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Watch the video here!
By the way, new article coming later this month.
Enjoy! In this video, me and slackur go over our Secret Santas we received from RF Generation!
Note: this YouTube series won't be replacing either of our articles. This is just a side thing.
I have a certain group of friends over about every week on Fridays. About 2018-ish, we started a little thing we've had going on for years: one person out of the three plays a game, and another person of the three will narrate it.
For reference and privacy's sake, I will be referring to the members of this friend group by their internet usernames.
The group consists of three members:
Me, obviously,
cool kid k,
and Grassalina.
(The whole narrating thing originally started because of one of my Grassalina's at-the-time lack of reading skills compared to the rest of the group, but she has since caught up with us and now we read the dialogue for fun. Sometimes I even do it when playing games with my mother!)
Minecraft: Story Mode was a game that I had played a couple times when I was younger. Back when that group of friends had just started this whole ordeal, that was one of the first games we played.
About October, we decided that now that we're older and have a more actualized idea of what's going on, we'd play through the game again. cool kid k was actually playing the game, while Grassalina and I watched and made decisions.
Telltale's writing in Minecraft: Story Mode had us all scratching our heads at certain times. While funny, a considerable amount of the dialogue options wound up having a way different meaning then what was originally intended; being that Minecraft: Story Mode is primarily a story-based game, this often leads you to make the choices that you don't want to. Due to this, we have ended up restarting an episode a lot.
The combat engine in Season One is also abysmal. The Telltale engine seems more designed for the cutscenes then the combat, which ends up leading to a combat experience that feels... not great. Thankfully, Season Two improved upon this.
Despite the negatives mentioned, I think that Minecraft: Story Mode, had Telltale survived longer, could have been fleshed out into a better gameplay experience. There's definitely a lot of good ideas here, but not enough to really cultivate anything.
I've been koola, and see you in 2023.
(I didn't really want to end the year on a negative note...)
I originally planned to write this month's article about Hollow Knight. I started it, and have played it a bit, but only got a bit into the first area.
What actually ended up happening was me playing a TON of Plants vs. Zombies this month. The exact set of circumstances that led up to this I won't delve into here, because it actually involves my personal life a lot, but just know that I ended up getting the game on Steam.
One thing that I want to say before I get into the actual review proper is that I've been playing it through on both Steam and on my 2DS at the same time. By that I mean I would play ~4 levels on my PC and then play them through on my DS.
In my opinion, the DS version of Plants vs. Zombies is EXTREMELY underrated! Sure, it may be laggy at times, but the actual game of Plants vs. Zombies is usually slow, so the lag isn't much of a problem. Something I find really cool about the DS version is unlike the other console ports, the game takes advantage of the DS's various features. For example, usually in 3-5 it's just a regular conveyor belt level, but in the DS version, it's this cool otherwise unseen minigame where you use the microphone.
Plants vs. Zombies is in a similar vein to Terraria for me. All of my friends (and even my older brother) have beaten the game at least twice. I, prior to this review, had only gotten to the second world.
Like I said, I don't really want to get into the specifics of why I started it this time, but I played way more than I usually do this playthrough. From my experience, the game is phenomenal.
I think my favorite part of Plants vs. Zombies is all the different strategies you can use. The game doesn't force you to go down any specific path. In fact, you can even start a level without Sunflowers with nothing more than a simple warning.
Because of that, I can't really REVIEW this game from a gameplay standpoint, other than the basics, which are already really solid.
I've been koola, and tacos are delicious. I would also buy a taco for $1000.
(Who knew that vegetation fighting dead people would be so fun?)
Omnifate has officially been my longest project.
The amount of hours I've poured into this project has almost outshined my amount of hours on YouTube on Switch.
All jokes aside, I've been hard at work on this for about 4 months now. Although the work on the RPG technically started a year ago, I hadn't really been actually doing anything 'til June 2022 due to various reasons.
Making a game isn't hard, honestly; the biggest problem that I've fixed has only took me 2 weeks.
What I find harder is telling the story you actually want to tell. I've had the idea for making a game since about 2020; it started taking shape in 2021; and now here we are with a demo of the game.
