We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Awesome :D You guys have likely spawned on continent 3, I have an account there, post your usernames and I'll see if I can help you out!

Rocket Science here :D

I'm not trying to pick a fight. People are allowed to have different opinions on how good games are.
I just thought I would explain why I hate Dear Esther so much, since you seemed kinda mad that I was making fun of it.

Normally I'm all about story quality over gameplay quality, but wow I really hated Dear Esther.

I'm not saying that I wanted enemies to shoot or platforms to climb or whatever but I would have liked something, anything to do other than just move along the set path. Even if the game had just trusted me to turn on my own flashlight that would have been something. When your contribution to a game is more or less just holding down the forwards key what is the point of even being there at all.

The best I can say about Dear Esther was that it was a reasonably good short film hamstrung by the fact it needed my constant input to keep going.

And yes I am probably criticizing it as being a terrible example of a genre it is not a part of, and I would argue that that genre is 'game'.

SpoilerShow

I know games are a medium and not a genre but whatever.

Unrelatedly, another new indie developer with an all-star design staff has arisen!

Onion Games

I'm pretty excited. The head director is Yoshiro Kimura, who also directed Chulip and Little King Story and designed moon: a remix RPG! Also their twitter is adorable.

onion like to kiss you o3o

I'm actually in the middle of Dear Esther, as in, I got stuck in a game where you just follow a linear path. I am Fighter from 8-Bit Theater IRL.

Tell your friends, Planetary Annihilation on the 26th.

We haven't had a good Eagle Time Mann Vs. Machine game in a while.

You guys wanna do something about that?

We haven't had a good Eagle Time Mann Vs. Machine game in a while.

You guys wanna do something about that?

I would love to! Who's free this Sunday?

I can blast some robots Sunday.

#fuckedbytimezones

Should I do it, guys? Someone needs to show this game some love!

Of course you should do it! The issue is still the time, so this answer is ^{not very helpful!}

(you may be able to get a lot of this straight out of PVR/PVM files on the disc)

Haha I'm trying out Card Hunter and it's giving me an estimated 21-minute wait before the servers can log me on, hahaha. But, at least it looks like the time is actually ticking down when they reestimate my login time every minute or so. I'll let you know what I think about this game, but like, maybe don't try to login this weekend.

e: It gave me a login error and booted me out, but when I tried to log in again it started up the login queue position estimated wait time right where I left off, so like, it's cool.

the game is actually fun

i did actually get kicked out when i managed to get in and it reset me back to the back of the line (lawl) but it is overall quite enjoyable

i do hope they allow more starting avatar choice when they do the official release though, since as of now a lot of them are just cosmetic store items

I can also do MVM sunday, yay

Unrelated: I've been playing Enemy Unknown again, and... it's fun, but I remember why I quit. The random elements are extremely shitty and fuck you over and then by the end of the month three countries are panicking and you haven't gotten any opportunities to fix it.

I guess I need to focus a LOT more on satellites and shit.

I busted my ass for hours trying to rip the map graphics from the disc. Here are the problems:

Admirable!

I’m not too familiar with Dreamcast internals and don’t know anyone who is, but there probably are custom formats involved (that’s just how it is in the game industry; don’t make it right or nothin’, just is). BIN files usually indicate that they put anything in there and didn’t bother with a more descriptive name. Game data, executable code, meaningless black squares, it’s not certain. The MDT extension doesn’t ring any bells; it’s probably some proprietary container or at least descriptive format from the sound of it (it could even possibly stand for “metadata”). EVT is also probably a custom format, but yes, there is a very good chance it contains game scripting and stuff like that just because of the extension name.

Since these things don’t seem to have too much standard stuff, at this point, someone who’s interested in the data can do two things to find it: trace through the code (yyyeah, have fun with that), or keep making educated guesses and corrupt various parts of the data until something breaks in a meaningful way, then try to narrow it down till you have what you want, e.g. an image or part of it turns into noise (it might still ultimately require some sort of looking through the code, but this way is better for telling whether that’s going to be necessary). The latter method is easier and faster for the most part, but I imagine it’s still not terribly fast when you’ve got an entire disc to scour. And I suspect in this case it would still require determining the image format to extract anything usable, and that’s certainly no picnic, even if it’s only sleuthing and not completely reconstructing it.

In other words, it may just come down to the old fashioned Nintendo Power method :\

I guess I need to focus a LOT more on satellites and shit.

