Blog: Books Read in 2019

Self. Understanding.

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Blog: Books Read in 2019

Self. Home.

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Blog: Books Read in 2019

Adventure. Love.

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Blog: Games of July 2019

July was the first month in a long, loong time where I was able to just relax. I spent a lot of it with old childhood favourites and sprinting around being Mario. It was a nice month. Then I got hit by what might be the best Fire Emblem ever and I'm not quite sure what's happens to all the time since.

My top five games (by play time) for July were:

1. Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Oh wow. So I picked this up on July 26. I played 30 hours. It's pretty great. I have a few nitpicks on pacing and story, but both the actual Fire Emblem grid-based combat and the interstitial Professorial team-building phase are really fun. Played the first pass on normal, casual difficulty (party because I'm tired of how hard Awakening would kick my butt) and I've found it a touch easy. Overall this game has taken over my life a bit and it's pretty glorious being able to revel in it for a while. That being said, my students may be a little confused come September when I try to teaching them by fishing a bunch.
   
   

   

   Ah. What a lovely place for a nap.

   
   


2. Super Mario Odyssey - The more I play of this the more I love it. There's so much diversity in things to do and the motion and control is a lot of fun. I think it could have a little more to it, and I'm sad there wasn't any DLC, but I've loved my time with Super Mario Odyssey.
   
   

   

   There is more in this game than has been dreamed of in any 8-bit philosophy.

   
   


3. Opus Magnum - Zachtronics gets me. I loved SpaceChem and Opus Magnum is the new, fancy, more accessible version of SpaceChem. The missions feel a lot more achievable than some of the early Zachtronics games, and once you've achieved a working result, it's extremely satisfying to go back in an optimize those results. I think having spent a lot of time thinking about algorithmic problem solving for novice computer scientists really put me in the right frame of my to enjoy this game.
   
   

   

   It's not efficient but it is pretty, which this game lets you do quite happily. 



4. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - I think this my be my game-of-my-lifetime. I bought the Collection of Mana mostly for the other two games, but I've spent more time on Secret of Mana and been extremely happy playing it again. I love the way the story flows, I love the big bright sprites, I love the controls and the combat. Of course it has its flaws, but it still makes me so happy to play. Incidentally I noticed a few things this time around. One is that the UK version has different controls and a different translation to the US version. The second is just how well the game prepares you for things. Most locations are mentioned several steps ahead of the story from the time they actually become important and I find it helps the game hang together really well.
   
   

   

   Take that, Wasp!



5. Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana) - I've started to play Seiken Densetsu 3 several times of the years and I've always played the first few hours and then trailed off. Mostly because I wanted to recapture my joy of Secret of Mana and play properly sitting on the couch. Trials of Mana is letting me do that and I have to confess I'm a little disappointed. I think the story is great and well constructed, but the flow and combat from SoM is missing and the game feels a little detached from my input (the way Legend of Mana on the Playstation feels). I'm wondering if the game didn't get brought across back in the SNES area because they knew it wasn't quite up to the standard of SoM. I think as a kid I would have been pretty disappointed with it (although my capacity to play through crappy games was pretty high back then).
   
   

   

   What a time to be alive.

Here's my total play time chart for July:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Project 1 & Project 11: Update I Didn't Write More

This post is just to finish off my updates for my summer of writing more. As it turns out, I didn't really want to write more, so I didn't.

As discussed in the yearly August post, I'm moving my focus elsewhere for now. That should mean more writing on the blog with more projects getting done. As for the fiction, I'm sure that will come again someday.

Updates:

Project	New Words	Total Words	Percent of Target
The Roofs	0	81	0.7%
Blogging	2645	6052	50%

Blog: Books Read in 2019

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Project 12: The Chrono Trigger Sprites Live - Marle

Once again, I've made some progress on my Chrono Trigger Perler Sprites. This time I got Marle done.

It's been a long, long time since I started working on these. In that time I've moved at least 3 times trucking an unfused sprite around with me. A little while back I finally fused the Marle sprite, and now that I have a little time and space, I'm going to try to push on. I'd like to finish the 1-to-1 sprites before September and then I'll see if I still want to do the double sized sprites.

The Marle Sprite

Similar to the Crono Sprite, I started by determining all of the colours in the sprite and which sprite colour of Perler bead I would use to match them.

