Choosing

In truth, I rather debated with myself on which game I would rant about this time, between two of my top selections among a pool of ones that I wish to eventually cover. In the end, I decided to settle for the simpler one.
First, Class requirements.
Now that the issues with the mid-term is all wrapped up with the class, I would really want to look forward to something to actually work the knowledge in my head over with. As the mid-term proved, Even if I understand the concept 100% in my head and can work it perfectly there, if I'm not familiar enough with coding it, then complications will pop up as I try to code multiple concepts. What's more, I feel slightly cheated as a part of the problem I had been frantically trying to solve, how to change the title in the HTML, was actually an absurdly simple thing, which made it all the more infuriating since I had shifted through the textbook so many infernal times trying to find it. It would be really great if we could have some sort of ungraded...ah...'Recommended Work' or such, for coding something like that even once would have been enough to permanently remember it.

Now then, Rant on.
Today's game is SteamBirds by Weasello. The two games I had been considering for this post at the top of all my selections are actually both turn based games. They both handle it in very unique ways, and I really wanted to rant about both a bit, but I ultimately settled on this one, as I said once before, for its simplicity. I also settled on this one for its uniqueness, as while the next game I will rant about is also turn based and innovative, it's much closer to what one would typically expect from a turn-based system.
SteamBirds is especially unique in that, although the game is quite obviously turn based, it still has a nice flow that doesn't impart the slower atmosphere of a typical turn-based games "click button, click button, click button" feel. Really the game is too unique for me to confidently talk about its playstyle up front, so I can only recommend you just try the game to experience it. Having said that, time to move fully into the ranting. The difficulty in criticizing a unique game is discerning, essentially, if your criticism is well founded or not. Id Est, trying to figure out whether a particular thing that you criticize about the game is actually something worthy of being called a flaw, or is simply part of the system and contributes to what makes it so unique. In other words, it is difficult to draw the line between Genius and Insane. Obviously though, I wouldn't have brought the game up here if I didn't have something to rant about. Perhaps not shared with you the reader, I am indeed a dedicated gamer and a part of that is the thrill of the challenge's accomplishment. Id Est, I enjoy being challenged and using my accumulated skill to overcome it, and the feeling of satisfaction that comes with it. Much like a batter at the plate in baseball, and the accomplishment he feels for hitting that ace pitchers fast ball right out of the park with all the practice he's put in to his career to be a better batter.
To be more straightforward now, I'm talking about the Star and Rank system, and my endeavors to have every star for every mission. Now, stars are awarded for the Number of planes that survive, How much damage they took, and, the clincher, whether they took damage at all. Obviously, this means I played several of the missions multiple times, with multiple failures. Rest assured, I'm not about to complain about the difficulty of some of the missions to you, I'd be refuting any claim I could ever make to credibility if I did that, since I had just made about a point about the trouble discerning Uniqueness from Flaws. No, my complaint is not in difficulty or balancing, but a much more easily discernible piece of any game is of course its controls. Now, I'm not out right complaining about how we control the planes, but rather some oversights in the controls on the developers part. The biggest issue, is that the playing field is actually limited, and that once you reach the edge of the field, the camera stops being centered on you planes and they approach the edge of the screen. Obviously I'm not asking him to invent an infinite playing field, by complaint is in an unseen side effect of this system. If your planes move too close to the edge of the screen during a movement, upon the return to your control phase, the arrow you need to click and drag to control them will be off-screen. Needless to say, if your plane moves off screen, it crashes and burns instantly. I had to restart at least 5 missions, several in a single mission, just because the distance I had to move to avoid getting hit for the maximum star ranking pushed me so close to the screen edge, and I accidentally got  a plane too close because I didn't know I was approaching the edge until too late. The second point of irritation for me, is that it was never clarified to you that some enemies can shoot behind them and force you to restart while seeking the best star rank, simply because while tailing them you got a speckle too close before turning off of tailing them. This is not the core of my complaint, but merely an observation to its end, as this little surprise would make for a excellent experience in the game play for a new player discovering it the hard way. My complaint, is that several times in missions I would need to loop around in front of an enemy plane at the edge of their range to get to a position I needed to be in. The complaint is that you cannot tell exactly how far a plane must be from its target to start shooting. Once a plane starts shooting, its bullets fly all the way across the screen and will hit multiple targets. Which means that if you pass just that little bit too close, even if your not playing to get full stars, it can royally screw over your squadron of planes. What is worse is that it happens not because you can't do it, for I did several times, but that you simply shifted the arrow just one or two pixels off from the needed location to avoid getting shot at. In other words, it would have been much better to include a way to check or display a particular enemies range.

