Knack is not the best game

Hey hey hey, it’s that time again! Time for Ryan to complain about a game that he’s been playing for free! On this edition: the PS4 launch game, Knack.

I went into Knack with hope in my heart. A quick check on Wikipedia confirmed that the critical consensus was not great. But I figured, this is kind of a cutesy action platformer, right? I should dig it. Only I’m not. I’m really not. Because Knack is, at least on the gameplay side, incredibly bland. It also sits quite firmly on the wrong side of the difficulty fence.

For all the frustration I’ve felt while playing Knack, it’s been something of a joy to watch. The cutscenes are fun, and remind me very much of a second-tier CGI film. Like Astro Boy or Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It’s super colourful, the plot is light but not too fluffy, and Knack is an all-around fun character. It’s no golden-era Pixar, but it’s definitely adequate. Which is good, because there are lots of cutscenes. I’m willing to bet that if I didn’t lose so much time to dying repeatedly, I think there may have been more cumulative time spent watching cutscenes than in actual gameplay.

Continue reading Knack is not the best game

Last Month in Movies – February 2018

Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters – An anime movie made for Netflix, apparently because Toho isn’t allowed to make a live-action Godzilla until Hollywood’s done with their movies. Also, the first of three!

This movie begins with the remnants of humanity floating through space, after having been chased off of Earth by Godzilla and scores of other monsters. But with supplies dwindling and no prospects for another habitable planet, the plan ends up being to turn around and go back to Earth. After all, time dilation has caused time on Earth to advance roughly 9 thousand years for the eleven years that the people on the ship have experienced. Godzilla has to be long dead, right?

Obviously, Godzilla is not dead, and so begins an operation to expose and destroy his weak point. It’s really convoluted and incredibly padded down with anime/sci-fi jargon, but whatever. It’s still a unique plot for a Godzilla movie, and I dig it. Not as much as I dug Shin Godzilla, but it was still good. I think the only thing that I actively disliked was the 3D animation. It wasn’t bad or anything, but it just didn’t quite work for me. Mostly because despite the fancy animation, it held true to the anime trope of not much actually being animated besides mouths and special effects. Oh well.

Continue reading Last Month in Movies – February 2018

Happy Borntday, Mr. Switch

Saturday, March 3rd was the Nintendo Switch’s first birthday. I celebrated in the best way that I could: I baked a cake and spent the bulk of the weekend playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It was a pretty darn good weekend.

Although I definitely tore through that cake too quickly. My belt is feeling a little too snug…

Anyway! Switch is a year old now, and there’s certainly a lot to reflect upon. Most of them good! That said, I guess let’s start with the more negative things.

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Thinks and Thoks – Nintendo Direct (March 8/18)

Remember last time I did a write-up of a Nintendo Direct, and I wasn’t really interested in most of what they showed off? Well, there was another one yesterday afternoon and it was a whopper. This time, I found myself profoundly interested in nearly all of the titles shown. That said, let’s take a more detailed dive into the presentation.

The first slew of games are all for 3DS, pretty much confirming my theory that Nintendo intends to keep riding the 3DS train until the end of time.

Wario Ware Gold – Yeah, I’m very interested in this. I haven’t played a Wario Ware game for what seems like forever, and they’re always super fun. But I don’t think I’m actually going to buy it. Since my budget is a lot tighter these days, the fact that I already own all the Wario Ware games I need is reason enough to take a pass on this “greatest hits” version.

Continue reading Thinks and Thoks – Nintendo Direct (March 8/18)

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – February 2018

~ Game Over ~

Monster Hunter World (PS4) – I’ll level with you, I didn’t actually beat this last month. I write up these entries beforehand based on assumptions and when the game turned out to be much longer than I anticipated, couldn’t be bothered to correct it. But it is beat for real now. Promise.

Super Mario RPG (SNES) – Initially, I thought that this was a game one could burn though in a couple quick sessions. That is not the case. It’s actually respectably long! And still a lot of fun!

