Hello! This is a blog all about visual novels, video games, mash-ups, programming, anime, never in that order never all at once and only very rarely divulging into other stuff! This week has a pretty important announcement, so I really hope you like that. So while I figure out whatever we did to these guys to make them so violent, here’s another semi-coherent blog!

EDGE

People may remember Edge from being the centre of that completely ridiculous Tim Langdel trademark lawsuit type thing. The game was up and down on the iOS store for ages, even being renamed to ‘Edgy’ at some point, that actually getting a copy of it proved to just come down to right place right time. Luckily, Two Tribes, the team behind both Rush and Toki Tori, have ported it to the PC, making it much more widely available for everyone to play.

The game is basically a puzzle platformer, you control a cube in a big isometric blocky level, and have to move around to collect prisms and reach the end of the level. You can move the cube in four directions, and the movement is rather deliberate. While the game is grid based you can’t just press the down button to move in that direction. Instead, moving in any direction will start to tilt the cube in that direction, forcing you to hold the direction for about half a second before the cube actually moves a space. Once you start rolling though the cube moves rather quickly, and collecting prisms seems to also increase the speed. The cube can also climb up one level, but only if there is nothing directly behind it. The main part of the game, however, is the edge system. Once turning onto a wall or ledge, the cube can hang there for as long as you can lightly feather the movement to keep it at around 45 degrees from the wall. This is incredibly useful because if the wall is moving, for instance, and the cube is hanging to it, the cube will move along with the moving wall. Any hang time will also be deducted from your overall time, thus making it crucial for getting the best ranks.

Speaking of ranks, this game is crazy with them. Each level has a leaderboard and a ranking system, ranging from the fabled S rank all the way to D rank. At least, I wish that was it. I got through the first 4 or 5 levels getting S ranks, feeling pretty good about myself. Unfortunately I then got a B or something similar. Feeling that this was a direct attack against my manhood, I retried and retried that level over and over again until I got that S rank. But no, what rank did I get?

S+.

FUCK. There’s a goddamn S+ rank! Now I have to go back to the first 5 levels and get S+’s in them too! Not only that, but there’s an achievement for getting S+ ranks in every level, giving me even more reason besides me just being obsessive to go back and get the best times. Having said that, however, I can’t for the life of e figure out how to S+ rank even the first level, my pride is completely shot.

The controls admittedly take some getting used to, and the isometric view doesn’t make it any easier. The camera is fixed to that one point and unable to turn around. This means that there are multiple instances of paths you’re meant to be going in being obscured by walls in front of it. Some of these, I’m sure, are completely intentional, as there will be hidden paths to take that you just have to know are there. There is also a mini map that is in a top down perspective, using that it’s a lot easier to see where platforms are and where you’ll just fall to your death. Luckily, the game is pretty good at checkpointing, usually checkpointing at each prism or before each difficult obstacle, so if you don’t care about your rank, there’s no need to restart a level from the beginning when you fall into the abyss.

The game is broken down into 48 different base levels, the same levels that are from the iOS version of the game, but on top of that there are new bonus levels and a promise for free DLC with new levels and modes. All of this in my opinion makes the game a really good deal, even if you’ve previously owned the iOS version. Two Tribes have really put a lot of work into this product that calling it a straight port is giving it a bad rap. This also has the added benefit of not being on a goddamn iPhone where directional controls are terrible.

All in all this is a great version of the game, and as previously stated Two Tribes looks to keep making that better with their free updates, something that they have a great track record of with their other two games, Toki Tori and Rush. I’m just hoping the S+ rank achievement won’t eat up all of my time like I suspect it will.

Wanko To Kurasou

I’ve been thinking about writing about this game for a while now, not because I think it’s amazing or anything, but there’s a big amount of “let’s get this over with” with this visual novel. The visual novel in question is Wanko To Kurasou, a visual novel that contains both lolicon and catgirls. Now, the reason I’ve been reluctant to talk about this one is, well, just that. I personally don’t have an issue with lolicon or catgirls, but I know a lot of people do. In fact more people who even play visual novels or are interested in some of the other stuff I’ve talked about previously have probably switched off already. Regardless, it’s still something I should probably talk about, or at the very least not just completely ignore.

