Bert Vandecasteele

Category: Games

Stuff about games.

  • Final Fantasy X

    Final Fantasy X

    (postscript: Yes I am aware nostalgia is a thing and No I do not care nostalgia is a thing)

    Life has been a tornado lately (I originally wrote hurricane, but I couldn’t help but read those words to the Ducktales tune so I changed it to tornado, fyi). I’ve been working non-stop, my private life is an absolute mess, and what little free time I have I spend on the train.

    To this end, I’ve bought a PlayStation Vita. Yes, the Sony handheld. Yes, the one that’s been pretty much dead for over a year. The reason for my purchase, apart from suddenly being in the blissful situation of finally making money? Final Fantasy X.

    Final Fantasy X is pretty mixed as far as Final Fantasy games go, but to me, it was the last one I could consider a great game. It looked great at the time (and honestly, the remake looks stunning on the Vita), the battle system was fun (if a bit lengthy) and the setting and story were breathtaking.

    Actually, they still are. Sure, the game’s aged poorly, the voice acting is quite terrible, the uncomfortable silences drive me absolutely insane, but behind it are some solid ideas – that were definitely hampered by the lack of experience with the technology they were created for.

    Final Fantasy X still moves me. It’s a tragedy, a star-crossed lovers kind of story, that, themewise, is built entirely on circles. You level on a sphere grid. You play sports in a floating ball of water. Even the story, which centers around the breaking of age-old traditions, is littered with them.

    Sure, you play as a metrosexual Japanese teen, one of your teammates is a giant talking cat, and yeah, the mysterious bushido plot device is definitely a thing… but to me, this game played its emotional beats precisely right. And to be honest, it’s the last time a single-player Final Fantasy game has managed to do that.

    Now let’s hope XV is good!

  • How Heroes of the Storm wants to turn me into an asshole

    How Heroes of the Storm wants to turn me into an asshole

    Yeah yeah, I know what you’re going to say – I’m already an asshole, yadda yadda, apply water to burn, etc. But is that true, really? If you look into yourself, when have I ever been truly nasty to you from the bottom of my heart?

    Okay, yeah, sure, that one time, but you had it coming.

    That’s right. Admit it. I’m a cuddly little teddy bear.

    Which is why I steered clear of games like Defense of the Ancients or League of Legends. In these multiplayer Moba-style games, you take the role of a hero and, along with four other players, try to grab hold of the enemy base while the opposing team tries to do the same. Not only are these games notoriously hard to master, but they’re a cesspool of verbal abuse. Within ten minutes of my first real Dota game, one of my teammates advised me that I should get neutered. That’s right. Neutered. Because I was bad at games and I would undoubtedly hand this terrible disease on to my next of kin.

    So I was not entirely without reservations when I installed Heroes of the Storm – Blizzard’s take on the Moba genre. In it, Blizzard heroes from all of their universes duke it out like that absurd fanfiction I wrote in the nineties. The game sports some key design differences that make it more accessible – it uses team effort to increase the players’ levels instead of personal skill, for instance – and I really like Uther, so I figured: Why not?

    So I started playing. And I sucked. Yet nobody wanted to sterilize me. Maybe they did, but they didn’t openly admit it. Someone called me an idiot. But this is the internet, so he was essentially slapping me with a puppy. I liked the game, kept playing more games, got better at it, picked a hero I really liked, started winning more games and got a feeling I had never experienced before: I was actually enjoying a multiplayer game.

    And then I started noticing it. That one guy. The one who idles in base for too long. Who is jungling when he shouldn’t be. Who keeps overextending himself and dying. Whose terrible decision-making costs us the entire game. At these times, I want nothing more but to ram down on the enter key and type the best-phrased line of insults to this random guy on the internet, just because he is keeping the team down and wasting everyone’s time. And I don’t want to brag, but my eloquence would totally reduce this guy to cinders like that guy who opens the ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

    But I don’t. Because I’m a grown-up. Grown-ups don’t call people morons. No do they tell people to get sterilized. Grown-ups know eugenics, and grown-ups knows how genetics work.