Rant concluded.



[insert default disclaimer here]

Returns

I missed a weeks post, and I have a feeling I'll lose some points for that...bugger. As always, HW first:
The midterm came and went, and I actually did really well on it, minus that infernal last problem. Mostly it was just the lack of time to do it, everyone in the class thought as much, although to differing degrees. After looking at some classmates work on it though, I found that maybe even with enough time I still might have lost some points on it anyway, as I discovered my understanding of how to use tables was a little bit off.

To ranting!

I'm actually presented with an extra dilemma now because of missing a weeks post, because now I have several games that I would like to rant about, but my policy (for myself) is to only rant about one game at a time, thus rendering a more complete and coherent rant. After much (read as: 5 minutes) thought, I've decided elders get precedence. Maybe not elder in age, but certainly elder in discovery.
Today's game is William and Sly by Kajenx. Since the game was originally posted to Newgrounds and not Kongregate, and is also the place I originally played it, the link is for the Newgrounds version even though there is one on Kongregate now. As you will be told from any comment/review body, the game is beautiful and has a nice fluent playstyle. Having said that, you probably are already well enough informed to know whether or not you actually want to play it. If you can't be brought to appreciate a game for its ambiance, you probably shouldn't play William and Sly, since the games biggest selling point is its atmosphere and the way the gameplay compliments it perfectly. Id Est, you won't like this if you're just an adrenaline junky, so don't bother playing it and giving it a bad rating or review just because you're a narrow minded half-druggie. Really that's what today's post is going to rant the most about, not the game itself since it's really air-tight, but the people playing it. In all good honesty I shouldn't be burning time on this, since for once the cavemen and trolls are actually in the minority, (imagine that), but I needed something to rant about for this post, and I'm not gonna find it in the game.
The deciding factory of whether you like the game or not, is whether or not you
A) are capable of appreciating Serenity, and
B) how well you can immerse yourself in the game.
People looking for a quick thrill, an adrenaline rush, or Zombies, are just not going to appreciate the game. If the games not what you are looking for, don't play it. I don't know how many times I've said something similar to this, but the fundamental problem and phrase in play is "Constructive Criticism". Constructive Criticism is not trolling, being an ass, or insulting something, it's analytically, logically, or intuitively offering suggestions and corrections. There's a reason people employ Critics with a paycheck. It's because they're doing something legitimate. Businesses don't employ trolls, they employ intellectuals who are capable of giving useful feedback on things. Saying, "Oh man this suxors", doesn't do anything. For the person saying it, or for the person receiving it. Well, except make one of them look like an idiot, and I've yet to see an instance of this case that the person saying it wasn't the idiot. Saying, however, something like "the backgrounds could be improved to distinguish them from the playing area", or "the controls could be a bit more fluent  for [blank]" is Constructive Criticism. It's providing feedback that is actually useful to the one receiving it. Applying this to the topic at hand, there is actually a great deal of constructive criticism on both websites for the game, and as I mentioned previously already, not a lot of trolling. The thing that really sparks this for me, is the comments and reviews about the Boss. Just because you can't beat it, does not mean it is unbeatable. Before you go posting a comment or review about how unbeatable any boss is, read around. Chances are, there was someone with a similar problem, and someone who provided a solution. Even more though, for this particular game, not only was the boss already perfectly beatable, but the developer went ahead and made him easier anyway. And yet still there are people recently who complain. For this game, the problem is actually ironic. Instead of it being a problem of the wrong audience playing the game, the right audience is playing the game, but is contextualized improperly to work with the last boss. To say that a bit more simply, The right kind of people are playing the game, people who can appreciate Artistic games. But because they are used to playing Artsy games, they're not used to the unique facet of trying to think about something from a different perspective when what you're already doing isn't working. For most bosses in games, the challenge is often just that, that you have to think about, or use, your capabilities in a new way that the regular gameplay hadn't needed you to. In other words, not only do you play a fox for most of the game, but for the last boss you must think like a fox. Rather than just running about blindly, sit down and analyze the situation, which in this case, is watching the bosses movement patterns. And trust me, there is a pattern. Figure it out, and don't whine in the comments and waste space.

[insert default credit claim here]
The MOT is mine, the content is property of Extra Credits videos artist.

Pacing

Keeping in pace with my last posts proposition to keep a diversity of game types, I'm going to put in a rather unique genre this time, a Dice game.
HW now.
Finally some programing, or at least typing out code. A bit flat, but I keep forgetting to do the turn-it-into-the-website thing, so maybe it's better they're simple so I can complete them fast enough to have time to derp around with remembering that. Now that I have filezilla at home though, that problem should clear right up. Looking forward to upcoming classes now that we're doing things with what we're learning, not only because it's more interesting, but also because it helps me retain them better.

