GNILLEY @ Game Jam Sydney: Where Screaming Is Everything
Today's Gameodactyl post was supposed to be about TATSUNOKO VS CAPCOM. And even though the game isn't exactly heavy on content, I felt I needed another week to flesh out a good review. Sorry all (especially Rex)!
So I wanted to share with our faithful reader(s) this excellent video from Game Jam Sydney.
(Global Game Jam is an awesome once-a-year event where indie developers present awesome games that they developed in a short amount of time.)
So this "game," if you can call it that, is entitled GNILLEY. The idea started as an experiment involving sound pitches manipulating colors and shades in a game. Eventually, the game (d)evolved into one where angry yelling leads to winning. All enemies go down via yelling. Bosses go down via lots of yelling.
To be fair, there were a few puzzles and tricks worked in where, to get past a barrier, you should only yell at 20% to 30% max yelling capacity.
Also the game uses a bunch of sprites and environments from Zelda. Just to save time as a basic building block I guess.
Anyway, check out the above video, and download the game to play for yourself by clicking here.
They Call Me…..Tim. Plus, a Tactics mod
So Gnathus and I put BRUTAL LEGEND to bed. If you're following my Twitter feed as fervently as you should be, you'll know I downgraded my assessment of the game. Ultimately, the further I got, the more it became a slog.
What interests me is the failure in video game basics from Schafer's crew. Last week there was the letter in which he told us we were playing his game wrong. First off all that information should be in the fucking game. We found not knowing what the hell to do quaint in THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: A LINK TO THE PAST because that was made 20 years ago. Even forgiving that, the letter basically says: We (Double Fine) put in a bunch of RTS stuff, but it means fuck-all and you should just go around punching people. The sad thing is, I would have loved to have played that game. Instead, I'm stuck trying to herd my army of mouth-breathers toward my opponent's more flamboyantly dressed mouth-breathers and occasionally using my facemelter solo. Blech, the whole end of that game left a terrible taste in my mouth.
Now, down the rabbit hole to the opposite end of the spectrum with LFT: FINAL FANTASY TACTICS. This mod takes a very different approach to FFT, and it pays off in spades.
The original battle system was flawed because the job classes were designed to be more consistent with Final Fantasy tradition than with game balance. LFT has tweaked every class so that abilities fit into a particular role. Archers can ignore height, which lets them get to high ground to become more effective. Knights get innate damage reduction, making them hard to take down, while samurai do double damage with their melee attacks so that they can lead on the front lines. These changes encourage the player to create characters that excel at a job instead of simply slapping the best skill sets on knights and black mages, the classes with the best stats.
The battles have also been drastically redesigned. Monsters in random battles have been given many more abilities then they had in the original. The added variety makes them much harder to handle, especially at the beginning of the game, when your squad doesn't have many abilities of its own. I was easily outclassed by random encounters.
Once I found some traction I was fine, but the first few hours were brutal. The story battles have received the same treatment. The difficulty ramps up, not by simply boosting the numbers, but because enemies have better skills and come in more balanced groups. I always thought the AI in the original was bad, but now I feel like they were simply shorted by poor level design. With most levels having a well balanced group, I've found the computer giving me a run for my money on almost every stage.
LFT took my favorite game and improved it by leaps and bounds. Other than the increased difficulty level, I'd be hard pressed to recommend the original over LFT.
I've also been reading Scott Adams' Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. If you're familiar with Adams' slightly Aspergian worldview, you'll enjoy this book. It's a collection of essays with Adams' take on everything from voter fraud to monkey god penises. A nice quick read that's easy to take in bite size chunks.