Trying somethign out, folks.  If this works how I think it does, only you RSS people’ll see it atm.  Sorry for like wasting your time or something.  Feel free to leave super secret comments.  Oooooo secretive.

Seriously, though, I’ll end up editing this if I get it to work how I want it to.  <3  So don’t be leaving any “Travis smellz” or “Zone’s a twat” talk on here.  I’m not sure who would say that about Zone but I can see Nikki and Travis getting into some sort of bizarre insult fight.  I’m watching you two. -squints in your general direction before taking a pie to the face-

Okay, I’m gonna be honest and state I’m about to use this part of the site for what it really is:  a blog.  But before I do that, HP-related updates are as follows:

• I hope to have the next page ready by monday.  So far things are going well enough.  It’s a bit of a schedule crunch but at this rate I will start gaining gorund back to my former schedule of things, so that’s good.
• I’m redoing all the sprites for the RPG again.
• Considering how everything but the submenu is getting redone, and the submenu isn’t done in the first place (and is really sloppy), a part of me is reconsidering the entire fate of the RPG… again.
• I’ve been tinkering in XNA

That all out of the way, yes, still on a loaner tablet from LM, and at this point lacking Fireworks, my main export-slash-onomatopea tool.  So we’ll see how things go.  I do hope to get the next page up sometime on Monday. It might be a little late, but until you hear otherwise, assume it will be there!  I apologize for this dry spell.  If it makes anyone feel better, I did play with Matt Matter a bit instead of trying to finally go finish the last area or so of Kingdom Hearts, which I have put off for something like two years now.  :B

Now, then…. (more…)

Fun times ahead.  I’m raiding my old Game Maker projects for things that have been lost to the sands of internety time or just plain don’t work on Vista.  Bumper Ball may be gone forever, but I still have a few finished projects hanging around to flesh out the games page a touch.

The first game proper hitting you all in the face?  Draliens.

Title Screen

Exciting!  All that… lack of color there.

That is quickly rectified.

Game is simple.  Shoot aliens with lasers of their same color.  you start just dealing with red and green, but if you can survive long enough suddenly you’ll be dealing with four colors of madness, motherships, and all manner of power-ups (and downs) helping you slaughter the alien waves, all while trying your best not to obliterate Earth’s shields, allowing a massive wave of enemies to rain down.  Missing a foe results in the ground rising you closer and closer to the ceiling, giving you less time to react and putting you at more risk of being raised beyond the top of the screen and instantly destroyed.

I chose to keep the game pretty much as it’s always been.  I’ll be doing this with all the games that go up, though I presently don’t know what all I can salvage just yet.  Give it time!  If you’re up for giving it a shot, have at it below, or hit the game up on Yoyo.  And feel free to use the post rating system and comments to tell me what you think of the thing, too, as I’m considering giving it a much more proper sequel…

Oh, the utter madness! Time to trot another one out of the vault!

Candeh Chaos is basically my attempt at the most loathed and an rejected of all Game Maker genres… commonly, “Kill the Clown,” games generally about clicking objects that appear to make them go away.  In this case, lollipops.  But come on, now, people, this is the Master of Excessive Overkill speaking.  Do you really think it would be that simple?

Initially, poor Dansu has to ward off lollipops by himself, clicking them away into iunnowherez.  Soon enough, though, the little guy recruits the aid of the candy corn fairies, little critters that follow him around and take out any lollipops in their path.  There’s also big green fairies, and small blue ones that move towards the nearest lollipop in their vicinity.  Powerups fall from the sky, from the fairy-summoning candy corn to clocks that increase the time between waves of candy or even outright freeze time, and even a certain piece of candy that makes Dansu obliterate candy simply by flying over it, and another that blasts away lollipops with an explosive burst!

Granted there’s also those nasty red clocks that lessen the time between waves, but if they tick you off too much, you can always have the fairies beat the big one up.  Always a good time.

If too many lollipops are on the screen when the next wave tries to come in, the universe pretty much implodes and it’s game over.  Pretty simple stuff, really.  Right?

The original complaints about the game were mostly around how slow the pace is at the start.  If you can get past that, though, it’s fared pretty well overall, never mind for something in the most loathed of GM’s brood.  Masterpiece?  Not really.  But I continue to find it pretty enjoyable.  Let me know what you think!

I don’t do this a lot, but there’s a reason for that.  I can’t ever make these things timely – I rarely finish anything, or at least not much I didn’t buy used three years after it came out.  That said, I did finish this, and the Wii version too.  Good times for all.  Or… well, it’s give and take.  The other reason I’m doing this?  I have an incredible disagreement with what I’ve been seeing as this build’s comparative score to the Wii across the board.

(more…)

I know my nerd-ramblings probably seem a bit odd next to the comic about hamsters blasting magic at each other in a setting most accurately described as “the era of mismatched eras” but this strikes yet another chord with me.

Microsoft did some bum things with XNA about the time they started charging a hundred bucks a year on top of requiring a Live Gold account to even play your own games on your own 360, never mind get them submitted online.  The trade-off was that you could upload your games to the marketplace, and, after peer review, they’d be there for you to make a fair profit off of.

Apparently they’re revising this a bit.

(more…)

I am so not kidding.  Go watch the trailer.

Done?  Good.  Now, tell me…

What just happened?

