A new product on Steam is the lowest reviewed of all time. I'm a huge fan of Paradox Interactive's games. With hundreds of hours placed in their games, I've found them to be well worth their price... that is if you like to install mods because the games by themselves are incomplete. Paradox for a while know has been critiqued for it's aggressive DLC policy. Often times they'll release games and then make DLC after DLC for said games. There's nothing inherently wrong with DLC, but when you're charging people full price for a game and then asking them to pay 2 or 3x that price for the full game, people take notice. And notice they did when Europa Universalis got a new DLC. It cost the price of a full game, about $20, and yet, it was entirely broken. Broken graphics, broken code and broken mechanics. This has called into question the validity of DLC as requirements for full games. A lot of people's grief has been directed at Paradox because of their priority of DLC over actual game content. They have been cited as using a strategy of releasing games early and unfinished but playable before then adding the content people expected in the first place at a price. This can be seen especially with the game Imperator which was slammed with bad reviews for being uncomplete and people knowing what was coming next. The pressure mounted so firecly that Paradox ended up updating the game for free. But what about Europa? The DLC currently sits at 8% Positive with over 4,000 reviews. It costs $20 which is half the price of the base game and recent reviews for Europa itself have fallen to Mixed. It's unclear currently what Paradox's strategy is for EU4, but it likely won't make such a blunder again. Hopefully.
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Everybody knows Team Fortress 2. If not by name but at least by image. It's characters and design is a massive part of internet pop culture. It's gameplay is renouned for it's greatness. With that said, I might have a TF2 problem. According to Steam, I just crossed my 660th hour played which is a lot. So why is the game so loved? Why is it the top 10 most played games per day on all of Steam despite being from 2007? First we should discuss marketing. On YouTube is a series of videos called "Meet the Team." These are classics that really got a ton of people interested in this world. It gave people a perspective on these amazing mercenaries. TF2 also has amazing gameplay which is probably what's given it it's most success. The weapons all feel great to use and are carefully designed to coencide with distinct character movements. Another thing is customization. You can create any kind of loadout you want for the nine different characters. With different primaries, secondaries and melees to choose from, there are many distinct ways to create your own playstyle. Couple that with the over 1600 cosmetic items for your characters, there's so many ways to play how you want. The art style is a distinct cartoon style look that is blended with the 1960s spy aesthetic. The music is also classic and was performed by a real orchestra. Being a game created by the masterminds at Valve, it's very stable with a clean and functional UI, but updates are lacking. The last major update was in 2017 and it's felt like an eternity for me. Despite this, the community continues strong with nearly 150,000 players online at one time in November 2020. Quite impressive for a game of it's age! Oh and the best part? It's free. 100%. No ads, no premium subscribtions. Nothing. It's totally free for anyone to play. I've put my own money into it purely on my own volition and it's a great system. A discussion on the economics of TF2 is for another day though.
5 Stars - An amazing classic with infinite replayability and is 100% free. The bifurcation diagram is something most people haven't heard of. It's a simple mathematic equasion that calculates values over time. So what exactly is the equasion? It's fairly simple, esentially it plots sequences. Ok well it gets not simple very quickly. When this equasion is plotted, it starts off rather normal. You can see that as it progresses, it slowly increases. Suddenly though, it breaks into two. Then four, then eight and then into chaos. Each subdivision comes faster and faster until chaos starts. Then, it's all broken. A deterministic equasion is picking radomness. So what does this have to do with computers? A lot, actually. It was one of the first ways that computers were able to create random number generators. Since computers are good with numbers, it was a simple way to create random numbers. This isn't though where the interesting facts stop though. It also is a fractal, an infinite shape, it records heart rates, populations and fluid convections. It's also part of the Mandelbrot Set. What that is is a shape with an infinite perimeter and finite area. I suggest that you look into these strange phenominons as there's just too much for me to cover but it's so amazingly cool.
Recently I remembered an old game I had on my computer. It's called Superpower 2 and it's a geopolitical simulator. I decided that maybe multiplayer would peak my interest and suffice to say I got hooked to playing with people. The game has war, diplomacy, economics and more. I took on the challenge in one game to play Greece. It was 2001 and I had to dodge the impending economic crisis that I knew would strike before my economy was destroyed. Suffice to say I pulled an economic miracle for the country. I made it one of the top economies in the world, and it was a great teacher for real world economics. It taught me the principals of interest rates, sector taxes and so on. This posed an interesting question to me.
Flash has been officially discontinued by Adobe and it's the end of a really important time in the world of the internet. This isn't to say though that there isn't hope. Flashpoint is an application that runs about 70,000 flash games all for free as an archive for years to come. Downloading all the games from Flashpoint is hundreds of gigabytes, about 750 to be exact. What it shows is the level of dedication the internet has for Flash. Some people may see it as decrepid or old but it does hold up well to this day. Many people talk about Flash games, and rightfully so considering how influential they are, but many people miss Flash animations, commercial usage and the sites that built around them. There are many sites to visit for Flash games. Armor games, Addicting games and especially Newgrounds were massive influences on the internet in the late 2000s. Even as late as a few years ago, sites like Cool Math Games are enjoyed by thousands of students that are bored in class. I've always hated the internet restrictions on school computers. They've always struck me as overbearing and controlling, but I understand why they were there. It was to keep adult content from kids in school. This came at a price though to students as many game sites were blocked. I know thought that students shouldn't play games in class (most of the time) but it's really a testimate to how popular Flash was as a medium that entire sites were blocked to kids to keep them from being distracted. Flash animations were massive too. From classics like Badgers to Tarboy to BFB which is practically a TV show for free, Flash's universalness can't be understated. It's really a shame that Adobe is letting Flash go because of how influential it is and I hope that Flash can one day return.
