I love Smash Bros., the one fighting game I truly love is Smash Bros, especially Smash 4. I’ve always wanted to put characters in there that would widen the game’s massive roster. The challenge I’m doing is to see which two games would go together in either gameplay or mechanics. Me, Issacclark322 and the community are doing this Game Making Challenge and I don’t know if this would qualify, but I hope it does. Hello and welcome to this Smash Filled Game Making Challenge!

Contra P1 and P2

I’ve always fantasized about putting some other Nintendo Classics in there such as Bill Rizer and Lance Bean from the Contra games. I’ve played this game a lot as a kid and seeing such a character as Megaman is in the game just shows they have the experience to put these guys in there. Of course both of them would be alternate skins in the game, so there wouldn’t have to be two characters with the same, but similar moves like Dr. Mario. Before I start, just know that “B” means Special, “A” means punches and Smash Attacks are a Strong Punches, just to not confuse the audience. Now here we go. Their Center B would be the Laser Gun, charging their gun up similar to ROB, but it stops on impact of any player. You can be able to do this in the air and angle it to hit below you or above you. The damage it would inflict would be about fifteen percent or twenty to be fair. A good move to use on players with a zero percentage. Of course the move wouldn’t have much of a launch rate on you and wouldn’t kill you if you are higher than a hundred percent or seventy. Their Side B’s would be the Spreader, taking a large area, but spread apart to no avail. I think it would be a good move to use up close to do massive damage and have LIttle Macs or Ganons stop their Center B charge. All three shots with the spread would do massive damage, but only do so little with just one hitting a player. The Down B would be Crusher Missiles, propelling you upward as you fire three rockets downward. Each shot would do good enough damage to spike someone, but has a very minimal range. It would have a good launch rate if you time it right and would be quick to the draw when doing so, so there would be no delay on doing it. Of course the damage would be fair, doing only five or ten percent on a player. As for the Up B, they would do a Fire Shot, shooting a circling flame upwards that can be aimed to fire at the left or right corner of the screen. It would do a burning effect and deal about five percent with each hit. I don’t know if this would capture the characters and their games well, but I think this would do well for a character in smash.

As for their A’s, the center A and side A would be their Rifles firing like how Megaman works with his Center and Side A. His Up A would be a kick or a knife swipe, anything that would swipe the air. Down A would obviously be a kick. As for dashing, the Dash A would be a tackle like how Gannon does it. So all this leads up to the Smash Attacks. Their Side Smash would be them shooting a short ranged Rapid Fire out, not doing enough damage to kill anyone near eighty percent or taking very long to execute, kind of like Duck Hunt. Their Up Smash would be them firing up, also like Duck Hunt. Their Down Smash would be them firing the floor, doing an explosive radius around each side of the player.

That’s about it for their attacks, but their animation has to be traditional. Their walk has to be almost identical to the original game’s walking animation, with very little frame. I think that would be the most faithful thing about it. When you duck or hold Down, the player model will duck like in the original game, proning on the floor and maybe allowing the player to shoot while in the position. Their jump would have to be identical as well, having them do a constant roll in the air. I don’t know what the animation would be when they run, but I guess it would be the same as the walking animation. I really don’t know if their would be anything else to their animation, but I think these guys would be a great fit in the game since they don’t shoot real life guns, so they can just use the pallet-like projectiles to be safe for the kids, unlike Snake. As for Throws and Taunts, I really don’t know, I don’t know what would be so faithful to the game or fallow to the characters’ esthetic.

For Contra’s contribution to be apart of the game, their item drops would be the Nuke. I think those would be awful additions to the game because it would destroy everything on the screen, but I guess it would have to be toned down a bit and maybe bring some good, like being able to kill any Trophy Characters in the screen. And I guess the Smash Ball ability would have to be the Smart Bomb or maybe just a plain cannon that swipes what’s in front of the player. I don’t know.

Metal Slug

Metal Slug is fun with a large variety of characters with a lot of room to work with. If I were to see them be in Smash, it would be a dream to me. Their characters are so rich to be put in this game, so much to have them do in the game that would conspire so well with the Metal Slug Series. Of course they would have to be toned down a bit since they use guns. Even though, there about as many characters in the game as the first Smash, so making sure each character be put in the game individually would be a pain. Why not have them all be one character with a collection of different skins, becoming Fio, Eri, Marco or Tarma. To the moves, the Center B, would be Grenade Chucking, doing burning damage and do about twenty percent when it hits a player. If you think that’s a bit unfair, the player has only ten to throw, so it wouldn’t be much of a spam move and faithful to the games. As for the Side B, the player can shoot the Heavy Machinegun, doing reasonable amount of damage, but not going that far. The player can walk with it as well, increasing the range of the special, but still has the same amount of range. As for the Down B, the player would shoot an Iron Lizard, an RC Car explosive that can race across the stage. It wouldn’t do much damage, but it would do a burning effect that do some stunning during its duration. The Up B would be the Super Grenade, a giant bullet shot in the sky (pay respect to the third game where you shoot upwards at some flying insects). The Special would do a moderate amount of damage that does very little launch rate, just to make it fair to anyone being spammed with that and easy to dodge.

Going to the A attacks, the Center A and Side A would be constant firing like in Megaman, but do no stun damage, mostly like Bayonetta’s Center A. You can walk and shoot with it like Megaman and when you’re close to a player, you do a slice move, paying some respect to the original game and doing a good amount of damage to push someone out of the way. Up A would be a Knife Kick, doing damage to anyone in front of you or above you, but each kick pushes you backwards. And finally, Down A would be a kick, also pay respect to the newer games of Metal Slug, where the melee move for most characters is a kick. Although faithful, the kick doesn’t do that much damage and doesn’t do much of a launch to begin with, so using it won’t do much, but is a good move to stop someone in their tracks.

To the Smash Attacks, Side Smash is a Backpack Boxing Glove, doing about twenty percent damage in touching distance and ten to eleven percent farther away. It’s faithful to the games and I kind of love the wackiness of the Boxing Glove out of the backpack. If your skin is Ralph from Metal Slug 6 and on, the Side Smash is a Grenade Punch being faithful to two games, King of Fighters and of course Metal Slug, doing the same amount of damage. The Down Smash would be the Armor Piercer slash on both sides of the player, doing a good amount of damage and not much launch. As for the Up Smash, I guess it would be a shooting upwards with his pistol. I truly don’t know for that one, nor can I recall what power-up would go nicely in this spot. The shots upward sounds like it would do nicely, but I feel as if there could be something better. Who cares?

To be faithful to the characters’ original source, each skin would be a different character of the games, such as Marco, Fio, Tarma, Eri, Trevor, Clark, Ralph, Etc.. I would love to play as any of them, and they would be a nice fit in the game, not doing much harm to the overall artstyle. Of course, this would be the second time Metal Slug would enter 3D (don’t ask), so their would be a lot of designers to help make them a reality in the game. If they ever did, I hope they stay faithful to Metal Slug’s artstyle, not giving Marco or Tarma eyes, either dots or nothing at all. All the females would have to have eyes to make them look cute, but still, the 3D models for Tarma and Marco are just strange to look at. Just leave them with the Bandana over Marco’s eyes and Tarma with his shades. To be more faithful to the originals, when you crouch or hold Down the models will do that squat, tip-toeing with your gun between your legs. And when you step near a ledge, the ledge animation from Metal Slug will play, flailing his arms back and forth while a strand of snot hangs out of his nose. The taunts would be some of the victory sprites whenever you beat a boss in the game, and I guess it would be fitting to put those same taunts as the victory screen corresponding to your character skin. Another small bit of animation would also be after firing your Side A a lot, the model start a reload animations, being different depending on the characters’ guns.The Item Drops would be the obvious food and weapons from the games. You can have the Enemy Chaser, Drop Shot, 2-Machineguns, Shotgun, etc, the obvious crap from the game including the Martial Arts Survivors, follow you and shooting a ball of energy at anyone nearby. As for the Smash Ball ability, each character skin would have something different: Marco and Tarma get the Metal Slug tank, Eri and Fio have the Helicopter, Trevor and Nadia have the Metal Slug Mech called Mk. 5, and Ralph and Clark have the Metal Slug Walker. They would play like a Big Mac, but instead of using amped character abilities, the player can shoot out of his metal slug by tapping A and shoot bombs with pressing B. After the ability is done, the vehicle explodes, damaging everyone around it. God, I would love to see that happen.

Waluigi

A very unique character in the Nintendo games, he has never had his own game. Yes, he was in many other party games or even in a Tennis game, he’s never been the main focus in a game or a main character at all. It’s surprising to see that since Nintendo gives equal showcase for almost every character in their games, but I guess an inclusion in the next game might be another characterization of the tall, high pitched purple man. His Center B would be Tennis Charge, hold to increase the damage of the attack, but there is lay off damage to it, so the farther it goes, the less damage it will deal. The ball will have a presence, becoming a similar move to R.O.B.’s center, being able to pick it up and throw it back at someone either it being Waluigi or other players. His Side B would be a tackle, doing a short lunge in front of the player and throwing whoever he catches behind him. There would be a rare chance where the thrown player would be stunned, as if someone broke their shield. Something new I guess, but I can see it would be annoying if the game can’t make it rare for the player. The Up B would be lunge upwards, being able to grab someone and throw them to whatever direction the player wants, but down. I think that would be an overpowered move if he could just throw someone downward, being able to do a spike that no one wants to be apart of. Of course, whatever direction you throw the player in, Waluigi will go the opposite way. The Down B would be a counter that can reflect a portion of the received damage, damage would differ with what attack he receives.

For the game attacks, his Center A would be a three hit combo, simple and dumb, but it’s something almost all characters in the roster have. His Side A would be a jabbing punch that does a low amount of damage, but it can stop someone on their tracks when they try to dash attack you. Also seeing he has some absurdly long arms, it has a long range to it. Up A would be a kick towards the left or right side of the player. Down A is a plain kick and that would be his A attacks. His Dash A would be a tackle punch like Mario’s slide or Gannon’s Elbow Dash. Simple really and the player would more rather rely on their smash attacks and partially their specials, since each plain A move has so little damage to them. Kind of explains his skinny stature.

The Smash Attacks would be where it’s at with the character, putting some extra damage to each of them. To fit his cheating character, each smash attack he performs can be saved. Hold down the attack would take a long time, but charges the damage and can be held for later use for the player. Like I said, it would take a while, leaving enough of a window for the player to be interrupted or force them to rarely do them. The smash attacks would make him a primary target for the rest of the players, but landing each shot with either smash attack and do so much damage. Of course this would be unfair if the player can hold each smash attack at once without any consequence, so why not leave a timer one Smash Attack held? The player would choose one smash attack and it would create this puff of steam emitting off the player, puff becoming small as he holds the attack. You can only hold one attack, so whenever you try to use another Smash Attack, the one your holding will be replaced with the Smash Attack you are attempting to use, recharging it, but not stacking it. You can quickly run up to another player, tap A and the held Smash Attack will be used. It will be the Waluigi equivalent to Luigi’s Uppercut special, depending on how close you are, doing massive damage or a moderate amount. Of course it would differ to which smash you use, great segway me, The Side Smash would be a back hand fist slap, doing a good amount of damage to players and to provoke other players to use him. It has a large launch rate that can kill someone at a 50 or 60 percent damage. His Down Smash would be a split kick on the ground, kind of like how sonic does his Down Smash. It would have a lot of range to it and doing a good amount of damage to provoke the players to make you a primary target. Moving to his Up Smash, he can do a regular headbutt that covers a decent range, but does a good amount of damage and launch. And when I say good for this character, I mean it’s good for Waluigi. If you think this would be a bit overpowered again, just know due to his tall stature, he can only cover his height. He still does a good amount of damage, but you can duck and his punches will go right over you, even his Headbutt. So there would have to lots of planning to actually do a lot with him. He’s not like Mario… Or Kirby… You just don’t do the same things over and over, you have to plan it and hope that plan works because you will have a lot of room to be attacked if you don’t

For his items inclusion, I really don’t know. Maybe a tennis racket since everybody likes to associate him with that. Maybe a fake coin and real coins much like how Mario Kart has the fake boxes, but not as noticeable. Kind of like the fake mushrooms, but instead of making the player small, but stuns the player as if he broke his shield. Other than that, it’s hard to include items to compliment his inclusion since Nintendo has never released his own game that much. I can’t even think of a good Smash Ball attack for him… I guess this is where I include the audience to say their ideas. Go on, tell me.

Destiny 2 is a game that everyone had their own opinion on it. If you went on any article about the game on this site, you probably saw some things that were questionable. The game got a Nine on GI and many other publishers. I am a big Destiny fan and I think that’s a bit of a raised bar to rate it such a high number. The game is fun and I will say it’s taken my life, but there are a lot of things the game has that can ruin itself and disturb new or older players of the game that will take a while to accept. Hello and welcome to this Abstract Review with no restraints on spoilers.

Story and Its Characters

The first thing that I should talk about is the story. It’s something that felt very absent in the first game, every that we hoped to see in the game was not there and felt very rushed. I actually got the game on launch and it was very dry until the DLC came out literally two months later. I’m not kidding, the game came out September 9th and the first DLC, The Dark Below, came out December 9th. Anyways, the game was deemed to have more story involved in this sequel, to please haters and fans who wished there was more to explore. The beginning was actually something new compared to the dry beginning of the first one. You come to your home and see it being burned to the ground along with your friends. It does a good job on conveying the real tragedy the attack on the tower is, having the player see places he use to go to being destroyed and burned, it’s something that every Destiny player would see as a threatening sight no regular player imagined on seeing. And the moment you defend the tower with Zavala was so touching, having the player attack incoming Cabal with other random players, sharing the same experience as you. I already covered this in my last blog about the Beta, pointing out some key things that was a character filled moment with something to think about with the story, seeing your home gone and Ghual taking the light from you. The one thing that was new is how you don’t have anything besides a Pistol to defend yourself. The game didn’t give you an Exotic straight from the start, the game gave you a class weapon to defend yourself from the invading Cabal. It’s something that didn’t expect and was very underwhelming when you lose it all. Of course the game would have been bad if they take away a good and powerful weapon, but I would have loved feel that kind of loss. Besides, it would have been cool if you could retrieve the weapons at a later level or light, giving you the mission straight from the beginning, once you recover, you see a chance to get it all back, but you are took weak to do so. That would have been cool and a great way to drive the player to achieve the best weapons in the game, until you get more complex and powerful weapons. That would have been a great way to begin a game and drive the player to keep playing this great adventure.

Besides that, the game does a good job on showing the devastation of how losing your light is, shoving the weakest enemy at you in packs, playing soft and saddening music that more so drives the feeling of this moment as you fight furious packs of enemies with the weakest weapon you found on dead Guardians. That single moments makes you think about the other Guardians in universe that died to escape these hordes. As you progress, you see how much time it took to get to the place you are. It took you hours to see this outpost of dead Guardians, showing you that you could have helped them if you came sooner. It took you days to stumbleupon a snowstorm that will kill you. Of course all this is said to you, to make the player think, but of course, if you’re a regular gamer, this is all something you know you’re going to get past. There wouldn’t be a game if your character permanently dies, so why care about all of this? The hordes aren’t even that hard. I wish they made each enemy increase in value, showing the different bars of health that each enemy can get, making each enemy horde feel so much of a tackle instead of pushing down a kid. I get why they did that, but make the player feel the moment that the Guardian is facing, punish the player when he dies by making his respawn go back to the start of the horde, no checkpoints, nothing to save the player from feeling the moment he’s suppose to feel. I know that dying in the same spot would be annoying, but at least make it challenging for the player to be careful in missions or strikes.

Once you beat two hordes, you have a ledge to jump across and a deep fall. The game forces you to fall, making this moment feel very scripted. I know story based games do that, but those kind of games do their best to make it feel natural. This felt forced and seemed like a possible jump. At least have a first-person cinematic in-game, having the player witness him hitting the ledge and falling to his death. That would have at least shown the struggle and how weak the guardian is now. After plummeting to the ground from an impossible height, you should see almost every on the Guardian, his reload animation, the way he held his gun, how he walked, all should look crippled. I know this would require more work, but this small moment in the game would have made the experience massively better.

Back to the review, you get picked up by this outcast gang that help you get back on your feat to prepare yourself for battle against the Cabal. This little moment was to make the player feel that there’s hope in this war. Of course you already know that, but it’s suppose to feel that way, a possible motive that will power the player to continue on this adventure. After that, you know can play the game, not at its fullest, but something to freshen the minds of the newer players and the old. Any regular players would find this part of the game annoying, since everything is taken away from you besides Earth, but it’s still a good start for anyone. The missions are one thing, but we’re not there yet.

The game makes you go on about three missions to get the player use to the new map system, then shows the player the story mission. You do a forgettable moment, get rewarded, repeat. They’re all fun and it was a shame to see that the first three or four story missions aren’t that great. Once finish those three or four missions, you get your Light back. Pretty underwhelming to get your powers back so quickly. If you’re a Titan, you have the Defender Subclass, Hunters a Blade Dancer and the Wizard gets the poorly named Downblade along with everything to go with it, but the punch ability. I wish they gradually gave you each ability, discovering more and more shards of light in more Story Missions, having Zavala or Ikora to doubt you in your battles. That would have made the powers more meaningful, making them feel well earned to player. It would be a boasting kind of reward, but at least it gave some importance to the ability. Instead we got it all at once. It just derived the player from any enjoyment at all that the moment where you get to show off your super on hordes of  enemies feel so boring. I know that’s a typical word to describe it, but you tend to want everything to end and continue on your fun. Like I said before, they should have made the player achieve each ability starting with the jump boost and on, give this moment a good story feel, but still maintains the gamey feel. Other than that, you continue your pursuit to stop Ghual, prove your powers to Zavala, give your part in the war to against the Red Legion, A.K.A the Cabal. There are some touching moments in the game where Zavala is willing to die without his light for the people he protected in the walls of the city. Ikora thinking she lost everything and there’s nothing to fix it, she lost too much, so why do anything. Cayde… He wanted to go on another adventure. I hear a lot of people say that people say that Cayde has a lot of character, but he is borderline Deadpool with his character. He never shows more emotion than just funny. I wish he was more expressive about the situation he ran away from, make him have a reason for why he wanted to go on an adventure! Say that he wanted forget the things he lost at the city, the friends, the Guardians he taught, show that he has more than just one emotion. This can be argued that this would destroy his character, but that would have showed why he likes to be funny, say he had to fake a smile a few times because of the memories. Why not have him show a funny, but worrying fear in him, not doing anything, but hide in cover. Or maybe say he likes to go to the Planet Nessus because that’s where he has Failsafe delete all the bad memories. Something make this character more interesting than him being played by Nathan Fillion or being funny. I love you Nathan, don’t get me wrong. I’m going off track again.