When I've watched interviews with game developers, the number one thing I hear is to keep it small. It is incredibly hard to control your excitement about such a project, so you'll often get carried away doing things related to the game, but not working on the actual game.
OMNIFATE has been a big passion project. I'm not really intending to profit off of it. My goal here is to create a game that I would want to play. I want to see more Earthbound-style games, so I'm making one. If anybody disagrees, that's fine.
So far, development has had its hurdles, but I'm really liking how it's coming along.
Composing the music for OMNIFATE has been really fun, too. In my head, before July 2021, I thought that if anything were to be completed and music was to be done, I would have music commissioned by someone like C418. But since I composed Wurly, I've been composing my own music and had a better appreciation of video game soundtracks. I've been told by a lot of people that my music is really well done. (Shameless plug but check out my music on Spotify or wherever you stream your music.)
I've been koola, and I know. I made this article way too late.
(Number of bugs: 348,973 and counting...)
I am going to preface this by saying if you've never played through the entire game of OneShot and don't want to spoiled, DO NOT READ AHEAD. I am going to put several line spaces so nobody gets accidentally spoiled. Go through the game yourself. It is amazing.
Alright, that should be enough.
I know I already said this, but don't read ahead if you haven't already played through the entirety of OneShot.
One style of games I extremely like, being the fan of games and coding that I am, is games that break the fourth wall. Games such as Undertale and Doki Doki Literature Club.
I had heard about OneShot a few times before but never actually looked that much into it. At that age I pretty much overlooked any anime-style game.
That's where is stood in my cognition for about 2 years. Just a Doki Doki Literature Club clone, I thought. (Even though OneShot came first...)
Until one December 2021. December 2021 was an interesting time to be an Undertale fan. Everyone was just coming off of the high of Deltarune Chapter 2. But, I guess, somebody in the Deltarune YouTubers group chat (which, as I initially wrote the script for this article, was a joke; now coming to figure out actually exists) suggested that everyone try OneShot.
Naturally, as one of the main consumers of this type of content, I of course heard about OneShot. At that point, I made one of the decisions in my gaming life that I regret the most:spoiling the entire main playthrough of OneShot.
I looked through the playlist for the specific playthrough I was watching and found out there was more episodes, so I decided to stop spoiling myself. I had by that point already sowed the seeds for my Dad to get me Steam so I figured I could just play it then.
On April 20th, 2022 (nice), I finally got access to Steam. After a couple weeks, I saved enough money to buy a $20 Steam gift card. I didn't get OneShot because I wanted to buy both F.I.S.H. and the Henry Stickmin Collection.
Fast forward to September 22, 2022. OneShot World Machine Edition launches.
I bought it as soon as possible, (which due to CGC 2022), was October 1, 2022.
I had a goal in mind: get through the main game, and experience the second playthough myself, unspoiled.
I succeeded in that goal.
Lengthy backstory aside, OneShot is an amazing game. The puzzles have you going into the operating system to solve them, and aren't too hard if you know what you're doing. I legitimately have zero gripes with the main game.
OneShot has you take the role of the savior of the world he's thrusted in. The savior, Niko, is basically a cat that stands on two legs and has skin. (that sounds much more gruesome on paper than in my head) Niko has the "sacred" ability to contact their god, the player. (Side note: I don't like how the Switch version handles this. It calls you by your account name, which is much less drawing than calling you by your first name.)
This player-character relationship is something I have not seen any other game do before (and DDLC doesn't count, that was just one point of the story.). Normally, in most games, you are free to do whatever you want to the characters. They don't feel real. They aren't aware of the outside world.
OneShot's ability to completely demolish this barrier of storytelling is completely unprecedented. It truly feels like something wholly different in the realm of games.
And that's where I would end the article.
...Except. In 2017, a new update to the game called Solstice was released. This update broke my already high expectations and threw them out the window. Not only does Niko communicate directly with the player more in this update, but he finds out why he exists, that this whole thing is a simulation, and that you wanted to have a second shot. He even tames the robot keeping this world together.
And that, my friends, is how you make a good game.
I've been koola, and OneShot is art. You cannot tell me otherwise.