Dice. Not really my thing, I hate chance dependent things since I prefer games challenging my skill or intellect than making me grind the RNG. But this dice game invokes a fair bit of planning, even if now and again the CPU screws you over with a series of imba dice rolls.
The game is Zilch by gaby. It's a recent find so I don't have much to rant about again...this is messed up I haven't ranted in several posts, MUST FIND SOMETHING TO RANT ABOUT NEXT POST.
Anyway, the game could use a much more randomized, or even just an improved arbitrary, dice rolling generator. I see combo's of 3 all the time, and I don't mean sets  of three, I mean the same exact score type three times in a row. Obviously Dice are pure arbitrary, but I still feel that it could be improved by some small degree. Ah well. Other than that, I'm curious if you are not allowed via the rules to just choose one dice when you get a pair or triple, or if it's just over-sight by the creator that it doesn't allow it since it automatically designates the highest set of them. I'm inclined to believe it's part of the rules. The biggest factor for the game in my opinion is the speed at which it loads, and the speed of the individual matches. It's great for filling in those little five minutes of wait before a class starts while your just sitting and waiting, or for something to play while another game loads. So, next post, next week, I'm going to pick something particularly controversial just so I can really let loose and rant.



[Insert default credit claim here]
Id Est, this is one I made.

And now for something different

Reviewing my lasts posts, I realize I seem to have rutted myself into a Third Person strategy lean, and further, into an all Flash based games segment. In truth, it's just two posts, but let's do something about it anyway.
First and foremost, work and time saving for Lillis:
Things feel like they're about to speed up now with the Web Programming as Prof. Lillis has vowed to grade our present pile of turned in work, and post more work to his website for us to do. Not that I should be saying this, due to the angry glares it would attract in my direction, but it's about bloody time. Not necessarily in the sense of it being Homework, I'd love it if we had none of that, but I want to actually DO something with the stuff we've been learning so I can double check that I really am learning it right and can use it right, or if it's just loose sand sitting on my brain, giving the illusion of constructive weight, but falling off as soon as I try to do anything with it. I would personally love it if every now and then he handed out some small example or project-like piece of material that was an ungraded "here's something to try" sort of thing. Sort of in the feel of, "here try this out and see if you can get it to work, then let's compare how everyone did it and what problems or discoveries they had."

Rant time:
This posts game today is, yet again, another game from Kongregate. I will be posting more than just flash games from Kongregate, fear not, but there's just so much good original material there that for me to ignore it would be for me to shame myself. The game in question is Elona Shooter from Noanoa. It's in a first-person-shooter style, but incorporated in a survival defense style. The game is incredibly complex and multi-tiered, and, of course, very fun to play. Be advised though, that to really last it out in the game you will have to find a balance between Investing, and Upgrading, and that Balance may mean favoring one over the other at certain points in the game.
 The ranting today is going to come much faster, because the games praises are all innate, it's just well made and lots of fun to shoot things. The most significant rant I have is actually because of a comments, or series of comments I should say, valid guidelines. In truth, there's only one real practical way to last it out to the maximum potential, and that's to use a Revolver or Crossbow. If you search the comments you'll find the advice on using and upgrading the Revolver and Crossbows to manhandle all the difficulties. It's just far too impractical to use other weapons most of the time, because they rapidly become outdated with the scaling difficulty over time, in addition to the cost of upgrading them instead of just buying another weapon. Anything with a significant reload time is also cripplingly weak because it means that if you haven't got a sufficient line up of support guns on the AI's, you're going to fall behind in keeping the invaders away very fast. The basic trick is that you get a manual reload weapon, hold down space bar, and then click at a set rate to just keep firing endlessly. Understand that it is not so much that other weapons are weaker, as it is that the revolver and crossbow strategies are just so ridiculously easy and powerful. If you take a duelist or other such class to enhance your choice of weapon, it becomes even more ridiculous to think about using other weapons.
 A long while ago, Noanoa patched the game so that you couldn't just save, Search the town, and then reload if you got a result you didn't like. Now whatever you get when you search, is what you're going to get no matter what, saving/loading, going through more waves, doing other things. That result is locked in until you search again and just accept it. I liked this patch, because it removed what is essentially an abuse of a game mechanic oversight. The problem I now state though, is that he hasn't done anymore patches like this. Some suggestions are pretty well just parallels of this type of thing, like repeatedly remaking a Sheriff class till you get a shotgun with 4 or 5 mod slots, or saving, upgrading the blacksmith, and then just reloading until the upgrade spawns the weapon you want to buy. Some people would say that Noanoa could also stand to re-balance some things too, but I haven't played it enough recently to say one way or the other if he should or shouldn't.