Back on the story, once you find out the Red Legion’s plan is to take the energy from the Sun and leave with everything destroyed, you rush to the sun and stop them. I love that moment in the game. This part of the story must have been handled by someone else since everything about it was just so awesome. You are constantly given music to amp you up for the fight, the enemies are in higher numbers, you can just feel the distress of the Cabal, throwing everything at you to stop this single Guardian, killing every Cabal Legionary he sees in rage, from stealing the sun’s energy. There was even part of this level where you go out where the Sun’s rays hit you and have to hide behind shade. The Cabal come in chasing you risking their lives to kill you while being constantly burned by the Sun. All that was just awesome and lead up where you destroy the Sun Siphon, you have to escape with  explosions and the sun killing you. This part could have been things barely hitting you, but this part made me feel as if I was in danger. Once you finish this segment of the game, you are told to go to the Traveler, replacing the Farm. That moment once you see that floating Traveler, you feel like you’re going to fight the good fight. The story had a slow beginning and filled with flaws, but that moment felt so in sync with what was going on. Once you landed near the Traveler, you are met with many other players fighting for the Light, doing the same mission as you. This moment was empowering to me, you fight with another player is such a great idea. It’s like playing a campaign and seeing the Grunts actually fight with their lives, seeing a gamertag over their head. It actually felt you were apart of something and as I’ve seen in many MMO’s, they do this a lot with any mission. I know this game is a poor excuse for a MMO, but still has some great qualities of one.

Before we talk about the final fight, there was something that I forgot to talk about: Ghual. I have mentioned him, but the game had some cinematic moments with the character, showing his plot with the light and his obsession over the Traveler. If you ask me, he builds this kind of crazy and obsessive person who will talk and torture the Speaker for any information about the damn white thing in the sky. But I’ve heard people say that he has this kind of plain character arc of a villain, I don’t know. If you ask me, he’s a Dry Erase Character: a character that feels different everytime you encounter him. It even felt like sometimes he had this bored voice to him, where he just didn’t want to waste time, but later he wants to prolong the capture of the light and leave the solar system to be blown to pieces, to talk more about the Traveler some more to the player. I think the only one moment in the entire game I liked with Ghual was when he asked the Speaker how does one become chosen by the Traveler. The Speaker responds with Devotion. Ghual is confused and Speaker makes it clear. “Devotions inspires Bravery, Bravery inspires Sacrifice, Sacrifice leads to Death.” At first this sounds very descriptive of the Guardians, painting a picture of their life and duty, but then he says this, “So feel free to kill yourself.” I know up to this point it’s a meme to the community, but I loved that and seeing Ghual’s reaction was such a given reward. The anger and rage he felt, but the one thing stopping him from hurting the Speaker was his second in command. Don’t know his name, but also made some great parts in those segments, giving some great character story. That’s another thing I didn’t like about the game’s story or these segments, they never make it clear as to who that guy is. I’ve actually tried looking him up and he doesn’t appear in any site or wiki page, but on the voice actor’s lists of the game. Apparently his names is The Consul. Perfect name for someone who is second in command for the Red Legion, on unknown territory doing as they please. Yes, I had to look that word up.

As we gotten through that, we are now to the final act, the fight with Ghaul. He just killed the Speaker and his friend, The Consul, and is on a power rage. He gathers as much as could from the light, which is strange since he was trying to find out how to be chosen by the light, but now he can use it… Did he already know how to use it? He starts to use all this power from the light and use abilities you have. Whatever Guardian you are, he will use all the supers against you. Cool in a sense, but it’s a bit cliche or predictable to me. I don’t know, it’s just something that I could have found out before I even gotten to this fight. And if he could have used this new power, why couldn’t he let all of his higher-ups have some? That would have been a great enemy to fight, a Cabal that has similar powers as you and can regenerate health. Anyways, the fight. He stays at the same  Light Level  which is about 170 or 150, which is kind of a bummer since I got to this fight at 200 light. All the fun was sucked out because I was grinding the entire game. Once you get him about two-thirds of his health, he runs back to the light and is invincible for a while until you clear all the enemies in the area. Once you do, you shoot him until he gets down the next slab of health, then that’s it. This felt very underwhelming when I did it, as if they made this entire fight something they wanted you to scratch off. Of course, if you wanna play nothing but the Story, which the game prepares you for during those missions, you will have a different experience, but the game should have made this fight something more immersive or simply more difficult. Maybe make him follow you Light Level for the entire game, so you would have to work around him as well as the incoming enemies, that would’ve been a very simple solution to this. When he dies, his shell you call a body cracks open and releases his energy. At first, you would think it’s the Light returning to the Traveler, but it’s actually Ghaul’s ghost saying that he is now immortal, taunting the Traveler. The Traveler gets pissy and releases a pulse of light to destroy Ghual’s spirit and Light touches every space in the Galaxy.

Month’s later, a cinematic moment comes in to say Hi and shows Zavala, Cayde and Ikora great the player with a happy and at peaces faces, showing that the leaders of the old are still standing and will never fall without a fight. Then they look behind them and there you are to greet… Yourself… This was to signify that you are apart of the leaders, to guide your generation to victory. It’s cool, but means nothing since the game will tell you there are still Red Legion in the Solar System to fight, just the make sure the player doesn’t put down the controller and forget about the game. I will say the game is fun afterwards since the Traveler has some new vendors to see and get some great loot out of while finishing their missions or quests. Kind of a great end, just made Ghail look like an idiot to mess around with, the cutscenes with him weren’t as great as many would say, but the game gave some interesting lore like Failsafe, Sloane, Holiday or even Hawthorne. No, I didn’t look them up, they all were great characters and had some great backstory that said a lot about the world and the planet they were on. My favorite would have to be Asher, a crazy scientist that doesn’t sound practical, but follows certain codes that would benefit the Guardians and the Tower. And his Arm, apparently it’s a Vex arm that in one mission where the Vex were being imprisoned by the Taken, he says he can feel his arm being drained of it’s life force, that someone wants to rip it out of him. It’s interesting and makes me want to read more into it.

Weapons and Loot

Now that we are finished I can talk about the game, so let’s start with the game’s weapons. If you don’t know, the primary and secondary slots have been changed. Instead of having the Auto Rifles, Pulse Rifles and Scout Rifles being the in the Primary and the Fusion and Sniper rifles and Shotguns being in the Secondary, it’s now Primary is Kinetic Damage, Secondary is Energy and the support weapons being the Power weapons. This means I can have an Auto Rifle in both Secondary and Primary slots. To most this means nothing, but it means a lot and has a lot of mechanics to follow. Energy Weapons do more damage to shields than flesh, while Kinect does more damage when the shield is down. Of course each one would do similar damage rate, but there is a great downfall to both that you need to follow or you won’t have fun. And the Energy has elemental damage to it, so it does more damage to a certain kind of shield. I found out what it was for and I feel stupid for not noticing. If the shield is say Orange, then fire will have the shield to explode, doing damage to anyone around the enemy. Of course, this doesn’t follow the same principles in the Crucible, but it does bring down those shields faster. If you ask me, this is great game design for this kind of game it’s just fun to just see a crowd of Cabal explode because the Commander was wearing a Fire Shield on the wrong day, I just love it.

The only thing I have a problem with in the game is how the newer additions to the Scout Rifles are. They seem to do the least amount of damage unlike the first game. They made the Scout Rifle so bad that it doesn’t even do much with headshots. I guess I might have gotten some of the worst of the bunch, but I haven’t found a good one in either Energy or Kinetic. If not, please tell me which one is better, I miss long shotting enemies. Anyways, the Hand Cannons, I believe, got a step up in this game. I don’t know, the last game kind of made them so… Ignored is the best word I can think of. They did massive damage up close, but weren’t the best in that type of situation. You want to lessen the horde as you risk your life, not miss five times and get only three shots in, that’s just not the fun way of doing that. In this sequel, they made them so satisfying having them do heavy knock-back damage. They actually stagger instead of continuously fire at you as they feel a small push on their shoulder. It stops enemies in their tracks and make each bullet sponge more satisfying to shoot. The fun weapon may be great on AI, but it would have to be in the right hands for it to be the same in the Crucible. Other than that, the game’s primarily used weapon would have to be the Auto-Rifle. I’ve seen a good plenty of people use the Scout Rifle (which is why I’m asking if there’s a good one), but there will never been a Titan or Hunter that doesn’t use the Auto-Rifle. It’s a weapon that does consistent damage to the enemy and doesn’t stop. It staggers as well, being the big push as to why people use it so much. Great weapon for basically everything. The Pulse Rifles aren’t much, although useful, the long pause between bursts aren’t fun while in a Raid or Strike. Other weapons I don’t see much use would have to be the Sidearms and Submachine guns. I can see why since some side arms have a huge recoil gap while aiming. For those who don’t know, Recoil Gaps are the time between shots while aiming, the small gap that the player has a straightened and controlled shot to fire again. Sides arms don’t do well while aiming, but have a great hipfire. Same goes for the Subs, since it’s just a recoil mess, you might as well not aim at all. Sidearms I would prefer be used in Strikes or Raids, but not in Crucibles. The complete opposite goes for the Sub, seeing that the unpredictable player can be stopped by the wide spread of the Sub. It feels like you’ve been cheated, but it’s been programmed that way, so it must be.

The Power Weapons are pretty simple having the Sniper, Shotgun, Rocket Launcher, Fusion Rifle, Sword and Machine Gun. The devs thought it would be cool to add one new Weapon Subclasses so we now have the Linear Fusion Rifle, being a more accurate Fusion Rifle with the same power and damage as one. If you ask me it’s cool, but acts like more of a Sniper Rifle more than anything. Anyways, they have a high damage rate that can kill anything in one shot or within at least two. The shotguns primarily used in only Crucibles or maybe in Strikes if you can do some sick tricks with it. Hard, but is do-able. Sniper Rifles aren’t really used, but are still fun to use, just this game doesn’t have the greatest mechanic for long ranged attacks. I mean every AI in the game moves into cover if you try. You can pick some off when they don’t notice you, but they’ll go to cover to lure you in to perform close ranged attacks. I’d say the best weapons to use is the Machine Gun, Rocket Launcher and Fusion Rifle since they all have such great damage at almost every kind of range. Swords can be fun, but you would have to make sure you don’t get yourself in a cluster f**k while you do it.

Now that we’re done with the weapons, the loot is fun. Of course the first game was bad because of how glitchy the loot spawn was, but this one is actually fun to farm. A lot of games like to make Grinding or Farming part of the core Leveling and Gears findings, but this one puts all of that a part of the missions and story. If you ever want to get great loot, you must go fight for the Light or do tasks people assign you. You can get loot by killing people in the same spot where every enemy spawns, but it seems that only happens when you need to level. If not, you will kill everything and get ammo, nothing else. Of course, out of random there will be an Engram, but that only happens in a 1 in 50 chance in doing so. At least that’s what I experienced. Other than that, there is also the Region Coins. I know that might not be what they are called, but I call them that. The coins can be found by doing missions of any kind in any region and can give you great rewards if you get a lot of them. The mechanic to this is to encourage players to keep playing and get awesome loot in certain regions. Of course this can seem like a grind once you do all the missions, but god, some of the armor and weapons are awesome as hell. Devrim’s rewards are one of the bests for a titan in my opinion. The only bad thing about it how rare they are if you done all the missions in that region or you looked for too many chests. That’s one mechanic I don’t like about the loot system, which is the chests. If you are going out to Chest Hunt, you will find less and less everytime to the point they give you nothing. No, not glimmer, not coins, not even some consumables to scavenge. You get nothing. The bad part about this is how there’s a consumable item that marks every Chest near you for about four hours. Sounds cool until you drain how much the game can give you at one single time. I wish they would at least degrade it as you go on with the Chest Hunting, making you have consumables that are worth something, but basically nothing, but still worth the trouble. Or maybe just give me Glimmer, make me feel like I found something instead of nothing. In Bungie’s defense, they said it was to make the player do more than just Chest Hunting, but why spawn them in the area if you get nothing out of it?

Besides all that, there is a new thing that I would like to complain about, which is the very low diversity of the Armor and Weapons. In the first game, every piece of armor was rare, if you had it, you were the only one who had that set and the shaders made it look even more rare. And what made them so much different than the last piece of armor were there effects. This Chest Piece has every kill with the Scout Rifle adds additional recharge to your grenade. These shoulder pads has faster reloading and deals more damage when you have an Auto Rifle equipt. That made each piece of armor feel so unique to your playstyle and it helped make the armor feel more than just a style. This game, however, made them in a fashion trend. You each armor had the same effects, nothing else to make the one right next to it unique, just clothing for the player to wear and upgrade. If you ask me, this is a major downgrade to the last game, just destroying how fun it was to grind for Armor. It’s now considered a the lowest piece of loot now, the only thing mattering being the Light level. I really don’t like that, but I can get past that. It’s something that most can since it only changes minor things in the gameplay.

Now that we’re done with the armor, now the shaders! I know many have said that the new Shaders are just the worst and all, but we all know that. I won’t go in depth since it’s been said in a lot of articles on this site and many videos discussing the game. The one thing I want to talk about is how the Devs defended it. The first game had you do missions to get rare ones or hope it comes in for drops from Crucible or Strike. It was always different and they all were great for almost anything and anyone. This game made Shaders a mechanic to get you to keep playing. Cheap to say the least, but the worst way to defend something like that. Since it destroys itself once you take it off, so you can’t put it on Rare Armor or anything below Legendary Grade equipment. It’s something you don’t wanna get use to when you played the first game for about two years, but you can easily gloss over it. And before you haters start telling me that the shaders are an act to get you to buy, you’d be wrong. If you level up while Level 20, you get a Bright Engram, something you can buy in the shop with real money. Of course this is another thing to make you keep playing, but it doesn’t mean you need to buy it in order to get it. You can get any Shader with those Bright Engrams, whether you wanted it or not. If you don’t care about making you armor a certain color in this game, the shaders won’t matter even if you did.

Gameplay and It’s Physics

If you ask me, the game is fun. Each mission was made by great level designers that know what they’re doing. Some can be short, but I think that was the point of the game, to keep you wanting more. If you ask me, I hate that when a game does that. “It was fun, but I wish it was longer” is the common quote said about the game. It’s great that it makes you want more out of the game that you feel is fun, but it happens constantly throughout the game, the player can take notice and find that kind of mission design bad. This sounds like one of those things that is more of a “Me” feel, so I guess you can ignore this one for now. I just want longer missions out of this game.

Next to that, there is the Strikes, the game’s highlight that seems to never get old. The missions you may find are just fun, well designed and have so much lore to it builds so much of the world. I love these missions in the game, but the only thing bad about it is how you’re restricted to whatever mission you are given. It’s like spinning a Roulette Wheel or rolling dice and hope you get what you want. It’s not like the first game where you were given choice to do a random mission in this region or a specific mission to get this type of loot. They don’t do that anymore, you have to take what the game gives you and it’s so annoying when you finish the worst Boss in the world and have to do it again trying to find that cool Strike Mission you got yesterday. It’s an easy fix that they could do, but I don’t think they won’t be doing that anytime soon until the first DLC is released. The same goes for the Crucible, having the Randomizer Mode on whenever you want to play that one fun Mode that you will never get. If you don’t like Capture the Point of Survival, you won’t have a great time in that mode. Then there’s a lot of maps that have lots of vantage points that are just bad. One map has this large box in a hallway that can be used to camp a lot. And before you Destiny haters start to complain about a game you haven’t really played, no this is not the core part of the game, you can completely ignore it and play something far more fun than the Crucible which you have a lot to choose from. And trust me, there is a lot to do in this game than just the Strikes.

The gunplay is pretty fun, every shot feels so satisfying and powerful. In both Strikes and Crucibles it’s very good when you land that hit and kill. It’s mainly what the first game was like, but the sounds are pretty much different and are so pleasing to the ear. Instead of of a lame sound for this awesome looking gun. Other than those facts, there’s not much to talk about with the game’s gunplay. There is the new Climbing Physics that help a lot when that jump doesn’t have a great distance. Sometimes it agrees with, but sometimes it wants to ruin your life. It’s easy to get use to, so you can tell what ledge or jump will trigger the player to climb. I think this was the response to the Iron Banner DLC secret, where you had to climb lots of ledges and risk yourself through large jumps. They might be planning something later, I mean who knows what they might do?

There are the more difficult Strike Missions in the game like the Exodus Black mission right now and the Raid. I’d say that this one mission isn’t great. It’ hard and I will say it’s rightfully fair with its difficulty, but why time it. I’m not saying take it out, I think the mission should be, but why make it so short? Once you get to the final boss, you have little to no time to do it and the Waited Respawn is very unforgiving. If they could at least try to make the spawning twice as long as a normal respawn area (ten seconds), I think I would like this mission a lot more. Don’t tone down the game’s difficulty in these missions, but make them possible. As for the Raid, this is a “Me” opinion, so you can ignore me on this one if you want. I’ve played two or three raids in my time playing the game, but this one is kind of hard. I’ve done some alone and this one alone is like trying to hammer a nail with a feather. Enemies are just bullet sponges and are too frustrating to deal with. If they could change difficulty of the player’s fireteam numbers, I think this would be do-able, but I can see this being hard to code and may cause some bugs to the enemy stats or change the game’s overall fun. Otherwise, I want to see Raids being dropped a little in difficulty or maybe make an adaption of the enemies. It’s fun with friends, but I want to be able to play the mode by myself. I’ve only found myself in one which is the Exodus Black mission, the most boring and irritating one out of the list we have. The mission is okay with some variety of enemies and lots of lore to it, but the boss is so frustrating to fight. Everything else is do-able and tolerable, but the boss is the worst concept in the entire game. The boss is a bullet sponge that is both difficult and fun. They have advantages against the players and use them in a smart and well made way, no hiding, nothing that can seem so frustrating or anger inducing. This boss is an invisible Fallen guy that sneaks up on you with his megaton hands and rocket launcher and do a massive amount of damage that it can makes his little minions and shock floor finish you off in seconds. I don’t know who thought of this idea of a boss being able to do that, but that guy or girl should be put to do something else. This would have sounded great on paper, but it deserves to be in a different game. I mean, there is no other way to actually get away from this guy, there is so many enemies that can kill you. There’s freaking Shock Shanks that make the floor around them do damage to anyone that steps into does damage and on top of that, takes away your jump and speed power. This can totally stop your flow of the game and make you panic and die. No one can help Revive you because you died in the shocky floor. You just become this *** that just died and have to wait to respawn as your Teammates try to defend themselves. I know this can give the Fallen some characteristics that they’re a cowardice or Honorless bunch of warriors that will do anything to make you easier to kill, but I’ve fought Fallen Bosses in the first game that were bullet sponges, but were still holding the same characteristics, teleporting around a corner to regain their shield or just teleporting right into the mix to do more damage and make you panic. You can still beat him as easy as other bosses below 200 Light, but the way this fight was programmed and planned is just awful. You don’t need to change it in anyway, just give me a choice to choose my favorite strike mission. I can’t talk about the mode besides it can be fun, because I haven’t played any other mission besides that one, Exodus Black. Bungie, if you are looking into Game Informer for some stupid reason and looking at the blogs, please make Strikes Individual Choice or make a checklist for the player to go down. Do something that will make me not play the same Strike everytime I want to have fun. This is one of the only things to do once you finish every mission, story mission or even faction quest, you have to make this Strike option a lot different or it will destroy the game’s replayability!

