It is the express purpose of this column to bring light into dark subjects, to bring hope where there is despair. For every great game or game genre, there is a trope, game mechanic, or other characteristic that is often maligned, even hated. I am here to defend the defenseless, to uphold justice where none has prevailed, to give meaning where once none was found. No game is perfect, but not every flaw is glaring. My job is to show that some of these things have redeeming value.
TowerFall has to be one of my favorite games. The people who know about this blog from slackur (about 99.9%) know that I love the Jackbox Party Pack series. A game that I love about equally is TowerFall.
The reason I don't talk about it as often is it's often hard to get setup fast enough to be brought up as a valid suggestion for a family game night or just hanging out with some friends.
For those of you who don't know, TowerFall is a 16-bit 4:3 (usually) game with two main modes: a battle royale mode, and a campaign mode. I'll be talking about the battle royale mode in this article, as it is the one that personally I like better, and I have never tried to complete the campaign, as of yet. The gameplay loop is simple: kill the other players. Now the way you do that is similar to the game Killer Queen Black; each person gets one life per round, and you can kill another person by jumping on them (we like to call that Mario-ing) or shooting your arrow at them. There are many other layers to this concept though.
The safest place to be in TowerFall is most likely always the air, because in the air, you can easily dodge arrows. You can dodge in the air, and this can be used to easily grab onto ledges and climb, steal an arrow going through the air, or simply go places faster. This game was made by the people behind Celeste, so naturally you can only dodge once in the air.
You win the game simply by having enough kills. The points system is based purely on kills.
Using these rules and some background elements, the team at Matt Makes Games (I love that name) was able to create a very addictive game that can be enjoyed pretty much anywhere, anytime.
And that's cool.
I've been koola, and it's 11:09 where I'm writing this; I should probably be getting to bed.
Final Fantasy VII's main battle theme Those Who Fight has always been one of my favorite tracks in all of VGM and was one of the main tracks I wanted to cover when I started my channel. I purposely held off on doing it though because I didn't think I could do it justice at the time and wasn't confident that I would be able to make the cover I really wanted to make until I had some experience under my belt. So fast forward about a year and half later, I've improved and somewhat learned the ropes with making these covers, and I finally feel like I've 'found my sound' if that makes sense. The time finally felt right to create my own interpretation of a very important piece of music. Was it worth the wait? Yes, it was. I can confidently say that I made the cover that I always wanted to make. I still don't consider it perfect, but after delaying it and working on it for an extra week, I knew I would never be 100% satisfied with it. It's time to call it done and move on. It's extremely gratifying for all the ideas I had swirling around in my head for the last couple of years to finally come to fruition, and I really hope you all enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed making it!
Well, I have just been in the RFGeneration swing of things lately. Two articles within four months?
Honestly, I find this a good way to convey my thoughts nicely, and it helps take up time.
So let's talk about Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing, for the two of you not in the loop, is a life simulation game where you are convening with "villagers" and as The Cutting Room Floor puts it, endlessly paying off your debt to a raccoon who has a monopoly over the entire island.
I like metal descriptions of things.
So, in every new Animal Crossing game they add new villagers and new features. Animal Crossing: New Leaf brought the most content changes, before Animal Crossing: New Horizons's newest update. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons you are the Island's Representative. People were lured into the game's new features when the its trailer first dropped. Terraforming (the ability to change the whole natural look of your island), placing furniture outside, and general doing more than you could in the other games, including placing villager's houses wherever you'd like, and better camp features.
When people actually got it into their hands, (myself included) most people were addicted to the game, and its new features.
However, getting used to these features, they quickly dropped the game and now it's getting more shelf time than play time.
The game went over 200 days without any updates at all.
And then, right as they thought Nintendo was done with it, a new update appeared. This included The Roost, a feature from earlier Animal Crossing games where villagers and you can sit and drink coffee.
People played the game for around a day when this update came out, and then immediately lost interest again.
Now, why was this?
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was supposed to be a game you could keep playing forever. But the lack of new features (the only thing if you didn't have the DLC that came with the new update was The Roost), generally no new direction, and lackluster online (this was one of the better games(!)) made people not want to play.
Nintendo has made better games in the past, and I feel like this was one of their edge cases. I'm still for Nintendo, and they can learn from this, I think; if they learned from the Virtual Boy, they can learn from this.
I've been koola, and your 2012 Minecraft dog feels lonely. Please check up on him for me, would you?
(Crossing Animals sounds way worse than Animal Crossing.)
Bood & Truth - Originally conceived as a sequel in the Getaway series, Blood & Truth sees the player as a small time London gangster embroiled in a battle with a rival family who are trying to execute a "hostile" takeover. With the move controllers, you will mostly be shooting at your foes with a decent variety of guns but also interacting with objects in the environment, including some electronics hacking and lock-picking. The movement is teleportation only but it works pretty well and feels smooth. There is a very minor weapon upgrade system that can be utilized between levels but it is nothing special, especially given the fact that there are only a handful of weapons in the game overall. The game is story driven, but the story never gets in the way of the action. However, I found the characters hard to take seriously. Dramatic moments didn't have quite the impact on me that the developers intended, because the whole thing seemed a little goofy to me, especially given that you can emote with a button press, and one of the gestures you can make is a particular one finger salute. Having said that, Blood & Truth is a must-play for PSVR owners.
Ok, well, I've stopped thinking of creative ways to talk about the delays of my blog posts. I'm supposed to have one every month, right? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
Well, anyways, I've been coding and Arting(tm) lately as well as have been making more than my fair share of music. Development is going along well.