[Insert default disclaimer here]

a Third for a Third

Once again, let's put the class requirement first, and make Lillis' day easier. This week was particularly hectic for me, as it seems that it's the same week for at least two theology courses, (and my lucky days, I'm in both. *shake fist at Murphy's Law*), to pump out two papers and a journal due at random points of the week. One at least has had 3 weeks notice, so that I managed to buffer against somewhat, although I almost forgot to turn it in. As a result, I don't feel like I retained as much of what we learned in my computer classes this week. The html is really starting to pick up, we're learning some of the useful stuff now like formatting and drop boxes, but at the same time, too much is whizzing by, and the speed I have to write it down as he puts it up for us to look at is making my notebook look schizophrenic. I can already feel the nightmare it's going to be for me to find stuff later. I really hope he gets the important stuff up on the web so I can just pull up named examples when I need them, I remember that being a great help way back in Java class, and all the others he gave handouts for.

Onwards.

Today's game of choice is actually going to make for a very uneventful rant. This would be Kupo707's game, Epic Battle Fantasy 3 . The reason why it's going to be very uneventful, is because this is a really well made game. It's the third in a series he's only kept on improving his skills with. The art is his own, with several concept and idea gifts from fans, so it's very original and refreshing. The game is really well balanced, and still challenging. There's really only two nit-picks I have with the game, and that's the 'medal rooms' and the upgrades. The upgrades are powerful, and useful, but can be really unfair. You could spend all your early game money upgrading something that will be completely useless at level 5 compared to free random stuff that happens when you get other gear up to level 5. Really this is hard to criticize, because it's suppose to be a surprise when you get that item to the fourth tier and the description of the fifth suddenly says in the description "randomly summons No Legs" or "randomly calls in Airstrikes". The last nit-pick I have is getting really nit-picky, and that's that the last medal room doesn't tell you how many medals you need to get in it, and doesn't even clue you in that it is a medal room, because the character blocking it doesn't say anything. Well, ok, she/it says ". . ." but really. Says nothing of use. That and you aren't even slightly warned that all medal rooms have invisible surprise battles when you step into a certain square, battles with monsters that are above-averagely strong for that area. Again, this is suppose to be a surprise, and after the first one it's not at all a problem anymore.
As a forward warning though, the game includes humor and cameo's from several 'Classics' in gaming history, so a few jokes may go over your head, but the game will still entertain you greatly, and is very fun to play. Since its release, it has taken, and maintained, the #1 position in Kongregate's front page 'Adventure & RPG' category, so it's very worth your time.

Taking things out of context is hilarious. oh right...
[Insert Default Disclaimer Here]

Second Thoughts

Ya know what...Let's not even wait till the class is over. Why bother going back and deleting anything? Or even daring to assume it's possible to delete blog posts in any way, shape, or form? Let's just kick this Ranting off right away, and mix in some homework as well. First things first:
So far the html stuff seems easy enough since I already got a taste of it from forging a rough draft in Leaguecraft.com's Guide construction system,
(which, by the way, was approx. 6 pages long, and was arbitrarily DELETED because it was never actually posted. Why was it never posted? Because one of the recommendations for making a good guide in a guide on how to make good guides in leaguecraft, (say that five times fast), stated that posting unfinished work just makes the guide, and its writer, look stupid. I agreed, and now I'm suffering the side effects of that guide not mentioning that Leaguecraft clears out unposted material once it reaches a certain age. >[insert multiple swears here]<),
and also since I've had three classes teach me three programing languages, and html bears a good deal of similarities to a programing language. I've discovered that the former problems I was having stemmed from two things,
1). The computer I was doing it on had an old/corrupted Textpad that was unable to do the highlighting because it couldn't save anything locally for whatever reason, and
2). I was missing the line containing the DOCTYPE sentence-long-mumbo-jumbo that is part of telling the browser just what kind of "thing" it is trying to display/handle.
Those being fixed in that I'm trying to figure out how Textpad got deleted off my home computer, and trying to remember to kick myself in the ass to go reinstall it, and copying the DOCTYPE sentence/line into my notebook so I can just create an empty template at home like he uses in the class examples all the time.

Right, now back to ranting.

So the current top game I'm playing at the moment is, as usual, a wonderful discovery via Kongregate.com's "Badge of the Day" system, which selects one of the games on it that they've given badges to and assigns some extra points to a badge on it, and puts it on the front page news scroll.

