Archive for the 'games' Category

End of an era: Fangamer Officecam concludes

Published by Fawkes on February 18, 2012 in earthbound and games. 1 Comment

It’s strange how a weekly special from a small video games merchandise company in Arizona can change your life. Fangamer Officecam is a show that broadcasts from the office of Fangamer every Friday, hosted by the staff of the office. Fangamer is a branch off of Starmen.net, the world’s largest community of EarthBound fans. Every week, they have a face-to-face chat with the internet, answer questions made over Twitter, and their resident artist Camille makes little clay figures based on suggestions submitted from the broadcast’s chat room. This past Friday, they announced that the next week’s show will be their last.

Continue reading ‘End of an era: Fangamer Officecam concludes’

Story of a Lost Sky Release 0.7.0 and the Roadmap to 0.7.1

Published by Fawkes on February 10, 2012 in games and touhou. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Story of a Lost Sky Title Art

We’ve recently released version 0.7.0 of our Touhou SRPG, Story of a Lost Sky. Check it out here. We’ve received some good feedback already, but we’d appreciate any comments as to how best to improve our project.

New Features

  • New missions: Chapter 3 (6 events total)
  • New portraits: Mokou, Reimu
  • New battle animation sprites: Fuzzball, Fairy
  • New playable character: Aya
  • New map sprites
  • New music: Big crisis theme and victory theme.
  • A few characters have been rebalanced. Work is still in progress.

This documents the programming and game design objectives that we are aiming to complete for 0.7.1 and we’ll be pursuing over the next few months. The objectives for the art and music components haven’t been assembled yet as we’ll need to consult with our staff to figure out where things stand. We’ll be working on three major branches.

Continue reading ‘Story of a Lost Sky Release 0.7.0 and the Roadmap to 0.7.1′

Youyou Kengeki Musou – First Impression

Published by Fawkes on December 27, 2011 in games and touhou. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Youyou Kengeki Musou is a doujin game from the doujin circle Annkake-Spa. They’ve recently released a demo of their game that demonstrates the central mechanics of the game. What follows is a first impression of the two-stage demo that they released a few days ago. The scope of the game and how well polished it feels is something that is to be commended for a doujin work from both the gameplay, music, and quality of the visuals.

Continue reading ‘Youyou Kengeki Musou – First Impression’

[12 Days] Day 7: Nekogami Yaoyorozu needs more love.

Published by Fawkes on December 20, 2011 in anime and touhou. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Nekogami Yaoyorozu was an anime that flew under the radar for most. It was airing at the same time as Steins;Gate and Nichijou, so it’s not surprising that it didn’t get as much attention as it deserved. What attracted me to it was that this was an adaptation of an original manga by FLIPFLOPs, the Touhou doujin artist that I wrote about earlier this month.

Continue reading ‘[12 Days] Day 7: Nekogami Yaoyorozu needs more love.’

[12 days] Day 5: Sometimes you don’t have to save the world

Published by Fawkes on December 18, 2011 in games. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Despite having only spent a few hours with Atelier Totori, I’ve already fallen in love with it. I’m not quite ready to declare it the game of the year yet, because it’s got some stiff competition from games like Portal 2, but it is a very strong contender.

The change of pace from having played so many games where the entire world was at stake was refreshing. The only other game I played in the series was Atelier Iris, which was much more strongly heavily focused on combat. In Totori, the combat takes a backseat to a character-driven, more immersive experience. It’s no surprise that this game appeals to the iyashikei fan in me with it being more of a slice-of-life story.

Totori and Ceci are also the most adorable characters I’ve met in a game this year. Ceci is the older, sometimes overprotective sister, while Totori is the younger one who dreams of being an adventurer. There’s scene that really touched me was after coming back from a long time adventuring, Ceci remarked how Totori has been away for so long and that she misses her. I’m looking forward to seeing Totori grow from being a fledgling, clumsy alchemist into a top-notch adventurer.

Ceci is also voiced by Asami Imai, so I hear Idolm@ster’s Chihaya whenever she speaks.

[12 days] Day 3: Revisitng Super Mario RPG

Published by Fawkes on December 16, 2011 in fanfests and games. 0 Comments Tags: , .