    Then what do grown-ups do?

    They ping the noob endlessly so everyone can look at his glowing icon on the minimap  and see for themselves what a moron he is.

    (P.S.: If you still want to play with me, you can add me as Otcho#1421.)

  • The Interview

    The Interview

    So! I made another game!

    Actually, I made this back when my online portfolio launched, but it had kind of fallen by the wayside because I was busy doing other things (like work).

    So what is it?

    I made a text adventure to promote myself. It’s a rush job consisting of weird ideas, experiments with multiple endings, variables and flags, and 40 degree fever. Play at your own risk.

    The game’s made with Twine, which is a really cool (and noob-friendly) program for this kind of stuff. I’ll probably make a real text adventure at some point, but seeing how this has taken me most of a weekend to get done, it’s probably going to have to wait a bit.

    So what’s this game look like from the inside?

    Screen Shot 2015-11-30 at 09.08.42This is the main structure. Every square has some form of text in it.

    Screen Shot 2015-11-30 at 09.08.55Enhance! I actually set out to make a regular branching dialogue. In hindsight, a lot of the game ended up more visual novel-y (and thus straightly structured) than I wanted because I got lost in endless descriptions of random stuff. What can I say, I love world-building.

    Screen Shot 2015-11-30 at 09.08.59And this is what some snippets look like up close. The hard part about Twine was that they just released a 2.0 and everything I knew from 1.X was redundant – yet still annoyingly present in the Google cache. Figuring out how to get multiple variables to trigger at the same time (which was important for the actual interview part) was a real bitch.

    So there you have it. Alternatively, you can download the source file (which is actually just a .html, rendering all of this infinitely less cool) and import it into Twine yourself.

    In summary!

    By the way, there’s quite a bit of other stuff on the portfolio that’s worth checking out. I’ll probably go into detail about that somewhere down the line!

  • Assassin’s Creed: Again

    Assassin’s Creed: Again

    I can’t remember the last time I wrote something about an Assassin’s Creed game. Thankfully, my blog and the wonderful people at TickCounter can:

    Boy, time flies, huh! In four-and-something years, the Assassin's Creed series has evolved all the way from the renaissance to industrialized London. Its gameplay, however, remains fixated soundly in the stone age. For those not in the know: Assassin's Creed is a historical videogame in which you take on the role of - surprise - someone who kills people. Templars, more specifically, which are kind of the bad guys but it's been 6 games since I've last cared about what they were. In this series, we've been transported to Italy during the Renaissance, the Carribean during the golden age of piracy (the one not featuring Napster), the American independence and French revolution. And as unlikely as this sounds: If you've played one, you've really played them all. Seriously, this franchise has changed little to nothing since I wrote those words of praise about Assassin's Creed II. There have been no less than seven Assassin's Creed games in the main series, and none of them have changed the formula in the slightest. There's still the hidden switch blade. There's still climbing towers to get a lay of the land. There's still that god damn free running system that does not work seriously Evie get the hell off that pole why do you do this to me!? And the worst part? Even though Ubi's so adamant on making these games exactly the same, they still manage to fuck some of them up. Assassin's Creed III was the most interesting story told by your accountant cousin. Unity was an incredible buggy mess. Now, granted, Syndicate does quite the okay job. The game looks stellar, and London is a solid piece of eye candy to interact with. It's a return to form after the abysmal Unity, but as the steam train rolls into assassination station, London, I can't help but shake the feeling that this is yet another Rome/Florence/Boston/Havana/Paris and I'll do nothing but climb towers and get dumb collectibles and listen to an inane story about dudes trying to kill each other because reasons, only historically. The most exciting new things about this game: There's carriages! You can play as a woman! You can meet Dickens and Darwin! And thanks to Graham Bell you can climb towers faster! Faster? Gosh, that sounds swell. Ubi, if it weren't for the possibility of having an Assassin's Creed set in pre- or post-war Berlin, I'd quit playing these games. Anyway, enough with the ranting. Time for a song:

    "We're doing a sequel - There's no need to disguise - The studio considers us a viable franchise"

  • Six cameras, one computer – and whole lot of sick moves

    Six cameras, one computer – and whole lot of sick moves

    Sometimes, unexpected things happen. It’s one of those cool things of being a writer – like going to Austria or accidently being in LA when your short film is in theatres. And that’s how I found myself in a photo studio in Kreuzberg doing motion capture for a video game.

