Recent posts by Pykrete on Kongregate

Topic: Kongregate / Outernauts and sleazy advertisement.

If anything, I’m disappointed in Insomniac. Sucks that the guys who put out stuff like Ratchet & Clank and Resistance would seriously think they needed to resort to something that underhanded, even for a throwaway Facebook MMO.

Topic: Outernauts / Support Issue Thread

I can’t even get as far as character creation. The menu at the very top of the window is present and the music plays, but everything below it is a blank white screen.

I recall an issue happening in Fantasy Online where the game would get stopped before login if you adblocked Facebook. Does this game have a similar external site dependency?

Using Vista/Firefox, up to date. Will attempt in IE.

EDIT: Works in IE, at least for IE’s usual loose and very laggy definition of “works”. Not sure what’s happening differently, but I’d really rather see this game in a browser that doesn’t blow chunks.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Outernauts is an oversized blank white screen for me. Granted one with nice music and an Insomniac logo, but a blank white screen nonetheless.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

The first boss was mostly asking “did you pack tons of potions?” in the most obnoxious way possible.

Then again, picking Alliance and Magicians gives you a dedicated tank and healer, which means you’re pretty much set for the whole game. I think I lucked out on that, because I wouldn’t have been able to do either myself.

^ I think instantly killing two of your party members over the course of the fight is a gimmick. It sucked double for me, because I was a mage, and he killed my tank second, so for the last phase of the fight I had to just kite him in circles for like 4-5 minutes.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Give Up was decent, but not as hard as I was expecting. Most of the levels you could skip half the path it obviously wants you to take — in the middle chunk of them you could go through that hole between the pair of spikes and skip that entire L-shaped deathtrap above it, and in the last several with the saws you could skip the entire bottom 2/3 of the level by using the invisible wall and single block on the top left to bumrush the first gun and get all the way to the saws at the end.

More than anything, I was dying to the game deciding to lose jump inputs for some reason. Like, it’d just not take any jump commands for upwards of a second at a time.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Good lord, this game leaks memory almost as badly as Death Dice Overdose.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Okay, did you seriously just put another pvp badge on a freemium MMO? The last one of those is barely off the front page of badges, and we already explained in excruciating detail why that’s a terrible idea.

Topic: Kongregate / Absolute worst (and I guess best) Kongregate badges

The worst badge I’ve seen on this site was probably Sacred Seasons 2. The game barely worked in the first place, locked non-paying players out of all but two equippable items, and was somehow even more of an obnoxious incessant hours-long grind of a small handful of encounters than the first game. It was one of the most shamelessly tedious and unbalanced pieces of crap I’ve ever seen in 25 years of gaming, money grubbing aside.

As a general rule, MMO badges tend to be kinda crap, but they’re worse when it has anything to do with PVP (have fun fighting pay-to-win players!), when the entire game is just blandly clicking through a glorified spreadsheet interface and requires little to no agency on the part of the player (Dawn of the Dragons), or when the whole thing is a glorified stopwatch (Caesary and all its ilk).

Even though the game itself was bland and kinda cringeworthy, the Wartune badge was probably the best timed-out badge I’ve seen in the genre.

Topic: Kongregate / End of Kong as we know it ?

Now that’s what I’d call a really low career aspiration…

Dunno if you’ve noticed, but right now pretty much any job that pays even half your bills gets snapped up instantly, especially if you happen to be a recent grad and don’t have a ridiculously long resume to compete with laid off experienced workers. Even getting into retail is pretty much dumb luck.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Yeah I had to refresh for it.

As for the others, neither game even loads for me. So, yeah. Classy. Which is a shame, because I heard Grinn was actually decent.

Topic: Kongregate / End of Kong as we know it ?

I don’t really see a problem with a downloadable game, since it circumvents some of the overhead of Flash. It should be noted that it can also run into more compatibility issues than running it through a browser.

Aggressively promoting crap is another animal entirely, but not really having downloadable games.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Look, here’s what I was taught in game design class. Retro graphics serve several purposes:

The obvious are pragmatic costs of production and computational resources. The latter is mostly only an issue because Flash sucks, but the former is quite relevant to indie developers and Flash programmers.

One of them is cheap nostalgia, which can serve to get a player in the proper mood for a very particular kind of game echoing old-generation play style.

One of them is a kind of storytelling training weight, because with constrained visuals you’re forced to focus very heavily on a well-written story, world, setting, and cinematography. This is much the same reason chiptunes tend to be catchier than high-quality audio — you have to focus very carefully on a core melody and don’t have room for generic hollow fluff.

Most powerfully though, it’s a deliberate abstraction step. This serves a dual purpose from a psychological standpoint. First, it dodges the uncanny valley altogether — pixels and low-poly models don’t have creepy Bioware faces, or whatever the hell we were looking at in Heavy Rain. Second, it creates a sort of emotional anchor because it forces the player to use their imagination from the very beginning and immediately make an emotional investment, instead of taking a picture at face value, passively waiting for input from the story, and risking it being insufficient to make that investment at all. It forces the player to actively relate to it constantly as a natural reflex to that abstraction.

This effect is sometimes in itself more powerful than any amount of high fidelity visuals. Like, I can load up one of my old SNES RPGs and get a more satisfying story than most modern ones, despite pixels, compressed storytelling, and dodgy translation. For instance, IMO Chrono Trigger cranked out a more powerful story and characters in 16-bit pixels than most RPGs today, and like I said, I seriously doubt even AAA developers with ungodly amounts of production dollars could put out the kind of quality you’d need to do any amount of justice to a story like To The Moon, which if anything was made more powerful by its choice of graphic style.

