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[13 Jul 2008|04:37am] |
Concerning the difference between the world as it is and the world as we perceive it.
TED is pretty much the best.
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[07 Jul 2008|02:41am] |
So, Chrono Trigger DS. Mega Man 9*. FF4-2. It's a good time for nostalgia. Apparently, there're also going to be DS remakes of Dragon Quests IV through VI. DQIV DS comes out here in September! More importantly, it means DQV could actually be released in America, which would be neat.
*Technically, Roll was the first female robot master. Or rather, I suppose, the first robot mistress.
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| I will find a star! |
[29 Jun 2008|11:50pm] |
Hoshi Saga
A strange set of minigames in which you find a star. I could do all of them on my own except #33. It's pretty fun.
Playing Hoshi Saga 2 now.
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[25 Jun 2008|04:46am] |
Recently I've been reading the TV Tropes Wiki a lot. Despite the name it deals with tropes in all forms of narrative art, and even mentions when real life appears to follow tropes. It's a lot more informal than wikipedia and so is full of jokes and many of the tropes are given funny names. "The Wesley," for example, is a character whom the creators love but the audience hates (though I actually liked Wesley Crusher myself).
It's interesting to see the pieces that make up stories categorized like this, and it's made me more conscious of their use. It makes stories easier to think about.
Some especially good articles:
Crowning moment of awesome
Crowning moment of heartwarming
Tearjerker
It's really interesting to read some of the personal reactions people have to certain scenes. And kind of validating, it's nice to know that other people cry at certain parts of Gurren Lagann, for example.
This comic was linked from the tearjerker page.
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[10 Jun 2008|09:35pm] |
I was about to comment on Shizuma's post regarding fun in games and I had a thought that I'd rather just make an entry about.
EDIT: this actually has more to do with the article he linked to than his post.
I completely understand the desire for "serious games," and I share it. I would love to see more breadth of emotion in games and game stories. I also share the desire for more "philosophical games," that deal with important concepts that the player can understand better by playing the game. Games could have a bigger role in the world than just toys for fun and I'm excited by this.
BUT!
A distinction must be drawn between why a person makes a game and why a person plays a game. Let's say you want to make a game to promote political activism and give the player a deep understanding of how it works and how it can succeed or fail. Awesome! That's great. The player doesn't care. Nothing you are interested in matters to them. They have their own reasons for playing games which do not necessarily have anything to do with your reasons for making games. Making a game appeal to people isn't pandering as long as you don't compromise your own goals. If you put all this effort into making a game, don't even try pretending that you don't want people to play it. I don't mean to say here that all players only care about fun, I just mean that you shouldn't assume that what you care about is necessarily something other people care about.
I don't like using the term "fun" in any serious discussion because I think it gives the wrong impression. You wouldn't likely describe a tradegy as "fun," but you might still like it. I agree that games don't have to be fun in the light-hearted exciting sense. I think that a better way to describe it without all the connotations of fun, while still including fun, is this: games should have features that make you want to keep playing them rather than quit playing. This is obviously pretty wordy, so I will call this "engaging." It still can't be the sole focus in making a game because it's not objective (one person will be engaged by a game and another person won't be), but I think it's a better, less loaded way of describing the desired effect of a game.
A game that teaches people and is engaging is better than a game that teaches people and is not engaging, all other things being equal. If you make a game that fulfills your goals while also considering your potential players' goals, it will fare much better I think.
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| "My First Friend" |
[06 Jun 2008|01:11am] |
This is wonderful.
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[04 Jun 2008|09:17pm] |
I just beat the platformer "Little Samson" for the NES. It has some of the best graphics of any 8-bit game, not just in quality of drawing but in detail of animation, and probably the most intricate platforming action on the NES. There are four characters and they each work differently. Samson can climb on walls and ceilings, the dragon can fly for a brief period, the golem can't move in any special way but is really strong, and the mouse can climb like Samson but is faster and smaller. The first four stages introduce each character and after you play through them you can switch between characters at any time. The game is short and the characters aren't perfectly balanced, but it was still a lot of fun.
This is just the first four levels. It doesn't have any of the bosses or cutscenes, which sucks cause those have the best animations. I really like some of the music though.