    Now, you might’ve seen professional motion capture – actors in spandex suits covered with Styrofoam balls, running around and overacting like they’ve just been cast in the next silent comedy.

    You know what? Turns out that costs a lot of money!

    Until I learned about this:

    That’s right. Markerless motion capture with a handful of Playstation cameras. Seriously. The whole thing is probably the nerdiest thing ever – I mean come on, you don’t even have to change out of your Firefly shirt!

    This is what the set-up looks like:

    IMG_20151023_112635550The process was pretty straightforward (and that’s coming from someone who barely knows two lines of C): You set it up, calibrate the room, and then start capturing. We ran into a couple of issues distinguishing parts of our bodies from the floor, but after the computer model magically stopped locking its hands to its crotch, everything went swimmingly.

    So yeah. Here’s me.

    IMG_20151023_174018373My sick moves have officially been downloaded to the computer. Pretending to run around in a white room might be one of the geekiest things I have ever done – but seeing how I had an absolute blast, I guess I should go full-out geek more often.

    At the risk of making this whole post sound like an advertisment: If you wanna know more, here’s a link to their website.

  • Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition

    It’s back, and even better than before!

  • Another tiny game

    Another tiny game

    Hey everyone,

    I made another tiny game thanks to the wonderful tutorials on the Unity website. This one was slightly trickier than the last, but I had tons of fun making it. I’m currently trying to figure out how to best proceed in this direction – how to move away from the tutorials and really start making my hands dirty.

    About the game: It’s a 2D roguelike (i.e. randomized game that’s out to kill you) in which you gather food and dodge zombies. So many tropes! I feel like a regular indie developer!

    • Play the game in your browser (unless you use Chrome): Click!
    • Download the game on your computer (unless you use Mac): Click!

    I’m really sorry, Mac users who browse with Chrome. You and I, it just wasn’t meant to be.

  • Shovel Knight – Plague of Shadows

    Shovel Knight – Plague of Shadows


    Please play this in the background while reading this post.
     

    Remember Shovel Knight? You know, the one that ended up taking the gaming world by storm, making a tiny underdog into an Indie hero that ended up getting its own Amiibo?

    Of course you don’t, that’s why I keep this blog.

    Click!

    That’s better.

    Actually, I had forgotten all about Shovel Knight myself. After all, the game was two years old, and I had sucked every droplet of sweet delicious gameplay from its interactive cadaver – what else was I to do but move on with my life?

    Time went on, and I went to enjoy other platformers. I rekindled the flame of my childhood crush, Super Mario Bros. 3.  I enjoyed both young and old hedgehogs in Sonic Generations. I explored Spelunky’s caves multiple times, finding them refreshing and new every time. It was a time of wild experiments, of insatiable hunger, of being lost.

    Then, one day, I booted my computer and was greeted by an unexpected message. Shovel Knight had updated. Shovel Knight? Surely that blue armored hero rang a bell?

    I hovered over the PLAY button, unsure what to do. Sure, I could click it and return to my old love. But what if things weren’t like before? What if he had changed? And worse: What if I had?

    Reluctantly, I put it off, minimized the Steam window and went about my day. Shovel Knight was in the past. I tried to distract myself as best I could.

    I made it seven minutes before I caved.


    Artist’s rendering of what followed.
    So apparently, I did change. And so did Shovel Knight, who bravely stepped aside for a new hero to take the spotlight: The maniacal potion-chucking alchemist, Plague Knight, a glass cannon antihero with great movability, who makes am already hard game into an abolute deathfest.

    Immediately, I fell in love once again – but differently so this time.