(83 years is now 290 days.)
I have been developing a lot lately, so I'm sorry for the lack of articles. It has been really good, though. I've been getting a lot of stuff done lately, (and have encountered at least 2,519 bugs), so that's been nice. Hopefully another devlog soon.
One thing I've been doing while not developing has been playing Terraria.
Previously, I had heard of Terraria, thanks to a bunch of my friends really liking it. I had started a few worlds but only got about five minutes into them before eventually just giving up and stating that it was too similar to Minecraft.
About a week ago, however, me and my brother were doing our usual activity of him playing the Xbox 360 and me on my computer. During these he usually plays Split/Second, but a day earlier he had beaten it. After I bombarded him with literally everything happening in my life, he stood there for 2 minutes or so before asking "What's a good Xbox 360 game?".
After a bit of thinking, the only things that came to my mind were Minecraft, which he was on track to beating, Split/Second, which he had just beaten, and Terraria. Out of options, I chose Terraria. He agreed and went to get the game from my father's collection. I had no idea what I was about to get myself into.
We load it up, and I plug in the red Xbox 360 controller I usually use on my PC into the actual console it was made for. He loads up the game after spending some time making his character, and I join.
I guess at this stage in my life things are changing quickly (the repeating narrative), because both Zach and I had gotten way more out of this play session than either of us thought we were going to. We ended up playing for around two hours that day.
Since then, every time we do our daily ritual of loading up the Xbox 360, this is the game we go to instead of Minecraft or Split/Second. There's just something about this game that really clicked with me that a game really hasn't since I got Baba Is You. I have since started my own world on my Switch and play it for a bit every day.
What's even greater about Terraria in particular is that I know diddly squat about it. I like to use the internet and have been regarded as the techy know-it-all in my family. Most of the games I like end up being unfun because after having that initial rush of satisfaction with it, I look up everything there is to know about it. I have seen this happen with most of my favorites, like Minecraft and Persona 5. But since I had previously dashed off Terraria as something too similar to Minecraft, I had not really looked anything up or watched anything about it, and that lets me enjoy Terraria to the fullest extent applicable by law.
I've been koola, and I somehow managed to write code so bad that it softlocked my entire computer for three minutes straight.
(Terraria isn't 2D Minecraft; Minecraft is 3D Terraria.)
Back with the initial batch of articles I wanted to write was an article about Miitopia. I have given Miitopia a mention in my first article, but I wanted to write a whole article about it. Now, I love Miitopia and think it's a great game, but I soon found there was very little to actually write about. Usually when I write an article, I pick subject matter that I can get a good few paragraphs out of at least, but Miitopia just never gave me more than like 5 sentences.
Miitopia is a sequel (/spinoff?) of Tomadachi Life, and with Tomadachi Life, I have more I can say about it because I have played the game A TON over the last two months or so.
I have seen people try to liken Tomadachi Life to Animal Crossing, (and have even done it myself occasionally), but I think these two games are vastly different, and there's barely anything Tomadachi Life really relates to. I even had some difficulty coming up with the tags for this article.
In Tomadachi Life, you invite Miis into this island of yours and solve their problems. The more problems you solve, the more XP you get, which can lead to more levels. That's... literally it. Besides a few extra modes such as the turn-based RPG thing you can play once a day (it is my personal belief that this is what inspired Nintendo to do a full RPG of), Quirky Questions, where you ask the islanders raise-your-hand polls where you can fill in the blank, and Judgement Bay, basically a digital coin toss with your Miis on either side, there's little else to do in the game.
It is this emptiness that gets me addicted. I want to solve all their problems and get their XP up. Worth noting is that their is several different problems to solve and different varieties for pretty much every problem. Such problems include hunger, romance, and friendship problems, with a few specific asks thrown in there sometimes.
This game, with its XP and leveling system, gives you the satisfaction of seeing something you've been waiting days for to be fulfilled, levels gained, or uniqueness experienced, on occasion, which is why I think it is very addicting to me. I play it every morning to see the little news broadcast, get my daily islander donations, and fix my Miis' daily problems.