This is a crossover that needs to happen. Source unknown.

Super Mario RPG was a game that defined my childhood. It was my first RPG, and I remember playing through it when I was in elementary school. Many, many years later, during the Super Mario RPG fanfest this past summer, I got a chance to revisit the game.

To this day, Super Mario RPG stands the test of time as a solid, traditional-style RPG. Everything from its humor, to its action-based battle system, to its lively cast of characters, to its diverse, upbeat, selection of music continues to make this a classic game that I’ll be revisiting years from now. Mario RPG followed in the footsteps of EarthBound by not taking itself too seriously, an atmosphere which was aided by its cartoony graphics that still hold up to this day. It’s not a particularly difficult game. When I was a kid, I dumped all my points into health points instead of raising my attack or magic powers and struggled with it, but I noticed that knowing what I was doing, the game was much less challenging these many years later. But it’s still enjoyable, especially the battle system. The timed-hits system remains one of the finest game mechanics introduced into RPGs that many games have since emulated. It provides the player an additional level of interaction that helped make the battles more exciting. Playing through it again and discussing with our friends was one of the highlights of my summer.

Oh yeah. The Mario RPG fanfest also spawned @DatValentina.

[12 days] Day 2: Two Faces of Gensokyo

Published by Fawkes on December 15, 2011 in anime, games and touhou. 2 Comments Tags: , .

This post is kind of something I’ve been wanting to write during the Fall but never got around to sitting down and doing it.

It was… 2005-ish when I got into Touhou. My first exposure to the world in a serious manner was through the doujin “Spring of the Residents of a Touhou Town” by FLIPFLOPs. I’ve since observed, especially now that it’s been over five years since I discovered Touhou, that this is one of those things where my first impression of the world colors how I continue to view it. FLIPFLOPs is one of my favorite doujin circles, and during this year I finally got around to catching up on their entire works for Touhou. I want to explore the two of the many faces of Gensokyo through two of the doujins that FLIPFLOPs has made. The first is “Spring of the Residents of a Touhou Town” and the second is “Two Scarlet Sacrements Under the Starry Sky”.

Continue reading ‘[12 days] Day 2: Two Faces of Gensokyo’

[12 days] Day 1: Story of a Lost Sky Progress Report 2011

Published by Fawkes on December 14, 2011 in games and touhou. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

New title screen art (For 0.6.1) by Jamuko

Hi! I’m Fawkes. This is my second time participating in 12 Days of Anime. I tend to stray more into gaming than focus exclusively on anime since I’m somewhere between the two communities.

The Kino weekly blogging thing kind of fell through due to me getting really busy and not really having much to say. I’m planning on a Kino wrapup during the 12 days event however.

Same as last year, we’ll start off this event by reviewing the progress made in the last year on Story of a Lost Sky, our Touhou SRPG project. This year saw the release of 0.6.0 in January and 0.6.1 in August, the latter having our first appearance at a real life event, the AM^2 convention where we were represented by Jamuko.

Continue reading ‘[12 days] Day 1: Story of a Lost Sky Progress Report 2011′

Final Fantasy Tactics and the search for balance in SRPGs.

Published by Fawkes on July 17, 2011 in fanfests and games. 4 Comments Tags: .

This is another post-Fangamer Game Club analysis post. Final Fantasy Tactics is a strategy RPG applauded for its broad and deep range of customization and Pokemon-like gameplay as you build your party to take on the game’s challenges. It’s also criticized for the convoluted story and the sporadic difficulty curve. I’d like to focus this post on the game’s balance, and how FFT struggles to find a way to achieve a balance that is satisfying to the player. This is more of a gameplay analysis so spoilers here are light.

We’ll break up the major problems with the game’s balance into a couple sections.

Continue reading ‘Final Fantasy Tactics and the search for balance in SRPGs.’

Does Paper Mario stand the test of time?

Published by Fawkes on May 29, 2011 in games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

For Fangamer’s recent game club event , I had the chance to play through Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 again. Paper Mario was a game that I enjoyed a lot during my childhood. This time around, I couldn’t help but notice how some of the game mechanics did not sit well with me. The following analysis is a refined version of my post on the game club event forum topic.

Continue reading ‘Does Paper Mario stand the test of time?’