Lork

I'll probably post this stuff on Medium soon, but I'm a bit leery of it just because I have no idea what "public" means on that service and they don't seem to have any interest in explaining it. Like if I make the pages public are they going to show up on the front page? Is it going to promote them to random people who go to the "Gaming" section? It also has the only in-game depiction of a human in the entire series up until (I think) the last game on the PS2. When I was getting the footage for that gif above I even replayed that mission so I could capture this dumb gif: Not quite as hilariously bad or avatar worthy as it was in my memory of playing it a month or two ago, oh well.

Armored Core: Project Phantasma (Playstation, 1998) Released a little under a year after the first game in the US (the turnaround in Japan was even shorter), this is a standalone expansion pack, featuring the exact same engine and basic gameplay, but new missions, additional parts, and a new mode which I'll get to later. Technically you could play this game without having touched the first one, but it would probably be pretty tough to start from scratch, because what you're actually supposed to do is import your save from the first game to bring over all the parts and credits you accrued there. The idea of an expansion pack on the Playstation is kind of wild - yet another PC concept adapted for consoles. I wonder if it was sold for full price (whatever that was at the time). I sure hope they didn't charge a lot for this, because in addition to not making any improvements to the engine or gameplay, the game is shockingly low on content, coming in at just 17 missions compared to the original game's 46. There's a much stronger focus on story, with lots of voice acted (but in-engine) cutscenes, but it makes the fatal mistake of being a story in an Armored Core game (Nobody cares. Nobody.) and in no way makes up for the reduction in mission count. I would almost write this whole game off as an utter disappointment if it weren't for... The arena mode, which really saves it. If you think the mech you just designed is hot shit, there's no better way to prove that than to put it up against another mech built under the same rules. Ideally that would be designed and piloted by your friend, but failing that, a ladder of 50 customized AI opponents to climb makes for a pretty good next best thing (not to mention a pretty good excuse to reuse the multiplayer maps, tee hee). The arena went on to become a staple feature of the series and it's not hard to see why. Banging up against a tough opponent, studying their weaknesses and countering them in your design, coming up with a particularly good design that meshes well with your style and bulldozing several ranks in a row... It's the design -> execute -> redesign loop in its purest form, and it fits the series like a glove. It's not perfect, though. The AI isn't very good, so in order to try to make the game challenging the upper ranks are filled with opponents who blatantly cheat, ignoring weight, energy and weapon type restrictions, which can be extremely frustrating. Oh well, it's tons of fun even still, and they'll have 50 or so more chances to get it right.

Is that easy and free? I suppose I could do that if you really think people would be interested in reading this stuff. Ah, I think we had this conversation on Slack a while back. Have you considered revisiting the latter games now that some time has passed? I can see the new controls being a very jarring change at the time for some: At this point though, I imagine the near universal proliferation of that control scheme must have caused it to seep into your brain almost by osmosis if nothing else. Assuming you've managed to avoid console shooters entirely, even just playing Dark Souls has probably gotten you a lot more acclimated to the scheme than you were before.

Are you sure that wasn't a player? Also, that ladder appears when you kill the tree person at the end of the path you were on when you got invaded.

And then Idle Thumbs happened. We will never find out what video game designers are tempted to do, and so I am sad.

I don't think the original was anywhere near as dark as he was describing on the podcast. I think it's just a case of the "original" graphics actually being somewhat inaccurate. It's actually a weirdly common issue with HD up-ports (or just... ports) where one version will inexplicably be way darker than the other. I figure that the various platforms must have their own ways of handling brightness which will produce wildly different results if the developers don't bother to account for it.

It kills me that you had a prolonged discussion on "Sword dads" followed by a segment on Die by the Sword, all without a single mention of Dad by the Sword between them. I mean it! I'm dead.

Not anymore. Who's the lucky winner? Whoever it is, I hope they plan to share what they find. The world needs to know!

In Which Jake Disapproves of a Mimic

It's a bug that sometimes prevents phantoms from going through the fog door after you. It's probably related to your connection to each other, so turning off cross region matchmaking might help, but I can't say for sure.

Poise is entirely based on the armor you're wearing. Very light armor (eg. anything that's just cloth) generally confers no poise at all, so you'll probably have to go heavier than whichever pieces you were most likely looking at.

Yeah, just wanted to further reinforce that when people say "Explore more!" they do literally mean to walk around the levels instead of barreling straight down the critical path without ever looking back, with the purpose being to collect all of the valuable items that can be found as a result. I wonder if this misunderstanding is the result of the different interpretations of video game conventions we all bring into a game with us, as touched on in the podcast. Those of us who grew up with games like Zelda or Metroid and learned to scour the world for E-Tanks and pieces of heart come in primed to appreciate the material value of exploration in a game like Dark Souls, but for someone who doesn't have that experience it might not be immediately apparent how much there is to gain from taking a brief detour down a side path. To be fair, I don't think that catacombs scenario is actually that common. We hear about it every time it happens because we're on the internet and it's a thing of note, but from what I can tell the vast majority of people either encountered the skeletons, realized that fighting them was futile and turned around, or didn't even find them at all until much later, but we never hear about that because it's unremarkable. I remember making an early-mid game excursion into the catacombs and getting into an early encounter with Patches the Hyena (best NPC, by the way!), only to realize that hardly anyone knew what I was talking about, because going down there even as early as I did was a rarity. Most people completely missed that encounter because they didn't bother doing the catacombs until long after Patches had moved on to the next area.

No, there are definitely cases where you can move a guy through a space that by both the rules as they are explained and the UI presented to you should be perfectly safe, only to be inexplicably spotted by a pod that has been in full view of multiple squad members since the start of the turn. I'm not saying I know for sure that's what happened to the podcasters you were listening to, but it is entirely possible.