In the world of Wanko To Kurasou, there are special anthropoidic cats, dogs and birds. Why? Videogames. That’s why. So in this world these pets are rather expensive but at the same time incredibly popular. The main character is called Yuuichi, who, orphaned when he was young, was brought up in a brothel. He learned the ways of the brothel, or something, and as a result became incredibly hostile to the idea of relationships and love as a whole. Now he is a college student who teaches a cram school for money. One day on his commute back to his flat, he comes across an abandoned doggirl called Mikan, and decided to shelter her from the rain and take her into his flat. Through-out the story he eventually gets another doggirl and starts living with Risa, the sister of Mikan’s original owner. Quite quickly the game goes into porn mode, which is really no shock considering the main characters back story, when the main character is convinced to help ‘relieve’ the group of doggirls and catgirls while they are in heat.

Now there is something incredibly fascinating at the core of this game, and to talk about it I’ll be spoiling one of the two routes in the game. So if you really want to read what is a rather one dimensional plot then ignore some of this. Anyway, this game, intentionally or not, really blurs the line between the owning a pet and living with a person. Just by having these catgirls and doggirls here, and I don’t play many games in this genre so I have no idea if it’s done elsewhere or not, really makes the whole thing seem a bit weird. For example, the second doggirl Yuuichi owns was owned by a breeder. She is an incredibly rare breed of doggirl, or something, and her previous owner was trying to make her pregnant with another type of breed to, you know breed an even more exclusive doggirl. This is a practise that does exist in this world with dogs and, I don’t know enough about it to know how frowned upon it really is, but in this context it can be equated to a form of rape. Similarly at the end of one of the routes, Mikan goes missing. It starts to become apparent that she might be lost forever, and in fact she was stolen by a group of people with the intent to sell her away. Again, this is a thing that does happen unfortunately, but when applied to these anthropoidic animals it becomes a bit more heavy hitting, especially when talking about how the penalties of killing a pet are far less than killing a human, it’s an incredibly weird thing to see these human-esque animals not being treated as humans in the slightest. Again, I have no idea if this game intended that, and I’m pretty sure it did not, this is just a weird observation that I made while looking maybe too much into the story.

Then again if I didn’t read that much into the story there wouldn’t really be much for me here. The game is broken down into two different routes; the first route is with your roommate Risa. In this route, Risa upon learning of Yuuchi’s past attempts to become his first love, and some hilarity ensues I guess. This route is also the one that focuses more on Yuuichi’s two doggirl pets, and treats the four as one big happy family of sorts. The other route is with the owner of a local pet store called Nadeshiko, who despite being the lolicon of the game, is rather predictably older than Yuuichi. The second route seems to be thrown in as an afterthought, or at least as an excuse to have a porn scene with the only other non catgirl or doggirl member of the main cast. The main story beats, and in my opinion the better route, is the Risa route for reasons I detailed in the previous paragraph.

So overall this is at the very least an alright visual novel. The art I have to say is rather fantastic, but I just wish there was more to the story. The characters for the most part are completely one dimensional and the Risa route, while a compelling final story beat, seems to be more of a quick grab for an emotional response as opposed to a well thought out arc. There’s obviously an audience for games like this but for me personally, it needed that little bit more to be great.

Super Secret Project Shh

If any of you follow my Twitter account you may notice in between all the talk about My Little Pony and the obvious sexual tension between Sparklykiss and I, I talk about something called ‘Super Secret Project Shh’. Well now, finally, I can reveal just what that project is!