I've owned Clickteam Fusion 2.5 since June, and in that time I've gathered a good bit of knowledge on game development and programming. Of course it isn't the same programming as Unity or UnrealEngine 4, but I've learned how to make games with it. I've collected my knowledge into one game, a platforming game, with simple vector graphics. I'll be explaining various aspects of how I made it in a few sections. The art, the code and the design. The art: I went with my tried and true minimalist vector style, designing assets in Illustrator before rendering them and sending them to Fusion. As for backgrounds, I used my traditional style which are much more complex than my foreground graphics for an interesting blend of styles that mesh rather than clashing. Image one is of 'Level 3' and image two is a background. They weren't hard to make and maybe took about 15 mins to make each one. Next I worked on the code. Fusion's coding can be confusing to look at but is rather simple when you get the hang of it. The gist of the coding is that instead of writing out commands, I make qualifiers on the left and results on the right. This way I can see exactly how every object is interact with each other and if there's a red X it means there is a bug (which there are none!) and that saves me a lot of time. One confusing thing though is how there are different "tiers" of code. This screen is for one level and has to be replicated for every single level, but other pieces of code are universal and don't require me to relist them every level. Learning what code should go where is part of the learning curve. The game's design came from many places. The first influence was a fangame I was working on. It was an extension of an unfinished Flash game which I've talked about on here with my blogpost about "Coding with Unicode." That game was a platforming game and the knowledge I aquired working on it was very important for this game and influences from that game can be seen in mine. Another key part was earlier games I have made in Fusion. Both art and code wise, the game shares a lot of it's "DNA" with another game I made. That one was complete and can be seen below: It was a horror puzzle game and I'm currently working on a sequel that has a lot better graphics and animations, plus an into animation made in Adobe Animate and multiple endings and many secrets. I'll have to talk about it in the future but for now this is my current project which I'm excited to see how it turns out.
2020 has spelled the death for a lot of things, but one that sticks out to me is Adobe Flash. With the rebranding of Adobe Flash to Adobe Animate and my browser Opera no longer supporting Flash along with Google Chrome, it really is the end of Flash games. I keep Firefox on my computer for that one purpose, it still supports Flash. Flash Games were in their peak when I was playing them in elementary school (2010-2015) and much like me, a lot of people stopped playing them in 2016-2019. And finally in 2019, it was announced that 2020 would be the discontinuing of Flash. Flash has gone through many rebrandings and changes through the years, but the concept was created in the 90s by a rarely discussed company called FutureWave. In 1996, their experamental multimedia program called Flash was sold to Macromedia. In the early 2000s, Macromedia was king. One of their former products called Clickteam Fusion, I use to make games which I think I've discussed in a previous post. Macromedia Flash 8 was a huge success when it released in 2004 which combined the ability to code and animate at the same time.
This was vital as it created an in-house way for people to make animations and programs. Many pieces of online software that weren't games were coded in ActionScript, which is the coding language of Flash 8. I own a copy of Flash 8 Professional edition and it holds up to this day. A window for animating with all the pens and keyframes you would expect, and another window for coding. It was clear that many great games could be made. The scene exploded with games and dedicated sites to go along with it. ArmorGames, Kongregate and AddictingGames were all sites I used to surf when I was nine. Thousands of little passion projects to play, with some bordering professional levels of polish. These sites still exist to this day. AddictingGames was purchased by Nickelodeon which shows how the corporate side of the industry saw the potential of these sites. This lead to the purchase of Macromedia Flash by Adobe. It was initally another huge innovation for Flash technology. It was merged with Shockwave for even more power and the application was streamlined for ease of use. It was pushed to it's limit, but Adobe was more strict about their control over Flash than Macromedia. Under Macromedia, Flash was being freely used by the users, but Adobe was more corporate than that and their idea of what the product should be was dissonant than what users wanted. The nail in the coffin was Adobe Animate. While under the hood it's quite similar to Flash, it couldn't be any farther at the same time. The only recognizable semblence of Flash in Animate is the layout of the animation tools and with Adobe's rediculous pricing, Flash was dead. The real question is this: "Why care?" What exactly did Flash do other than provide entertainment for kids? It's very important for the history of the internet. A lot of modern internet culture stems from Flash. Whether it's memes or professional IPs, a lot of modern online communities owe it to Flash. There are a lot of games that were originally Flash games on free websites that are now "real" games. One that comes to mind is Motherload. A game about mining on mars that has a sequel called Super Motherload on Steam and it costs $15. It's very well polished and professional, and it owes its origins to Flash. So many animations were originally made in Flash too! It jumpstarted so many carreers and personally, it was the first kinds of games I played. My love of video games and their development comes from Flash. And that's why I think Flash