Since the various advice threads in this forum seem to be divided up by engine (Unity, Gamemaker, Unreal etc.), I thought it might be useful to have a more general thread for asking and answering questions about the discipline that we all seem to either love or hate. I'll kick things off with a question of my own. If I have a vector representing the direction that I'm facing and another vector representing the velocity of an object somewhere in the world, how can I use that information to find out how fast that object is moving perpendicular to me? To put it another way, I want to single out the speed at which the object is moving in a direction of my choosing, ignoring velocity in all unrelated directions. Because this seemed to cause some confusion when I asked about it on IRC, I've come up with an example: Let's say that on a 2D grid, I am looking straight down the y axis. There is an object somewhere that is moving at a velocity (v) of (x=1, y=1). How can I find out how fast the object is moving along the x axis (p)? In the example we can easily figure out that p is 1 by taking the x component of the object's velocity, but that is only possible because we're aligned with the grid. How can I find out what p is if I'm facing an arbitrary direction?

I haven't listened to this episode yet and this probably isn't related to it at all but I feel that it's vitally important for Chris to know that Duke Nukem's voice was inspired by "The Full Throttle Guy".

After giving it what in retrospect seems like far too many chances, I've decided to give up on Shadow Tower, a "King's Field-like" by From Software. I really enjoyed the actual King's Field games, so I thought Shadow Tower would be right up my alley, but the ways in which it diverges end up really dragging it down. Where King's Field had challenges that were perfectly suited to the somewhat cumbersome controls, Shadow Tower matches you with enemies that can move, turn and attack much faster than you can. I can sort of admire the ambitiousness of the enemy designs (the game has an absolutely insane number of unique creatures, and many of them have multiple novel attack behaviors), but that doesn't make it any more fun to get chain-stunned by sweeping laser beams and shockwaves that I had no hope of avoiding. And as if that wasn't bad enough, in a misguided attempt to build a survival horror atmosphere, the game has been saddled with a truly horrendous durability system that turns exploring the dungeon into a tedious chore. Literally every piece of equipment you use is constantly falling apart at an alarming rate, requiring you to frequently swap it out using the world's slowest menu system. Even your magic spells deteriorate! Let my pain be a warning to anyone looking to check out From Software's earlier work. Shadow Tower is unfortunately the only game of its type available on PSN right now, and I'd hate for anybody to try it out and get the wrong idea about its genre. It can be much better than this!

I don't know if they took it out for Fallout 4, but NPCs in Bethesda games ever since Oblivion actually do pick up stuff they find on the ground. The only way to ensure that your stuff is truly safe is to put it in a container, but not one that refills itself - otherwise whatever you put in it might get overwritten when it respawns.

Yeah, the area you just completed was an optional, ultra sadistic challenge gauntlet. Basically the Dark Souls equivalent of an MMO raid, I suppose. There's one in each DLC, you can recognize them from the sudden spike in difficulty and the appearance of those headstones with the messages next to them that say something like "The signs are being channeled from far away". One word of advice I can give is that if you have a no summoning policy, I would make an exception just this once and treat yourself to a few phantoms, even if it's just the NPCs. These areas were very clearly designed to be taken on by a team, and you will not have a good time doing them alone. The one you just did might have given off the wrong impression because the Smelter Demon is a chump, but the other two do not fuck around. I don't even know what you would have to do to beat the boss of the Sunken King one alone, but whatever it is couldn't possibly be fun.

That's not how it works, and never has been. Bosses that require you to figure out a "trick" outside of their arena have been a part of the series all the way back to Demon's Souls (See Fool's Idol, Seath, 4 Kings, Kalameet, and Mytha, The Windmill Queen). There's nothing in the games saying that you have to, or even should keep banging your head against a boss if you just can't beat it. They actually go to great lengths to ensure that there are as few bottlenecks as possible, always providing multiple paths for you to go down in case you get stuck on one, with the one major exception living in infamy. Your attitude toward the boss fights is a valid one to have of course, but you have to accept that it's not shared by everyone, and I definitely don't think it's reflective of the design of the games or the way most people play them.

??? The game makes a point of showing you a bunch of enticing looking items and pathways encased in ice before you get to that part, then has a character unfreeze the ice and ask you to "find the knights who have been lost". I don't know how much more obvious they could've made it without resorting to methods that are completely uncharacteristic of a Souls game. I mean, weren't you curious about what some of those treasure chests had in them? Even if it weren't for those hints, wouldn't it make sense to explore the other paths after a few failed attempts purely based on the logic that you could come back with a higher level/better equipped character?

Yeah even with rotation completely locked it still animates like that. Anyway, I managed to get around the issue by swapping in a non root motion version of the offending animation and controlling movement with a curve. I still don't understand why the two versions behave differently even with root motion disabled, but the important thing is that it works.

It happens even with root motion turned off. My best guess is that it has something to do with the direction the animations thinks the character is facing conflicting when transitioning between them. You can see the red arrow flip around in the preview; I'm just not sure why it doesn't reflect that in the preview, or how to/if you can change that direction manually.

What it's supposed to look like: What it looks like ingame (slowed down so you can tell what's happening: This is hacked together out of several different stock animations that may or may not have been meant for anything remotely related to what I'm using them for, so it's not surprising that issues would crop up. Still, as a non animator is there anything I can do about this?

How was the Shenmue campaign bungled, if I may ask? I've seen vague mentions of that around the internet but no reference to what it's referring to. It seems kind of odd considering that they made a record amount of money, but maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the specifics.