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.
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