Yes, satellites are an important part of the spinning-plate balancing act you have going in the early game.

Yeah, the lack of proper DC emulation is positively problematic. Oh well. But if you found where the data is, that’s actually where things get easier since it’s unlikely the image format is something unheard of and you could probably hand it off to someone who knows what’s up, who would otherwise be occupied not stumbling around for it. The finding it is the time-consuming part by far. (This is why I do the translation side of fan translation, by the way.)

Have you considered getting your mitts on the official Japanese guide book?

It’s ISBN 4797308826, definitely out of print, and I can’t even find an English link, much less someone who’s already imported it and is selling (I looked for unofficial guide maps, too; couldn’t find any). Most of the online prices in Japan are <1000 yen.

I could find only one review and peek inside. (the reviewer seems a little disappointed that a guide book is mostly guide? well, okay, bud... still not as spartan than the strategy guide books we usually get over here, if we even get them.)

So, I've been playing Card Hunters! So far, I like it. Thoughts below:

SpoilerShow

So, Card Hunters is a browser-based game where you play a tabletop game in your friend's basement.

The game plays like Final Fantasy-Tactics-y grid-based tactical RPGs, with Baten-Kaitos-ish card fighting a Paper-Mario-ous sense of your-characters-are-almost-entirely-defined-by-their-equipment-so-if-you're-stuck-on-a-battle-you-can-rebuild-them-from-scratch-between-battles-osity. All actions in the game, from moving to attacking to spells, are done by playing cards from your deck. Unlike other deck-based games, your cards come from your equipment, and each piece of equipment bound to a handful of specific cards. Some of these cards are better than others, but in general, if you try to switch to a different card of the same equipment level because one of its cards is really good, it'll also come with a couple of weak cards, or even a detrimental card you're forced to play.

The aesthetic of the game is all about the basement-tabletoppiness, the characters all looking like cardstock cutouts on cardboard board, with soda and dice hanging around the background of the screen. Because your friend is just learning how to DM, the main campaign is a series of prepackaged quick campaigns, each of which is just a few battles wrapped in generic fantasy flavor. Around these battles, there's a more interesting narrative of your friend learning how to run games and meeting the cute pizza-delivery girl. I'm hoping this is a running narrative with characters that actually develop, but it might be something like a limited set of randomly chosen scenes where you keep seeing the same ones over and over.

There's also multiplayer. I haven't really tried it much, but if you like turn-based strategy multiplayer you'll probably like this. There's, like, ranked multiplayer and a ladder and stuff, it's fleshed out, whatever.

The game is free-to-play, but don't let that bother you. The paid stuff is just cosmetic upgrades, a couple rare items, a few extra quests and the ability to farm ~30% faster. You can get either everything or mostly everything through normal gameplay, and if you do want to support the developers, there's a $25 package that gives you everything you'd even want to pay for. It's not really pay-to-win (although I imagine paying would help); during the beta, two of the top five players hadn't paid a cent.

The game is also browser-based, but that's not a huge issue either. The campaigns and shops restock once a day, but for at least the first dozen or so dungeons I've played, I've made it through without having to go back and grind, and I haven't needed to wait the 24 hours to access a previous dungeon again.

The difficulty is well-managed so far. I've died a few times already, but I've also only died a few times so far. Each dungeon gives you a few continues before you have to restart the whole adventure. It's probably not helpful that I've been trying to play a party of three dwarves. (Each of your party members can be a dwarf, human or elf, which come with a tradeoff between hp and movement speed, and later on come with special racial bonus equips. Dwarves are the slowest, so I'm kind of getting outpositioned a whole ton. On top of the classes, you choose between warrior, mage, and priest, which equip different items and therefore use different cards, and therefore can use different cards.

My biggest complaint is with the tone. Although the game gets the detritus around RPGs well (or at least the stereotypes about the detritus around RPGs), it kind of misses the point of the role-playing game. There's no chance to play a role. The game eschews all the talking and characterization parts of an RPG to just talk about the combat systems. In addition, having the characters' abilities just defined by the items you equip, and not by any choices I've made in the game, leaves me even less attached to my little paper dudes.

There also appear to be a few issues with the server, especially because this is the opening weekend. For now, expect a 10- to 20-minute wait before you can log on. (There's a timer to let you know.) In addition, the game sometimes stalls completely after your turn; this even happened once right after I won a difficult battle, forcing me to replay it. Fortunately, toggling between windowed and fullscreen seems to jog the game into moving to the next turn.