The colours in the Marle sprite and Perler Beads colours

Thanks to the lessons learned on the Chrono Sprite, I produced a map for each bead colour in the form of a separate sprite image (and included the bead colour in the file name, which I really appreciate returning to these two years later). The table of those colours are below.

Sprite Part	Hex Colour	Perler Colour	Notes
	---	---	The Original
	#381838	Purple	Again I chose to outline the sprite in purple which gives a good definition to the outside. Might look a little better with the top and bottom filled in as well.
	#f8a838	Butterscotch	Highlights in Marle's hair.
	#584848	Dark Grey	Darkest shadows on the crossbow.
	#807060	Light Grey	"Metal" in the crossbow.
	#f86810	Orange	Low lights in the hair, belt and shoes.
	#488878 and #205040	Parrot Green	Two sprite colours into one perler colour. Largely shadows.
	#f8a8a0	Peach	Pinker skin tone.
	#80f8b8	Pearl Blue	Pants.
	#801800	Rust	Shadows and Crossbow Body
	#f8d8d0	Sand	Skin tone highlights, a little more beige than the true colour.
	#a0a8a8	Silver Perl	Crossbow highlights.
	#f8f848	Yellow	Hair highlights.
	#ffffff	White	Highlight pixels and filler for the crossbow.

Success of the Sprite

I made sure that the full bottom of the sprite was level all thew ay across. This allowed me to avoid the problems I had with Crono where he tips over if not propped up on the edge. Possibly not a problem in some applications, but if you want your sprites standing, then they need a consistent bottom row. I think here I added in a little extra purple on the bottom to make it stand (although looking at the purple pixels, I can't really see). I hope that me!from-3-years-ago knew what he was doing.

The other change I made was filling in the crossbow. It's technically empty in the real sprite, but for structural integrity I opted to fill it in so that the sprite would be much more rigid and robust. In terms of looking at the sprite in the real world, you barely notice and I think it still looks good.

I'm quite happy with the sprite. I have it sitting next to the Crono sprite in my office window and they look very good together. I am especially enjoying being able to see them from the garden outside.

The process of putting everything together was a bit rough. This project fell way down my priority list, so the couple of times I jumped back in there was a long figuring out what was going on period. On the plus side, I was much more organized about generating the sprite-part sheets, so building the sprite and putting together this post was fairly straight forward.

My next sprite is Lucca. I haven't started yet, but I'd like to have the sprite finished and the next blog post in the series made by August 23, 2019.

Project 1: Blog x 9

Happy August! Also happy blog end and start day (belated)!

As of August 1, I've completed the latest year of blogging and I'm going to lay out my plans for another year of blogging. Now, it's time to update the Blog as Project and the Blog as Blog again. Also it's time to sit in my garden and enjoy August.

I finally finished my PhD in 2019, which I hope will open up my time to work on interesting projects and write about them here. The last year was a little thin on those with the bulk of the posts being reading updates, with a few other posts sprinkled in. I'm starting to get some momentum up though and trying to use that to carry through and get things done.

Back in May I set myself a goal of writing 4000 words a month for the blog. This has been pretty largely a failure, but I think the tracking has been good for me. I've probably written about 2000 words a month and I think for now that's ok. My primary focus has always been to try to be doing more things, which means I think I should be putting my time to working on projects rather than writing about stuff.

So for the Ninth Edition of the Blog, I'm planning to get at least one project post out a month (which ties in nicely with my New Year's Resolution to finish a project a month). I'd also like to put in a few more video game thoughts posts, as I've been playing a lot of good games this year.

Let's go make something!

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Blog: Books Read in 2019

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Blog: Thoughts on Long Live the Queen

I saw Dan Floyd play Long Live the Queen a while back and was reminded of the weird awesomeness that was Princess Maker (2) back in the day. Last week, it was on significant sale in the Summer Steam Sale, so I bought and played it for about 3 hours. I feel a bit conflicted about the game, but at the moment I don't really want to play more, so I thought I'd write up a quick thoughts post now.

Long Live the Queen

 As always, beware spoilers for Long Live the Queen (at least one of the major endings).

Things I Liked

I like making numbers go up. I think I've mentioned that in some other of these "Thoughts On" posts, but I have a long history of falling into games that have a numbers go up mechanic. At one point towards the end of my undergrad, I found myself obsessively playing a "Stop Being a Loser" simulator and realized that if I quit playing the game and did the things I was getting my avatar in the game to do, I'd be a lot happier.

