point where you are using RPGMaker to make platformers/tactical battle engines/whatever, I honestly do not know what RPGmaker is doing for you. Handling menus? Handling input? Handling graphics? Those sound relatively minor compared to the task of doing the thing you just did, and you could probably just start from scratch using your preferred programming language and libraries and probably save time unless you are an RPGMaker pro or its scripting language is way more powerful than I'm giving it credit for.

Avoracio wrote:so real coding is still an ominous unknown to me.

Coding is like any other language - just because someone knows how to form syntactically correct statements it doesn't necessarily mean they will ever use them to write anything useful or coherent. Remember: the biggest obstacle to writing a novel isn't learning how to write or read. Also, like any other language, the overwhelming majority of things it is used to write are pointless trash or incomprehensible gibberish. And if you have lots of strong opinions about things, everything you read will piss you off and convince you whoever wrote it is, of course, a stupid twat. (Aside: the sensation of reading something stupid and finding out you wrote it years ago is pretty much exactly the same whatever language it's in.)

Was I trying to make a point? Oh, yeah. Software is about design. Code is just the set of instructions you give a binary monkey so he will do what you want him to. And sure, that is a frustrating and tedious task that frequently results in monkey shit everywhere unexpected complications, but big secret: it's not particularly hard, it's just a big ol' timesink. The hard part is deciding what the behavior of a complex system should be, and what set of instructions result in those behaviors, and those two problems are basically code-independent. If you can do the latter, you can almost certainly teach yourself to do the former and do it.

Koumei wrote:Seriously, how can you have a thing about dating Juiblex without having to obliterate the minions of your rival Orcus?

Clearly, there's something wrong with your taste. Demogorgon (left) > Orcus > Juiblex > Zuggtmoy > Graz'zt > Demogorgon (right). Yes, Demogorgon is both best and worst tier. No one ever said love was easy.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Tue Sep 10, 2013 12:37 pm

Speaking as a guy who is starting on a computer graphics course, graphics coding is made of pain and not having to do it is a perfectly good reason for just about anything. I mean, when doing graphics coding you have to actually care how long multiplication takes compared to addition instead of declaring that both of them are O(1) for a single operation.

Ed · Post by Ed » Tue Sep 10, 2013 6:02 pm

name_here wrote:Speaking as a guy who is starting on a computer graphics course, graphics coding is made of pain and not having to do it is a perfectly good reason for just about anything. I mean, when doing graphics coding you have to actually care how long multiplication takes compared to addition instead of declaring that both of them are O(1) for a single operation.

"Graphics programming" (though that's almost too broad to be talked about) is trivial at the level being discussed here. I knocked together an 'engine' with significantly more 2D flexibility than RPGMaker--the one I'll be using for my JRPG--in a weekend just by knowing a little bit about OpenGL. And I do mean a little bit. LodePNG, VBO, shader, done. I'm on the trailing edge of competent and it wasn't that hard. Setting up OpenAL for 2D positional audio was harder, though. I had to actually, like, do math. Not a lot of math, but more than zero.

Performance concerns do not exist with this level of game development, either, except on very downmarket mobile devices. If you target the iPhone 4S/iPad 2 and up (and similar Android devices) there's little you need to care about in terms of perf. My triangle budget, using relatively simple shaders like desaturation and color switching, is 30,000 for 60FPS. It's just not a problem.

I have never cared about the relative performance of multiplication and addition except in an embedded context using microprocessors older than I am.

icyshadowlord · Post by **icyshadowlord** » Wed Sep 11, 2013 1:13 pm

I wonder when Disgaea D2 is coming out in Europe. I'm still waiting for the third Blazblue game as well...

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu Sep 12, 2013 1:05 am

Disgaea D2 is out in Australia in a month or so, so it should already be out in the UK, and presumably "somewhere between the two times" for the rest of Europe.

On the programming stuff: the RPG event-coder (function scripting, basically) is pretty flexible, and it provides enough framework that you can wrap your head around the idea. I mean, I think I have an idea of how the tactical thing might work:

The player character is the select cursor, and every character on the map is an event with an icon of that character. You activate an event by "stepping on it" and pressing the action button, bringing up a set of choices. Move would just show a marker on squares in range, and you then select one and it sets the event to move there. After something moves/acts, it is set to "inactive". When you end the turn, the AI things all act, although giving them intelligence even approaching the hilariously abusable Disgaea one would be very hard. And then it sets your team to "active" again.

Victory/Defeat would basically come down to event triggers. Choosing Attack/Cast Spell/Whatever would bring up the combat screen and put both things on opposite sides, deal the damage/status effect/whatever, play the animation and then end the combat thing.

Whereas coding it from scratch I'd start with "???" and from there probably go to "Ah never mind, too hard".

Torchlight folks: new Synergies update. There is now a new area beyond Table Mountain, which has maps to level-100 versions of the normal areas (including "thank you for rescuing me, have 1700 fame and a magic item" people, and phase beasts, and heaps of locked chests and bittersprites), just in case you wanted to wail on level 100 goblins like it was 4th Ed D&D. Oh snap!

There are also quests, but they're currently boring "Go into icysnowland and kill 50 mirka slashers" type stuff, and there's a problem with the coding where you have to repeat quests (after completing the second quest but before cashing in, you have to complete the first one a second time. And so on. So you do them in the order of 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1... and properly complete them in the order of 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3...) But it's a start. Hopefully we'll get a proper new chapter and stuff.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Sep 14, 2013 11:07 pm

http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/3DS/Ace+ ... sp?c=44768

Nice, it looks like Ace Attorney 5 is getting an english release.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Sep 15, 2013 9:50 am

King of Fighters 13 got a Steam release, with various features for online play and so on, as well as the old DLC characters being unlocked right from the start. Not bad for $30, though honestly the characters look a bit... low-res. Fluid animation, just not very crisp sprites (compared to the backgrounds and such).

And their definition of Easy, when it comes to the final boss, is a lie. Make sure you don't kick your monitor in frustration, it's not an arcade cabinet.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 7:42 am

Final Fantasy XIV

Ed · Post by Ed » Tue Sep 17, 2013 1:57 am

That naked man does not know what an illithid is.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Tue Sep 17, 2013 2:10 am

The Illithid does not seem to have a much better handle on the situation.

Corsair114 · Post by **Corsair114** » Tue Sep 17, 2013 8:34 am

Rule 34 in 3....