Monday, December 1, 2014

EWW Smash Bros for 3DS/Wii U

Yep, it's finally out, and thanks to the Super Smash Bros for Wii U GameFAQs forums, I compiled up a list of potentially every known possible complaint the game has thus far.

*Characters:
**No additional Donkey Kong or Metroid representations due to lack of recognization of these series in Japan, despite their huge following outside Japan.
**Gannondorf remains a Captain Falcon clone with little to no effort to differentiate the two.
**Ice Climbers cut due to incompatibility with 3DS and to keep the roster between the two 100% identical.
**Kid Icarus and Fire Emblem having four representations due to overwhelming Japanese feedback for these characters and their home franchises, which explains why Palutena's Guidance is present.
*Bad/Poor clones, with not enough differences to make the two major and most criticized clones (Lucina and Dark Pit) unique.
*Characters cannot be customized directly from the Character Select screen, requiring you to traverse through the Custom menu to find it.
**Miis:
***Too much focus on Guest C for Mii Brawler, Guest B for Mii Swordfighter, and Guest F for Mii Gunner in artwork and in-game renders.
***Fighting Mii Team artwork does not edit in user’s Miis, and portraits show the above Guest Miis instead of the face of the actual Mii(s) used in-game.
***Trophies of the Mii Fighters as well as the ending images not altered to show the user’s Miis instead of the Guests.
***Lack of Voice Synchronizer ala Tomodachi Life to allow the Mii’s names to be said properly instead of “Mii”.
**amiibos
***Character Select and after-match results screen still shows the original character’s name (i.e. Villager instead of Vikkager) instead of the amiibo’s name.

Others:
*Menus cannot be navigated with the Wii U Gamepad's touch screen
**Menus could be better designed, such as not burying previous games' "Solo" modes (Classic and Stadium) in with "Games and More"
*Smash Tour is mediocre/bad (personally I dislike how you can't do it with less than 4 players) Smash Run is also very forgettable, with the massive number of Kid Icarus and Subspace Emissary enemies completely overshadowing the other series’ cast of enemies.
*Needs more diversity in trophies (plus Fewer/No errors in trophy descriptions and trophy sources, stating the EXACT debut of a character, Final Smashes used in non-Smash games included)
*Needs an Adventure Mode ala Melee's.
*Needs a better Classic Mode (could have the same path system as 3DS, but with the gameplay style/stage layout of Smash 64, Melee, and Brawl with at least 12 stages and several bonus events, plus the bonuses from Smash 64/Melee being brought back). It wouldn't overdo on 5+ player maps and "Intruder" opponents, and when a match occurs where you're up against a team of copies of one character, it never uses the Mii Fighters.
*All-Star should be like prior games, where you only fight the characters of one universe for one round, with the three boss characters (Metal Face, Ridley, and Yellow Devil) disabled on Gaur Plains, Pyrosphere, and Wily's Castle respectively.
**The inability to continue in All-Star.
*Shortened Music Tracks
*Too many "Mobile" stages (ones where you fly around then the stage "stops" in a certain location, like Isle Delfino, Wuhu Island, and Skyloft)
*Too many retro/past/familiar stages (especially from Brawl and Melee maps that were present in Brawl), with some of these Past stages being the ONLY maps of a certain franchise on one version (Green Hill Zone in 3DS, Onett in Wii U)
*Lack of "Battlefield" versions for maps which have small platforms arranged in various ways ala most maps in Project M.
*When you want to end a match with a four-button combination, it now gives you a prompt asking if you want to conform to end the match.
*No option to disable bosses in stages.
*Palutena's Guidance generally not being well-liked.
*Pausing is noticeably laggy, running at like 15 or 30 FPS on pause.
*The game not saving modified rulesets (Time, Stock, or Coins, and the time limit/starting lives) even though it saves item configuration.
*Stage Builder is a bit flawed, such as not being able to copy/paste and delete shapes, with poor grabbable ledge detection.
**No Player Spawn point configuration.
**Abscence of certain special parts from Brawl’s Stage Builder, such as no slippery surfaces, falling platforms, spikes, and conveyor belts.
**Inability to play Large custom stages in 8-Player Smash
*Poor online, with non-Tournament Legal settings in For Glory (Two stocks + 2 minutes instead of the preferred Three/Four stocks + 8 Minutes) and no 1 vs. 1 in For Fun
**Inability to play stages that lack hazards or camping/Cave of Life spots in For Glory, ala Battlefield
** Players getting banned for targeting a single player in Online, even if it's unintentional.
*When you fail an Event Match, no instant prompt to retry and the game just boots you back to the Challenges menu, forcing you to sit through loading screens.
*Lack of online rankings and lobbies, along with vocal chat when playing against anyone.
*System memory error 160-0103.