Of course, people will have varied opinions, you can’t please everyone, it doesn’t always take for certain people, etc. What I described is a noticeable effect that seems to happen on a broad scale of people to the point that it’s actually analyzed and taught. It’s something that accidentally popped out of constraints that we had by necessity back in the day, and it’s something that a careful developer can evoke on purpose. Modern graphics have their place too — scenery is the big one, because even if our animation looks uncanny at times, dear god can we make pretty scenery. The list of tools at a developer’s disposal is an immensely more complex deal than “pixels are never better than smooth lines”.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

One reason to use old-timey style retro graphics is to sidestep issues with uncanniness. For instance, I couldn’t imagine a game like To The Moon having anywhere near the impact it did if it were a super-high-def AAA production.

That’s not even counting how a lot of us old-timers quite enjoyed that era of games, back when developers had to bother making a decent game instead of spending millions on graphics and hoping nobody noticed the game was crap. Purposefully limiting your medium is actually a really effective way to focus your concept.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Are you referring to motion or to appearance when you say graphically bloated?

I’m referring to poor optimization. I’m well aware that graphically involved games with lots of moving parts and effects can run just fine if optimized perfectly. Look at Legend of the Void, or…hey, Obliterate Everything 2, which runs unusually fast for a game defined by swarms of elaborately-drawn objects shooting particle effects all over the place.

The problem is that this is obfuscated terribly in Flash, and most developers don’t know how to do it — which is why Flash is a terrible gaming platform — but it tends to be much more expedient and have room for error with a pixel game because developers are less tempted to use high-quality .svg MovieClips for every single object on the screen, when .bmp Sprites suffice, are easier to cache properly, and expedite using low stage quality without impacting visuals.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Eh, I’m about 2/3 of the way through Obliterate Everything and not running into that. Like, I’ll pause to set up the very start because that’s a lot of stuff, but I’m not having all that much trouble putting new stuff in on the fly for the rest of the level.

And I’m all for being critical or even harsh when a game really, really blows — I mean, hell, look over the last several pages — but…that’s honestly a very silly reason to hate retro games. Especially when it says nothing about how fun a game actually is.

Besides, I’d rather badge a retro style pixel game that actually runs smoothly in Flash instead of a graphically bloated and poorly optimized MMO that bogs down in basic menu navigation, or a tower defense with gradients and transparencied particle effects everywhere.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

The last couple games are decent. I may or may not bother with the hard, but I enjoyed them.

See, this is the sort of stuff we should’ve been badging all month.

Topic: Kongregate / kong devs please read: rating system stagnation/complaints

Derp. I always went straight to the recommended games page and never saw it. Yeah that should probably be in both places for consistency’s sake, but good to know it’s there.

Topic: Kongregate / kong devs please read: rating system stagnation/complaints

Another feature could be to let a user remove games from their recommended list. I assume it gets there by some kind of ranking system based on your ratings, so just keeping a list of games for it to pass over as the user Xes them off would be sufficient.

Topic: Kongregate / kong devs please read: rating system stagnation/complaints

We currently have filters for genre and order by rating/date. It would be pretty nice to have another field to filter out anything older than X months.

I mean, my Recommended list hasn’t really changed for, like, a couple years, and most of the games on it are from 2008.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Oh goodness no. Badgers have notoriously poor taste in entertainment. Being cooped up in a mountain forge with a pack of crazy British hares for so long does things to a beast. Low standards. Prone to bloodrage. We’d be getting badges for random 2-star tower defenses because it reminded them of some obscure ancestral war against impossible odds.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

Crazy buggy, crazy laggy because lol particle physics, seems to end completely at random (I’ve gone way, way over 100 balls with no end, and I’ve had it end while well below). The badge isn’t anything unreasonable, but the game is bad and unstable enough that it probably shouldn’t be promoted with one.

Topic: Kongregate / Why the derpy writing?

Certain characters used by the hidden HTML can cause weird issues with how the forum parses your post. This most often means ASCII straight quotes " and/or apostrophes that delimit text strings (and are typically converted into Unicode directed quotes “” by the parser in part to avoid these issues), and angle brackets <> that delimit HTML classes.

In most cases there aren’t problems, but weird parser priority issues can be introduced during patches, and are usually local to things like blockquotes that are basically junior-HTML-within-real-HTML and are most vulnerable to these things. If you ever see anything like &#34, for instance, that’s where the parser freaked out and replaced an apostrophe with its HTML character number.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

5 is reasonable for the medium. The Forest Temple ones were irritating but all wholly doable and had a little breathing room with random spawns.

I wound up doing 2-1, 2-6, and 3-4 to get up to 10 insane, and most of it was dumb luck. 3-4 was literally just hiding in the bottom left snapping at whatever it decided to throw my way, then grabbing the invincibility and parking on the spawner.

Topic: Kongregate / New badge discussion

The medium was harder than the hard, really. Most of the levels after the first temple aren’t mechanically reasonable on anything higher than Normal, and half the ones that are come down to blind luck with the spawner randomly deciding not to alternate corners or stick something on top of a stationary obstacle.

Hell, there were several times the last boss was unwinnable because it stuck one of the last stones right next to him and there was no way to cleanly pick it up.

Topic: Kongregate / So, gamestop's in for a while now...

There’s no need to resort to that kind of straw effigy to condemn Gamestop. I’m quite willing to level any number of complaints about Gamestop’s direction of Kong (CHECK OUT THESE TERRIBLE MMO’S OH GOD PLEASE GIVE THEM MONEY), shady and borderline illegal business practices (pulling Onlive codes from boxes), and extremely abusive treatment of their own employees (which resulted in a class-action lawsuit).

But yeah, the contest thing isn’t necessarily on them and does run all too often into some nasty international laws. A lot of them are America’s fault for being IP hawks in stupid ways.