All the things the Queen might learn.

Long Live the Queen follows on the tradition of the Princess Maker games, where in, you are responsible for taking a young lady and preparing her for life. In this case as a queen of a moderately sized country. You do that by sending her to various classes, such as Queenly Deportment, Sword Mastery, Ecclesiastical Divination, Economics or Magic Use. The points you (or the Queen) gain in are then used to pass or fail various checks which determine how following events go.

The Queen is feeling under pressure today.

In the case of Long Live the Queen, failure at a lot of these checks seems to either lead to nothing or to fairly swift death. Passing the checks, however, is quite satisfying. Knowing that you’ve prepared the Queen by learning avoid insulting a guest by understanding courtly manners feels great.

The Queen is not immune to arrows (without training).

I also generally enjoyed the setting of the game. I’ve been reading through all of the Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga books and the idea of playing an Aral Vorkosigan simulator appeals to me as well. Can you take the leader to be and grow them up to be a strong, caring, beloved, leader (or a horrifying, but entertaining monster)? The setting of the internal and external forces on our Queen are interesting and lend themselves to the possibility of some interesting storytelling.

Things I Didn't Like

While the possibility is there for interesting storytelling I feel like there isn’t that much effort put in to actually telling that many stories. The story of the game hinges on the various tests of the Queen’s abilities and on a few of her choices (but generally the choices only master if she’s able to pass the check first). There seems to be one strongly preferred plot, with small side deviations (generally leading to death). There seem to be a few other larger plots, but they seem to require playing the game in very specific ways to trigger them. As such the plot felt a little as though I was being railroaded in my choices about how to develop the Queen.

The Queen knows production and trade, so can make good choices.

In one example you sentence a criminal to execution and he tries to personally attack you. To the best of my understanding, the only way to successfully manage the situation is to have the archery skill prepared, so that you can fling a sceptre (or something) at him (unless you’ve learned magic, but we’ll return to that point in a moment). If you fail the test in that particular case, you survive, but I can’t help but feel that the responses to that situation were very limited.

The Queen cannot defend herself.

For instance, if instead of training archery, you trained fencing, you could grab a sword and personally defend yourself, or if you were trained in diplomacy you could talk the criminal down, or if you studied tactics you could position yourself so that your guards could better defend you. In these situations the direct pass or fail may not actually matter, but it could lead to more interesting stories.

Beyond the specifics of the various tests the Queen must pass, it feels very much as though the only acceptable path through the game is to learn magic. After several playthroughs where I died in various ways I ended up taking a walkthrough for the last time and was able to navigate most of the checks I had struggled with. I think having the magic route be important is excellent and I enjoyed that playthrough, but it felt very much as though having magic rendered all other decisions in the game somewhat moot. I wish there had been a slightly different way to approach that.

I also feel a bit that there’s a limit on the endings of the game. I certainly haven’t exhausted the potential endings at all as though you die in some fun way, or you survive and marry someone. Either, I wish that the game had more interesting outcomes available to you, or that if it does have those more interesting outcomes, it indicated them to you a little better.

The Queen did not live long. Long Live the Queen.

Things I Noticed

I like the mood system to moderate the bonuses to the various scores, but I feel as though it lead a little to the railroading of the game for me. For example, if the Queen is angry, she gets a bonus to martial and military skills. That’s a great approach, but it means that you have to select activities for the week that will make her angry. I think a few other mechanisms to modify the mechanics might have been a good idea to bolster the emotional side.

The Queen is feeling very emotional right now.

Things I'd Include in A Game

I think my problems with Long Live the Queen are that it’s not quite the game I want to play. I think the creators were aiming for telling a story within some boundaries of personal investigation. I think I was hoping for something that allowed you to explore how an initial situation might evolve if a person made a particular set of decisions.

I see the “plot tree” of Long Live the Queen as a few strong trunks with a some lighter, shorter branches off in other directions. I would like to play something with many branches around the same length with a few interesting shorter ones to break up the game play.

Final Things

I liked Long Live the Queen, even if it wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. I’ll probably drop back in on it at some point, but for right now I feel like my three hours has been enough. That being said, in doing a little research for this post, I noticed that Princess Maker 2 has been remade and is on Steam, so I might dive that way for a little while.

The Queen is a magic queen!

Long Live the Queen has given me some food for thought for a game I’d like to make at some point and I’m glad I played it.

Blog: Books Read in 2019

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