Please refer to this GameFAQs post for more things wrong with Sm4sh.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Old stuff related to Trainyard

I shouldn't need to bring up by now that I'm a huge follower of Matt Rix's Trainyard. Released in 2010 this was a really unique puzzle game with a concept that I adore to death (I'm a huge color nut).

Before the editor for the game was made, I came up with an idea that I had since abandoned; adding support for territory colors alongside the primary and secondary colors already found in the core game. Normally when you try to mix a primary-colored train with a secondary-colored train, you get a brown-colored "Garbage" train, which doesn't see much use outside of the plethora of user-made levels.

The original idea behind this concept: Instead of making a brown train when both a primary and a secondary were mixed, a territory color would be made instead. However not every primary +secondary combo would result in a tertiary color; if you were to try and mix red + green, yellow + blue, or yellow + purple, it would make brown instead of a territory color. Below is a diagram I made long ago that shows how the tertiary colors would function in-game:



I also did a few example levels that use tertiary colors as the main focus.




As you can probably tell the idea didn't really take off, since I was the only one interested in it and it would've made the game even more of a brain-wreck since according to Matt, most players didn't get the color-mixing concept, even having trouble with creating the secondary colors form the primaries.

Otaku-Ball Alpha Footage

Saturday, November 1, 2014

An ecchi story from a while back

Because of a certain incident that happened with a friend of mine, I have made this story private.  If you want to read it, send an e-mail to superjustin@optonline.net and I'll send you a PDF containing the story.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Diamonds - Complete Collection

I'm sure I may have hinted a while back that I'm a big fan of Dub Myers' and Oliver Dreer's rather unknown Diamonds game. And since it's "For Kids" spinoff is very much not available online, I decided to make a bundle of the Windows versions of both Diamonds and Diamonds for Kids.

You can download the collection here.
MEGA Mirror here.

Keep in mind these are 16-bit Windows games, so they will not work on anything running on 64-Bit or higher. So if you're one of those guys that still has a Windows XP (or a virtual machine) lying around, pop these in and go have some fun.

As a bonus, I included some level sets for Diamonds. "BONKERS" is a trimmed-down version of the nine levels from the "Go Bonkers" game in the Genesis/Mega Drive version of Action 52, "FORKIDS" is the levels from Diamonds for Kids converted back into the original Diamonds, and finally "MOMENTUM" is a conversion of Black Frog Industries' Diamonds clone Momentum.

On the topic of Diamonds, I wanted to bring up this sprite sheet I made a few adjustments to.