Uncanny Valley (PS4) – A neat indie horror adventure, which I played to the least satisfying ending and then couldn’t make more time for because of my obsession with Monster Hunter.

RiME (PS4) – I was having a great time up until chapter 2. Then I was having an adequate time up until chapter 5. Then I just sat there and quietly wept for 20 minutes. (More words.)

Thimbleweed Park (Switch) – I thought it would be a brisk run, but it took me 15ish hours to solve this bad boy, and that’s having used the hint system very liberally. …I may just be really dumb.

Lords Mobile (iOS) – I downloaded and played a bit to get free hashcoins in Greasy Money, but the offer expired long before I reached the requirement T_T What a waste of a Sunday morning.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – February 2018

Now I’m an animator (but not really)

I continued through Chapter 2 of my video game making odyssey last night, wherein I learned the basics of animating a player sprite. So really, I spent most of the time drawing out a crappy little sprite seventeen times for all his jumping and running frames. But hey! Progress! It seems again like I really did very little in the two hours or so that I spent working on this project, and I keep having to remind myself that this is a massive thing I’m trying to do and it’s always only going to move forward in baby steps.

This time I also took a screenshot of my project in GameMaker Studio. You know, to prove that I’m actually doing this. Future Ryan will be filled with so much sorrow when he looks back at this post and remembers giving up on this dream.

It’s not at all what it seems

So, I played Rime finally. Mostly because it has been free on PS+ during February. I was mildy interested otherwise, but not $40 interested. After the fact, though, there is a part of me that kind of wishes that I hadn’t played Rime.

I knew nothing about it going in. It looked like another “guide this character around the island and solve some basic puzzles and we’ll tell you a story” kind of game. Not totally a walking simulator, because you can jump and climb and swim and all those good video game verbs, but fairly close. It’s a generally non-violent game, too. You never attack anything, and your main means of interacting with the world is to shout at stuff.

And the first forty minutes or so substantiated my hypothesis. You’re set free on an island, with some basic puzzles, a short list of collectibles, and a few mysteries to discover. This is great. It’s really pretty, very scenic, and the world design is quite good. To keep you from swimming too far away, there are schools of jellyfish that you can’t pass. Much better than an invisible wall!

But then you reach the tower, which appears to be the goal, and which I sort of thought was going to be the endgame. There are so many collectibles left, though! Maybe I just did a bad job of exploring? No, there’s a lot of game after that. Four more chapters. Each entirely distinct from the rest. The fun, colourful island replaced with desert ruins, wooded ruins, rainy ruins. A lot of ruins, is what I’m getting at.

MASSIVE SPOILERS NOW.

Continue reading It’s not at all what it seems

From consumer to creator

I have a long history of enjoying video games about making video game levels (Super Mario Maker, Chicken Wiggle, etc.), and have dabbled in a couple of programs that make it easy to put together more complex stages (like Super Mario Bros X). Back in high school, I even took a class on basic programming where I learned to cobble together crappy little tic-tac-toe and mastermind games.

Last night, however, I took a major leap forward and began the process of learning how to create an actual video game.

I have now downloaded and started futzing around with GameMaker Studio 2, and got absolutely lost in the process. I was so involved in learning about the program and how to use it that I completely forgot to make myself dinner. That never happens! More importantly is that I actually feel fairly confident about diving headfirst into what amounts to a completely overwhelming project. Usually as soon as anything shows even minor resistance I give up immediately.

Progress made last night started with installing GameMaker and clicking around, and realizing that this was not a good way to go about it. So I looked up some tutorials on creating a basic platformer. Two-and-a-half hours and one (of six) YouTube tutorial video later, I had assembled my very own little box of platforms in which a cube could run and jump around freely. Even though it amounts to less than the Visual Basic tic-tac-toe game I made sixteen years ago, I’m still really proud of my creation. I feel like I accomplished a lot last night, and I am very anxious to get back and start learning more.