So I started this project exactly one year ago today; and I felt I shouldn’t tell anyone about it until the time was right, I guess. The only problem with that is with no obligation to finish it quickly, I just ended up adding a bunch of stuff to the game. Now though, I feel the game is going at a steady pace that I might be able to release it at some point this year hopefully maybe oh god.

So just what is this game? This game is Bullet Bill 3, a sequel to the predictably named Bullet Bill 2. I find this next part weird to say, but if you were on the internet 5-6 years ago and played flash games, you probably stumbled onto this. Like I said, this is weird, because it sounds incredibly pompous. But even if you search Bullet Bill in Google, the first two games take up the majority of the results. Bulletbill.com is a website that I didn’t even make where you can play the first two games. Bullet Bill 2 on Newgrounds sits at over 800,000 views, and still gets around 250 plays every day, 5 years after it was released. As far as flash games go, these games were pretty popular, so much so that when coding the game at university last year instead of university work, classmates would come up to me saying “Oh cool Bullet Bill 2 I haven’t played that in ages!” They were completely shocked when I told them I made those games, I’m pretty sure some didn’t believe me.

Anyway, the game is rather simple. You control a Bullet Bill and try to dodge obstacles, you get hit once you die and start from the beginning again. Through-out the level there are bricks and enemies to kill and get points. Very basic stuff, but pretty fun if the ‘success’ is anything to go by. The 2nd game came out in 2006, and I always said I’d only make a sequel if there was a legitimate reason to. Back then I was a pretty terrible programmer (even compared to me now where I’m only slightly competent) so any ideas I had were shot down by my own coding limitations.

And I hated that.

Therefore, I never did anything like it until I had more programming knowledge to do it justice. Fast forwarding to last year, and after playing a bunch of Modnation Racers and LittleBigPlanet, I got really interested in the idea of user created content. I set about trying to figure out just how I could make that work, but still a little sceptical if there was anyone that would actually use it. Still I ventured forth and over the next 4 or 5 months I created a basic level creation tool, where I could create and save levels in basic text dumps and load them back up with no problem. I took some inspiration from flash game Punk-o-Matic, in which saved levels are also done in a similar way, and Excitebike, for having different characters correspond to different elements within the game. Back then, I was pretty happy with it, and was ready to announce. But then I decided to just add more stuff to the game, stuff that necessarily doesn’t make the levels any better but just for stupid fun. After watching a lot of those Super Mario World Rube Goldberg videos I decided to add bob-ombs and change the properties of koopa shells to allow for crazy stuff like giant lines of koopa shells flying everywhere. A lot of fine tuning to make everything just feel right, but at the same time trying not to make everything so crazy that the original ‘dodge stuff’ gameplay was compromised. I decided at some point to also have a bunch of non-Mario characters, to which Rufi91 jumped at the chance to suggest Nyan Cat, and I made a bunch of sprites to make it fit in with the Mario All-Stars style. I added a few other just silly characters but those are still secret I guess.

The music was made by a friend of mine known as Wolfgun, and you can find his dope beats over on his Soundcloud. While he doesn’t do much remix stuff, I actually first encountered him via the greatest Super Mario RPG remix ever made, so there’s that.

Don’t really know what else to talk about so I’ll leave it at that! I hope you enjoyed the video I put together (I’m still pretty new to video editing so aaaah) and I’d really love to hear your opinions on the video and if you’ve ever played the previous games. But most of all, I’d really love if you guys could tell people about it! I’ve been working on this is secret and as a result only a handful of people even knew it existed. Now, however, I want people to know! So please any help in that would be incredibly appreciated.

So if you remember from last week I mentioned my new found love of My Little Pony, and the more eagle eyed readers may notice that this is the mashup segment.

So... here you go!

How did I find time to do these as well as edit that video? Who knows!

Man what a week! It’s been rather crazy all around. I guess I better get back to coding! Again, any thoughts on the trailer would be greatly appreciated. You can also play the original two games on my website, Psy City, as well as a bunch of other games, movies and mashups that I’ve made over the last 7 or so years. So until next time!