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[30 May 2008|04:57pm] |
I just read the Thirty-Six Stratagems on wikipedia. They're pretty great. Some of my favorite parts:
2. Besiege Wèi to rescue Zhào. "The state of Wèi attacked Zhao and laid siege to its capital Handan. Zhào turned to Qí for help, but the Qí general Sun Bin determined it would be unwise to meet the army of Wèi head on, so he instead attacked their capital at Daliang. The army of Wèi retreated in haste, and the tired troops were ambushed and defeated at the Battle of Guiling, with the Wèi general Pang Juan slain on the field."
12. Take the opportunity to pilfer a goat. "While carrying out your plans be flexible enough to take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself, however small, and avail yourself of any profit, however slight."
13. Startle the snake by hitting the grass around it. "Do something unaimed, but spectacular ("hitting the grass") to provoke a response of the enemy ("startle the snake"), thereby giving away his plans or position, or just taunt him. Do something unusual, strange, and unexpected as this will arouse the enemy's suspicion and disrupt his thinking."
16. In order to capture, one must let loose. "Cornered prey will often mount a final desperate attack. To prevent this you let the enemy believe he still has a chance for freedom. His will to fight is thus dampened by his desire to escape. When in the end the freedom is proven a falsehood the enemy's morale will be defeated and he will surrender without a fight."
36. If everything else fails, retreat. "When your side is losing, there are only three choices remaining: surrender, compromise, or escape. Surrender is complete defeat, compromise is half defeat, but escape is not defeat. As long as you are not defeated, you still have a chance."
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[30 May 2008|04:06am] |
I've been thinking lately that natural selection is more than just a biological process, it applies to all things. Memetics has been described in these terms too, as ideas competing much like genes do and so forth. But of course it's important to understand that it's not a willful competition, it's just that some ideas/genes/whatever else will continue to exist and some will not, following two simple rules:
1) In regards to specific objects, if something has traits that make it harder to destroy, it will be more likely to continue to exist.
2) In regards to categories of objects, if instances of a category have traits that cause more instances to come into being, the category will be more likely to continue to exist.
These are basic, obvious rules, and their effect is enormous. This is largely due to a third rule which arises from the first two:
3) If it is possible for an object to become more stable and prolific, it will do so.
This is not because it desires to. If it's possible, then it will eventually happen, and then the more stable/prolific objects will outlast the rest. It is possible for stars and planets to form, this we know from simply looking at stars and planets, therefore stars and planets will eventually form and they'll stick around because they are more stable than random dust floating around in space. It is possible for life to form, again this is obvious, therefore life will eventually form and it will last because it obviously excels at both the rules of selection, #2 especially.
I'm actually not sure that life is really a coherent concept. Cellular life is, that's something that can be easily defined, but I don't know that the dichotomy between "life" and "non-life" is anything more than a different arrangement of matter. So I think the search for extraterrestrial life might face difficulties. If we find an earthlike planet then it could have cellular life too. Since it'll be dealing with similar materials in a similar environment it might arrange itself in a similar way. But maybe there are other complex organizations of matter on other worlds that we would never recognize as life.
I think that's what life is. Highly-evolved matter. Planets are another kind of highly-evolved matter, I think. And stars. I dunno that they're very good at reproducing themselves though, as far as I know they don't do it at all, so they're not good at #2 but obviously way better than us at #1. We could learn much from each other!
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[27 May 2008|02:25am] |
In my less busy moments of the past few weeks, I've played a game called "Fatal Hearts." It's a visual novel, basically you read textboxes and make choices which affect what you say and do. There are 14 different endings and I've got 13, dunno if I'm gonna try for the last one. I got the game for free off Game Giveaway of the Day a while back and I think it's worth buying. Many of the commenters there said it seemed like it was made for a 14-year-old girl, and it is certainly girly, but that's no issue for me. I liked the characters and the story was pretty cool, even surprising in a few parts.
As simple as it is, I think the visual novel is a pretty good genre, just because you're giving the player control over things that actually matter and letting them steer the plot to an extent. There were several places where I felt like the game should offer me a choice but didn't, but there are still some wildly different directions you can take it and it was really neat to explore all the options. One of the best features of the game is that it colors the choices you've already made blue, so you can easily identify choices you haven't tried yet on your next playthrough.
The "visual" part of this visual novel ranges from pretty bad to pretty good. The character sprites you see for most of the game are good, and the backgrounds are fine, but the special scenes are drawn by several different artists, which sometimes doesn't work so well. Most of the game is drawn in an anime style and one of the artists has a realistic style which just looks bizarre next to everything else. And one of the artists just isn't very good, but most of them are fine.