Now let’s talk about Leveling. I really don’t like it, but it was fun while it lasted. Along with the story, it felt like they wanted this part of the game to be done with in the first few hours of the game. Grinding isn’t a pure factor of the game, but it’s fun when you see that bar get to full and the screen shows this awesome particle effect with the text appearing: Level [insert number here]. I don’t know why, but it was satisfying to see that. It actually made me want to play more to reach that level cap, but because the cap is twenty and it takes about a few hours to get there, the fun is short lived. I wish they made it something along the lines of difficult, but fun, making you want to see that bar get like three Exp or more. Borderlands did the same with the leveling system, making it kind of difficult, but it was fun gaining that XP. But since the game allows the player to gain Region Awards and Legendaries and your first Sparrow once you hit twenty, the fun feels like it just began. To most this is a f**k up to say the least, but to me? I would have to agree it was bad to make it easy to reach the cap, but I think it’s a nice reward to reaching such… An… Easy feat… Okay I can see why. I guess they could have given the player the Sparrow right in the beginning since the first game did that and getting somewhere is a pain when you don’t have the vehicle, but then the goal to get one and keep playing to reach the level would be gone. I do see where they are going, but I wish they could have changed it up or at least made it like Borderlands, difficult, but fun.

I know Grinding isn’t fun, that’s obvious, but you can make it satisfying to make it fun, reward the player lightly, but make it feel like an impossible feat. Not to the extent of Dark Souls, but you get it what I’m saying. I think the most scummy thing about the game is how they don’t allow the player to get Region Awards or Legendaries until they hit Level 20. I kind of felt scammed when that happened, but you can get past it.

Player Characters, Factions and the Clan

If you played the first Destiny before you started playing the sequel, your character will carry on with some new HD Graphics. I will have to say the draw to distance on the character is less chopping that the original, the shadow starts clipping around the player once you try to get a good look at him. I guess the only downside would have to be how you don’t have any new features to mess with, no new faces, no new features, no new hairstyles, nothing. I guess there wasn’t enough time within development to create them, but they could have at least put in some new things to mess with. I guess this is a stupid thing to criticize, so I guess you can ignore this paragraph or not, I don’t care.

Staying on the topic of your character, I said that the player character is being voiced in this game, but apparently no, that’s not true. I wish they could since they hint at it a lot in the game’s cutscenes, having the player being interrupted before they could speak by their Ghost. This kind of annoys me since all Races chosen by the player is completely voiced and was in a minor sense in the first game, but was not utilized in this game. I know they couldn’t use old sound clips, but they could have asked the original voice actors to do VA work as the Player. I bet they were busy at the time, but they got real famous people in this game doing minor voice acting roles in this game, why not get people back like Matt Mercer, Peter Jessop or Susan Eisenberg to reprise their roles in this game as the Guardian, the hero of the game? I think I would have liked the game a lot more and many more if they made the main character talk more instead of become a bystander in a war your Ghost put you apart of. It feels like you’re the puppet of the Ghost’s ideas and actions, having you do what he thinks is right. I want to cut these strings! I want to cut them and unseal my lips and scream to the heavens and tell you, you little piece of what is left of the Travel, that there’s no strings on me! Okay… Maybe gotten carried away, but you get the gist.

Right next to that is the Factions. If you ask me that addition to the game is strangely amusing to me. I know it’s just a faction that does nothing to the story at all or the game itself, but it’s a great upgrade to the last game’s factions. Before you had to collect items that would help the faction, like Ammo, Weapon parts, Armor Scrap, things that seemed to be more useful elsewhere making the factions in the game feel like a buddy that only hangs out with you because you have what he wants. This time, you are given Faction Tokens whenever you do a mission that act like Region Coins, depositing it as reputation and giving you rewards for doing so. And it’s easy getting these coins, even getting them in the Crucible or random moments in a region, you can get Faction Tokens just about doing anything that’s beneficial to the player. I think the only downside is how the Faction’s Daily quests are so repetitive sometimes. Go kill these enemies in this region and you get something rare from me! Things like that are Faction missions and add nothing else to the game than that. I think they could have made them a quest hog, where you get randomly generated quests that give you rewards or more reputation. I think that would have been more fun to the player and would add more content than just plain Kill-This-Thing-In-This-Way Missions. Before the Factions inclusion, there was clans. This kind of like joining a CoD clan in most games, but it’s more official. You get random invites from players or friends, you join a clan and you do stuff for the clan to improve their reputation in the community. To most, this would be an easy ignore on the game since it plays such a small factor in the game, but if you’re a High School teenager that has friends that have no lives, you want to join a clan. If you have a friend that plays on and off with Destiny, you won’t be able to join his clan until he is on the game, so you would have to wait a while to join or until he finally invites you as Clan Founder. If you were thinking that there wasn’t a clan search, you are correct, making joining a friend’s hard if they aren’t on or invites you. I hope they put in a clan search so I can finally join a friend in his clan and do a raid for once without dying to the first enemy alone.

Enemy Diversity

The game, to put it simply, doesn’t have much new enemies to fight, just the Cabal, the Fallen, the Hive and the Taken. Yes, technically the enemies are a different breed of such, but they are still the same kind of enemy types as the first game. There are some crazy redesigns and a very low list of new kinds of enemies in each enemy type, but there’s nothing more than that. This topic of the review will be short since this wouldn’t be worth three to four paragraphs of me talking about the enemies. As I said in the Beta Review, they focused a lot of the attention of designing each character on the Cabal. Of course they would because they are the main freaking enemy in the game, the killer of Light, the kind of thing that the first game didn’t hold. The only problem I have about that is how it shows. The Vex, Taken and Hive are pretty much the same kind of enemies as the first game, with barely any changes to them. The Fallen went through some noticeable changes that made them more interesting. They adapted as animals, so they have spider legs instead of a second pair of arms, so they like to crawl around instead of run. There is one new enemy type, which is the invisible enemies, being very creepy and edgy. The Cabal had a complete redesign, replacing the shield enemies with energy shield enemies, and have about two new types as far as I can see, being the Butchers and Flamethrower Legionaries. It kind of sucks for how much diversity there is in the enemies, having this feeling in your chest that makes you want to fight something new, but overall this can be easily ignore to the player, having no need to whine about it in the future.

Conclusion

Overall, this game is great, not perfect in every way and definitely has plenty of room to improve, but I would recommend this game. I know this was a long read and I think my editors won’t want to read this in one day or at all, but I enjoyed this. The game is pretty bad in some spots at it’s current state, but I hope the next update or DLC fixes most of the problems we face in the game. I enjoy it a lot and my dad loves everything about this game. It’s just beautiful to look at and is fun to play. Of course this game isn’t for all, but if you enjoy shooters with an insane amount of enemies, guns and gear, this game might be for you. I know there is a lot of people rating this game too high for its current state, almost hitting a 10/10, I think this game would deserve an 8.5 or 7. It is fun and is a great game all together, but it needs some improvements to earn a higher rating. I know my opinion doesn’t matter, but I just want to say it at least.

I hope you liked this read as much as I liked writing it, taking up to 11 pages on Docs, ‘til next time…

Play More Games

Before You Buy...

About a month ago, I had a challenge due where you write about which two or more games would be wonderful together. Of course like the *** I am, I didn’t make an announcement about it to get more people on board with it. There were great entries to the challenge, but I still wish I saw more. I really feel bad that I didn’t announce it. Thanks for the entries though. I loved them a lot, especially the late ones. Those were fun. This time I’ll make sure this goes noticed by the community, so I hope people like this challenge. There are a lot of great games out there that were lost to time or forgotten because of a specific reason. Now to the challenge!

There are a lot of concept of horror and seeing that the gaming genre has used that concept to their advantage. I’ve seen games use a master AI that can tell the smart enemy AI where you are just so it can hunt you down in the most unpredictable way. Others have handicapped you, talking your vision and have you use echolocation to tell where you are and enemies hunting for you. I want to know what your guys’ ideas are on a new and original horror that may have some great mechanics no other has done before or take some key things in horror games that made the game special and mix it with another. I want to see you guys go crazy with this and I hope you guys enjoy this challenge. The deadline will be around the 21st of this month. Happy Halloween and I hope you have fun writing this challenge. ‘Til next time….

Play More Games!

P.S. You may ask questions if you please and don't forget to include the name "Game-Making Challenge" in your blog in some way

Falcon

I know I may come across as an FPS fan, loving anything that’s in the first person and shoots a gun, but my favorite genre is horror, and the one thing I know about horror is that it’s a difficult challenge to take as a developer. You have to cross new grounds to be able to make your game interesting or remotely scary. If it’s not done correctly the intended scary moments are laughed, and not in a good way. This can be troubling for a developer and his team because of how stressful it is, making them question whether the things they’re creating and coding are even going to do what they intended to the player. It’s a lot of hard work that can go to waste or do some damage to well known team or company. It has happened to the greatest I mean look at Monolith, they basically given up on the genre as far as I can see. Well, I want to talk about what makes a good horror game, listing off the ingredients for a truly frightening and fun game. Hello and welcome to this Game-Making Challenge of the Month.

Hinderince

Horror never makes you feel comfortable with your situation even if the monster is gone or out of reach, the game makes you worry and the one thing that makes the player worry even more is his incapabilities. In terms of movement, anything athletic is gone. All those things you’ve learned in CoD or Titanfall should go out the window once you start up a horror game. You aren’t an experienced soldier or Parkour runner, you’re a run-off-the-mill character that needs to get out of a killer’s situation. Running is an ability, but how fast you go is very slow, the player mustn’t, and I mean mustn’t be able to easily run away from a monster or something of that nature. That’s one critique I had about RE7. Being able to get away too easily from anything is going to be a utilized ability in the game, you want the player to use other mechanics in the area like hiding under the bed in a diseased ridden hospital room or behind a toppled table against a corner, these can easily be ignored if the player can just run circles around the monster. That just makes the monster look stupid. If you look at the game Alien Isolation, the player is not faster than the Alien nor is she faster than the survivors on the colonial vessel, she is an engineer like her mother and only knows the basics of tools and tech around her. That made the game very intense having the Alien spot you release this never before felt fear, watching that thing, in seconds, jump so fast at the player making him scramble to the next room. There was a sense of vulnerability in that moment that most games seem to ignore.

And on top of that, the game made guns feel like garbage. Why? Because that would have made the game easy. That’s another way to hinder the player, just make any sensible thing you can think of in that type of situation and make it feel like a Nerf Gun. Bringing out a knife is a risk, a gun only pushes or stagger the monster, even a freaking explosion doesn’t do Jack Daniels to the monster. Of course you can have a monster die in the game, but it would take lots of resources or ammo to do so. If you ever played Dead Space, the game makes the most awesome-looking weapons in the game feel so weak against the Necromorphs. Of course the player is able to kill them in large numbers, but they still stand as a difficult enemy. In that game there was also a low supply of ammo for each gun. You can be stocked up on ammo, but that takes up space for some other potential items like health kits or money to upgrade your weapons and other abilities. You can to think about what you should keep and what you need to protect yourself. There was also an ability that helped you when you didn’t have ammo to fire, you could pick things up and through it at them like a bullet, but it was difficult and slow on doing so, so there was a benefit and consequence. It made you vulnerable even though it was suppose to help you.

Difficulty

A lot of people think that a horror game should be hard in order for it to be scary, but that’s both true and false. If a game like Dead Space made you die constantly because it was suppose to be hard, it would be more annoying than scary. The difficulty would have to be regulated to the player’s ability, not being too hard, but still difficult. Not too easy because the game would be boring and funny instead of the intended feel of the game. That’s one thing that developers have a hard time with sometimes, making a game with some difficulty, but can still be passable is very hard to think about. I know it seems like a simple concept, but it takes up a lot of time to play test and see if it can be what you intended it to be. A lot of times the string of code that cues this and cues that will mess up and not happen. This puts many developers in time constraints and most likely have them stop trying. Not saying this is the case in a lot of games, but when you have a schedule that will happen just to shorten the work effort. This kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier where you would have to make sure everything is working right or even bypass with a smart AI. As I mentioned before about Alien Isolation, the player is given a lot of things to think about and the Alien AI is just something to be feared. If you ask me, most of the events (maybe almost %80-%90) of the game was not scripted. I mean the AI intended to scare you and kill you, but there is another AI that terrorizes you in that game called the Overseer. The Overseer is a master AI that watches and learns from the player and transfers that data to another AI smart, fast learning and quick AI. This can be harder to implement, but it’s easier to fix since it’s all there and the AI has no real presence in the game, so there won’t be much to be careful over, just making sure it does what it’s intended. No worrying about model glitches, AI bugs or even amped AI glitches where they do too much of what they’re suppose to.

For the short of it, you must make the game easy to learn and to bypass for the player, but still make it difficult. You never want an easy game because that seems lazy to your team and the company, nor do you want to have a hard game and become ignored in the marketplace from any new player or inexperienced players.

The Monsters

In a horror, the monster or monsters have to see feared in some way. They’re always disturbing, but you would have to make sure you put the right kind of disturbing on them. I know that seems kind of limited, but there is a lot of room for just one word. A monster can be anything disturbing: a pedofile can seem very creepy and have you want that person as far away as possible. It can be a Spiritual Demon that represents the character’s inner guilts and thoughts mortalized as this creepy looking freak of a monster. Anything disturbing can be anything you would find in nightmares, literal nightmares painted in a picture.

If you ever played Silent Hill or games by that developer, the monsters symbolize something about the character. Reason why they did that was because Silent Hill was their personal hell, trying to reveal all the wrongs they did in the past that they forgot or just have them try to figure out what they’ve already done to be there, creating this kind of sharp twist in story. I think the best way they did it was in Shattered Memories. The game had you answer deep questions that would change the game entirely and most importantly, the enemies appearance. They would look like destroyed feminine beauty that attacks you from behind if you chose to be a little sexual during the questions. Sometimes they would look like disgusting blobs of flesh because you chose strange answers to some questions. They made these enemies awesome in the game, always changing when you took the psychosis test. Impressive for its time and I’m surprised no one took advantage of it.

Besides their look, they would have to act very strangely. In Dead Space they made some move so… Weirdly for a lack of better words, and that movement was so inhuman. They would shake their heads like as if they were from Jacob’s Ladder, convulse their bodies making it seem like they’re breaking their backs and bones. It’s strange to see them do that and it builds the creepy factor in the monster. If you strive for something realistic, like a killer, trying to make the killer look large or just have him more capable than you are. You can hide his face or build some character in him, but the most effective thing about the killer is that he appears to be void of emotion. I can never see how that’s frightening, but it just creeps me and a lot of people out, just a man with a blank expression barrelling towards you. If you want to go realistically unsettling, you can have them be crazy, being able to bend their double jointed backs or remove something human off of them, like lips, eyelids or normal facial features. Something that seems unnatural for a human, but seems possible to the human body will convey the right image for the crazy killer look.

Audio, Music and Atmosphere

For the main finale, the most important thing about a horror, the feature that makes or breaks the experience: the audio. A lot of people forget about this when they think about a horror game, believing that the feeling comes from the experience alone than the music that builds it. I mean, monsters and atmosphere is one thing, but the sounds and orchestra that follows it helps build the both of those things more than you may believe. If you ever watch a scare in a movie, it’s mostly silent with a faint violin playing ear-rape in the background and once the scare comes in, the entire orchestra plays this maddening song that just frightens you and fills your mind with this intent anxiety. Imagine if all of that was gone, just the creaking wooden floor and some footstep, just complete silence that prepares you for the scare. Once that jump comes in, you just brush it off, no added emotion, nothing to keep you in that feeling. It just goes away and you go on with the next few scenes. In a horror movie, it matters more with music and slightly amped sounds, but for games, a special sound team has be present to make every feeling right and every cue convey the right emotion for the player, it takes more audio from your surroundings and more music to build that emotion even further. There was one old PC game I played when I was a kid that my dad loved watching me play. I wish I knew the game’s name, but whenever you knocked into an object, it would fall and a small team of violins would play for a few seconds, building an uneasy feeling for you. It had amazing sound design and every piece of it was a masterpiece to horror. Back to the subject, when you want to make the player feel on edge, make every sound loud. I know that sounds dumb to most, but it grabs the player more than a faint thud, make sure the player can hear it and see it, make sure that the player can get jumpscared by an empty paint can falling on the floor. Maybe follow it up with a pluck on the violin strings, just a simple pluck to get the player worried. Of course, you don’t want to do this frequently to the player, because it’s going to get old, only do that in an extended period of time just to worry the player later.

I know most indie horror games abuse this option a lot, but you have to trust me, if done right it’s gold. You don’t need to make it ear-rape either, just plucks on strings and small blows in the trumpets. You just have to make the music short and easy to listen to, but still convey the feeling of the situation. When the moment’s right, you can make a full song on a chase, boss battle, etc., just don’t abuse it. And a clear rule on this is to make sure it’s not some audible cue that’s just there to scare you for no reason, that’s just won’t make sense for the player and acts as conditioning for the player, so the planned scares won’t do as much as you may want them to. There is one rule before I go on, don’t use stock sound effects. I know it’s cheaper and requires little work to use them, but they drag the atmosphere done to the floor. It’s easier to make one person to do many sounds and mix them together to make a unique monster sound identifiable or jumpscares feel largely more refreshing. Now to the next part!