Anyway, you should probably try this game out. It's free, and at least the first few hours that I've played are pretty fun.

Wow, I am not that good at coherently and concisely writing about games!

Actually that was a good writeup, I've been playing it too and I agree with all of those points! I've never had to grind, but going back to grind can still be fun and beneficial. I will usually die every other quest, and never twice in a row, so 90% of the time that means I finish the module, the other 10% of the time starting at the beginning. Games are fairly quick, the multiplayer is limited to 20 minutes per player (your own clock ticks down on your own turn so nobody can stall out if they're losing), if that helps give you a sense of time. Yes nopad, the narrative is a running narrative, the scenes are tied to each quest.

The only problem I have is that because all the customization is gear-based, at the beginning of the game the gameplay isn't too engaging. Hey I can equip this item that has 2 bashes that each do 3 damage, or I can equip this item that has 2 chops that each do 2 damage to 2 targets. BIG MEANINGFUL CHOICES. though I'm starting to get to the point where there are interesting choices so it does get a lot better pretty quickly.

I tend to like strategic-competitive games in this vein, once I get a hang of it I could see myself getting really competitive about this game. I'd like to see more choices though, I can imagine there being a lot of deeper choices with cards/items but so far I haven't seen anything much more than synergystic builds like "stack as many piercing attacks on the same character and get items that boost piercing damage" or "have a team of all dwarves so you can use this item that makes all dwarves draw a card"

That's a thing of beauty.

Seriously, Japanese strategy guides are totally worth nerding out about, even if you don’t plan on reading a single word. I’ll give an example I think is really well done, and that I happen to own.

First, an apology about the serial-killer photo quality; even if I had nicer photography equipment, I have no studio space or anything like that. Then again, the back of the book intimates that reproduction of contents is strictly forbidden, and while a handful of unreadably blurry cell phone photos of non-exclusive content for a gushy review totally counts as fair use of copyrighted material in the U.S. (where I live and where the images are hosted), please do not follow the image links if your jurisdiction does not permit such usage![/lawyermode]

SpoilerShow

https://i.imgur.com/LQ3Cqs1.jpg
This is the Melty Blood Act Cadenza Ultimate Strategy Bible (Ichijinsha, 2006). It’s the guide, but not the only guide; there’s a smaller, A5-ish-size book with more of a beginner emphasis, too (which is also a much more convenient thing to carry to the arcade). I suppose I should’ve included something for scale, but this book is about 240 pages thick and A4-ish-size. It’s hard to tell from this photo, but I have left the obi on; the actual cover doesn’t have that large text.

(dat metallic title )

https://i.imgur.com/7jGQIyU.jpg
Since this is a quality publication, they dedicate entire color pages just for section dividers. Don’t worry, space is not wasted in actual content pages. It’s packed, but divided off into nicely demarcated boxes and stuff, just like a magazine. That’s why they often call these things “mooks”; they’re books with magazine design, more or less.

https://i.imgur.com/swaoMmr.jpg
So after about 20 pages detailing the essential mechanics of the game from the very basics up to the extremely game-specific in gory detail, there’s a lot of pages dedicated to each character. On the first page for each, there’s a couple sentences for the character’s background, little pictures demonstrating the palette selection, and pictures showing what normals and stuff look like. On the rest of the pages, you have the special moves and such, along with detailed advice pertaining to them and the animations depicted as a series of images. And frame data, since after all, this is a fighting game with (at the time) a competitive scene.

Note the size of the text on the left. That is roughly the text density wherever there is text (most of the book is pictures), and if translated into English I estimate it would probably need about 125–175% the space overall (Japanese-to-English space requirements are more forgiving with prose, but prose this ain’t; it’s terse tip text).

https://i.imgur.com/xt5qDwp.jpg
What’s this after these anti-boss strategies? Art gallery!

https://i.imgur.com/I8nsxx9.jpg
On a single spread, we have the game portrait and thumbnail art for who are coincidentally (who were back then) my roommate’s for-fun main, my other roommate’s serious main, my for-fun main, and... the hilarious character.

After that, on non-glossy, greyscale print there is a collection of at-a-glance movelists (technically for transcriptions of speech!) in one section, and in the next, more general tips for fighting with a particular character, rather than the move-specific ones found in the glossy character-specific section. So it might seem a little inefficient and repetitive, but it’s actually more convenient because in the heat of the moment, you’re more likely to need the back section than the in-depth front section. Thoughtfully done.