Unfortunately the game contains some of the absolute worst puzzles I have ever seen. In one puzzle you need to find out what a German word means, and the game just tells you to go find a translating dictionary. What? In another puzzle you need to figure out the order to input a series of weird symbols, and the game tells you to research a book that will tell you the order. Awful. In one puzzle you have to draw a symbol in the air with the mouse, basically "<". This is fine by itself, but it's so strict that it'll take you a thousand tries to get the exact right shape. Those aren't even the worst ones, really. There were a few good puzzles, and once you do a specific puzzle you can skip that one next time, but they're pretty annoying the first time through.
Still, it's a fun game, and I definitely recommend it.
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[04 May 2008|03:58am] |
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Queen - Fat Bottom Girls |
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So, at the beginning of the writing class I'm presently taking the professor handed out a sheet detailing the various correction symbols he uses on our manuscripts, each with an example sentence to show the symbol's use. This is the example sentence for the "??" symbol:
"Without the pleasure of sunlight there is no pleasure nor sunlight."
It doesn't really make sense, but I kind of like it. If I saw this sentence at the beginning of a story I would at least know I was in for something different and interesting.
I played more OHR games today than I have in the last very long time. Even though many of them were terrible (these were the terrible game contest entries, after all), it was still fun. RMZ's and Surlaw's entries were actually good too, surprisingly good in RMZ's case. I've also been doing OHR work recently for the first time in about half a year, which has been enjoyable. Also Gamemaker work, for the first time in a few months, but that's actually OHR-related too. I'm creating a program in GM that will let you direct a cutscene, there's a little map upon which you can place NPCs and heroes, and then you can move them around and show textboxes or backdrops or whatever else, and the program will generate a commented plotscript based on your input. I hope that it will make cutscene creation easier for newcomers to the OHR, plus I've always just found it difficult to script a scene without being able to see it. I don't expect that program to be done very soon though, since I've got so much stuff to do that's of more immediate importance.
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| Japanese Ronald McDonald teams up with LSD to perform Giygas' battle theme |
[02 May 2008|02:46pm] |
As an aside, I had a science teacher in 7th grade named "Ronald Donaldson," and I just realized Donaldson and McDonald mean the exact same thing, just in different languages.
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| In which the very busy man geeks out about horrifying weapon-gadgets |
[26 Apr 2008|03:46am] |
I believe I found the coolest sentence on wikipedia today:
"Publicly traded company Ionatron develops directed-energy weapons for the United States Military."
Ionatron! Lasers! Well, electrolasers anyway, but still!
Oh wow. A company with a much less awesome name, Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems, is developing a perhaps even more awesome product:
"XADS is developing a short-range wireless electroshock weapon called StunStrike. The device appears to be a Tesla coil contained in a briefcase."
StunStrike just makes it sound like a special attack from an RPG.
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| "Strategy in RPG Battles," part 8,735 |
[18 Apr 2008|03:11am] |
A thought about RPG battles: a big problem in trying to make them strategic is the fact that most of them are static. As in, you can find a strategy that works in the first turn and it will almost certainly continue to work for all subsequent turns, with the possible exceptions of those times you need to heal or cure your status. This, in a word, sucks. If the real challenge is in building a strategy and you do that in the first turn, the next 20 turns are a waste.
One thing I've thought of before that I still think is a good idea is for the enemies to change during the battle. Switching between offensive and defensive mode is a simple example, or enemies that grow stronger over the course of the battle. I think being able to move around on the battlefield like in FFT helps too, and I think it would be great if the environment affected the battles and the battles affected the environment.
Tonight I realized though what makes them so static: healing. This is crazy! But it's true. Taking damage and getting negative status effects are things that change the battle, at least a little, and healing changes the situation back to normal so you can go about doing the same thing you were doing for the past 10 turns.
Thus, in order for battles to be strategic in a dynamic way, they require two things:
1) The player and enemies should both have actions available to them that change the nature of the battle.
2) Both sides should also have actions available to them that let them react to these changes, but in a way that does not reverse the changes.
Imagine if a party member gets wounded and, instead of just healing them, you have to command someone to protect them (or it could be automatic like an FF paladin). Or you just make that party member run away. Or you cast protect on them and move them to the back row. There are plenty of other things you could do, I'm sure.
I dunno why I keep thinking about RPG design when I'm no longer especially interested in the genre. Possibly because it's just so broken that I want to fix it somehow.