Atmosphere in a game is the canvas to a painting, it’s easily forgettable and can go without it, but it’s what makes the painting there. The Audio and the Music are what paint the on the atmosphere. The place around you has to convey this worried emotion in you that anywhere in this building, forest or area is going to bring out some danger. If you were to take out all sounds in a horror game like Amnesia, playing deaf for a second, the atmosphere is dropped down because there’s no sound to bring out this certain emotion, no small creepy moments of silence that take you off guard, just the room and the monster in it to bring out this emotion you’re suppose to feel. The atmosphere is important to the game and needs to be brought out in some great way so that the emotion can be exaggerated. Suspense can be a sudden push on the player, which both mediums I listed can used in. Music can be loud and sound like noise that brings the player in a disarray, the sounds can be loud, having crashing noises overlap the music, giving the player a warning that the monster is near. This can be used in chase scenes, boss battles or fights that take place, making the player not want that to happen again. You can also make the player gain anxiety through lots of audio cues in the game with music playing faintly in the background, having him go paranoid as he plays the game. I think Condemned has made that apparent in the game, having AI hide in corners just so they can whack you on the head with a 2x4. Through the entire game, you would check corners and watch for anything that sounded like footsteps. Music played very abruptly when that happened too, having the player panic for a moment as they adjust to the crazy hobo in the room wanting to kill you. You just have to create some kind of layer of music or sound on any proper moment, it really makes the moment better than it would without it and makes the game somewhat memorable.

Well, that’s my idea of a great horror game. I hope you enjoyed this entry and the challenge (if you’re doing it) and don’t worry, if you’re late you can still do it by the end of the month. It is a monthly challenge after all. The next challenge will become public around the beginning week of November, so be ready when the time comes! Again I hope you enjoyed this and ‘til next time…

Play More Games!

Felix

Last month’s challenge was scarce to say the least, but we had one entry by Haley Shipley that was actually interesting, check it out. Anyways, I can see why it was so scarce in the entries, seeing that it asked for something too specific, which doesn’t give so much freeroam for the writer. This time I’m going to make it more freeroam than usual and I hope you guys like it.

September’s challenge was about mixing two games together and see what comes up. There were some greats that came of it. One of them being a very good addition of a creative Zelda idea. The one I want is what two genres would mix well. Do you think a platformer would be a good work space for a shooter? Or do you think a Puzzle game would be a great playground for a racing game? I want to see some crazy pieces of work, so don’t be shy to do the impossible. As a challenge, I only have one rule for you guys to follow: please explain to us why it would work. Don’t just tell me that it would work, tell us why it would make a great hit for the players out there. Explain the mechanics, the gameplay it would have, what elements that would make this a good one-timer or have lots of replayability, tell us everything that you think would make this genre mash-up seem interesting. I want to hear your guy’s ideas, so be creative about this one. Good luck on this one, the deadline is the 28th of this month, Happy Thanksgiving and ‘til next time…

Play More Games!

P.S. You may ask questions if you please and don't forget to include the name "Game-Making Challenge" in your blog in some way

#NationalPaskintiDay

The challenge I put in front of the community was to write about which two genres should fit. It’s a fun thing to think about and a challenge since there were so many genre mixes already made. It’s hard to think of one that was already done and possibly harder than I anticipated; it basically made me do September’s challenge instead, mixing two games together. Well, I hope the challenge goes well with you guys, so here’s mine for the time being. It took me a while to brainstorm this, but when I was with a friend showing her the wonderful Co-op of Portal, we began to race the puzzles like as if we were on a timer. We both had the same idea and she asked if there was a puzzle race mode. There wasn’t, but that got me thinking, were there any puzzle racing games? Would that be fun with friends and people around the globe to test their mindful skills of puzzle solving? I actually had to scroll through the internet if that existed and nothing but fastest 10,000+ piece puzzle record! So I brainstormed what the game would be like. Hello and Welcome to this Game-Making Challenge!

Rough Idea

Basically the game would have four players start with a top view of a room with a basic puzzle in it like matching images up with three petistoles. Once the players finish the puzzle, they will proceed to a randomly generated room with a graduated number of puzzles. Of course, the game won’t have you start with something easy and they throw you right in the mix of the expert puzzles. The point is that no two players will have the same puzzle room. And to not make the player feel claustrophobic, the room will be in random sizes and shapes to mildly confuse the player. The puzzles themselves, however, have to be mildly simple, but still challenging. It requires focus to do them and it’s easy for someone to do that, but being distracted will put you off from the game. This is just to make the racing part fun instead of the usual frustration most people have. I want this game be playable to almost everyone, including kids.

I would love to play this game both Locally and Online, it’s something I want to see people gather for and enjoy as a party game. The ideal platforms for the game would have to be both console and PC, because it’s a great family game and perfect for friends and PC would make a great platform for people to Modify the game to their creative thinking. That would actually make it really open to a large community… Hmm… Never thought that would a thing I’d think about.

Modes of Interest

The game would have different modes to explore, having the simple ones being Casual, Ranked and Custom. Casual and Ranked would be a chance to challenge yourself with random people, Custom having people of different variety of skill, while Ranked will be the ideal place to test your skills from your rank. Obviously. The other points of interest on the modes would be Puzzle Attack.

Puzzle Attack would be like a mixture of Mario-Kart and Tetris Attack, as you go through the rooms of puzzles, players will find special puzzles marked in either red or blue. They would be hard and in a time limit, but if you finished it in time, you would be able to stump your friend with added puzzles to finish the room. There is no end to the rooms you finish, so the winner would be determined with the amount of rooms he finished in a 5 minute period. Another would be Finish Line, where you can select the amount of rooms to race in, and finish those twenty or ten or so rooms to finish the round. There would be no time limit, but special puzzles can be used to stump players, although that could be disabled. Then there’s Marathon, a mode where the last man standing wins. Each player is given an individual time limit which starts at two minutes. The player can gain time by finishing the room within 10 or less second and finishing special puzzles (which don’t affect other players) giving them at least 15 seconds. Each puzzle solved can stack the time earned by five seconds, but can only stack up to a minute. The player with the lasting time limit wins the match.

Leveling-Up

Leveling would be mostly a cosmetic thing, a badge to show your friends, but going beyond certain levels would have player get cosmetic items like hats, suits or characters that reference other puzzle games out there as well as map design. Other than that, Leveling would also determine who you would play with in Ranked Matches. I hate the idea of Lootboxes, so this would help give the player some cosmetics and maps to design.

Beside the players leveling up, there would be Courses as well. The courses will all have it’s own look to it, like being in a Temple from Egypt or an Alien Spaceship. And as you go through each course, each one would be more difficult than the last. The player would unlock these course as he levels, having each one carry more puzzles or harder to solve puzzles in each one.

Well this is my challenge entry for this month. I hope you liked it and tell anything you think I need to fix. I wish you a late Thanksgiving and I hope you had a great a great one. I really don’t know what will happen to the next challenge seeing it’s the holidays where you have to spend time with family and friends, so I’ll make sure this next challenge ends short. Again, I hope you liked this entry and ‘til next time…

Play More Games!

Battlefront is one of those titles that gave Star Wars fans a warm heart. It was complete fan service done right and it still lived in a lot of fans’ hearts even after years of it being out. As of late, the mantle that held the Battlefront title was given to a company that might revive such a game. The team who made the Battlefield franchise was going to design it and the company who has been known for it’s trash was owning the Star Wars title IP. Although knowing what monster was holding a loved game series, we still had hope for it. It came out and we had barely anything to play. Only a few maps and only one redeemable mode to come back to. Battlefront had some great potential to it that gave hope it’s coming sequel, Battlefront II. They promised so much that we actually forgot what monster was holding the title again. I can tell so many already know about this and too many have already covered it as well, but here we go as they say. Hello and welcome to this widely known opinion.

The game was in hype, if you didn’t already know, so they released a beta to see how cold the pool was. When the community touched the beta, they responded with constructive criticism. Almost every bit of what the player didn’t like was explain calming from what I saw that pleaded for EA to fix. The only worst thing out of this was the lootboxes and the Star Cards pay 2 win aspect, everything else would have been easy fixes for any developer. EA heard our cry and said they would take away the Star Cards and only add in cosmetics. We actually thought they were going to do it! I mean, they only said they would. Said. Anyways, Once the game released in a large hypetrain, the game turned out to be… Well, we already know what it is now. The game was a microtransaction mess that bullied its players to buy them that destroyed casual matches and actual fun in the game, deriving everything that was the old Battlefront games. The legacy we thought they were going to old was already thrown to the floor and shattered to pieces. There is no fixing this mess that EA has created, no fix or patch will change the minds of the stubborn fans of the Classic Star Wars franchise, nothing in the world will help this monster of a company from what a scandal they tried to pull on us.

You may think there might be someone high enough in the company to have the brains to actually fix this, but no! They did nothing to fix the holy promised that was Star Wars Battlefront. As you may have known already, the community is boycotting the game as we speak and anything involving EA’s work, so this might shake EA’s staff right? Well, they wanted to give us a “Q&A.” We asked anything and everything with the amount of faith we had on this once to be thought glorious game and they only answered the ones they wanted. Questions that were easy pleasant for the company to answer and most of the answers they gave us were more bullcrap than No Man’s Sky. It felt more like an insult than anything when they told us that we have to feel like we’re working to get these characters and abilities. The working process of which to unlock these items are at least 40 hours of play time and all that is just for one item. Bull! Bull I say, said everyone on Reddit. And so the same comment that responded with “Work you b**ch,” was downvoted beyond hell itself, holding the record for being the most downvoted post on Reddit. That is a message EA. You should take it to consideration. And… They didn’t.

It took the owner of the IP they’re holding to take down the microtransactions.... Temporarily. A crappy move even though some liberation was taking place. It felt like the gaming community had some control in this instead of being ignored almost like always. Then many politicians and political leaders took action on this game, saying that the game was a gambling simulator and it’s against the law to sell something with such disgusting, unknown rewards. Did that help? I’m not sure, but people are still boycotting the game as we speak. The game got an awful rating, in fact the lowest rating in the decade. I believe it’s still hold the 0.4 rating right now, but I don’t know if EA has learned its lesson or not.

As for the fans, they’re angry. Anyone that destroys a well known property like Star Wars will be hated of course. Other than we already established, the game was thought to have very little problems. The story was okay, what we had was amazing and the perspective was unique, but was so short lived. It was fun seeing Han in a beard. It was fun playing as characters in the Star Wars franchise that we loved, but it started to feel more like a Greatest Hits collection instead of an actual campaign. The multiplayer is actually fun and has only one, large problem on its hands. I won’t say it because you already know. The only thing that could need changing would be the Dog Fights. It was saddening to see a fun piece of work be so saturated with greed, that this game could have been fun and decent if the game was never involved with you-know-who. This game wouldn’t have been the same disaster that was the release of No Man’s Sky.

When I got my hands on it, after hearing all of those horrible reviews, I thought the game was decent with some good fun to it. I can see how everyone was so mad and felt betrayed, I mean they did say the DLC would be completely free, but if they avoided being greedy with the game would have gotten a lukewarm reception. Critics would have given the game something like a seven or a  possible eight. Then the artistic critics would say it’s not great and give it something meaningless like a five or a four. Everyone would have lived on with their lives without a crisis in our hands that everyone and their mothers have to know and deal with.

What went through their minds as they did this? I mean of course money was stapled to their freaking brains, but this is a major market that can reflect and change on many things; it’s not just America, it’s the entire world that has to adapt to this kind of economic greed. Freaking Belgium outlawed the game outright and this would hurt the company’s financial gain. Then Hawaii came to say something and have everyone else feel suspicious to investigate. Now everyone has all eyes on you, EA. Running won’t help and talking yourself out won’t either. What you did is unacceptable to both the community and the industry. Why the hell would you do this when it was such an extreme tactic that was more noticeable than an unsubmerged, German U-Boat? 

But in the end do we have to hate on the game? For the sake of hating the company we have to do it publicly, but what about overall? Should we believe the great title Battlefront is dead and ruined for good? Well, they brought back the servers for the classic Battlefront games on PC, so if you want to waste all of your hype, go to those games. I mean, you’d be going against the Boycott, but at least there’s a good Star Wars game out there that you can still enjoy. I know this is kind of a strange post, but I hope you enjoyed this and ‘til next time…

Play More Games!

leef i woh si sith

Developers reflect the company they work at and vise versa. The impressions we get from those companies matter because that shows our overall thoughts on the companies. I mean, since 2015, people have been identifying Konami as a heartless, greed machines that wants to kill anything great about them. If that’s no evident that we like to give those kinds of companies an identity, so here’s all the ones I want to point out! Hello and welcome to this really strange post.

Playstation, The Giver of Storytellers

I know there are some platformers they’ve been making in the past, but that was back when Platformers were famous. Now, games likes to follow this standard of decent storytelling and derive their games on that factor. What about the gameplay? Well, who cares when the games are all about the story? And trust me, there is so much story to care about, you will forget the awful pieces of gameplay there is in the game, and the small amount of fun you will get you’ll have to work for! But what about Knack, you say? We don’t talk about that game… We don’t… I know that was an exclusive that was produced and planned by Playstation, but we do not mention or think about that game at all.

Nintendo, The Polishers

If you ever watch a playthrough of a Nintendo game (if they don’t copyright it), the person playing it will mention the ever so famous words “Nintendo Polish.” It’s has been burned into the minds of gamers and has been the ultimate judgement for games played made the normies out there. Nintendo makes a game that has a minor mechanic that most players would try to exploit can’t be exploited. What do you call that? Nintendo Polish. Every other game can’t do this because they’re not Nintendo. I mean, c’mon! They’re Nintendo! Nintendo knows all, knows everything, proper keepers of game design!

Activision, The Creators of CoD

Freaking Normies, everyone knows that Activision is God! Just kidding, what I’m trying to say is that no one can name a single game by Activision that’s not Call of Duty. I can understand why, they made this game a yearly released title, why wouldn’t you think they made CoD? I mean, they did make games like Skylanders, buyout Crash Bandicoot, were legends back in the Atari days and made and tried to milk the Guitar Hero genre, games you would never imagine would  be made by the CoD creators, right? It’s kind of bad, but it gives them the money.

EA, The Pot of Gread

Draw two cards, please. EA has always been the company that makes games for their better being. You will never escape an EA title that doesn’t have you spend real money for goods like Cosmetics or Easy Unlocks. Their biggest controversy was how their latest game was nothing, but a Pay 2 Win game. The company has done this kind of greed before, but on a smaller scale than this. I guess their lasting imprint in the world will be how they ruined a great looking franchise.

Konami, Use to be Great

Remember when Konami was great? Pepperidge Farms remembers. Konami was a great company that made some memorable games like the Metal Gear series, Contra, Bomberman, Silent Hill and even the beloved TMNT game on the SNES. What even happened to their name? The company had a great name for what it’s worth and had some great line of game, what made them so hated and created the hashtag F**k Konami? Oh… They fired and disrespected the most beloved developer of the company, creator of the even more beloved series, Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima. Wow… You killed yourself when you thought about it, Konami. Since he was out of the company, same goes with him working on the latest MGS game, giving us the game unfinished and gave Collector’s Edition Owners the what you had left of the game, to make us even more mad. Well, there name will be forgotten in the void of our minds until our generation dies, never to be talked about with respect or with a kind attitude. Sorry Konami, you were d*cks to Hideo. So ends your legacy.

Bethesda, Leaders of Single-Player

When you think about Bethesda, what do you think of? No, not the glitches. Yes! The fact that most of the games they’ve made are single-player! You thought I would kick that dead horse? Ha, I’m not that desperate for low hanging fruit! There hasn’t been many companies ready to take that kind of risk to create a game that would dare to not have multiplayer, because the game would end there and there wouldn’t be an active player-base to rely on for potential sequels. It can drive the game down because of how much less there is compared to game like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Bethesda, as brave as they are, they make games for the singleplayer-elitists out there and they love it. It might not be great game or completely finished, but at least they tried. I loved their take on Wolfenstein and Doom so much that it’s surprising they even made games like Elder Scrolls or Fallout. They might have tried to take advantage of the games with paid mods, but we shouldn’t get too far into that… Should never mentioned… Never…

That’s everything that would make me write about a paragraph of each company! Seriously, there were so many that would be summed up with just a few words. I mean… Naughty Dog… Uncharted is the only words that come to mind. Well, I hope you enjoyed this satirical piece of mine (And when I say Satirical, I mean it. Please don’t take what I said seriously), because it was fun to write. As always…

Play More Games!

EAT PANT

There was a game that came out somewhat recently that would top many games on the Steam Most Bought list. It has so many players constantly playing to this day and have gained a massive following as to how huge the impact was when it exitted the beta phase. That game was Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds. Whoever made this game and whoever helped make it happen got millions upon its release. It was on everyone’s minds and eventually destroyed those on top in the most played list on steam. The game, as you can tell, was a masterpiece of game design and it was challenging to master. If the game is so famous to begin with, there has to be some clones to follow, right? Well, you’d be surprised. Hello and welcome to this mind opening thought blog.

As the game came out, there was one title struggling to gain some decent money. They almost lost the IP and the player base almost went as far as Battleborn, they panicked and made a free mode that anyone, even those who haven’t gotten the game, could play. It was Fortnite: Battle Royal. Carries similar aspect from PUBG, having players go all out on a large server on a small map that continuously got smaller as the match went on. It looked the same, but was far from what PUBG was. Despite that, the game gotten on top the most played and most bought with PUBG which bumped up the sales for Fortnite way up and raised its player base to an all time high for the game. This caught the eye of the PUBG developers and out came them talking about filing a lawsuit in any form of news media. The game was too similar and needed to be taken down, right? Well, you’d be wrong. Game Design isn’t an art according to law. It’s just a piece of gameplay, not an art piece on display in a Art Gallery. There are many people who copy many game designs on almost all platforms in games. If we had those things copywritten, the concept of genres would be gone and the market would crash due to low output on games to play. FPS’ wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for Doom Clones, so this lawsuit seems very silly if you think about it.

And come to think of it, the game isn’t the only one to have an all out brawl with a hundred people. Minecraft was kind of the start of it, fans making a server that was Hunger Games themed, but the server list was limited to only twenty or thirty people. Then there was the DayZ clone, H1Z1 which had a buyable mode that had players go against each other as they spawned in random areas and had to scavenge houses to find weapons and gear to kill each other with. Then, talking about more recent games, the Culling which was the most similar to both Battle Royal and Battlegrounds.

The Culling was considered a Hunger Games themed game, being picked by rich people to fight in an arena for their amusement and for you to gain something for yourself. Players had nothing on them besides their fists and had to find or craft what they could to survive. If you wanted to have some bandages you had to find it, get some leaves to craft it or buy with the money you get from a vending machine around the map. The map continuously got smaller and force players out from hiding to thin out the number of players. It was a fun game and was played by many people on youtube. It was a hit, but was hardly know to many people outside of the PC community, kind of like how Rust was. See, you raised your eyebrow in confusion as I said the name. So, the person that should feel like suing is Xaviant Games.