In my time not spent developing I have been mostly watching YouTube videos; however I have also been replaying through some games including Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Super Mario 3D World, and Super Mario Bros. 3. I'm making my way through OneShot and will hopefully have an article about it in at least 83 years.
I've even started my own game collection as well.
And I'm making it my goal to have learnt toki pona (it's a conlang. That's cool but I won't get into it here) by February 2022.
Wait this article is about Baba Is You?
The game I find my self coming back to the most now that I've coped with the fact that I can't beat every game is Baba Is You. As previously described like a year ago, it is a block pushing puzzle game where the rules themselves are present on the screen as blocks that can be pushed around.
It recently recieved a level editor update, which piqued my interest. Now, the level editor isn't exactly new, as it has been around in the PC version for a year now.
Unfortunately I have no way of buying stuff on my PC so this has been unreachable for me until now.
I must say the controls for the level editor are rather weird; I think that since it's been on PC so long, the developer had to make a way for it to work on Switch. It literally uses all the buttons on the controller for different functions.
Now, the level editor is extremely versatile. It contains every word in the game. Because this game is essentially a programming language in and of itself, this allows you to take the Minecraft Redstone approach and build computers, so long as they fit into 64 x 32 squares.
This means that you can make music, games, and other stuff really easily.
Also, part of the level editor itself is the existence of levelpacks, which are essentially entire games made with levels from the level editor. In simpler terms, the entire original release of the game is a levelpack, and you can make games that big using levelpacks.
Now, the developer has added 2 whole new games' worth of content into Baba is You.
This is the type of developer support I want to see in more games. I (as a developer) want to do that, and I hope more games can learn from Baba Is You, to make more games finished, and then add content down the line if they ever want to.
You simply don't see that in AAA games, from my point of view. EA gets bashed so many times for this, and rightfully so, in my opinion.
If you're a aspiring game developer, heed my advice.
This has been koola, and I just thought of ending my articles like this.
(Baba Is You has influenced my music so much, so that's another reason.)
Pictured: Another mainstream media/futurist/political/conspiratorial lie. It is the end of 2021, and not only do we not have flying cars, no one I know has a Hydrosub either. I blame the supply chain breakdown. Giant birds, ornithopters, and 1970s TVs not included.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, fellow RFGeners! As we close out the last 365 24 hours together, let us focus on the positive, and not the errors I keep accidentally adding to the database.
In Episode 041, MetalFRO and Addicted take a close look at a game from a venerable arcade developer, as it moved away from the arcade setting, and into people's living rooms. How does this third entry in the R-Type series fare against its arcade forbears, and does it successfully bring the formula home?
Growing up as a child in the 80's, I recall a few stories from friends and classmates about the video game goodies they got to open at their family Christmas celebrations. It was always fun to hear what they got, in part because I knew I would probably get a chance to play some of those games soon enough, when I could go over to their house. Sometimes it was high praise for the game or console that mom & dad (or grandparents) bought them, and occasionally it was complaints that they got a game they thought was "lame" or that they had already thoroughly played via rentals or borrowing from friends. Typically, I was more than a little jealous, since I never got gaming stuff for Christmas. My first game system was the Game Boy at age 12, and I didn't get my own console until I was 14, and I had to buy it (and the TV it hooked to) myself. So I had to live vicariously through others, reveling in their new acquisitions as best I could from afar.
So a few months ago I was contacted by Red Bull Gaming to participate in a fun contest they had planned. Myself and two other builders were asked to build the most intimidating fight stick they could think of for Red Bull's Tekken legend Anakin. I never made a fight stick before but was happy to accept the challenge. Red Bull put out their own video with all three of our stick builds and a brief interview on their channel. This is my behind the scenes on how I came up with the idea and built the fight stick.
Daylight Savings Time ended a few weeks ago and that means it's time to break out my VR rig. I love playing PSVR in the fall and winter. It's one bright side (pun intended) of the cooler weather and earlier dark hours. I feel like I haven't been following PSVR releases in a long time (did I even play this thing last year?), but I have a lot of games on the shelf that I haven't touched, and this month Playstation Plus is featuring three PSVR titles for download. Here's what I've been playing.
My dad was not a gamer, video or otherwise. He played me at chess exactly twice, handily winning both times and had no interest in playing again as he said he had nothing else to prove. When it came to the fairly new invention of video games, it wasn't as if computers and technology were foreign to him; he was one of the punch-card programmers who set up terminals for the Army's ARPANET, laying the backbone for what became the internet of today. His purchase of a Commodore 64 during my youth was completely transformative for me and shaped my future in many ways, including my introduction into the burgeoning world of video games.
Posted on Nov 14th 2021 at 01:00:00 PM by (Pam) Posted under video, review, PS1, JRPG
This is a review of one of my favourite PS1 games. Star Ocean The Second Story is an amazing JRPG with a real-time action combat system, great interactions between characters and the most amazing crafting and skill system.
We are a community of collectors, gamers and the likes, and some of us enjoy to let the world know what is on our mind. For those members, we have the community blogs, a place where they can publish their thoughts and feelings regarding life, universe, and everything. Some of those members might even choose to write about gaming and collecting! Whatever they write about, you can find it on their blog. You can either see the latest community blog entries in the feed you see to the left, or you can browse for your favorite blog using the menu above. Interested in having your own blog hosted on RF Generation? It's rather simple, first be a registered member, and then click the "My Blog" link that you see in the navigation above. Following those two steps will certainly get you on your way to blogging.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy our entries, rantings, and completely unrelated series of thoughts. We write for you to read, so we certainly hope that you enjoy our material.