Although such books will unavoidably contain inaccuracies or oversights here and there (for instance, if a nasty infinite combo arose before a game’s release, it’d have been fixed and never made its way into the guide, but it affects the game in an important way nonetheless; typos have also been known to make their way into guides), they tend to be reasonably authoritative and comprehensive on the whole.

Some English-language strategy guides do manage to cover their respective games in this level of depth (maybe I’ll get to do a side-by-side comparison one day?), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one achieve the level of elegance in graphical design found in a typical Japanese strategy guide. The ones I’ve seen are always have something up with them; too busy-looking or nasty font selection or whatever. Not to mention they almost never get to show off exclusive tidbits like developer trivia or concept art rather than the generic presskit materials every magazine already got mailed to them (in fact, this sort of thing is so lucrative that Squaresoft back in the day started a series devoted strictly to it instead of keeping it as a mere selling-point for guides). Really, I’d love to get in on translating this sort of stuff for a living, but in the back of my head I don’t think there’d be a strong market for it here at all.

I've largely avoided wiping in Card Hunter by the skin of my teeth (had the warrior fall in the wizard's golem cleanup, managed to scrape by with tactics), and I've done this by using the mechanics to force the enemies to screw up due to their limited AI and their specific movesets limiting the types of threats they can use, which creates wiggle room for your guys...pretty important when you are almost always outnumbered/undergeared. The card based gameplay can just as easily screw them over as it does to you.

That's why you see those silly HOW TO WIN AT NINTENDO-type books from the 80's.

I recall one from the 90s for Genesis titles. Since I didn’t have one, I read it a few times over, just imagining what wondrous kinds of games could satisfy the conditions laid out inside. At some point I “lost” it (read: my Mom “lost” it “for” me), but the few I do remember, well, the real things just don’t compare to the world’s most powerful graphics technology, I’m afraid. (alternate version... I think I like the couth one better, actually).

youtube

“zeedayn”
“neero”
*twitch*

re: game handholding
I think there really is an happy medium here. The bullshit where a popup window explains how to do every new thing, not just once, but EVERY TIME YOU SEE AN APPLICABLE SITUATION (I'm looking at you, Legend of Zelda) is extremely obnoxious and immersion-breaking. But on the other hand, when I was 10 I got stuck in Minish Cap because I didn't realize cracked walls were A Thing and not just aesthetics, so there really are people who need help. Probably help more useful than popup windows which always say the same thing.
In my opinion, developers do need to tell the player button combinations in game, because I personally do not find it fun to hit all the combinations of buttons just to see if they do something. I think modern games (with exceptions, especially first person shooters and third person action) have been getting better about showing you the controls in play and without an onerous tutorial, but that said there are still way too many onerous tutorials holy shit.
As for how your capabilities interact with the world, this is one area where I feel modern game design is both obnoxiously wrong and is failing to move in the right direction. Standard adventure game hint structure is to have an npc/journal/sign obtusely mention that you can do x to y if you z, which is pretty dumb because they just told you the answer. I wish games just made the interactable object vs. non-interactable object distinction very clear and let me experiment without doing something like bombing every wall in a building because they all look the same as the one that breaks.

Why is a game better if many of the people who buy it can't complete or even get very far in it?

Why not just make it an option to turn off the tutorials so that people who don't care about Earning The Win can actually experience the thing they paid for.

There is a concept in certain fields of an “affordance”. The basic idea is that the way to use some things is inherently obvious based on your past experience. Console gamers know how to use a controller, and certain button layouts are simply conventional by now. This can be slightly mysterious to brand new gamers, but modern controllers make it pretty clear what you’re supposed to grab onto and messing with the inputs a bit should give you a rough idea of what they’re supposed to do (teaching a complete newbie how to get a disc into the console without damaging it or anything, on the other hand... well, that’s a tougher design problem).

Yet for some reason a lot of games have gotten deep into the idea that players don’t understand how to use a controller, even when we are hours and hours into a game. Frankly, it does not take a lot of processing time for a computer to see when a player might have trouble with a certain concept and thus need a nudge in the right direction, but we rarely see that sort of thing in practice, because it does take conscientious design. If a game flashes a hint that I need to go past a ledge before hitting jump after I’ve made the jump too early ten times, that’s cool. If it tells me that before I see the jump, though, I’ve been robbed. It’s taking me out of the game for no reason.