But why would even have the word of them talking about the lawsuit be out there? I mean, if you look at it, it can give your either bad side or a good side to the lawsuit, having people support one side or the other. I don’t know if that ever holds heavy in law, but it really gives the game a bigger notice. The news talk about the game that some people probably never heard of and it gave their attention to that game. You hear about and now you want to get it, assuming you never heard about it until that article. A marketing gimmick it seems, but it also gave both games attention. The question arise as to why they wanted to sue the people who made this mode similar to their own. It’s like how Mortal Kombat was when it became controversial, people talked so wrongful about, how it made anyone a killer and showed the worst kinds of gory graphics in the world just made kids want to play it even more in the arcades. After hearing that kind description really made you want to play a few rounds with Scorpion, eh? It gave the developers attention and the game was already in unwanted public attention, so the game became a successful hit that demanded sequels. Why give both attention to your game being high and mighty and the game that you claim is the enemy? Seems like you’re giving them a hand with their downloads, Player Unknown. I mean, there are so many mobile versions of your game, Player Unknown, that look so similar and copied from your game. Why not sue those Asia companies copying your game? I mean, they might not be in the same light as your game nor will ever be the same, but they pretty much copy all the assets from your game and made it mobile. There’s even a Minecraft one out there with the same iconic character with the helmet and explosion behind him, but it’s blocky instead. Why not strike your powerful fist on those companies? Probably because they’re small that probably don’t have much and doing that would look d**chy, but you do it to the big boy in town, Epic. No attention to those small guys down there in the mobile section.

It just seems stupid to me that they would sue someone over game design or a similar genre. It’s like as if From Software sued the people who made Surge or Lords of the Fallen. And seeing who they’re doing it to is kind of suspicious to me. Speaking about attacking a company for similar game design looks like it would have more to it that that, like someone slipped fifty grand in someone’s pocket in the elevator. I don’t know what could have gone, but I read that the lawsuit was never acted out, so this whole thing could be try or not. Maybe someone put some sense in Player Unknown, I don’t know. I know this is a strange post and probably didn’t go anywhere, but added more questions to a few month old thing that happened, but I hope you enjoyed this read. Thanks and ‘til next time…

Play More Games!

It Should Have Died

To enjoy something, you must feel challenged to do so. I don’t know who said that, but I think those play very nicely to any game in general. Whenever you get ready for a round of football, you never expect it to be easy to make a touchdown. There are human barriers that’re in your way and the entire team has to get one person across the field with the ball in their hands to score a point. Sounds easy until you make those human walls move. It might sound frustrating to get past these meat shields with a single football in your hand, but the challenge to do so is really fun even if you get pushed down. It’s just the thrill and the challenge that makes the game so fun, which is why Difficulty matters in games, because no one will want to play it when it’s too easy to master or even beatable in a manner of minutes. Difficulty matters, as I said before, and that’s why games like Dark Souls is so world renowned… Too renowned in a matter of fact… The whole thing about difficulty in games, is that it varies games to game. You’ll never need the same kind of skill in every game because you need to master a new challenge instead of the same old run across the screen type of deal. There’s a reason why people aren’t liking games where you kill things in the first-person, because they all kind of have the same elements of challenge. When a game came across the seas of Japan and landed on our shores, we got a new thing to master than feels so much different and now we have something to become the new standard to hard. That games that created such a ripple in the mindsets of Gamers around the world was Dark Souls… The most annoying game to ever exist…

The game became a legend and scared anyone away from the game’s legendary of a legend difficulty. It made players rethink what made games hard, having people blame themselves instead of the game for once and actually having people look at their surroundings before going in places. People called it revolutionary while others called it just plain stupid because it’s scripted events in the game that give evidence to the player with claw marks on the floor and scorched doorway, but f**k those guys because they don’t know us. It was amazing. It created a new kind of genre for people to love… Souls-Like… Which was quickly changed to Soulsborne later on, but let’s forget about that for now. People used to exaggerate how hard the game was. It was a joke that was soon taken seriously. First a reviewer made a comment about a realistic mechanic on Battlefield, which you die quicker than most shooters, which he began to call it, “Like Dark Souls.” As to how that’s true or even remotely like Dark Souls is beyond anyone, but it was a small ripple in an ocean. Many people heard it and had no mind to it as very few commented about it.

Then within the years which people got hyped for each Dark Souls game passed by as well as the mixed conception for the clones, people have gotten games that were harder, more challenging to the player, something new. A motor cross game with realistic speed mechanics and a great working wind engine was released the public. Difficult, of course, but it was a fun challenge that was enjoyable to explore with new mechanics. People had fun and it was great, then reviewers stapled a phrase to the game… An ungodly phrase that no one wanted to hear or even believe. It’s the… Dark Souls of Racers… A disgusting phrase that spoiled our mouths’ as we read reviews and watched videos, but that was not the first or even that long ago.

Twas the year of 2017 it happened, where that phrase sparked a larger fire than before. Anything remotely difficult that people had their hands, they tainted it with the annoying phrase than became a meme. “This Indie game is the Dark Souls of the Indie Community!” “This game was so hard, I almost thought it was Dark Souls!” Words that made no sense which was overused in almost every review. It went as far as being stabbed in Cliff’s Ego during his earliest work. Even the greatest masterpiece of a game, Cuphead, was touched with such a sinned phrase, which speculated a theory, to a easter egg reference. To most it was laughed at and poked fun of, but Cuphead was no joke. Fan Theories, Speculations, the belief that the Souls games are connected to the same Cup-World. A cancer to say the least, but the only word to describe how much we wanted a new challenge. We were given such a great a game that challenged you and taught you how to do things you barely did before and now we can’t get it anymore… None to satiate our lust for a new challenge to endure and enjoy besides the clones that come after its inspiration. After the end of the Souls series, it felt as if we lost someone dear to our hearts and we coped with us comparing it to something we can’t exactly get anymore, desperately trying to find a reminder to what great challenges and accomplishments we faced with the great Dark Souls series. We didn’t take its death well nor its final words in the DLC, so we went to find something like it, a reminder (as I said before) to cope with our loss of such a rare game series to come by these days. What is my point you ask…? I don’t know. My sister wanted me to tell her why I hate the fact people keep comparing hard difficulty or a mechanic in a game to Dark Souls when it’s remotely nothing like the series nor is it like it in any way. It’s like comparing Mario to Sonic, very different and nothing alike.

I know this is a bit of a sh*t post, if you may consider it as such, but I thought it was funny to write. Very stupid to read and feels like a kid trying to hard to be artistic in his words, but enjoyable to me. I hope you like this stupid post and ‘til next time…

Play More Grains

Dark Souls of Youtube

The challenges I gave you were very simple, think of a game you would make and you guys delivered, but that doesn’t really make you think like a developer. This challenge is going to be very different compared to the others and will be a very hard challenge. This time you’re a developer back in the nineties, the age of Pokemon is at rise. Your company, GloboChem, wants in on the portable gaming action, so they chose you and your three man team to take on the task to go against Nintendo. It’s Christmas, so you have an idea of a gaming stocking stuffer, so you and your team will have to make a cheap, but fun portable to please the children.

The only rule I have is that you’ve got a $10,000 budget, list what materials you would use with that budget and how much you would pay your team per day. I want to see you guys plan your things out, tell us how you would go about this trick, what you would do to make these things happen, what small games you would make for a cheap, but fun gaming stocking stuffer. Please remember the budget and all that jazz. I know this is complicated, but you can ask me any questions. The deadline is the 15th of January, so I hope you enjoy this challenge as much as I liked writing it with a friend. Til’ next time…

Don't forget about this guys!

Play More Games!

P.S. I would like to announce that Haley is going to help write the challenges with me for now on. I wouldn’t ask he any questions about this challenge, since I completely forgot to talk about this rules of the challenge as we agreed to write about this. Sorry Haley, I’ll let you do a lot more than just talk about the challenge next time.

The sun falls to the horizon as the moons light the rest of the night, the cold winds flow through the crisp air as the sound of hooves hit the ground. Fours Knights of the English ride at the night as a guardsman’s body was seen in the distance. “Fallen near,” one knight says. They race to the body, the sound of their armor and the stomping hooves startle the birds in the forest wall. The knights are horrified by the sight, a puddle of blood next to one, a gape-mouthed body with a bolt sticking out of its skull and a Joraal  lying with a bolt in his chest. A knight steps off his horse to see the bodies. One knight spoke, “What do you suppose happened here, Gallingway?” his voice muffled in the helmet.

“I don’t know, but it’s obvious he killed these men.” He looked at the guards.

“We must find the owner.” A Scout spoke.

“Sir,” he pointed, “The sign.” Gallingway took a long look at the sign, a place he hoped to be treading, the fake meeting he wished to have with the owner. This was no longer a safety check on the farm, this was an investigation for the Knights and Scout.

He made a smile and said what was on the blank of wood on stilts, “Promised Farm of Higgins Estate, Bakery and Management Dealer.” He took off his helmet as the long, red feather on it tickled his cheek, he spoke with concern in his voice, “We must find the reason why this Khaja Slave was out here and why he killed these guards this far from his estate.”

“What should we do, you highness?”

“We approach him with dignity and loyalty like the rest of the Knights of the King. James!” He pointed at one Knight, “ Grab the guards and hitch them to your horse. Scout, you carry the Khaja as well.” His men carry the bodies on horseback as they race towards the estate.

Gallingway thoughts were filled with the killed men they found, curious if he lost his chance again. He pushed his horse to go faster, barreling ahead of the rest. He was concerned as those behind him tried to match his speed. He could see the Estate Gates.

A commotion arose in Gallingway’s mind, a plan of war, a war that could be won. He betrayed all his commanders, his friends, his own king he saw so corrupt. He was nervous, but determined to start a conflict, to finally show the true Red Banner. The Revolution starts, he thought.

They arrived. Two men opened the gates as the horse was lead to a hitch. “State your presence,” a man with a dark voice spoke. “We had no papers saying the king’s Knightsmen would arrive.” Gallyingway looked down to his hand, one gloved hand with a strange mark on the back of it.

“We came because of a commotion down the road by your farm. I wish to speak to the owner.”

“We don’t know of such commotion, so that’s not ours to discuss. Run off to your duties.”

“I am the second in command with the King’s Army, I can have your people put into Jail, tear down this farm and sell all the Joraal for cheap. Who is the owner?” The man clenched his gloved fist as the men beside him moved back. Steam began escape his glove. He aggressively walked towards Gallingway.

“With what had happened to your officials recently, I can hardly believe such a thing can happen at your government’s state. Go, you Red Hog, I don’t want to see you anymore.” The Knights had their hand near their sword as they waited for the gloved man to strike. Gallingway stood proud both his arms behind his back, under his red cloak.

“Carter!” a withered voice yelped. “Let this man do what he will.”

“Sir, this man is invading property without the proper papers to-”

“No need! If they are of Royal Army, they can pass by-”

“But sir, they need to abide by their own law-”

“It does not matter,” he shouted. “You heed me or you be fired, revoked, gone.”

“Yes… Sir…” he walked away in shame as his guards lead them inside.

Trophies were in display, Hogs Heads, Buck Antlers, even an old Dragon’s skull hung proudly on the wall next to the rest. The Knights took a closer look at them and saw a golden label on them, each having the same three names being referenced: Hance, Hannible and Jeremy. They enter a hallway and find pictures posted on the wall. This man must have been rich, he thought, pictures weren’t as easy to come by in a plantation of any kind. The hallway ends as they find a double door guest room. A beautiful design of branches and flowers bloom and shine on the wood of the two doors. The handle looked comfortable to hold in your hands as it created this eye-catching design of a tree branch. The Knights were never to witness the decor of the King’s Castle nor did the officials he hand appointed, it was a secret and a legend for the people to speculate his living style.

Higgins, at the door, opens it as a fireplace is lit across the room. A large fur chair beside a small table holding a bottle of whiskey and two glasses rest in front of the fire as heads of the creatures across the known lands mount the walls with great pride. As they walk inside this beautiful room, they notice portraits laying atop the fireplace, pictures of two boys and a fair man with them. He noticed what caught their eye, “Fancying yourself of my youth?”

“Parden?”

“The pictures. The only thing that can make me smile. Although… There carries a sad ending to them.”

“Age?” Gallingway responded.

“Not quite.” His smile faded as he grabbed another portrait of himself and the two boys. “You see these two fair men here?” He hands the picture to Gallyingway as the other Knights and the scout wondered to stare at the creatures.

“I do.”

“They were my sons, great boys they were. Never seemed to disappoint. They always found a way to make an angry old man like me proud.”

“What were their names?” the scout asked.

“That’s not polite there, boy.” Gallyingway shouted.

“It’s okay. I’m happy to share. The one there, holding the bow, is named Hance and the I have my hands around is named Jeremy.”

“Mind I ask-”

“Ask away, Knight.”

“What happened to them? Did they run off, leave without writing?”

“No… Once they were drafted in the war back when the damned Khaja were an unraveled mystery, they were killed and never to be seen again as men of the English Army.” He stared at Gallingway. “Since I found out of their deaths, I wanted to know who did it, what kind of people were they when they sunk a dagger in their souls.”

“Why think that?” Gallyingway said with a soft voice. “It was a war of the savages, those people fought long and hard against us, why couldn’t they have killed your sons?”

“Because it was too good to be true. Messengers told me they were missing and the only things they found were their badges and nothing else. They were apart of the Keltic Conspiracy, the battle where no man was found on either side.” He took a swig of his English Whiskey. “I gave a whole lot of money to trace their bodies. Whole lots.” Downed a quarter of his glass. “As we took the expansion outward, we found the village of Khaja. First time seeing them and we found them with graves of the our own in it. Found our men’s helms on pikes above their graves. Disrespect it was. Sold those bast**ds as slaves as we dug our own and gave them a proper burial.” He grabbed his Whiskey bottle and poured another glass for himself. The Knights and the Scout watched him with long faces, worried looks. “Do you know what we found when I came along?” He smiled. “My sons. Both buried in the ground with pikes driven in their skulls.”

“Were you furious?”

“By the gods, yes I was furious!” He raised his voice. He paused as he realized who was at his presence. “Sorry, I just have some rampant emotions. I believe I forgot my herbs today, so I may appear a bit tipsy.”

“Sure it’s not the Whiskey?” the scout whispered.

Higgins changes conversation, “So, I imagine you fine Knights in shining armor have yourselves a lot of these Khaja, eh?”

The Knights smiled as the scout cackled, “You bet this one does!” He slaps the Knight on the back.

“I do, I do. Wife loves the freetime she has.” They all laughed as Gallingway stare at the fire. He wanted no part in this conversation, he wanted nothing to do with this mindless laughter. As they made more remarks about their Joraal, a scream disturbed their cackling. “What the bloody hell was that!?” An explosion could be heard in the distance. A man rushed in slamming the door open with blood dripping down his face.

“We’re bein’ attacked! They have cannons, arrows, the whole lot of weaponry. We have to leave here, Masta Higgins.”

“Whose fight us?”

“No time, Masta. We mus’ leave to ya shelta!” Gallyingway takes off his helmet and marks it with an X with his knife and places it back on his head as he follows the guard out.

Fiery arrows fly from the forest borders as flashes from the cannons there revealed themselves in the dark horizon. Guards at the gate were trembling as they dragged men away from battle as they screamed for mercy. One with friend was laying on the floor staring, blank faced at his leg in the distance lead by a blood trail, his friend making sure he goes through fine. Houses were broken down as the wheat of Higgins’ field was burning, creating an illuminating light into the skies, drowning the stars out. Gallyingway was not fazed as the Knights and the others looked away from it, avoiding the carnage they swore to face.

“What should we do, Higgins?” The one threatening Gallingway earlier was asking for advice, orders to follow in this strange time. “The guards are thin, our arms are shortened and we are not fit for this kind of battle. What should we do?”

“Gather the Khaja and hand them weapons.”

“Sir, that’s insane!”

“There’s a reason why they’re attacking and that’s to free the Khaja, so put them in front of their crosshairs!”

“Incoming!” A guard yells as a cannonball hits the walls.

“You have no choice, Wallas! Just do as I say.” They go as he looks dumbfounded, not knowing what might become of them after this.

“You heard the man! Give the Khaja our arms!” He appointed three men to the arms shed as they grabbed armor and gear to the Joraals. Afraid and forced to fight, they all bared the likeness to a guard. They were told to fight by a few guards as they all refused.

“You cannot make us fight in such a battle!” a Joraal spoke. A guard grabbed him and stabbed him in the thigh.

“You will fight or you will put down here and now.” They all ran to the gates, arms at the ready to strike and take a life. Men watched them as they fought, making sure they did as they were told.

Gallingway ran with Higgins and the others as they past by men with crossbows and shoulder cannons. He couldn’t believe how armed this plantation was. They seemed ready to the teeth that would be in this situation. It seemed that the screams and cannon fire was farther away, safety felt granted to the Knights and Higgins. They were at the other side of the Plantation. Men coward behind the untouched soil there as men brave enough were making sure some were going to shelter.

“Have you seen Jeremy!” Higgins yelled at a nearby search party.

“He’s at the shelter alread-Argh!” An arrow hit him from the forest walls near them. “They’re flanking! They’re flanking!” Fiery arrow began to fly towards them, destroying all the huts they could. More guards flee to the shelter with Higgins as it feels like this battle is a loss to them. A whistle sounds is coming towards them as a cannonball explodes in front of Higgins and Gallingway.

A ringing deafens Gallingway as he could feel his armor embedded on his body. His helmet was gone, the ringing begins to move to his right as he tries to get up. He screams in pain. His leg is broken. He could hear the fires near him, but the ringing won’t stop. The shrapnel grazed the right side of his head, some still peaking out of his skull. Joraal in armor begin to scavenge the area in front of him as Jeremy could be seen trying to run away, but one of the scavengers catches and knocks him out near his owner’s body.

A familiar face could be seen by Gallingway. She called out to him, begging for him to answer, but the ringing stopped him from listening to her. She screamed for someone to pick him up as I stood to see wandering souls begging for a path to be lead upon, all of which lead to the void.

I like the environment in games, the world it inhabits and showcases. Sometimes it can be a vast jungle of an urban city like Fallout 4 or it can be ruined world full of culture like Darksiders 2, and what they all have is a story embedded in every landmark and ruin that it can be amazing to explore the deep depths of what the devs made. To be honest, my dream is to put in the time to make a vast world that has so much to explore and culture that would be hypnotizing, making you wish you lived in this world. If you haven’t read my poorly written series The Story of Jeremy or at least my abandoned Amnesia series, I have a few already in mind to create, but the one I want to talk about is the world in Story of Jeremy. The vast land you would tread is called Cloven Isle, the known world of the English and the only place to find industrial cities and business. Hello and welcome to this Game-Making Challenge.