It’s going to be a long, long road. I have huge plans for the game that I ultimately want to make, though I know that it’s not going to all come together right away. I’ve obviously scaled way, way down for the time being, just focusing on learning how GameMaker works and how to code. If I come up with something halfway playable as I learn, great! But all the design documents that I’ve been drawing up are for a project far too large in scope for someone with just slightly more than “zero” knowledge of programming.

So, I think I’m going about this all right. Following tutorial videos. Learning the basics first. Taking pride in each baby step. Understanding the concept of scope. All that’s left is to wait and see if I actually follow through on any of this, or if I get bored after a week and never think about it again. Exciting stuff!

I am bad at Uncanny Valley

In January, one of the free games available on PS4 through the PS+ program was Uncanny Valley. Now, normally I don’t bother with the weird little indie games that they put up there, but Uncanny Valley is a horror adventure game. And when you’re me, “horror” and “free” are the magic words. One or the other will pique my attention, but both will guarantee a download.

The game begins in a nightmare scenario, wherein your guy wakes up in an alley and is subsequently mauled by shadow monsters. Then he wakes up in his home but the shadow monsters sack the place and maul him again. Then the game proper begins and you’re on the subway to a new job. You’ve been hired on as a night security guard at an abandoned office building. You get the tour and instructions from the morbidly obese day shift guard, Buck, and then you’re off to the races.

Now, Uncanny Valley is the type of game where your actions affect how the story plays out. I apparently did quite poorly, as I got a pretty awful ending. But that’s putting the horse in front of the cart. Gameplay consists of wandering throughout the office building for seven in-game hours each night. Then you can either retire to your bedroom to sleep, or continue wandering until you pass out. It seems like every time you fall asleep, you’re taken to a new dream sequence where you end up getting mauled by the shadows again. I don’t know if the mauling is inevitable or something I was screwing up, but I’m not sure I’ll ever find out the truth.

The first couple nights weren’t very exciting. I met the woman who is in charge up facility upkeep, Eve, and found a number of cassette tapes lying about. There was a safe in the 4th floor office that I had no key to, and I was able to turn on a number of computers to read through staff emails. Other than that, nothing happened. I guess I also learned that if you hold the right analog stick, it shows you how much time is left in your shift.

On night three, I found a tape deck and started listening to the cassettes that I’d collected, but then the power went off, and Buck told me that I’d have to go out to the generator to reset it. There was a puzzle on the generator that I was unable to solve, so when my guy passed out, I was put in control of Buck, who then had to go out to fix it himself. This is when the first spooky thing happened, and the screen faded to black as a scream rang out, following by a number of gory sounds.

When I woke up, there was an odd red light shining into my washroom, apparently coming in from the next room. But I couldn’t get into any of the other rooms, so that was a dead end. I opted not to go over to the generator room, just to see what would happen if I ignored it. Turns out, nothing at all. I listened to the rest of the cassettes, which had recording of a man speaking to an AI of some sort, and said AI apparently hurt a man whom she was getting to know fairly well. Seems like maybe that was what happened.

After listening to all the tapes, I hit my timer to see that my shift was over. My guy passed out though, and the next day when I checked my timer, the shift was already over again. Bluh? I spent the day exploring the few rooms I hadn’t been to yet, and the day after that, the timer still said my shift was over from the moment I woke up. So something had gone horribly wrong. Whether it was a bug or intentional, I do not know.

I walked down to the generator room to find Buck’s mangled corpse, but my guy did not react to it in the slightest. Weird. I felt the urge to end this madness as quickly as possible, so I went up to Buck’s room, stole his car keys, and attempted to take off his his car. But I was greeted by some hoodlums who I’d apparently wronged somehow, and they knocked me out and took me into the office. I woke up in some sort of production facility, and complied when they said not to move a muscle. Then the lights went out and there were screams and more gory noises. When the lights came back on, I wandered to the back of the room passing by the mutilated corpses of the hoodlums, and found Eve. Then she knocked me out.

I woke up in an idyllic-looking house, along with Eve. She said she loved me and we’d be happy together forever. Ruh-roh. I wandered over to the bathroom, where my guy was like “I bet I could break this mirror” so I did that and got a shard of glass. Then I went to the storage room and found a grate. Being an adventure game, I attempted to use the shard of glass to pry to grate open and escape, but my guy was standing too close and interpreted my action as wanting to use the glass on himself. And that’s how I ended up slicing my guy’s gut open.