Now for quite the longest time I've been planning on cramming as many features from multiple games as possible into one game, as I did with Diamonds at one point. Mostly this was to introduce elements from Diamond Ball III (on DOS), Crillion (on C64) and Dudes with Attitude (on NES) into Diamonds, though since then I had a change in plans resulting in some of these features being dropped. Since then what this sheet basically allows would include:

*Being able to start a level off with another color besides Cyan
*Roster of colors expanded to 12 colors.
*Bricks, Boulders, Painters, Keys, Locks, and Gates are available in all 12 colors; compared to Cyan only existing as the brick (without any Painters) and Orange only having the painter, key, and lock. A colored brick can be set to respawn if the player is killed.
*Lighter painter blocks are removed when they are used, and are restored if the player dies. Their destruction is not required to enable destroying the Diamonds and passing the level.
*Boulders that shift one tile opposite the direction the player's ball hits it. They too (if desired) are restored into their original position if the player dies.
*Gates; The solid ones become hollow when the player becomes the color depicted on the gate, the hollow ones become solid when the player becomes the corresponding color.
*Gray Blocks and Gray Boulders can be destroyed/moved by the ball regardless of what color it is. They do not count towards level completion nor are worth any points, and are restored if the player dies.
*The Death block can be skinned into either the original Diamonds appearance (the Skull) or the DfK appearance (the red vortex).
*Arrow Tiles would block access through the direction the arrow points towards if the player attempts to enter through that direction. In other words it would be a one-way tile.
*The black balls with white outlines are based on the "Killer Ball" from Action 52 (Genesis/Megadrive)'s Go Bonkers. They bounce in one place endlessly (at about three-quarters the player ball's speed) and destroy the player if touched. However unlike Go Bonkers, the ball would also be removed if the player attempts to touch it.

Gone are the enhancement/powerup blocks, sand/water blocks, the random color painter, the ? block, and the electric gates. Simply because not only were they for the most part unnecessary since you can make just as good levels without them, but the graphics made for them looked for lack of a better word, a bit on the ugly side.

Friday, July 4, 2014

Based on a true story

Your guess is as good as mine as to why these two decided to get hitched in Tomodachi Life.


Sunday, June 1, 2014

Marihoe Karting Figure 8

Yes I made a video.

And yes it's at 50cc since I just started the game earlier today. I spent three hours on the sucker and got a temporary sore thumb after six GP's worth of racing.
Once I unlock more crap and get races that aren't just a "derp I can race" sequence, they'll exist.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Battle Lode Runner (PC Engine) Soundtrack Gamerip


After seemingly no attempts at a game rip recently of the Japanese-only Battle Lode Runner (which got a release outside Japan via Virtual Console), I went out of my way and recorded all the songs used in the game.

-Download-

Friday, May 9, 2014

Pokemon: the SJB Fanon Type Chart


And so here it is: The type matchup chart I will use for any Pokemon-styled fan game I make.

To make it, I used this:
http://www.dragonflycave.com/typechart.html

Friday, March 28, 2014

The downfall of the Pac-Man tribute project

Greetings everyone.
Originally I had written a post on this before a few months ago, however I decided to rewrite it with a more mature approach along with some backstory.

Let me introduce you to Shaun LeBron, the key developer of the iOS title Pterodactyl Attack and for some time was the owner and creator of an online incarnation of Pac-Man that was in-developent for some time until Namco Bandai reared it's ugly heads into the window and shot down the project's GitHub page, failing to see the concept of a fan-made non-profit tribute. I'm sure if this project was made in Japan it would be safe, as games that are obvious clones like Rosenkreuztilette have existed far longer and are much more well-known than this project, and no form of copyright from Capcom has slain those series' existences.

The project was simply known as the Pac-Man Tribute Project, and it's final version prior to it being canceled can be found here.
The biggest part of the project to some was it's extreme accuracy to the original Pac-Man (something that even World's Biggest Pac-Man, something that was sponsored by NBGI themselves couldn't even get halfway right), but it's primary selling point was the "Cookie-Man" variant, which generated randomly-built mazes that a good Pac-Man maze designer would create, and something that would be appropriate for an actual arcade Pac-Man title designed professionally. An in-depth document showing how level generation is done is shown here.