I've been koola, and Nintendo could make a lot of money from turning Tomadachi Life into a mobile game.
(Oh wait, Miitomo existed?)
A while back (if you define a while back as one week ago), my older brother and I went on a social camp with some friends. Now, I won't be going into specifics, but during that time we played a lot of the classic game Mafia. We played a custom-made offshoot of it, which included five roles. We had Sheriff, which could tell if one of the players was a Mafia or not. We had Doctor, which could heal players that would be killed. And we had Cat, (I don't even know how the name came about) which could mute players. This information will be important later.
Back in 2020, a small indie game titled "Among Us" blew up.
The gameplay structure makes for an extremely fun game, in my opinion. I love the social deduction aspect of Among Us, even if I am bad at playing as an Impostor.
I mostly play Among Us online, but I have played it person before a couple times. I have also played it over voice chat, which in my opinion is the most fun way to play, even if it does cause a few issues. It's my favorite way to play Among Us, but it's incredibly hard to get enough people in a voice chat to play, in my opinion. I mostly play in voice chats in small groups. I've even done with RFGeneration before!
What in my opinion, causes Among Us to fall flat, however, is the changes to this formula. Near the end of 2021, Innersloth released an update to Among Us that added multiple roles. I dislike this feature heavily because it messes with the already established formula. My experience with Among Us was mostly only in late 2020 and recently, so I'm basing it off of my experience recently. The extra roles we added in Mafia made sense to go with the formula, but the new roles in Among Us make the game 10x more complicated and feel worse, in my opinion.
If you do turn off the extra roles, however, Among Us feels nice to play and is a great game in my opinion.
I've been koola, and please STOP saying "sus". It was funny back when when it was only used for YTPs.
(I wrote a whole text block about the gameplay structure that I just removed because everybody know how Among Us plays.)
A while ago I received Paper Mario: the Origami King as a gift from my parents. I have played the game a bit, but as I was getting used to the controls, I noticed something. The D-Pad has no functions at all! This is the type of game you would expect the D-Pad to fully work with. Ever since then, I've been noticing the same problem in various other games.
The D-Pad issue has two sides to it: either a) the D-Pad just isn't connected to any keybind at all, or b) it's connected to a set of inputs that makes little to no sense for it to go to. It seems many new games fall into category "a", while games from 2-4 years ago fall into category "b".
I have a theory that this is part of the "technology evolution" we all have been just getting used to lately. Sometimes, things that you don't notice but function perfectly fine are removed. And then, when you actually want to use those things, you realize what happened. (Apple users know this all too well.)
I said that I first noticed this with Paper Mario: the Origami King, but I also noticed it in Scribblenauts Mega Pack before I started really thinking about it. (For reference, in the original PC and Wii U build these versions seem to be based off, the D-Pad will function as expected. It moves you.) But in Scribblenauts Mega Pack, the D-Pad is assigned to a group of buttons that used to be on the top of the screen at all times as part of the HUD. (The originals were touchscreen games.)
My point being that the D-Pad in Scribblenauts Mega Pack is assigned to a menu that makes no sense to me. It's not even explained how the D-Pad functions in-game. I just kinda figured it out myself. What is explained in-game is the ability of pausing the game to get to these actions.
The original "b" case I brought up can be useful at times. I just wish that they would assign it to some other but ton that doesn't get used very often, like Select.
And it is for this very reason that modern controllers (like the DualSense and Xbox Series controllers) still keep the D-Pad in the first place.
In most modern games, however, you will usually get nothing for seemingly no reason. There might be some people who are disabled in a way that they can't use the control stick and use the D-Pad instead; but modern games not accepting any movement options other than stick or even having a way to rebind your controls really makes me worry about accessibility.
I've been koola, and it's called a Directional Pad, not a "Directions Pad".
(What even is the Xbox 360 controller's D-Pad anyway?)
Ports are a fun subject to talk about. It's interesting to see a game ported from one console to another. Sometimes, it makes perfect sense, like New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, (even if the name is a bit iffy), but sometimes they don't.
