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.

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