is important for the history of the internet and in gaming. Ok the title might not make sense yet but let me explain. I created an online game that you can play right now. The concept is fairly simple. There are clues hidden in each level that get you the next level's URL. So on and so forth. While coding the game in HTML was pretty easy since all I did was look up some basic HTML tutorials and got a deal for website hosting, it wasn't a huge deal. The majority of the game is looking at images. I had to use Photoshop to make these images. Creating these images was a huge lesson in Photoshop for me. I had to learn practically everything on my own. The main tool I use is the Curves tool. It's great at adjusting the RGB values and RGB brightness of an image. I can change each channel's strength to adjust the image just how I like it. It's also taught me about text manipulation. It's easy to think of text as a simple tool that you place and then move around, but it's far more complex than that. Text can be an important tool in creating an interesting image. Take a look at the 'After' image below! There are other factors as well. For one, I need to get good images to photoshop tbem. As you can see below, I can make a boring image of my Apple IIc into a creative, dark scene. It's all thanks to Photoshops great tools! Before: After:
It's officially October and that means it's time for the spooky games! You have your ususal crowd of horror games you could play, or you could take a trip to the past and see the horror games that have been forgotten. A little bit of history first: Final Fantasy had become a major success on the NES, and their new game for the SNES was going to be Final Fantasy 6 (In Japan, known as FF3 in North America). The game proved to be a major hit. People loved the stories, characters but what was a surprising hit, was the graphical style. It was very popular. Now days, Final Fantasy is in 3d, but the legacy of FF6 is carried on in the form of RPG Maker. I own two different versions of RPG Maker. The original 2000 version and their VX Ace version. I've never made anything good on them since RPGs aren't really my thing (also I don't have the work ethic) but the software let's anyone (even me) make decent looking RPGs. With the creation of the internet, people started sharing their RPGs across the world and starting in the late 2000s and into the mid 2010s, one trend emerged. While yes, RPG Maker was created with the intention of making fantasy RPGs, the ability to make your own characters AND scripting to create your own game code, it let people take the tool in a different direction. A new genera was born: RPG Horror. Sadly, the genera has faded away. I remember it's peak in the mid 2010s on YouTube. Back in the older days of YouTube (Before it was all corporate and boring), RPG Horror was taking off and accelerating YouTubers to subscriber counts never seen before. It was almost like the Minecraft craze. Many famous YouTubers created their platform on playing RPG Horror games. RPG Horror games had to get creative. With only a few tools at their disposal, it was up to creators to make something scary out of an RPG. Many successful RPG Horror games blur the lines of what can be considered an 'RPG'. Here are a few that broke the mold: Ao Oni, Ib, Crooked Man, The Witches House, Mad Father and many, many more. The Witches house in particular spearheaded the trend. I'll make sure to play as many RPG Horror games as I can for October since I think it's a very creative genera and one that deserves to be remembered.
Some people really like Incremental games. I am one of those people, when it's done right. Some people hate them, and a lot of people don't know what they are at all. Incremental games are also known as 'Idle games' or 'Clicker games' (Huge waves of groans) but I think that they don't represent what the genera could be. Critics of the genera generally say "What's there to do, It's just clicking!" but that's a real understatement. First though, what is an incremental game? That's a fairly complicated question. In their most basic form, you click on something to get a bigger number of a currency. Currency is spent in a shop to get items that get you more currency without clicking. That is a really basic form of the game and I do agree, it sounds a bit monotonous. But that's like saying "FPS games are only, click to reduce enemy's heath." Then an FPS doesn't seem very fun either but tons of people (myself included) love them. Incremental games became popular with the release of a game called 'Cookie Clicker'. It was simple. click the cookie, you get cookies, spend cookies on upgrades, get MORE COOKIES! It very much set the tone for future games to come. I love Cookie Clicker as a guily pleasure. I've beaten the game multiple times which takes weeks to do, but let's talk about some of the more interesting takes on the genera.
Sandcastle builder was created by the webcomic artist XKCD. It's a very slow and tedious game. You may remember my game review of 'Pathologic'. It actually reminds me of that. The game is great, but not fun. I love it, but it makes me frustrated. It sounds like a paradox but it really isn't. The game is really, really, slow. I reached the second stage of the game on day TWO. I don't even know how many stages there are. It's crazy to me how much effort went into that game. Candy Box is also really different. It's almost an adventure game in disguise. It starts out very simple. Click the button (it's all basic HTML, no graphics) and you get candy. Spend candy on upgrades. Not this again! But, it changes very quickly. After only maybe 10 mins of clicking, you unlock a map. The map shows you a town with this super cool ascii art. You now have a character, and you can go and explore, talk to people, and complete missions. It's really fun! |
AuthorI am an artist as anyone else is an artist (if that makes sense). My style is abstract and I also draw cartoons. I am also a voice actor for a web-series. Archives
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