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.