Against all odds I’m here for another edition of my weekly blog! Here is where I take some time out of my week to tell you about the games I’ve played, visual novels I’ve read, anime I’ve watched, and stuff like that. I say against all odds because when I usually post this blog every week; I’m now deep asleep, probably dreaming about my perfect waifu Viola Cadaverini as I usually do. This is because my sleeping pattern has been completely shot by Pascual, his awesome charity event and his tendency to make me sing Space Oddity at 4am. But that was last week! Who can even remember what happened a week ago?! I sure as heck can’t! So let’s get this started before I forget it all!
Psychonauts
It’s been a while since I’ve told myself to play through Psychonauts. I installed it quite a while back now actually, and told myself I had to play it. However, back then I didn’t own a wired 360 controller, and only got to the second or third level before hating playing platforming games with a keyboard. Fast forward to, like, a few weeks ago or so now and Double Fine, being the awesome bunch they are, added achievements to the game. This just reinforced my desire to play it, and finally I set aside some time in my busy schedule of doing nothing, and played some Psychonauts.
The game is still a lot of fun, hell I don’t need that qualifier, the game is a lot of fun. The characters are amazing, the gameplay is top notch and the story just keeps ramping up each time. The game never has a peak because each moment somehow just gets better and better than the part previous. My favourite level is probably a tossup between two different ones, and for two completely different reasons. Firstly, the level that made me laugh the most was probably the Milkman level, and that was all from the weird secret agents you could interact with with different items. All trench coated up and talking in monotone, part of me kept imagining Castiel in those roles, which made it even funnier. That level also looked brilliant too, with its weird twisting and no centre of gravity roads. However, the best level in my opinion based on aesthetic was the bullfighting level. The sharp black shadows looked really cool, and made that level is particular stand out. Having said that almost all of the levels had their own little style that made them interesting, and while sure there weren’t that many levels in total, having each one differ that much really makes up for that.
Like I said I never played the game before now, so I never got to experience the Meat Circus in all its amazingly cruel glory. After beating it I thought it wasn’t that hard, but I couldn’t tell what they could have possibly changed to make harder. Talking to a friend it seems that the original choices were crazy. First off, falling to your death in the tent in the patched version doesn’t result in a death in this patched version, which, admittedly, I thought was kind of weird. When you have to protect Little Oly, from the sounds of it the patched version makes him a lot more resilient to attacks, so you don’t have to practically speed run to reach him in time. Apart from those two it seems that the Meat Circus is still intact, and I did get super annoyed at one part that took me several tries to beat, so it’s not like they just made it into a straight line to the goal.
I only got to rank 70 or so, so I’ll probably be playing through the game all over again. With the new achievements there are achievements for doing certain things at certain points of the story, which admittedly can be a pain, but gives me enough reason to go heads first into a second playthrough. But I think before I do that I’ll try and get up to rank 101, which involves me finding all of those god forsaken fragments, which involves me playing Mila’s race level and missing, like, two fragments because my eyes aren’t the best in the world and the colour of the fragments easily blends in with the track and GOD DAMN IT VIDEOGAMES.
After 6 years, Psychonauts is still a great experience, and quite possibly one of the best 3D platformers out there. If you’re like me and waited for some bizarre reason to get this game, it’s pretty cheap on Steam, and with all new achievements! Let us all just hope that with Double Fine now owning the IP outright that this means a Psychonauts 2, because oh god that ending.
Snow Sakura
This week for no real reason other than because I felt like it, I took a look at Snow Sakura, a relatively old release from the group behind Family Project. Nothing has really brought me to this release other than it exists, so my expectations aren’t that high. I mean, it’s even officially translated, which means the translation is probably going to be terrible, as most official visual novel translations are. Oh well, let’s go!
Snow Sakura follows the life of Yuuji Tachibana. Actually first of, before we go any further, I really hate it when visual novels name their main character ‘Yuuji or ‘Yuuichi’, I mean come on can you get anymore on the nose than that? Anyway, where was I... Right, Yuuchi, the typical student with no life ambitions (I swear to god) has suddenly been moved to a small village in the middle of nowhere, while his dad moves to Hawaii for ‘business reasons’. As a result, he is now living with his uncle, and his cousin, Saki. This eventually blah blah visual novel plot their way around the town and Yuuchi gets himself a group of friends in which the number of female drastically outweigh the number of males. Along with Saki there are Misaki, who has a crush on Yuuji, Kozue, who has a crush on Misaki, Rei, the shrine miko, and Misato, Misaki’s older sister and somehow a teacher.
You may have noticed I stopped talking about the plot of this visual novel some while back. Well, the reason behind that is, that’s really all there is to the plot. Every so often Yuuji’s father sends him videotapes about how awesome Hawaii is, but apart from that it’s really just a set up to justify ‘new setting new people’. Apart from that this visual novel is pretty much a slice of life type deal. The entire story is set on the different character branches, and well even then it’s not really that big of a deal. You’ll go through one character’s route before encountering the ‘hey we need to add some drama in this game so here’ section, which that in itself gets blown over pretty fast with the ‘happily ever after’ brigade.
The one story beat that is does have isn’t even consistent. Yuuji remembers visiting the town as a child and meeting a girl under a famous Sakura tree that blooms in the winter. Now, despite this being a flashback, the girl he meets under that tree will change depending on what route you’re currently going down. This actually irritates me to no end. The weird thing about it is that in some routes, they say who the girl was that Yuuji met, but then never reference it ever again. As if they felt that that flashback was only important for some routes, and the others just had to close that story beat before getting on with their completely separate story.