I have long stood by my stance that Final Fantasy (and most of Square’s works in general) takes itself way, way too seriously, but that all goes down the drain next to this.  Dramatic music with the Sephiroth choir singing to two people kissing in front of fireworks just before the girl starts randomly crying, assumedly because she isn’t telling her sister she’s some made up noun, or running off with a guy named after a weather condition.  Then some chick sings some most-likely heart-wrenching song (or so the moody piano implies, but it’s in Japanese so good luck there) as things explode, people talk about how they’ve ruined everyone else’s lives, and a villain who comes out looking a lot like a less cool Sephiroth (because, you know, he has to counter what I’m told is a completely intentional female Cloud lead character, also named after the weather) come out and justify why they all have to die, and people start crying, and arguing, and crying, and screaming, and “you can save us!”

Oh, and somewhere in there it shows that they’ve gone back to the traditional turn-based battles, or something similar, which admittedly irks me but I see something there trying to add some sort of depth to it.  Hopefully that meter where I see “Attack” four times doesn’t mean I’m just pushing X three to six more times to attack repeatedly when the inevitable level grinding comes into play.  FF12′s system wasn’t ground-breaking, but at least I got to run in circles while waiting for Panelo to get done recharging from yet another Cure spell, then beat things with a stick.  Then run some more.  That little bit of input, kids, makes the difference in whether or not a player feels involved, which is often important to things like interactivity, the separating factor between games and a TV show.

I planned to rant about game design tonight, between some forum discussions and my own approach to how I work out my little theories and designs, but this so won.  Sure, FF has always been kinda a stick in the mud as far as being upbeat is concerned (though in my experience retranslations have helped this – I never knew Edgar was supposed to be funny until the GBA version of FF6.  Kinda makes me miffed 7 still only has the original release, though Barret tries, bless his heart.  Coincidentally, there’s also a token borderline racist black comic relief in 13.  And yes, he is crying and I think pointing guns at people.  I’m confused), but compared to this the most serious moments in the series seem like a bunch of clowns prancing around in posies singing gleefully about kicking midgets, and then they do so, and then the midgets laugh as they fly away, propelled by the kick and their own rainbow-colored farts.  That’s how incredibly drama-infused this thing is.

Don’t get me wrong.  This is the first FF of the console generation, and it’s about darn time.  I’ll be getting it, but I’m a lot less eager about it all of a sudden.  The battles aren’t what I’d crossed my fingers for, and while the story seems a bit more character-focused (as it dang well should be), the overall amount of “holy crap look how serious the voice acting is” (which actually during that opening bit made me verbally state “are you kidding me?”) ends up being repulsive more than anything else.  Too thick, Squaresoft.

This is a 7+ minute trailer, here.  There’s roughly 30-60 seconds of clips from battles on it, and those actually look good. Sure, it looks like it’s back to being turn-based, but when lady-Cloud comes flying in on a horse or someone comes out on motorcycle-stolen-from-Cloud-and-totally-pimped to BURN THE ENEMIES WITH IT’S EXHAUST FLAMES you take notice and think “okay, that looks pretty sweet.”  Undoubtedly about the 50th time you’re forced to sit through it it’ll be much less so, but for a trailer, lookie there! But screw that, let’s focus on the sheer, unrivaled drama that would make your grandma’s shows seem like comedies.  Holy crap.

I’m glad the new Mario & Luigi is out.  I’m going to need something to counter that mass of emo I just sat through.

GDR time! That’s Game Design Rant.  Tune out now, those of you whose eyes just glazed over.  My apologies if your head just melted or something.

So hey, yeah! Sin and Punishment!  No, not the glorious game that has a (hopefully) glorious Wii sequel on the way.  Ironically, it avoids… well, wait, no.  I don’t think it avoids this subject all too much at all.  Imagine that.  How fitting.

What started with a humble wall of text we call Zone’s assessment of Tomb Raider Anniversary led quickly to talking of the merits and complaints regarding games and their tendency to either be boringly easy or TV-shattering rage-quit hard (or am I the only one with that experience?).  At some point it dissolved into Zone and the new guy (RzR) fangasming over Armored Core, and more power to them, but the subject in question never left my mind.  No, children, I went on to ponder just what is fitting punishment for failure, and why, and when, and… well, we’ll get to it.

(more…)

We’ve all had these moments.  Or, at least, most anyone who’s ever touched RPGs or the modern adventure game genre has.  That deadpan character nobody likes, or the polar opposite, the class clown who makes fun of the last boss and, most regrettably, lives through the encounter, quite possibly as your last standing party member in a group of people who didn’t deserve to be punched anywhere near as much as he did.  Perhaps, even, you’ve encountered that wonderful coup de grace, that special kind of story – be it game, movie, or novel – that is filled to the brim with horrible puns and loathable characters.

It may be the Game Design Rant, but odds are, with this one, you could have avoided the gaming craze all along, stumbled upon this, and still know what I’m talking about.  You know awful character writing when you see it.

(more…)

I have an entire list of gaming-related topics I’ve been waiting to tap for these things, but can’t seem to get myself together for most of them.  Apparently, I do best when I’m actually cheesed off about something.  imagine that.

So half a week into unemployment, I find myself done with the page and needing to rant, but in quite a funk regarding doing so.  I just didn’t feel up to running around the internet trying to find images and think of decent examples, and since it’s already Wednesday, I don’t have time to go back and add another page’s worth of garbage to this one like I tend to.  Yes, my drive was minimal, but a short trip to YouTube later, I found myself reminded of everything I hate about social gaming, networking, or just plain being social.

People suck.

(more…)