FremLog

Also, as long as I’m procrastinating, might as well post this too. It’s only like a week or two late.

• Diddy Kong is a lot of fun. I was surprised as how fun and balanced a character he was.
• But Sonic the Hedgehog is definitely my favorite character.
• Moves are way easier to pull off. Love chaining combos in midair? So much easier now.
• Way more floaty. Wee!
• Because there’s a lot more airtime, there’s a lot more focus on combat in the Y-axis. Sonic’s down stomping attack is used a lot.
• Sonic is now the fastest character. However, he doesn’t really move all that fast compared to the characters in Melee. Thus, everyone moves more slowly.
• The nerf bat hath smiteth Link, my previous main. He feels a lot less visceral than in Melee. Part of might be the animation cycles; in Meele it was totally possible to pull off two or three spins in a row on DK. Now, not so much. Things feel slower and smoother.
• SOOO much more of an emphasis on items. I have no problems with items normally, and Nintendo hit the sweet spot with the defaults in Melee. Now it just feels like too much.We’re talking like five smash balls in a single round, and two or three insane ships of doom, split into three pieces which everyone battles like crazy over. Yeah. When you play with items (he said, abusing italics), you fight for items. There are now at least five or six items of power equal to or greater than the stupid hammer. And they spawn all over the place! Seriously, it’s completely insane.
• However, you can turn it all down and/or off, so I’m not complaining too much.

So, I’ve innocently been trying to do homework and adjust to living in a dorm with 200 other people again.

Then Kyntt Stories was released early. Then Ubisoft went insane and released Sands of Time, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and Rayman: Raving Rabbits for free. Then EA, trying to top Ubisoft, released the original Command and Conquer for free. I was told of all this information by various parties within the span of about 24 hours.

Just as school started. I think the world has declared war on my work initiative.

No, really! The rumors of it’s death appear to have been highly overrated. I think. Judge for yourself.

Inspired by this post, I’ve been designing a simplified version of Defense of the Ancients. I call it “TinyDoTA.”

The goal: A simple, easy to learn, hard to master version of DoTA that can be played through in 15 minutes.

Disclaimer: I’m not actually any good at DoTA. I’ve probably missed some stuff.

Heroes

Get a class system working. Ideally three classes, maybe five. Good, well balanced, etc. I’m thinking the classic Warrior, Archer, and Rogue system. Maybe a Mage class, too.

Players

Smaller map. For LAN play, four people. The more people the game requires, the harder it is to lean and get into.

The Rich Get Richer

Corpse runs

The other player won’t get any gold from killing a PC. Actually, maybe something like the bonus system in allegiance. For each kill (regardless of PC or NPC), the player’s bonus multiplier goes up. When killed, they pop out as a ghost and must run to their ancient. The opposing team could attack the ghost, but doing so would cause the player to respawn instantly, loosing their XP bonus. Would have to be balanced so that this was controversial. (What fun is a game if you always know what the other side will do?)

Levels

If you get behind the leveling curve on DoTA, you’re pretty much worthless. Worse than worthless, since going out will likely result in your death, feeding the other team. Maybe each team sends out more powerful units in direct relation to the opposition. For example, if the other team has high level characters, send out big units that give little XP. If the other team has low level characters, send out little units that have high XP. Maybe this would be counterproductive, since it would make the game drag out too long.

Leavers

Having everyone stay would be even more important with only four people. If one person left, their some of XP would have to be transferred to the other player to compensate. How much is too much? Either that, or an NPC would be called in to take over their unit. Would need to respond to the basic DoTA chat and take commands. Also, would have to be weak enough that a human player was always better.

Items

Your items are your character in DoTA. There are a ton of them, too. I’m not entirely sure how to manage this aspect. There are far too many of them for quick access, in my humble opinion. An interesting game mechanic would be to make each enemy tower a store. The closer to the enemies base, the better items. You’d have to go right up next to a tower while being attacked by it to make your selection. Perhaps one would simply have to stand next to a tower for some period of time to unlock new items back at the store in one’s base.

So, yeah. That’s all I’ve got so far. Anyone else have ideas?

Kenta Cho. ABA Games. Best crazy Japanese shoot-em-up games ever.

First new release since like March: Titanion

w00t!!!!

It’s basically old timey Galaga done up right. You remember that annoying enemy that would grab your space ship and use it against you? This time, you have that ability. It’s very fun to just suck up an entire line of incoming
ships, then blast down the next wave with them.

Update: Yay, there’s a way to run it on Linux! Either follow the instructions for compiling here, or grab the package I’ve compiled here.

What with E3 and all the buzz about Nintendo, I got bored and decided to parody it.

(Suggestions for improvement, etc welcome. This is just the first draft.)

A little while back, I did a review of Rocket Boards. If you read it, you might have gotten the faint idea that I disliked the game. More then most games. So, in another "Talk about the game and I'll let you have a copy" type promotion, I was asked to review a little game called "Professor Fizzwizzle". Fuzzwizzle. Wizfuzzle?

Fortunately, the name is one of the only faults I can find with the thing. It really is a great game. I actually played though the demo about a month ago just cause it looked like fun. I shall now ramble aimlessly about how much I liked it for the rest of the review

Continue reading ‘Professor Fizzwizzle Review’

I received Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, among other things, as a gift a few days ago. It looks like a pretty neat game, it appears to be pretty much Neverwinter Nights with a new graphics engine, better storyline and a Star Wars theme. My good friend Alex recommended it highly.

Of course, Alex has only played it on Xbox. But the PC version can’t be too different, right? Well, one would hope. Little did I know what path lay ahead. Would I stick to the happy, legal, light side? Or would I succumb to the dark powers of software piracy?

Continue reading ‘Trial by DRM’

So, PyWeek2 is nearly over, and I think I’m done with my entry, PixelShip.

It’s badly coded and not technically impressive at all, but it runs and it’s kinda fun. I like it anyway.

So, if you happen to have Python 2.4 and PyGame 1.7 installed, why not hop on down and check it out?

So, there’s PyWeek2, this Python game programming contest thing going on this week. I know almost nothing about Python or PyGame, but I entered.
In retrospect, it might have been better to wait until I at least had a little sprite to move around. Oh well. It’ll be interesting to see how things go.

I am currently attempting to master object oriented programming in order to display a little ship on the screen. The objects appear to be winning.