When he woke up again, Eve had bandaged him up, and when I tried to walk away, my guy decided to try to sock her in the face. At which point she knocked him out. Again. Finally, he woke up strapped to the wall, with Eve explaining somberly how she had to make sure that he couldn’t hurt himself any more. So she hacked his limbs off one by one and cauterized the stumps with a blowtorch. Then she cuddled up to his mangled torso and said “I love you.”

I don’t know if I’ll play this game again to try to earn a better different ending, but man, that went places. And here I was, playing just to try to do a good job at being the night guard.

Monster Hunter World: (could be) The Movie

In the review I posted a few days ago, I made note that Monster Hunter World has a much more engaging story than any previous game in the series. While it’s been fun to follow as I play through the game, I don’t know if MonHunWorld’s story will stick with me at all after the fact. Lord knows that I have no idea what any of the other games’ stories were about any more. What I do know, however, is that this plot is scores better than the plot that I’ve read for the upcoming Monster Hunter movie.

First of all, let’s look at a brief summary of Monster Hunter World’s plot. It begins with your hunter, part of the Fifth Fleet, travelling to an island called the New World. Your fleet is part of the bigger Research Commission, who are in the New World to investigate a phenomena wherein elder dragons cross the seas to the New World every ten years. The particular monster you’re tracking is Zorah Magdaros, a gigantic turtle-like creature that wears a volcano as a shell. Throughout the course of the game, you follow tracks of Zorah Magdaros (though how something that big manages to elude the Commission, I cannot explain), learning about the New World and the creatures that inhabit it. At the midpoint, you learn that the elder dragons migrate to the New World because it’s their final resting place. But Zorah Magdaros has a massive amount of energy built up inside of it, and if it happens to reach the heart of the island when it dies, the release of that energy will incinerate the entire place. For some reason. I’ve already forgotten why exactly. Because it’s going to take a dip in the lifestream or something.

This all leads up to an exciting climactic showdown where the Commission tries to block Zorah from the lifestream or whatever, diverting it back out to sea where it can expire harmlessly. It’s actually a really great setpiece, and makes for a very entertaining climax in the game. There’s cannons, a really big ship with a giant mechanical spear weapon in the hull, and a happy ending. Putting all that on the big screen would probably be pretty neat too. The story actually does continue afterward, but it’s into another mystery that isn’t strictly necessary to get across the point of the Zorah Magdaros story arc. So let’s call it there.

Now, as far as the proposed movie goes, the first strike is that it’s being directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. You might know this fella as the man responsible for all those Resident Evil movies that everyone hates. According to buzz on the internet, his script “would involve an American being dragged into the parallel universe that the Monster Hunter series is set in, learning how to fight monsters, and having to deal with the situation when monsters cross back into the real world and start attacking, such as a final climactic battle at Los Angeles International Airport.”

So basically it’s Space Jam.

Normally I like to try to be more positive about upcoming media. It’s really entitled to damn something before the final product is ready. But I really don’t care for this particular brand of the fish-out-of-water story. Especially because there’s no need for it. Why do we need to tie this into the real world? The fantasy world of Monster Hunter is so rich and interesting on its own, it would be a disservice to only give it half a spotlight to placate Average Moviegoer. Or at least, I’m assuming you would go that route so that people who don’t play Monster Hunter have a point-of-view character that they can relate to. You could also write the story this way because it’s a great way to completely avoid have to be creative and write an actual story. But hey, who am I to judge?

Anyway, that’s my little spiel for today. Just something I felt like I needed to rant about. Regardless of how uninspired the plot my be, I’ll still go see a Monster hunter movie. I really just wanna see those monsters up on a giant screen.

Ugh… Now that I say that, I just realized that there will probably be some Hollywood re-designs of the monsters. That’s… I’m not looking forward to that.