Mainland

Nyma, the country of civilized men and women, is a vast valley and prairie where the Prairie is a rural country that the farmer rules and the traveling merchant thrives. Although many miles away from the King, they still are considered men and women of the English Empire and support them thoroughly. The Valleys are where the English cities lie, where stone streets lead the people to and from capitals to capitals, where the working man strives for the English Dream and outnumber the beggar. In the Main Capital of Colleign, is where the royals and loyalists stay as the King rests atop it, living in luxury.

The Farmlands of the Prairie will be a place where law isn’t fully enforced and many raids take place. The player will begin here as he starts a revolution with the Joraal, a feline race that has been enslaved by the English, attacking farms to free slave Joraal and witness what kind of madness their owners have put on them. The player will see some awful things there during the main storyline, where slaves are conditioned to be less than human and turned to an obeying, lifeless coil. That’s only one of many the player witness. Your choice to put those kinds of Joraal slaves down or help them regain their sanity. It’s your choice and either one will have a downside.

English Knights, Scouts, and Rooks will patrol the roads of the Prairie, having them take down revolutionaries or at least bring some protection to English supporting farms and merchants. The raiders around there are dangerous and will attack anyone they can, English Knights, Revolutionaries, even defenseless farmers there if they please.

The Valleys will be more industrial and political, having more people insult you for your ethnicity or political stance and seeing a lot of begging men sitting on the cold, stone streets. Although the town seems almost in economical ruin, the citizens are considered wealthy enough to be in the middle class and have less crime than the Farmlands in the Prairie. People aren’t considered of right mind when you’re a Joraal. Seeing they’re in favor of the King, they don’t take kindly to any Cat-Like men or women in their towns, although no laws against them being within city walls. Some will insult you and give you a choice to react to it aggressively, verbally or ignore it all together. Your choice in doing so will weigh positive and negative very heavily. For example: if a man insults you and you ignore it, people will begin to continuously insult you until it evolves to straight violence.

There are seven capitals: Aeris, Thara, Acura, Themwoode, Erveland, Dimwall and Colleign. Each one having themes to them. For example, Aeris is a weapon sporting capital that aren’t afraid to show it by any means as Themwoode practices the English language and how to use it in any form. Basically meaning they can give you better insults that mean something instead of an empty threat. The player will be able to go to and from capitals, having different experiences that really tell what the people living are like and how they live.

Beyond the Forest Wall

The people of Nyma have a religious belief that beyond the wall is many evils that no man could surpass. Just inside the border are human-like monoliths that watch out whoever has bad intentions on the forest they’re entering. If you have a good soul and good intentions on entering the forest (meaning you finished the revolution of the main quests), the monoliths won’t have consumed by the forest. Beyond that is the forest border is the lost civilization of the Keltic Reign. This is where the ruins will be seen, statues, temples, even large cities that the English haven’t fully recovered its history. Living there are creatures only heard in legends and the player can find documents of them to see their weaknesses and where they might tread. They all do many different things to the players, such as the Krill, a hive mind crystal that takes over the dead. If they slash you, you get a lasting damage effect that takes sometimes days to finish it’s effects. This will be a kind of fetch-quest kind of thing, document every kind of species beyond the forest wall and bring a piece of evidence from the creature. Would be a great piece of world-building in the game, having these creatures only heard in legends and classify them as real for scientists.

The Keltic Ruins will also carry some madmen in there, people who have crossed the border and couldn’t come back, from all links of civilizations and some would even bare the English Flag, to show how many have turned so quickly. Besides the Ruins, there still lies the sea. The sea will be a high-level area as well it being only unlocked when you complete the main quest. It’s where all kinds of dangers roam, sea creatures that can topple warships and deadly hunters that can sway an entire crew to kill themselves. The player will have to manage his crew as well as fighting off everything he encounters or try to ward it off if you are afraid to lose a few men. And if you couldn’t tell, the crew will determine how fast and reliable your ship will be. If you lose them all, you will have to go off by escape boat to the nearest island. Speaking of Islands, they will be the many stops in the ocean, finding places to recruit men or Islanders to go off on your adventure. Some will need convincing to go and others want money in return while some are in desperate need of adventure. These people will also not be human… Entirely. Some will be kinder creatures out there and even some civil ones that you would normally attack. All their personal perks will affect you and your crew as well as the ship itself and will change the look of the ship as you keep recruiting. For example, Civil Krill will turn your ship into a hive overtime and it will become faster and every attack you deal on a sea creature or monster will poison them like as they did to you not too long ago. And a small chance of the creature you killed will become a krill and aid you in your adventures. Other more legendary creatures like Titans are not going to become a Krill. That would be too cool.

Besides all that I explained, the landscape will carry some great landmarks for the player to explore as well as ruins. Some will be completely void of all life as others will be infested with whatever took over the ruin. There will be legend landmarks, places you could read in a book of legends, such as Keddrick the Giant’s lair along with his quest line and story and the Gambling Tower, a place where everyone is trapped to gamble their lives away until they reach the top.

The legends will be a core part of the game, making them the most memorable, having nothing to gain from people’s quests like in other games, the quests are found by the player instead of given to him, having the game make you feel like you stumbled upon it.

Creatures

As I pointed out before, the game will have a mechanic of documenting legendary creatures, proving their existence in the realm of science and magic. There are three categories to put each creature in Mystic, a category consisting of creatures that have unimaginable power or misunderstood power, but this category can be untrustworthy since these creatures of legend or rumor. Creature, a category that used for anything below human or near such a thing; these creatures are considered animals of nature and are thoroughly examined by scientists. The Human category is classified for anything will the same differing intelligence as man’ Joraal and Giants fall in this category. The ones I have in fleshed out right now are the Krill, a hive mind infestation that infects the dead and kills anyone who appears as a threat to the hive. Titans, a guardian-like creatures that scales taller than the largest building known to man, a huge danger to all they come across and the common mind can only see it as a large shadow. An Amino, a creature that have eyes that puts their prey in a relaxing, paralyzed state as every feeling, even pain is more soothing than the last, making feasting on you all the more peaceful. Una-Gwin is a river monster that stalks their prey, purposely making them paranoid and makes sure to bring them down into the river to drown and feast upon them like piranhas. Harpies are a peaceful creature that can make bad days into good ones by playing a song with their enchanted lute, sometimes even nesting near an estate, giving the landowner good luck until the Harpy dies. There is many more creatures I have, but that makes this entire read ever so longer to write. I don’t know how I would makes these creatures into a balanced enemy in the game, but I think they would work somehow. I haven’t really put much thought into making this world in a game. Of course they all would have habitats to live in, only meeting them in a certain area, but I hope I can make them all a cool piece of the world to experience.

I hope you enjoyed this challenge and I do hope this was a good read. Please tell me how the world is and if I fleshed it out well. I would love any criticism you have on this entire world I have. Anyways, I hope enjoyed this The day to post the challenge is on monday, so I hope you enjoy making your own worlds and have a very great valentines days this month. ‘Til next time…

Play More Games.

Greatness Awaits

If you are a regular player in a PC game like G-Mod or Counter-Strike, you have been banned at least once in your life for the stupidest reasons in the world. Why? It’s because of Admins that don’t know how to deal or take care of anything on their server. Some even abuse their power and ban as much as possible because they had a bad day. It’s something that a lot of immature kids and adults do in the game. It’s natural. At least none of our favorite developers out there are banning people like immature adults, right? Right?

Oh no

Overwatch has been a game that a lot of people have been flocking to after hearing rumors of how great the game is. I mean, my cousin who hasn’t played a game since the SNES age bought the game because of how many people loved his shirt he obliviously bought. And I know I have said I hate the game, but the one thing I don’t think I mentioned was how much I appreciate the concept. Would I say it was great? Yes, but there are a few problems with the game that hasn’t been fixed since launch. A lot of you Overwatch fanboys out there might be really pissed to hear me say that it’s a broken game and state that they made many fixes for characters in the past year it has been out. I’ll have you know that just because the update says “Fixed” on it, doesn’t mean it’s good. D’Va used to be the one character to distract everyone, she was vulnerable and not much of a bullet sponge, but she could do enough damage to catch the eye of the enemy team. That was launch. Because she has been annoying a lot of players too often with her core mechanic, she was nerfed completely, so she could be “Playable,” as stated by the developers themselves. You can no longer flash your defense matrix at any time and her drop-off damage has been shortened to only do a fraction to what she once did before. She is no longer a tank apart of the team, she is now a speed boosting team member that stays behind cover and wait for players who ran astray from their team. How is that fixing? I don’t think the butt of a joke that is her Ult was fixed or not because you could hide behind a pole, next to the explosive mech and not take any damage as a tracer, but I hope it stayed because that’s what makes a fun game, right? Some strange piece of physics in a game that makes us all laugh, right?

Then that’s one thing I don’t like about the team taking care of Overwatch, they don’t know what’s good for the game and their community. I might have pissed off more fanboys and girls by saying that, but obeying complaints from angry players isn’t a fun option to take. I mean, if players started saying Doomfist should be a healer, would you like that? No, right? Well, that’s what they did with Mercy a couple updates back. Remember when she was the most sought after character in the game because she could revive the entire team? Well, now she’s another kind of cannon fodder for players to have a second thought for because now all the annoying Battle Mercies (which in any game with a healer is not a good idea) can have fun with their most requested character fix. I know that many more fanboys are trying to tell me she can still revive, but they don’t know I played the game multiple times with a friend that spammed invited me to the game. I played it quite a bit to see how much it changed and I don’t like what they did to the only good healer in the game. She is the same playable Mercy as before, but her core mechanic to revive everyone in one go is now gone, the reason to make a Mercy aware of where he/she is in the battlefield and the enemy’s primary target when seen. But all that is beside the point, my reason to bring these things up is because the community is pretty bad and the developers are treating them as if they know all of the game design and how a Team-Based should play, something I should have continued on with.

Recently, the team announced that the team will be watching out for reports and players that are being too “Toxic.” If you don’t know what that might mean, then let me enlighten you. Say you make a gesture (a taunt that was put into the game) too much, you are toxic and may be banned or suspended for some time. That happened to a player a while back believe it or not. And if you refuse to play a character the team is asking for you to play as, you are now toxic and deserve to never play the game again. That kind of stuff shouldn’t be heard by the developers. Developers know the toxicity of the players they attracted and they try to stay away from them in the best ways they can. I mean, criticism is always heard if said enough times, but if it’s stuff like how too many people are using a character the right way or that a healer should protect himself, those things should be ignored. I know you might not like how Hanzo is playing, but he has about 125 HP and is easy to kill if you know how to move that mouse. The whole thing just boils down to getting good at the game instead of making the game adapt to you.

I know that many of you are questioning why I care about this in a game that I don’t even enjoy, and I understand that, but I take a developer’s decision by heart and treat it like it reflects myself. And making a Toxicity Police to watch over your game and ban those who fall in the toxicity is basically a digital genocide. Laugh all you want, but that’s the only thing I can compare it to, so stop judging. Anyways, this is also giving some people too much power, having people report other players for something they didn’t like and get them suspended for not playing a healer. I know it might be a bit harder than just reporting it, but I feel this can get out of hand and the devs won’t see it until it’s too late. I mean, (I might have said this already, but who cares) a player was banned for being good as Tobjorn. He wasn’t a newb or trolling, he was a high ranking Torb that knew what he was doing. If this can happen, you can get banned for anything right now.

I know many people appreciate this whole situation saying that it’s in good intentions, but this can be so bad. If you play a match in a game and you’re afraid to even talk or let alone do something slightly offensive, that’s not a great time. I’m not saying it will kill Online Gaming, it will shorten it if others adopt this, making online games less common. It might bring some single-player games some fame, but it would make multiplayer games a cesspool of toxicity and teenage spunk. I really don’t like the fact I have to watch out what I say in games, since it has a sense of escapism in terms of speech. I love to criticize this map, but I don’t wanna offend someone on the server who loves it. I don’t wanna say this character isn’t great and offend someone who has a body pillow of her. I don’t wanna feel afraid to say anything about a game or anything in real life in a game because someone out there might hate what I have to say. I bet I offended someone with this post alone…

Am I banned now, Blizzard?

Well, I hope you enjoyed this post, which I believe no one wanted to see this, but I hope someone out there shares my opinion on this whole situation which is long ago outdated. Still, I hope someone out there enjoyed this and ‘til next time…

Play More Games!

Not  Scurry at Night...

“Never thought you’d be alive.” a voice, muffled, enters Jeremy’s ears as he wakes. Darkness covers his eyes as he feels a man’s shoulder against his abs.

“Never thought you’d stay.” The voice was feminine. “Open the door. You’re the one with the key, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am.” Small rods metal clashing against each other as the door creaks open. “In you go.” The voice felt strange to Jeremy as gravity shifted downward, setting him down on a chair. “We must make sure this boy is going to help us. If not, we have to throw him somewhere he can thrive, away from this place.” What did they mean by that?

I swept into their minds to see, but there was hardly much. Only the plan and the expectation of execution. Jeremy sat there groaning in pain, bandages are wrapped around his neck as a piece of the wound peeks out of the bandage. Burns maybe?

“He’s waking.” One of them speaks.

“Let him,” another comes in. “What’s good putting him out. Might not like us afterward.”

Curiosity and laziness fill one of the men, “Who’s going to stay and watch him.” Their heads nod as if they needed some place to be.

“I’ll stay here.” A deep voice creeps in the men’s ears. The two men looked at the man in surprise.

“Don’t you know how long you’ll have to stay?” one of them explained.

“Of course, we’re not sure,” the other shouted. “But the days seem like they might turn to years. Maybe decades.”

“Probably after the war,” One of them looked at the other as their tales swept the air back and forth.

“Don’t call it that!” The man was angry, a war was no war when it was for freedom. Freedom. The word was the only thing in their heads. They found a new neighbor, stabbed them in the back and now they want to do the same.

Jeremy began to move, bag over his head, the two men walked out as the shrouded person stayed staring at him. A tired moan burst out from the black rags on Jeremy’s head, footsteps heading towards him, a chilling smooth voice enters his ears, “Are you awake?” Calm and relaxing, but worrying at the same time. With what little life Jeremy had left in him, he answered.

“Who… Are you… You?”

The deep voice entered his ears again, a soothing relaxing one. He didn’t know whether to trust this person or call him a kidnapper. “No one of your concern, but I want to help you.”

A gallop of hooves hit the dirt as sounds of men scream “Hyah” are coming outside.

“What was that?” Jeremy spoke.

“Nothing.” That soothing voice was so charismatic to Jeremy. “Let me remove that rag over your head.” A gentle touch over his head, dragging the black vision away from his eyes, shedding bright, intense light upon him. The light begins to dim, a man bent down in front of him being covered by a shrouded hood and black armor upon his chest. There was no skin to reveal what he looked like, only his eyes. A glowing, bright, blue pair eyes that intimidated Jeremy.

“Does that feel better?” He replied with the same soothing voice.

“Who are you,” ignoring the question.

“Like I said before, I’m of no importance.” Jeremy raised one eyebrow. He tries to scratch his head, but the bonds behind the spine of the chair prevent him. “Sorry for the restraints,” he giggled, “We wanted to know if you were with right mind.”

“We?” Jeremy replied.

“We call ourselves the Red Banner,” the man got up and walked behind Jeremy while taking out a knife from his waist. “If you haven’t noticed, there is a race of people out there that are being enslaved by a madman some call a king. We want to change that.” Jeremy’s arms are free, slumping down as soon as they get the moment of release. “We just waged war with your owner’s farm. Finally makes ourselves known to the world.”

“Wait, you’re the terrorists?”

“Is that what they call us?” he smirked and let a giggle. “We only killed men who did so much wrong in this world, raping women, taking children’s lives and even torturing men while they watched it all happened. They all needed to pass the void once in their time.”

“But they were people,” Jeremy muttered.

“They weren’t by the time the King took power.” He walked in front of Jeremy, standing this time. His hooded cloak waved against the air revealing a sword made of royal, Keltic Steel along with bolts wrapped around his leg. He could see a tail. He was one of his kind.

“I know many people call us monsters, murderers, but we wish to only bring back our humanity. I ordered our many men and women to attack your farm so I can reach you and your father, Khal`En.” Jeremy’s eye’s flared.

“How do you know my Noama?” he cried.

“Noama? You know our native tongue?” His didn’t react to his surprise. “I see. I was with him in his tribe. We were basically family, caring for me while my father hunted. Even his poor wife was such a sweet ma’am during her care. My parents and I considered each other family, your father and mother. I wanted to reunite ourselves-”

“Where is he?” He interrupted him with a worried frown curving around his face. He looked down in sorrow as those bright eyes began to dim a bit.

“We found him, but…” he couldn’t say it. His voice began to jump as he spoke, a  quivering pitch of high and low, feminine to masculine. Jeremy didn’t notice.

“But what?” He reached out towards Jeremy, grabbing his arms and sliding them down to his hands, holding them as he took a knee looking up at Jeremy. A single tear fell down his face.

“No,” he muttered. “No! How!?” He screamed. “How!? Tell me!” He clenched Jeremy’s hands, struggling to let out this frustrated sadness out. Trying to flail his fists at this cloaked man. He didn’t want to embrace this fact, his only caretaker, the only person to actually show him love and friendship that can’t be replaced. He kicked and tried to leap out of his chair as the man rested his head on his clenched fists until he gave up on his disbelief and fell on the man’s hands holding his. The man released his grip on Jeremy and let him in his arms, letting him cry on his shoulder.

I felt somehow responsible for Khal`En’s death, feeling as if I was the one who let that bolt hit his shoulder. Beyond every other death, every other soul I let enter the void, I felt nothing. No guilt, no sadness, only the relief of a wandering soul, freed in either the Void or the Pit. But this one… I feel regret. His father means something to me at this moment as I watched the tears and sorrow dwell in front of me. He was the only soul I ever regret putting in the void. Otherwise he would have been reborn.

Jeremy spoke out his cries, “I want to lie down.” He proceeded to get up as a jolting pain ran across his back and legs.

“Don’t do that,” the man said. “You have a lot of injuries from the attack.” The man picked him up, carrying him in his arms, setting him down a beautiful bed in what feels like a newly furnished room. A green blanket was spread across the bed as well as fine furs and skins decorated around the room, gape-mouthed animals and creatures displayed giving it an English Dream emotion to it.

The man pulled out a familiar box from under the bed, a torn box. As Jeremy saw it, his eyes lit up with somber joy. “I spoke with your father before he... “ He paused. “He told me to give this to you.” He brought it up and placed next to Jeremy on the bed. He opened it and found an ashy book and a rusty, golden campus.