The title in question this time, is Urbz game, Mud and Blood 2 . The greatest summary of the game can be rendered by looking at the comments: "The first lesson of war: War is not fair". That is precisely what Mud and Blood 2 is. A survival game wrapped around a RNG, designed to kick your ass in the most unfair fashion. An ass kicking that you enjoy every second of. Or at least that I do.
Enough praise, Let's rant. While certain unfair aspects are just a part of the game, and I don't mind, I have a few nit-picks about it, like a certain time where I had just finished placeing a bunker, got a few bonus tact points from something, and called in a bazooka unit. He immediately lifted his zook, took aim at an enemy mobile artillery piece, and planted that God Damned rocket right in the middle of my bunker and blew it to little bitty pieces of rubble. Understand, a bunker is 100% immune to damage from anything, unless it get's hit Dead Center, which blows it up. I don't mind that there's friendly fire, and I've suffered a few gibbings from my own units chucking nades while I'm trying to retrieve a crate, but there's a difference between friendly fire and just being retarded. I have never had this happen a second time, not even with 2 bunkers and five zooks firing constantly. I'd like to point out that while those Nazi's also get gibbed a lot by their own explosives and shit, there also is a special artillery that is 100% incapable of harming them. I don't mind that we have nothing like that, anything on your side can kill you practically, but I do NOT find it amusing that I often see grenades coming out from under camnets, having my bunkers blown by my tanks and zooks, often firing at something that was already dead, or watching my gunners empty a full clip into a corpse while an enemy picks off my officers and medics, is not making the game more challenging. It's just making it more annoying. I would like it if he patched it. In the end it is trivial, but it's not a "oh dammit" like when a random german artillery blasts your bunker and its people into oblivion, it's just pure annoying because it's something that doesn't make the game so much more challenging, as it does more annoying. Zooks really shouldn't be able to kill your own stuff, aside from hitting a nearby tree/rock etc and the AoE killing it. That would be fine. That's just war. Having a zook shoot your own bunker dead center is not war. It's just a stupid AI.

Seriously though, the game is fun. Hard, will kick your ass, but fun. Just remember, there are some badges dependent on the first 100 games, if you find you like the game, I recomend looking those up so you can work towards them if you are so insane as to try and unlock them all. Try to do so by about your tenth game. That should give you time enough to determine if you like it well enough to consider a spoiler for the sake of not having to restart and lose a bunch of progress.

Signatured, Zetro.



This, for instance, Is something I made.

Firsts

Efficiency. It's a good thing.
So for my web programming class I've been instructed to post at least once a week a reflection on the neat stuff I've learned. But why make a blog that's just a month or two's worth of weeks journal posts? that's so wasteful. Instead, for the class I'm going to post the reflections, then when we're done with the class I'm going to go back, do the closest thing to deleting them  I can manage, and then I'm going to turn this into The Gamerz Rant. First things first:
So far the HTML we've learned just feels like any other programming I've learned so far. Nothing special yet. But, I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong because Textpad didn't fill in the nice helpful highlights that I saw on Prof. Lillis' example, and it threw an error at me the first time I tried to save my page as a .html, when it didn't have anything in it but the braced opening and ending framework, and no contents. When I finally touched it up in the .html checking site that Lillis told us to use and got rid of all the errors, it still gave me two warnings about "potentially" problematic things, that both seemed to say the same thing, but I didn't know what it was saying, even when I checked the instruction page it linked to for them. *shrug*

Back to Intro'n. The Gamerz Rant. I've been told, and do know myself, that I have "vomit of the keyboard" in that I never shut up once something gets me started. Typically, this is actually a "someone" and I'm telling them something, or discussing something, or hell, who am I kidding, sometimes I'm just flat out arguing with them in a hostile manner. Some come off more knowledgeable than when I started, some hate my guts for it, no pattern is discernible because so far everyone reacts differently. The trend seems to indicate that I'm not a total ass though, because League of Legends now marks the the third game where I have a friends list of over a Hundred. I'm told that I tend to raise good points. And there's little I enjoy more than having someone improve their game because of the things I tell them.
But, Fear not! This is not going to be some dinky lecture zone. Oh no. I'z gonna have a mission statement here.
My goal is to post constructive criticism, suggestions, and helpful observations for people to use as needed (with appropriate credit being given when necessary). I want this to be a place that someone can come to to have a quick laugh, or to nod their head and say "I see", or "Mmm, a good point even if I don't agree."

Signatured, Zetro.

Oh and FYI, Unless otherwise stated, always assume that pictures are made by anyone other than myself.