I feel like I’m being hard on this story, in all honesty I enjoyed it, and surprisingly enough a lot of that was due to the translation and the characters. There are a lot of really silly characters in this game, Yuuji’s dad, Uncle, Saki and best friend Sumiyoshi dealing out the majority of the jokes. The translation work, much like parts of Family Project, do delve into meme territory in parts but the characters are so ridiculous that it makes sense for them to do to, unlike when it happens in Family Project.
Overall Snow Sakura is a fun, albeit simple visual novel that is pretty funny in spots, but pretty light in terms of proper story. Oh, and there’s this little fairy girl too that shows up once you complete all the other routes I don’t know. Maybe she controls the snow? Who can say really.
A Tendency to Overhaul
A weird aspect of programming is the ability to take all of your hard work, throw it on the ground, and start from scratch. It’s a practise that’s both encouraged and expected, at least that’s what I’m taught. I have a ‘get it right the first time’ attitude to the whole situation, and the idea of throwing out hard work seems incredibly silly, unless it’s absolutely essential.
This question was brought forth by one of my university friends, during a Direct X lesson. We’ve been given a framework to use to learn about how different aspects of Direct X works, it’s a fairly basic framework, used to teach us 3D rendering, shading, alpha blending and apparently lighting. My friend, however, took one look at that framework, and deleted it, only to build his own framework. Last week he had finished said framework, and could do a lot more than the stuff we had been asked to do, due to the flexibility and the knowledge he has of his own framework. I haven’t done this myself, opting to see how far I can get using the default framework, and to be honest I probably should have made my own framework too at this point. I should have seen how poorly written the framework was at the start like my friend.
In a different class I’m straight up not doing the tutorial work given. After talking to my lecturer about the things I can already do on the PS2 hardware (oh, this class is PS2 coding by the way), he gave me the ending framework to work on instead. As it turns out, every few weeks in that class for the next few months, we are going to be given different frameworks to use, thus rendering (ha, programming humour) all the previous work completely moot. I sort of figured this, and therefore only did the barely minimum work to show I knew what I was doing, before just getting the final framework. The reason being, well, what was the point of making sick ass classes if they were going to be obsolete later on?
I’ve overhauled several times in the past, and multiple times on the same project. A more recent example is the game I’m still working on, Bullet Bill 3. Originally there were two different level generation functions, one was for the actual level and the other was for the creation tools. They worked fine but they were completely independent of each other. This was because the creation tools needed different files than the level so that they could be dragged and dropped and all that kind of stuff. Then I figured it’d be cool to render the level in the save files, as a preview of the level, and a quick reference guide so the user knew if the level they’re saving over was the same one they are working on or not, and this required a third generation function. Then I thought the same idea would work with loading levels from the main menu, bringing it to a total of four functions, three that all pretty much did the same thing. So I scrapped the entire thing, and made two giant functions instead. One that generates the level in a specific place and specific size, and another that derives from the previous function, which replaces all the objects with their moveable equivalents, for the creation tools. This means that if I have to change the generation code, I’ll only have to change it once instead of four times. Have I had to change the generation code since I recoded it? No... No I have not.
This is only one part of the code; there are other parts in which I took the completely different approach. The main game code looks like some kind of programming based Frankenstein’s Monster at this point. There are parts of the code that started being completely definitive as something that always happens in the level. Now though, after adding so many effects and abilities and the like, there are more exceptions to the rule than there are thing it applies to. Similarly I recently added a new effect to the game, but in doing so, it broke every other effect. My solution was to make an exception to everything else so that when this latest effect is happening, none of the others can until it’s finished. Looking over the code there is an if statement that covers the majority of the code that uses a variable that is never not true, there are exceptions to some rules to accommodate features I’ve completely scrapped from the game, which call variables that no longer exist. It’s a case in which I probably should redo the entire thing so that the code looks good, but whatever, the game still runs, and that’s what matters right?
As with most entries in the programming section of this blog, I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Scrapping code when applying new features makes sense, as it in theory will make the code a lot better to look at, but for the projects in which I’m the only programmer, making my code look good isn’t really the top priority. At the same time, scrapping code in favour for more compressed and better optimized code makes perfect sense to me; it’s just weird to have this idea in my head that even though I’m having a hard time trying to get this code to work, that at some point in the future I could even without thinking, delete the entirety of it just to redo it. Still seems weird to me.
Trotstarr
Since I started making mashups, and I guess since people for some bizarre reason listen to them, I’ve always liked the idea of making mini-albums centred on one core idea. The giant half an hour long mashups are a lot of fun but take a long time to make, so that’s why I figured I’d star making a few mini-albums too. The theme for the first one is, as is probably expected of me at this point, My Little Pony. But not just My Little Pony, but My Little Pony mixed with Taio Cruz.
An odd pairing but I thought it worked, in total there are 5 songs, 4 of which feature backing tracks from ‘Rokstarr’, the album I based the cover art from. The fifth song uses a backing track from a fan made Luna based song and overlays it with the newest David Guetta joint, ‘Little Bad Girl’.
You can download the mini album here, hope you enjoy it!
Once again this brings an end to another long winded blog post. Now if you’ll excuse me, Viola and I need to go collect some debts... if you know what I mean.
(What I mean is I’m going to sleep.)
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