“I hope this is enough to show you we mean no harm to good people.” He walked out of the room as his glowing eyes glared at me. I could feel them on me as he traced my movement with his head. I followed him out of the room watching his eyes and mind, knowing whether or not he sees me. I stepped in front him and he stopped.

“What you, spirit?” I felt lips form against a face that wasn’t there before, luscious ones that appeared on a feminine face. Beautiful arms extended through my body as I controlled them.

“How can you see me?” I answered.

“What are you and why are you here?” He ignored me.

“I am what most men call Death.”

“You don’t have a name?” I searched in myself to see if I did, but there was nothing.

“The Gods haven’t given me one.” I felt a tear fall down my feminine face. Why am I showing emotion?

“Well, with name or not you must leave.”

“I cannot.”

“Why?” he yelped.

“Jeremy is an interesting soul,” I replied. “He makes me interested in life more than any other soul. My hands guiding his father to the Void is the only soul I felt I was involved in, that I had to have done something to stop it-”

“But you had no choice?” I looked at him as another tear fell down my face. “How long have you followed him?”

“Since his father’s capture to slavery.”

“Oh my…” His voice was feminine for a moment as he said that. He covered his mouth as his other have glowed a bright yellow for a moment. He looked embarrassed for some reason and spoke again.

“I hope you mean no harm and I hope you send a message to the Gods that we need help and faith.”

“I can’t make promises,” I replied as he walked to the walked in the kitchen to make something for Jeremy to eat. My beautiful features began to fall back into myself, my feminine face with luscious lips and my slender, calm arms were gone in an instant as I looked in Jeremy’s room reading the book of legends with rivers of tears down his face.

Recruiting Rookies

Well, I think I’ve been in the dumps lately. Just been doing nothing, but try to find something to write. Literally just reviews that felt too biased and stupid one-offs that were going everywhere in a boring way. The only piece of writing I have been enjoying is the whole The Story of Jeremy series I have. I think I’ve been improving a bit in my writing I hope, but I’ve been trying to do more gaming involvement in my writing. I’m not saying I want to create a game and tell you guys about because I don’t have the right computer or software to do it, plus I need some professional experience via a school or videos. It’s basically preferences. Anyways, I will be able to do the challenges I put out there and I will try to do some of the community challenges out there, although not seeing any, so those will some of the gaming-related posts I will make.

I’m thinking about taking a break for once this year to recharge my ability to write about games-You know what I’m coming from. I’m taking a break from that crap and focusing on my series I’m working on. I would like to see what you guys think of it, but it sounds attention seeking, so don’t. Just… Don’t…

If you wish to know my personal life, I’m doing fine. A bit of a sickness every now and then. School is fine for now, but Chemistry is biting me in the ass. The teacher is fun though, would be the kind of person I would hang out with. That’s about my life right now. Interesting ain’t it? I will be doing the challenges Haley and I post as well as some possible Community Writing Challenges, but the most you’ll see out of me would be The Story of Jeremy. If you’re wondering, the next challenge is going to be next month, so don’t worry yourself so much… The two people that do the challenges lately… Well, I hope you liked this update about what might happen to me on the sight and ‘til next time…

Play More Games!

I know this isn’t common in my account, but I love Team Fortress 2. It’s a game that I played and studied the hardest on than my own classes in school. I know most of the ins and outs of the game and there’s one thing I want to talk about that no one wants to. If you know what a heavy character is in a multiplayer match, you know he’s the man getting all the attention and dealing a decent amount of damage to get it. The character in Team Fortress 2, obviously named The Heavy, is a character people like to ignore for strange reasons. Although their reasons for doing so are reasonable, they don’t understand the point of his character and playstyle. Hello and welcome to this break down of The Heavy.

When you play as a Heavy, you fall in one of the two categories: a Bullet Sponge or a Dangerous Tank. A lot of people tend to fall into the Bullet Sponge category, but there’s no wrong there. He’s meant for a distraction and carry most of the damage dealt for the team. He may not do as much damage as many other classes in the game, but he sure does take the most, having people go to him instead of taking the Rocket-Jumping Soldier about to carpet bomb them. I know that’s a strange spot to be when you're supposed to defend and you play as the walking bullet magnet, but since the Heavy Stature is mostly brawn, it takes most of the attention and intimidates the players running into him.

It’s basically an illusion for the player playing as him, having people try to kill this hulk throwing thousands of bullets at me instead of the guy that does a hundred damage in one, direct shot. I mean he does a good amount of damage, dealing about 10 to 15 damage, can kill a Scout in a few seconds if he stays in direct line of sight and walking in a straight line. Heavy just let every other team member get their shot as he just takes all of their attention, making him seem more like death than a Force-A-Nature Scout would. The only downfall of his character is how unfun he can be. I mean, he does a good amount of damage as I said before, but you would have to have the tracking speed of a computer to be able to kill a skilled Scout or anything to be exact, and he doesn’t have any good drop-off damage either, having the damage go from 2 to 5 damage from mid-range. He may have some good sounding weapons on his hands, but they only do it for you when they feel like it. I’d say the only good weapons would be Natasha and the Brass Beast. Look them up if you don’t understand.

Another thing people don’t like about him is how he doesn’t have a good second option, having nothing, but a joke of a shotgun to call a backup. I know many people may argue that the shotgun is good, but there are specific classes to utilize that weapon, classes that have the great ability called strafing. Scouts can do it and even  Soldier has the god-sent ability to. The Heavy is too slow to be able to properly strafe and actually dodge projectiles as much as other classes. At least give him something close to a speed boosting shotgun or a quick getaway for him to properly succeed in this ability everyone else seems to utilize. I know a lot of you veterans are telling me there’s the Gloves of Running Urgently, but those drain your health to make it fair for the players opposing this running Heavy. I want a shotgun to make this character more likable to new coming players in the community, but that’s another problem for another post for me. The point I’m trying to make is that he’s not as appealing to people.

To those of you that played with me, I like playing as the Heavy in Attacking Situation despite him being in a Defense Category. Why would I do that? Because he’s intimidating to other players. He makes Soldiers backup and Demos treating him like a sentry. He’s something that pushes the team instead of attracts them. Although he does barely enough damage, there is a class that counteracts that: the Medic. If the right Medic has the Kritzkrieg, then you have a show to put on that will amazing your team. Once a large group of Scouts, Demos and Soldiers comes in and sees a Medic pocket a Heavy, they like to back off while still trying to suppress them. No matter how far they are though, there is no drop-off damage, dealing a 25 damage for each shot. You can take down an entire team with those thirty seconds of Kritzkrieg Ubering. The only problem with this situation is if the one member of the team is willing to give up fun and be Medic. I’m not saying Medics aren’t fun to play as, he’s my secondary main, he’s just not a class that you can exchange play flows with. He has a different playstyle and doesn’t act like the rest of the roster of characters, but that’s beside the point.

Every other character in the game has a specific playstyle that can appeal to a lot of people, having a lot of ways to play as them and still have fun, but the Heavy has only two jobs: Protect and Intimidate. Those two are broadly spread to many players’ appeals, it’s only for a specific player and he leans more in the support class than anything.

The rest of the characters in the game have weapons that completely change their playstyle and help make them more appealing for players to enjoy, making a defensive class into an offensive class, but the Heavy has barely any to change his playstyle, only every making him the natural Heavy he is. He isn’t appealing and he hasn’t changed because of it. I mean most of the change was to create an alternative to enemy classes like the Huo-Long Heater was made to prevent Spies to backstab you.

If you ask me, he needs a lot more changes than you think. He has a great kind of playstyle that sadly instead fun to play as, being the Sponge and all. I think there should be an entire update to him, making him more appealing to players in the community, giving him new weapons that change his gameplay and secondaries to make a better backup than a sandvich you're supposed to run away to properly use. And maybe some new maps to accommodate his character and his mysteriously funny backstory. I don’t think this should have happened, I want this to happen.

I mean, it has to work and many people have to care, right? Right? I mean, we don’t have to vote for it, right? It won’t have to be a demand kind of thing, right? It doesn’t have to be next to the most broken and hated character in the game, right…? Right? Right!? I saw this when the Meet Your Match update came along and happily voted for Heavy, hoping it would make a difference in his lacking character appeal. Seems people wanted to make Pyro more playable than a class that might be fun to play and fight, like the Scout or Soldier… Or Engi… Or Demo… Or everyone else in the game besides these two characters people have a hate/love relationship with. At least we got another Sandvich with it… It’s the only good thing that came out of it the Jungle Inferno update...

Well, I hope you enjoyed this post and understood most of what I said, seeing not a lot of people play this game in this community. Funny since I came to this site hoping there were active players of that game. I still hope you enjoyed this and give me what you think of my statements and all, and ‘til next time…

Play More Games!

What is that I smell in the air? The waft of speculation! It's time to look deep inside of our needy little hearts and wonder what the next major animal crossing release will look like.

1. More towns to go to

What if the world was finally opened up (wild world) and we started a new leaf on this and actually became city folk? 

I hope my African American listeners found those puns funny. Why? Because black laughs matter.

2. Marriage

I know you filthy cretons. You romanced the cat, in your mind she's your wife but the game won't allow such promiscuity. We want romance options!! Let me marry an animal and move in with her, jeez. Until then one can only hope.

3. Wilderness exploration

I want a forest wear I can fish in ponds, rivers, streams, lakes, saltwater lakes, swamps, freshwater oceans.. Well you get the picture. The map in animal crossing feels cramped. It's a tiny bitty square of land. I want a more open world feel! While we're at it, we should have animal trapping, hunting, and a bow. It doesn't have to get super violent, but I need a place to kill some dear. With this in mind.. 

4. Deeper RPG mechanics

What would be the perfect game? A beautiful baby would be born if the accessability of animal crossing married the obsessive mechanics of something like Persona 4, or maybe the Sims. 

At the very least, I would like to gain experience, level up, and get better at bug catching gardening and fishing. Conversation in the series has always remained surface level, almost to a bore. Why not create relationship bars? When they fill, your friendship progresses with an animal, and more quests and dialogue options open up. 

5. Last but not least, surprise me.

Why do we get the same game map, EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Why do we start off with debt. EVERY SINGLE GAME. 

Even with the tent mechanic in new leaf, the player is quickly forced to go into debt to have a cool house. Let me buy my house with bells fool. Can we kill off Tom Nook and make him a special character or something? 

When will we get to see a new biome. I'm tired of staring at brightly colored green and brown circles of grass. In the fall I want the whole ground to be covered with leaves. I want to have a town in the desert, or forest. I just need some visual variety. 

Do you agree? Share your thoughts in the comments below. I mean it. I had to drag my desktop to starbucks to write this blog. So I want 100% participation! Just so you know how serious I am, I have included all Mr. Resetti dialogue so it takes you longer to scroll to the bottom of the page. You will then feel such nostalgia and warm tender feelings, that you comment possibly three to four times.

Mr. Resetti:

Hey, 'scuze me! Mind if I bend yer ear for a bit? Won't take a second.

Lesse... Uh... Oh, right. I should introduce myself proper and such. The name's Resetti.

Most people call me Mr. Resetti, on account of me bein' a respected member of the community and such.

Lookin' forward to workin' with ya!

...'Course, this'll probably be the last time ya ever see me since there ain't no center or nothin'...

Ahem, so, it says here you quit without saving last time ya played. Care to explain yourself?

 

Select "I wanted a do-over."

Oh, a do-over, huh? Somethin' didn't quite go your way, is that the deal? 

Well, I guess that's one way to play it...

But don't ya think that just maybe it'd be more rewardin' to roll with them punches you're takin'?

That's definitely how I'd most likely recommend ya play the game.

Don'tcha wanna do the right thing and save? For the kids? For the whales? C'mon - save the whales!

Select "My batteries ran out."

Aw, man, ain't that a kick in the moleskins!

'Tween you and me, them batteries don't last quite as long as they used to when I was a li'l mole...

D'ya think I could get ya to be more careful about charging up in a timely manner going forward from here?

'Preciate it...

Select "I had no choice!"

WHAT?! Haaaaa, that's a darned shame is what that is!

I dunno nuthin' about machines, so I can't really help ya out there.

But I hope from the bottom of my mole heart that such an awful thing never happens to you again!

 

...Wassat? You were expecting something a little different?

Heh... Yeah, here's the thing. The Reset Surveillance Center? It don't exist no more.

When they were drawin' up the town budget for this fiscal year, folks were all like:

"What's wrong with a little reset every now and then?" "We don't got the funds for this nonsense!"

Blah blah and so on and so forth... So ya see, I ain't here on official business or nothin'.

I'm just volunteerin' this once. So next time you reset, I ain't gonna pop out.

This is it.. Ol' Resetti's out...

(if the player is the mayor)

Course, if you were to use your mayoral powers to restore the center, well that'd be different.

And if that should come to pass, I'd be back on the job in full force! Unstoppable mole power!

(if the player is not the mayor)

Course, if you were to lean on the mayor to bring the center back, that'd be a whole 'nother story.

And if that should happen, I tell ya I'd be back and better than ever! Overwhelming mole power!

But listen to me! Runnin' my trap like a fancy pirate or somethin'!

Good luck with all your future endeavors! Take care now! And buh-bye!

(Resetti Goes back down the hatch)

 

Mr Resetti:

Hey 'scuze me!

(pops up from the ground)

How do ya do, Mr./Ms. Mayor!

If the player saved before quitting last time

Now don't ya worry. I know ya made sure to save last time, so I ain't here to chew ya out.

If the player did not save before quitting last time

Now don't worry, I'm not here to read ya the riot act about not saving. Yer off the hook today!

 

Naw, I'm here to thank ya!

Ahem... For bein' so gracious as to establish the Reset Surveillance Center...

allow me to extend ya my most heartfelt thanks! So thanks!

With this I can finally get back to monitorin' reset behavior in town!

I guess this means ya see how important it is for me to keep chewin' ya out when ya reset!

That's how I'm takin' it anyway... Well, don't worry! Next time I'll give ya the verbal lashin' of a lifetime!

Oh yeah. Just one last thing...

I know yer the mayor, but the center is off limits, even to you! Them's the breaks!

Resetti out!

(Mr. Resetti burrows back into the ground)

After Building the Reset Surveillance Center (If the player is not the mayor)

(Like the mayor, regardless if the player saved before quitting last time, Mr. Resetti will show up once the Reset Surveillance Center is built.)

Mr Resetti:

Well, look who it is!

(pops up from the ground)

If the Player saved before quitting last time

Relax, kid. I know ya saved yer game properly last time. I ain't here to chew ya out or nothin'!

If the Player did not save before quitting last time

Relax, kid. I ain't here to read ya the riot act for not savin' last time.

I'm here to let ya know the (name of town) Reset Surveillace Center is open!

Since this town's been so gracious to restore the center...

I'm guessing the mayor of this town wants me to put those no-good resetters in their place! Yeah!

That's what I think anyway. So next time ya "forget" to reset, I'll be bringin' the thunder! BOOM!

Oh, and by the way, the center's off limits to the public, so that means you! Sorry, kid!

Resetti out!

(Mr. Resetti burrows back into the ground)

 

First Reset Dialogue (if the player is not the Mayor)

(Resetti pops out of the ground, facing the player)

Hey! Excuse me!

I'm from the, uh, Reset Surveillance Center. Name's Resetti.

You can call me Mr. Resetti. 'Cause that's my name. Not my full name, but you ain't my ma, so...

Anyway, nice to meetcha.

By the way, last time ya played, maybe ya forgot to save before ya quit?

Now I know when things don't go they way you want 'em to, you can reset and try your luck again.

Yeah, I guess that's one way to play...

But takin' what life gives ya and rollin' with the punches? That's a better ride in my book.

That's how this mole suggests you play the same. My suggestion.

What I'm tellin' ya is the mayor of this burg set up the Reset Center for a reason.

Resettin's frowned upon here in [name of town], and it's my job to see people follow the rules. Got it?

When you're finished playin' ya gotta save! We clear here? I hope so! Don't need no stress!

Oh yeah, one last thing...

It ain't "bob wire". It's "barbed wire". It's got barbs. It ain't got bobs! NO BOBS!

NOW, SCRAM!

(Mr. Resetti burrows back into the ground)

Second Reset Dialogue

(Resetti pops out of the ground, facing the player)

Hey! Excuse me! I'm from the Reset Surveillance Center, and I need a few minutes of your time.

Here's the deal. Last time you played, you quit without savin'. How'd that happen?

 

Select "I wanted to reset."

OK, I got it. Yeah, I figured that might be the case.

Know what gave it away? Your face, that's what.

I've been at this job for years, kid, and I can see right through ya!

Before ya start with the questions, lemme explain a few things to ya.

Somebody resets and lights start flashin' all over the Reset Center. We always know. ALWAYS!

The system works, pal. Trust me. And there ain't no reason for you to be testin' it!

Just stop with the resettin' already. When you're done playin' your game, make sure you Save and quit!

You got it? Learned your lesson?

Oh yeah, one last thing...

People don't drink "expresso." It's "espresso." "Expresso" ain't even a thing! Don't ya forget it!

NOW, SCRAM!

 

Select "My batteries died."

Really? Batteries? They just went kaput on ya, huh? Mmm...

Do us both a favor. Try to keep 'em charged. Keep an eye on 'em at all times, OK?

A little request from me to you. Yeah, see ya 'round.

 

Select "I don't remember."

That so? Ya really don't remember a thing? Huh...

Well, I got no clues, and I ain't no detective or nuthin'. Sorry for the trouble.

 

(Mr. Resetti burrows back into the ground after ending any of the conversations)

Gallery

Intro

Add a photo to this gallery

"I wanted to reset."

Add a photo to this gallery

Third Reset Dialogue

(Resetti pops out of the ground, facing the player)

(Selecting "My batteries died" or "I don't remember" from now on will make Mr. Resetti say the same dialogue as he does in the second (unless Don Resetti is there instead). Choosing these options will not skip an "I wanted to reset", only delay it until the next time "I wanted to reset" is chosen. All future dialogue listings here will simply assume that "I wanted to reset" was chosen.)

Mr. Resetti:

Hey, how ya doin'? I'm with the Reset Surveillance Center. I need a few minutes of your time.

Yeah, so, last time ya played, looks like you quit without savin'. How'd that happen?

And here we go. "I wanted to reset" ain't the answer I'm lookin' for... You're a real piece of work, kid.

Listen up. I'm gonna lead ya to water one more time, and you're gonna drink!

Ya ready for this? You're playing New Leaf and havin' yourself a grand ol' time.

It's about time to call it a day... So, what's your next move?

Huh? What was that? Ya press START and choose Save and quit? Winner, winner, earthworm dinner!

Ya do that, and all the stuff ya done in the day gets remembered, see?

But if ya forget... Them fish ya caught? The furniture ya finally got? Them memories ya made?