As I was going through a huge Pac-Man phase at the time, including creating hacks of the Atari 7800 Pac-Man titles, I was able to find Shaun's project through some careful Googling, and from there I found his e-mail and began discussing with him my own ways in which his tribute project could be taken to the next level, incorporating new design elements from various unauthoritised Pac-Man clones, the most obvious being the two Champ Pac-Em titles developed for DOS by CHAMPrograming, as well as the massively lesser-known Ultra Pac-Man featured in the "Super ABC" board released as a conversion kit for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man cabinets. Elements from Pac-Man Plus were also suggested, along with a newer maze generator that allowed for a wider selection of map designs with Cookie-Man. Also suggested was both a level and a level-set editor, allowing the tribute project to serve as a platform for one's own Pac-Man fan-game.

If you want the full resources collection I supplied to Shaun last year, you may acquire them below:
-Download-

Shaun at first welcomed these suggestions happily, even declaring me a conceptual artist, but due to development on his other project Pterodactyl Attack, as well as the above mentioned troubles with NBGI, Shaun would have to delay updates to the project.

I contacted Shaun later on a few more months down the line, and he still seemed interested in doing the Pac-Man tribute project revival, though as stated before Pterodactyl Attack would remain his big project, and come November the same year, he states that because of lack of interest and worry of Namco Bandai striking again (and possibly the complex nature of my features), development on the Pac-Man Tribute Project was canceled. In it's place, Shaun had discussed the possibility of making an educational legal guide about how Pac-Man worked rather than developing a game that recreated the existence. I contacted him back further questioning the cancelation of the project, and he announces his idea to terminate our short-lived friendship by blocking me on Twitter and ignoring any and all e-mail attempts since I had tried convincing Shaun to revive the project after he stated the eventual fate of the project in Janruary.

Shaun, wherever you are, and if you're reading this, please accept my apology for making a fool of myself and not understanding the legal troubles that you went through and were trying to avoid with this project at first. I wish you with the best of luck on any further projects that you may decide on, including Pterodactyl Attack. If you begin responding to my e-mails again and un-block me on Twitter, I promise I will not pester you to continue the project you canceled. I'll just wait till I learn programing myself and create the revival from scratch, or find if anyone out there wants to experiment with this and bring it into existence with altered graphics and etc. to remove the Pac-Man feeling and make it less likely to encounter legal troubles (complete with disclaimers).

On an unrelated note, happy 5th anniversary to this blog.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

PIERCE THE HEAVENS WITH YOUR DRILL, MAMAF***ER



WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK HE IS

No I am not posting these directly onto deviantART. Facejobs don't count as real art.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Monday, February 10, 2014

A disturbing Famicom game just got HORSE


Eh, it was bound to happen eventually.
(The game pictured above is Touhou Kenbun Roku (東方見文録), an unknown Japanese-only Famicom game, for good reasons.)

Also my first Pony post... yay?

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Java Troubleshooting

Hello everyone.

Recently Oracle made an update to their utility known as Java. Since then I haven't been able to start up any online Java applications, even to the point where the Java Icon doesn't appear on my Dock and a Java console window won't appear on the top-left of my screen. It may be related to my home folder not being in the same hard drive as my system's Library (Java Preferences do not allow me to change the location of the main Java data files).
I also should note I have Adblock on. Because screw you I don't want any spyware and tracking cookies on my Mac.

If you want to help, I need some checking with what I have checked under "Advanced":

Friday, January 3, 2014

Tetris Printer Algorithm

First off, Happy new year to all my readers!

I know this thing has already existed for seven months on the internet and was spread around to death, but I do want to make my say on this little project from Michael Birken:

This is a tool designed with the mind of making pixel art out of Tetris blocks, explained in full detail at this link. As a quick Tl;DR version, basically by placing and eliminating just the correct blocks and rows on an enlarged Tetris board (20 blocks wide), you can form pixel art of up to 8 colors. After seeing this I contacted Michael about the possibility of making an online tool for taking low-res pixel art and turning it into a GIF image that simulates the experience of the video above, and he considered it as a "Part II" of the algorithm.

As for the artist's edge of things, I'm still not really in full swing yet. Damn you Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch and your large online community!