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| this is not a moogle |
[12 Apr 2008|01:09am] |
Portrait of ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) moogle1 based on this photo.
For some reason or another Harlock and Moogle's look more realistic than the previous ones I've drawn, possibly cause I just copied their photos and possibly cause it's so much easier to draw that way.
I had to speculate a little on the hair for this one, since it blended in so much with the background, but I think I've seen pictures of him before that had hair like this.
EDIT:
Portrait of tim_taylor based on this photo.
I tried to go back to a slightly more cartoony look with this one, and I think it worked out! I enjoyed drawing this one, the kanji in particular was fun to do (and hard). The jacket doesn't really look like anything, but I'm not sure what I could've done to improve that.
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[05 Apr 2008|03:47am] |
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Earlier today I was watching TV and saw a commercial which played the "What is Love?" song while showing various people bobbing their heads. I don't recall what it was advertising because I had to use all my focus on not ramming my face through the TV screen.
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[01 Apr 2008|06:06am] |
* I decree that henceforth, no plane shall be allowed to fly if it creaks and shakes more than a haunted house sliding down a mountainside.
* Coming home after a trip is always strange, even after a week away I feel like I'm completely accustomed to that life and returning home is exactly as strange and new as leaving it. I think this is because there's no such thing as changing back, really, the very idea is nonsense.
* SaGa Frontier is pretty great just for being so weird and reminding us that a game can be an RPG without being identical to every other RPG ever. Things that interest me about it include:
- Spontaneously learning new abilities during battles (makes battles a lot more exciting, for one thing). Also, the abilities are totally awesome and unique instead of just "Fire/2/3" (or the even worse -ara -aga system). And you learn based on what you do! It's awesome.
- The way that mecs can equip ANY item in the game (even potions and stuff) to improve their stats.
- The way equipment works in general, with no single "weapon" or "armor" slot, just generalized slots you can stick almost anything into.
- The variation between humans/mystics, mecs, and monsters. I like that different types of characters play differently instead of just being the same exact thing with different stats and abilities. Mainly they just grow differently, but growing your characters is a pretty big part of RPGs.
- The fact that getting new party members isn't just something that happens in big plot events, it's exciting to be able to walk into a tavern or something and suddenly meet someone new. Destiny of an Emperor had an effect like this too and I loved it there. Heh, but there the characters were all very similar, I just loved their sprites and wanted to see them all.
- The mystery about how it all works. It's strange, but the fact that I don't completely understand how humans gain skills or stats is a good thing. I think it's because it's something you can figure out to a certain extent, and it's nice not having it spelled out for you.
* Zero Punctuation is great but it makes me bitter towards the gaming industry, which is maybe a good thing actually. Even Nintendo, maybe when Miyamoto retires/dies they can retire/kill his characters too. We've had enough different versions of "Mario (activity)." I'm sure they're mostly fun, well-designed games, but a little variety would be nice. I just can't really see them as this saintly champion of innovation, brave enough to go against the grain and not go after the easy bucks when they're worse about milking old franchises than anyone has ever been, ever. They've designed great new characters before, why can't they do it again!
* It's april 1st, so I guess every website on the internet is going to do something retarded. WHAT? YOU TOOK YOUR WEBSITE DOWN? OH NO!
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[01 Apr 2008|01:46am] |
I'm about to write a longer post about various things, but I wanted to save this quote I just heard on TV:
"In my next life, I want to come back as me." ~ some guy who owns a diner, whose name I did not catch
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| Apple's aesthetics have changed a lot since the 80's |
[24 Mar 2008|01:57pm] |
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We are Apple (Leading the Way) |
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[23 Mar 2008|03:57am] |
An 8-bit portrait of harlockhero based on this photo of him. It feels wrong that a portrait of Harlock, especially an 8-bit one, isn't more dramatic and heroic and such. And I tried opening his eyes a few times but it never really worked out. Ah well! I'm still pleased with how much it resembles the photo.
Moogle and Tim, yours will be done eventually. Warning: I'm going to be gone from the 25th to the 31st and will not be able to work on them during that period, so unless I do them in the next two days it'll be at least another week.
Learning the NES's assembly language is HARD. It is made much harder by the fact that for the two tutorials I've found, following them EXACTLY produces failure, and I don't know enough about the language yet to know where the mistakes are. Oh well. I'll keep at it.
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