POOF! All gone in an instant! Nobody wants to see that. So don't forget to save properly!

And I know all 'bout them cheatin' punks who reset on purpose too!

Somethin' didn't go their way. Their shoes were too tight or their ma was mean or whatever...

So they just quit without savin'. They erase it from ever happenin'. They're using reset for do-overs!

Findin' them resettin' cheaters and readin' 'em the riot act is what the Reset Center pays me for. Got it?

Maybe you've heard the old wives' tale about moles never gettin' angry for anything? Yeah?

Well them wives were off their rockers, 'cause this mole ain't takin' no guff from punk kids!

Next time you see me, I'll be wearin' my ANGRY hat. You've been warned!

Oh yeah. One last thing...

They call it "cole" slaw, not "cold" slaw. I don't really see the big deal, but...

"Gee, Ma," I says. "Give a mole a break. It ain't like I said HOT slaw." Hey! Whatcha lookin' at, punk?!?

NOW, SCRAM!

(Mr. Resetti burrows back into the ground)

 

Fourth Reset Dialogue

(Resetti pops out of the ground, facing the player)

Mr. Resetti:

Hey! Hey, you! I'm with the Reset Center. I need a few minutes of your time.

Here's the deal. Last time ya played, ya quit without savin'.

Ya wanna tell me how that could have happened?

Huh. That so?

Gimme a sec, will ya? I gotta switch gears. Ahem. LET'S DO THIS!

(Mr. Resetti burrows underground, then comes back up)

Mr. Resetti

GRAAAH!

I SAID "NO RESETTIN'"!

WHAT DON'T YOU GET?!

THE "NO" OR THE "RESETTIN'" PART?!

.....Phew.....

Ain't had to yell like that for ages. I'm seeing spots over here.

Know what I think? I think ya got a melon made of titanium or something.

Answer me this, kid: Is there a reset button in real life?

If ya tank a test, can ya hit rewind and take it again?

How 'bout if ya oversleep? Can ya rewind time and get your tuchus outta bed? Huh?

Course ya can't! Ya know why that is? It's called life!

Look, in a game, OK, ya can reset and try the same thing over and over again.

But ya know what, [name]]? That time ya spent playin'? It's gone, and ya ain't gettin' it back.

If some piddlin' thing don't go your way, who cares? What's the big deal? It's just a game...

..... Pshhh...

"What's up with this mole? How long's he gonna yell at me?" Yeah, that's the face you're makin'.

All right. Whatever. Maybe I overdid it a bit. All this yappin's got me real worn out.

Bet you're tired of it too, huh? Let's call it a day, all right? But ya gotta promise me!

When you're done playin', ya gotta SAVE AND QUIT! OR ELSE! ...We clear?

Oh, yeah, one last thing...

Ya know how sometimes you get to a point in a conversation where the whole thing's a "mute" point?

Well it ain't on mute! The point's "moot"! "MOOT"! Like a cow! Ya can't mute a cow!

That's my language tip of the day. Whaddya want? I'm a cultured mole.

NOW, SCRAM!

(Mr. Resetti burrows back into the ground.)

 

Fifth Reset Dialogue

(Don Resetti burrows out of the ground, facing the player)

Don Resetti:

H-hey!

WAHHHHH!

Whoa! What's up with the racket? My achin' ears are gonna be ringin' for hours after that!

OK, right, nice to meetcha, Mayor!

I'm Sonny's big brother. Name's Don. Thanks for puttin' up with the kid. I know what a pain he can be.

Sonny's blood pressure got a bit higher than it shoulda, so he's sittin' at home just takin' a load off...

And here I am takin' care of things for the family business. So let's just get into it. Ahem...

[name]], it looks like last time you played, you quit without saving. Wanna tell me what happened?

Select "I wanted to reset"

OK. Here we go... Sonny has this thing where he yells and lectures and gets all carried away.

I'm sure it's caused some troubles with folk, and for that I offer my sincerest apologies.

But, ya know, and, yeah, this is coming from his brother, he ain't a bad mole. So give him a break, OK?

It's one thing to be passionate about the job, but he can be a bit inflexible, ya know? Yeah.

Tact ain't his strong suit. And that mouth! A way with words he ain't got. Not much goin' for him...

But he's a good mole, so cut him some slack, will ya? Do it for ol' Don.

Aw, where's my head? I don't take care of business, then HQ's gonna have to put me on a report...

All right, here goes nothin'. Ahem. AHEM. Me-ma-mole.

Uh... Resettin' ain't no good. So, um, don't do it, [name]]! We crystal? Ya know, like clear?

Do yourself a solid, and remember what I just told ya. Hmm... Yeah, I think that should cover it.

Now if you don't mind, I gotta be gettin' back. Be a good kid and stay outta trouble! See ya!

Select "My batteries died"

Ah... The batteries ran out on ya, huh?

I hate to trouble ya, pal, but do us all a favor and charge those puppies in advance, OK?

Thanks for your cooperation. Great. Uh...see ya!

Select "I don't remember"

Hmm. You don't remember...

I hear ya. I got some faulty memory wiring upstairs too. Yup, it can be a real headache some days...

Sorry to bug ya with this. All right. See ya around!

 

(At the end of any conversation, Don burrows back into the ground)

Sixth Reset DIalogue

(Mr. Resetti pops out of the ground, facing away from the player)

Mr. Resetti:

Hey, I'm with the Reset Cen... Huh?

(He turns around)

Oh, there you are...

Hey, it's me from the Reset Center. Can I get a few minutes of your time? Thanks.

So, uh, last time ya played, looks like ya quit without savin'. How'd that happen?

What's that? Really?

In that case, gimme just one second, will ya! Kaff kaff! HERE WE GO!

(Mr. Resetti burrows underground, then comes back up)

GRAAAH!

IT'S YOU AGAIN!

HOW MANY TIMES WE GOTTA DO THIS?

Haaa, haaa... I'm just gettin' over bein' sick. I ain't ready for this yet!

But you! You don't seem to have gotten the message yet! Grrr!

 

But you! You're the type of person who don't listen to nobody. Grr! Let's do this one more time.

Here goes... Let's forget about other games for a minute, OK?

This here is New Leaf. It's a special case.

What I'm suggestin' to ya, ya little twerp, is that ya try playin' this game WITHOUT resettin'.

Look at it this way: There's no resettin' in real life, is there? No, of course not. That'd be crazy.

Look, I know you're thinkin', "This is a game! Leave me alone already!" I hear ya, but...

It ain't happenin'! The Reset Center is here to enforce the rules, and ya gotta make your peace with that!

Think YOU got it rough? When the reset alarm goes off, it don't really matter if I'm eatin' or takin' a bath.

I could be dreamin' of chocolate-flavored earthworms... IT DON'T MATTER! I gotta dig. End of story.

You can't see from up there, but I didn't have time to put on my socks and shoes! GAAH! Now then...

I'm tired of yappin'. How 'bout we call it a day? But listen to me! No more resettin'! We clear?

Oh, yeah, one last thing...

Ya know when ya say somethin' happened 'cause some other thing caused it?

Like "I chalked up his resttin' ways to not knowin' the rules"... Ya ever hear that one before?

Notice how I said "chalk", not "chuck." That's 'cause I ain't throwin' nothin'. "Chuck" means "throw."

Don't throw things. Ya could put an eye out. It's all fun and games until a mole loses an eye.

NOW, SCRAM!

(Mr. Resetti burrows back into the ground.)

 

Seventh Dialogue

(From the eighth encounter on, one of the following dialogues will be randomly selected. Most of these dialogues will automatically continue without pressing the A button. The ending to each dialogue depends on how rapidly the player pressed the A button while Mr. Resetti was speaking. Additionally, the grammar tip Resetti gives at the end will be randomly generated [variants are listed at the bottom]]).

(Mr. Resetti pops out of the ground, facing the player)

First Variation

Mr. Resetti:

Hey, you! Yeah, it's me again. You wanna tell your ol' pal Resetti what happened?

Aha! Ya did, did ya? That's how this is gonna play out?

It's GO time! Don't you move a single resettin' muscle! I'll be right with ya!

GRAAAH!

HOW CAN IT BE YOU AGAIN?! HOW?!

DO YA EVEN KNOW WHY I'M HERE?!

...Dirt clods! I gotta run through this all again, don't I? Fine! Get your head outta the clouds and listen up!

Ahem. Testing 1, 2, 3... AHEM! Let's forget about other games, shall we? It's hard, but just do it.

This here's New Leaf. Notice how that title is still different from those other games?

One of my duties is to ask that ya play this game without any of that... guh... resettin' nonsense.

I know what you're thinkin'. "I can play any way I want. It's MY game." And I hear ya, believe you me.

But here's the deal: this game's got its own rules. Accept that and ya save us both a mudslide of trouble.

I hope that sunk in. Let's see... what's that next part? Earthworm recipes? Naw, that ain't right...

C'mon, Resetti, think... Oh yeah! There ain't no reset button in the real world.

...Good. Got that taken care of.

That means... Right, time to tell ya there ain't no do-overs in life.

Don't get mad at me. I don't got nuthin' to do with that rule...

If the player did not press the A button

Yo... Ya better not be sleepin'. Hmm... Ya been so quiet, I was thinkin' you was in dreamland.

But if ya say you've been listenin', I'll take ya at your word. Trust - it's a two-way street, ya know?

All right, I think ya learned your lesson. Go do somethin' fun. But, hey! NO MORE RESETTIN'!

Oh, yeah, one last thing.

(Grammar tip)

NOW, SCRAM!

 

If the player pressed the A button a moderate amount of times

What's that look? "I might be listenin', but maybe not." THAT LOOK! That look's for CHUMPS!

Ya know somethin'? That look's like muddy fur, a cold bath, and strong chill all wrapped together...

Ah, I'm outta steam here. You're on your own. Get movin', and remember: no more resettin'!

Oh, yeah, one last thing.

(Grammar tip)

NOW, SCRAM!

 

If the player pressed the A button repeatedly

GRAAAH!

I CAN'T TAKE IT!

"TAP TAP TAP!"

"TAP TAP TAP!

BRAIN...HURTS!

What ya got against buttons?!

They didn't reset your game! YOU DID!

I counted [number of button taps]] button taps! You know how many times that is?! TOO MANY!

You think your thumbs got some sort of unlimited mashin' powers?! 'Cause they don't! Give 'em a rest!

Enough is enough. I'm all outta get-up-and-go juice. You can hit the road, pal. Scram already.

Just show a little dignity and stop resettin'!

Oh, yeah, one last thing...

(Grammar tip)

NOW, SCRAM!

 

Second Variation

Mr. Resetti:

Hey, you. Ya lookin' for me? Then why is it you're seein' me today?

Really? That's how it is? That's how ya wanna play it?

Alrighty then. Ya got my back against the tunnel. Stay there. I'll be right with ya!

(Mr. Resetti burrows underground, then comes back up)

SERIOUSLY?! WHAT IS UP WITH YOU?!

WAS I NOT CLEAR?! WERE YA SLEEPIN'?!

...Fine! I'm gonna walk ya through this one more time. Clean the dirt outta your ears, and listen up!

AHEM! Forget about all the other games ya play. This ain't got nuthin' to do with them.

This here's New Leaf. Ya notice I didn't mention any other games, right?

We strongly...STRONGLY suggest ya skip all the resettin' business when you're playin' this here game.

"But this is my game! I can play any way I want!" Yeah, I know what you're thinking'. Believe you me!

But them's the rules, pal. Stop bangin' your head against the rules. You're gonna concuss yourself.

Great. Glad that's clear. Now, what's next? Uh...yeah...

Ah! Got it! There ain't no such thing as a reset button in real life, right? Course not...

Nobody gets do-overs. That's life... Sometimes it ain't fair!

 

If the player did not press the A button

Yo... You awake? OK, all right. Ya been so quiet, I thought you was catchin' some z's.

OK, looks like I was wrong. Good thing too, 'cause I woulda been really peeved!

All right, I guess you've learned your lesson for the day.

I'm lettin' ya go for now. But I'm beggin' ya - enough of this resettin' business! Got that?!

Oh, yeah, and one last thing.

(Grammar tip)

NOW, SCRAM!

 

If the player pressed the A button a moderate amount of times

Ya kiddin' me? What's with that "I might be listenin', but I might not be" face? I don't like that face!

I see that face, and I wanna pack up my pickaxe and tunnel for home...

Ah, whatever! I've had enough'a this mess! But I'm warnin' ya - no more resettin'! Ya got that?!

Oh, yeah, and one last thing

(Grammar tip)

NOW, SCRAM!

 

If the player pressed the A button repeatedly

GRAAAH!

KNOCK IT OFF!

"TAP TAP TAP!"

"TAP TAP TAP!"

THAT SOUND!

Enough with the button mashin' already!

You're gonna break somethin' vital!

Ya wanna know the number?! Yeah, (number) times! That's how many button mashes I counted!

Ya goin' for a world record or somethin'? Get ahold of yourself!

Hah... I'm done. I got nothin' left in the tank. I'm done with ya, ya silly, button-pressin' timewaster.

 

Hah... I'm done. I got nothin' left in the tank. I've got no time for silly button-pressin' twerps.

 

Just do me a solid, will ya? Grow up and stop resettin'!

Oh, yeah, and one last thing.

(Grammar tip)

NOW, SCRAM!

 

Third Variation

Mr. Resetti:

Hey there. How's it goin'?

Yeah... Last time you played, looks like you kinda quit without savin'. What's the deal?

AHA! Guilty as charged! Uh-huh! UH-HUH!

Alrighty then. Don't you move! I'll be right with ya!

(Mr. Resetti burrows underground, then comes back up)

GRAAAH!

I DON'T GET IT! WHAT'S YOUR DEAL?

I TALK AND I TALK, BUT I GET NOWHERE!

...All right! Let's run through this one more time. All you gotta do is stand there and listen. Clear?!

AHEM! I know there's a lot of other games out there with strange rules, but we ain't talkin' 'bout them!

This here's New Leaf. Emphasis on that "new" part there.

We strongly...STRONGLY suggest you play this game without none'a that resettin'.

"It's my game! I can do what I want!" Sure, I know what you're thinkin'! And I get it. Really, I do.

But rules is rules. Sooner you get on board the Resetti bus and accept 'em, the better off we'll all be!

 

But rules is rules. Sooner you get off the stubborn bus and accept 'em, the better off we'll all be!

 

Ya get what I'm yappin' about, right? Now let's see... What else was I gonna tell ya. Uh...

Yeah, that's it. Ain't no reset button in real life... There ain't no do-overs, yada, yada...

Lemme skip to the end... Ya gotta play the cards life deals ya. If ya don't... YA LOSE, BIG TIME!

 

If the player did not press the A button

Yo... You awake over there? You been so quiet, I was worried ya might have drifted off on me.

So really? Ya been listenin' the whole time? No quick catnaps? Perfect. I like that.

Looks like ya learned your lesson, so let's call it a day. But listen! Don't make me come back here!

AND DON'T THINK I WON'T!

Oh yeah, one last thing.

(Grammar tip)

NOW, SCRAM!

 

If the player pressed the A button a moderate amount of times

What's wrong with your face? Hm? Ya listenin'? Not listenin'?

How's a mole to know? Do I look like I'm a mind reader or a people person? Not so much.

That look ya got on your face right now, that makes me lose all will to do my job with any gusto...

Know what? I've had enough of this for one day. I'm headin' for home. No more resettin'! Ya got it?! Oh, yeah, one last thing.

(Grammar tip)

NOW, SCRAM!

 

If the player pressed the A button repeatedly

GRAAAH!

"TAP TAP TAP!"

"TAP TAP TAP!"

ENOUGH!

IT'S DRIVIN' ME NUTS!

You tryin' to break your buttons or somethin'?

I counted (number) mashes!

Give it a rest, will ya? This ain't no button-pressin' contest! Who do you think you are, Buttons McGee?!

I doubt you even know who that is, or even if that's a real person.

WELL, IT AIN'T!

All right, that's it. I give. This mole's done for the day. I'm cuttin' ya free, punk!

But, please, for the love of all that is good and filled with dirt, no more resettin'! Got that?!

Oh, yeah, one last thing.

(Grammar tip)

NOW, SCRAM!

 

Grammar Tip Variants

Mr. Resetti:

A really bad headache is called a "migraine," not a "mindgrain."

It's painful, but it ain't some fancy health food for your noggin!

BELIEVE ME; I'D KNOW!

 

Mr. Resetti:

When ya don't care 'bout somethin', ya "couldn't care less." If ya "could care less," that means ya still care.

It ain't that tough. "Couldn't care" means ya don't care. Stop carin' 'bout stuff ya don't care 'bout!

 

Mr. Resetti:

Ya don't get a "new leash on life." Ya get a "new lease." A "new lease" means you're excited 'bout livin'.

New leash? That means ya got a new pet or somethin'!

 

Around Wikia's network

Random Wiki

• Games
• Movies
• TV
• Fan Communities

Follow Us

Overview

• About
• Careers
• Press
• Contact
• Wikia Gives Back

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Global Sitemap
• Local Sitemap
• API

Community

• Community Central
• Support
• Fan Contributor Program
• WAM Score
• Help

Can't find a community you love? Create your own and start something epic.

• START A WIKI

Community Apps

Take your favorite fandoms with you and never miss a beat.

Advertise

• Media Kit
• Contact

Animal Crossing Wiki is a Fandom Games Community. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.

The Walking Dead, Luke Cage and Star Wars Rebels! Which are you excited for?

Video GamesEntertainmentLifestyle

• Explore the Top Fall Shows: Luke Cage, Star Wars Rebels and Supergirl!

Hello GI online! This is the first "game" I have ever programmed. It runs off a language called DCPU-16. It's an offshoot of a game Notch/mojang was making called 0x10c. It's very simple, but it took around 12 hours of work. Copy and paste the code into http://www.dcpu-ide.com/ 

I've included the code in the comments below; this is what you should copy and paste into the website's text editor, then hit debug, then hit run in the upper lefthand corner. Enjoy!

For those who are interested in programming as well as gaming, this article is for you. Recently I wrote a small blog piece on a language called DCPU-16. If you have the creative spark within you, it's actually fairly easy to jump into programming video games, even with limited experience. We created this project in an assembly language programming class that is basically a mock version of space invaders. 

I thought it would be cool for you to see the evolution of the projects you create when programming. Last blog's piece I showed you something simple, and this is considerably more complex in scope. 

Once again, just follow a few simple steps and you'll be on your way to playing space invaders!

Copy and paste the code into the website in the comments for a quick laugh and a reminder of how brilliant the people that made these 8 bit games where. It definitely wasn't a walk in the park. 

Thanks for playing :)