A curious case is Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS. (Even more iffy names). Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS, as easily guessed, is a version of the game Super Mario Maker, originally released on the Wii U. At first this makes sense. The Wii U was a failure in the sales department. Super Mario Maker basically was the only thing holding it by the fringes of complete financial failure during 2015.
I bring this up because with Super Mario Maker's financial success, it would make clear sense to bring it to Nintendo's other console at the time: the very successful 3DS. A portable version of this game that people could enjoy on a console small enough to fit in one's pocket sounds amazing! Nintendo was biting a bit more than they could chew, however.
How do you take a game as complex as Super Mario Maker and fit it on something with a 268 MHz processor? Nintendo's answer was, well, you directly put it on there.
That was their first mistake.
Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS's code is basically the same as the Wii U original. Which, again, for a clock speed of 268 MHz is not a very wise decision. It has very poor performance when many objects are moving, as expected. But the extent to which this is treated is... not very good. It even occasionally lags on the menus. It lags during some of the game's built-in story mode, which I'll get back to soon.
I think that most of this could be fixed with some performance patches. But the game never got any. All of the patches were bug fixes; I'm not Ceave Gaming on this topic, but it still hurts a little bit.
On the other hand, most of the built-in levels are actually really good. They preform well (usually) and are actually really fun. For a portable console, you would need to have a good category of offline levels to play on a road trip or something, which I think this port really excels at. The massive amount of quality offline levels included in this port is amazing and I think that this deserves some talk in the debate of this game.
One thing I've been leaving out in this article is the online functionality, and that's because this is basically what everything brings up when they talk about this version of the game. A game maker, if it has a level-sharing system, needs to have a good one, right? The original Super Mario Maker had a relatively nice level-sharing system. You could search for a level by its popularity or difficulty. You could also do a "100-Mario Challenge" where your goal was to clear as many uploaded courses as possible with 100 lives. You could also sort this by difficulty. In Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS, you get a randomly selected batch of levels to scroll through. You also can get "Recommended Courses" based on what levels you played. For a game creator tool, this is a really bad way of handling online levels.
Additionally, something the community gets flared up about for this game is the fact that you could not upload the levels you created to Course World. This causes a lot of disco--wait. No. Basically every single party of the debate hates this choice. You can only share your levels to people you created in Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS to people over StreetPass.
Overall, Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS is a badly preforming version of the Wii U original, with loads of great offline content and lackluster online support.
I've been koola, and I'm done ranting for today.
(Expect some more Omnifate stuff soon, because I'm getting into getting a demo out by the end of summer.)
So I was lingering around RFGeneration not really doing anything, and I realized that I had not shared anything about Omnifate with RFGeneration since August. A lot has happened since then.
Let's start with some of the more influential stuff. I switched to making Omnifate an RPG, as I noticed that most of the story elements I wanted to have would fit better in one. I've been composing music as I come up with the story, and just overall composing for fun sometimes.
I have acquired the services of an artist. Her pen name is Raini, so that's what I'll call her for the rest of this. Raini is very helpful for Omnifate and makes anything I draw look 10x better. She draws in this anime art style that just oozes joy out of me when I see it. Seriously, I hope she pursues this as more of a career.
Next, I'm working on getting a demo with at least the first bit of the game in it in the summer months.
Coming up with a good story is a really hard thing to do. I don't want to plagiarize, but I also don't want to include no standard RPG tropes, so I've just been working out the story in my head as I go.
Overall, development is coming along better.
I've been koola, and Omnifate is coming as soon as I can finish it. Please stay tuned.
(I really have to fight procrastination.)
To define a favorite game is a intensely loaded question. "Should I include the story in the discussion?", "The music?", "The humor?", "The gameplay loop?" "The in-game tutorials?"
There is probably never going to be a right answer to this question. My personal belief is that you should judge games by their gameplay and story.
If you gleamed the article before you read it, (or even looked at the tags), then you'll notice that my article is about a rhythm game. Obviously, rhythm games can't have stories, right?
Yes, and I think that this one's humor does it enough.
F.I.S.H. is a game by a content creator I have been following for a good few years now, Timotainment. His content and sense of humor is top-notch, and in my opinion, flows directly into this game. You are to stop fish from entering potentially unsafe areas where CLASSIFIED is happening, and your tool to stop these fish is a stop sign.
The gameplay feels very fast-paced and intense in some parts, and that's a good thing for a rhythm game from my point of view. The difficulty curve does take some getting used to but that is probably just a product from my overall lack of experience with rhythm games.
Overall, F.I.S.H. is a very fun, humorous, intense and amazing rhythm game. I love it, and would highly recommend it to most.
I've been koola, and some of my recent articles have been filled with mostly pessimism and cons.
(I hope this suffices.)
On 2/18/2022, Nintendo announced that they would be shutting down the 3DS and Wii U eShops. As an aspiring game collector (wow wonder where that came from), I would like to delve into that.
Now, what they are actually doing is removing the ability to purchase games "as of late March 2023". However, they have set specific dates for specific things being removed; namely, the ability to add funds using credit cards will go away in May 2022, and with a Nintendo eShop Card in August 2022; the ability to use download codes and purchase free software will go away in March 2023.
I have loved the 3DS and Wii U since launch, and have dwelved several hundred (heck, maybe even thousand) hours into both systems. There are still several digital games which I intend to buy for them.
But what I want to go into is the apparent piracy issue. With the ability to add funds going away in just six months, people will start pirating games because of low stock. Piracy will increase rapidly among these systems.
I see this issue going in one of two ways. 1): Nintendo bans the Nintendo Network ID of pirates as they have been doing for the past decade. 2): Nintendo gives up and focuses on Switch anti-piracy.
If #2 happens, then there will be no reason to buy physical games for the average homebrewed 3DS / Wii U owner.
If #1 happens, then people will be upset because Nintendo is maintaining anti-piracy measures on a system that they discontinued the ability to buy most of the games for.
I think the only silver lining is if Nintendo follows in Sony's footsteps about the closure of the Vita and PS3 stores. I do not expect that to happen, but you can always hope for the better.
I've been koola, and I've had like 3 article ideas this month.
(They're all probably going to be pushed back by at least 4 years.)
So I'm finally doing it. I'm writing an article about one of my favorite games ever so far, an article I've put on the backburner of my writing for forever, a game that I have loved ever since I heard about its creation, DELTARUNE.
Now that's pretty high praise, and (I think,) deserving praise. Now, why do I love DELTARUNE so much? It has a really good sense of humor, has amazing music, and is a turn-based RPG. Those are all aspects of games I enjoy. Oh yeah, and it's made by Toby Fox. That too.
So let me elaborate on them all.
The sense of humor is mostly slapstick, and is really well timed for the moment. Everything is checkable, and either leads to a punchline or IS the punchline. Take this beginning segment of DELTARUNE Chapter 2. You just fell into a garbage filled area. There is a trashbag with an eggplant shape. When you see it, you think, "Oh, that's weird". Eventually you walk around and find "an eggplant shaped like a trashbag". I find these little gags funny, and can help relieve the "constant feeling" that most RPGs give.
The music is my next point. DELTARUNE and UNDERTALE's creator, Toby Fox, has an amazing musical talent. So much that I have listened to the soundtracks so much that my own music bears significant resemblance to it.
(Here, try comparing it.)
The music is so good it even earned a spot on Nintendo's list of games with the best soundtracks.
Turn-based RPGs have always been one of my favorite genres. Something about them is so relaxing, but it doesn't have the complete and total "lack of game" that a visual novel does. DELTARUNE follows in UNDERTALE's footstep for the most part (I mean, it WAS made by the same creator) in the battle system. It is a mix of turn-based RPG and bullet hell.
DELTARUNE is one of my favorite games ever, and I can't wait to see what comes of it in the next few chapters.
I've been koola, and one of my New Years' resolutions this year was writing more. Can you tell?
(I composed a whole song for an RFGeneration article.
It will be on Spotify sometime soon. Like, 2 days soon.)
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Welcome to my little side of the internet! This is where I post game reviews, video-game related things, and stuff about MY game, OMNIFATE. Expect a new article about every month; sometimes I post more than once in a month or take five-month long breaks.
(The schedule is a guideline.)
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