    Shovel Knight was silent and stoic and told his story in pictures – Plague Knight is an awkward geek who can’t stop yapping. He is a text-heavy hero with a text-heavy story, but one that once again grabs you in the chest with its absurd honesty. Plague Knight is the perfect fairy tale for geeks: An awkward romance starring a regular guy who wants to take over the world.

    Plague Knight is an amazing unicorn in the games world. It’s the white whale of DLC: Free, long, absolutely different and yet somehow the same. It should not exist, and yet here it is: A whole new way to fall in love with a wonderful classic all over again. Get it on every platform that matters for next to no money. You won’t regret it.

  • “Watch more TV”, says my hero

    “Watch more TV”, says my hero

    Here’s an interesting article about writers in gaming by the esteemed Sam Lake, writer of the first two Max Paynes and Alan Wake at Remedy in Finland.

    (He’s kind of my writing hero.)

    Now, I’ve got no idea whether Remedy’s next game, Quantum Break, with its mixture between 22-minute TV episodes and action gameplay, will be any good on the story front. Actually, I personally don’t see the blend working all that well – but boy do I want this to succeed.

    Even though it sounds like the exact opposite of what storytelling in games should be. For me, the strongest stories in games have always been the ones that made twists into gameplay actions instead of cutscenes. Quantum Break just seems to go entirely into the other direction, with gameplay impacting a 22-minute story segment that’s essentially a cutscene.

    Or is it? This is professionally produced television, right? You wouldn’t call Breaking Bad a cutscene, would you? So is this a cutscene just because it happens to television inside a videogame? And what is it about the word cutscene that makes it sound inherently worse than other forms of non-interactive fiction?

    Quantum Break’s storytelling concept confuses me. I can’t wait to see what happens.

  • Hack ‘n’ slash

    Hack ‘n’ slash

    Here’s a familiar feeling:

    You want to like something, but you’re unable to. The stars should be aligned, but somehow, they’re not – instead, you get a nagging feeling of frustration. A feeling that says: Have fun, damnit!

    So why aren’t you?

    Sometimes, you know the answer. I, for instance, know precisely why I don’t like Game of Thrones (but that’s a post for a different day). Often, however, the reason for disliking something is more subtle, and while you can point in the general direction of a possible cause, you can’t really nail it down. I’ve never liked Discworld, and I’ve never understood why. It’s funny. It’s creative. It’s good. All the stars should be aligned – why aren’t they?

    Enter: Double Fine’s “Hack ‘n’ slash“.

    Hack ‘n’ slash is, in essence, a Zelda clone with a twist: Instead of a sword, you wield a USB stick that enables you to plug into objects and change their code. This way, you can move boulders, burn bushes, and manipulate enemies in ways that bend the game on your knee and makes it cry for mommy.

    Manipulate their health? Their damage? Their faction? Go hog wild.

    It can all be done at the flick of your stick. It’s one of the best videogame ideas I’ve heard in a while, and it’s done with great consistency. Hack ‘n’ slash features sets of increasingly complex puzzles that at first feel impossible, but always have a way out.

    So here we have a creative game that does something truly different. I can feel the stars aligning.

    They’re so close.

    But I’m not having fun.

    Ugh.

    So which one is it, Bert, I can hear you ask? Is it the “I know what’s wrong” kind or the “I have no clue” kind?

    Well, dear reader, it’s a bit of both, I think. Hack ‘n’ Slash has real obvious problems that bring the coding party to a sudden stop. The puzzles can be agonizingly hard. The movement feels a bit sluggish. The story feels like it knows it’s terrible, yet it insists on interrupting you constantly.

    But are those dealbreakers? I turn that question around in my head. Maybe Hack ‘n’ slash isn’t the problem. Maybe I am. Am I being too harsh? That must be it, right? Just me being a dick?

    So I boot Hack ‘n’ Slash, play a bit. I find myself wanting to check a walkthrough. I’m looking away from the screen as wait for the character to finally run all the way over to the next map. And I’m rolling my eyes at the (skippable!) story in the most disdained way possible.

    Nope. I’m not having any fun.

    Sorry, Hack ‘n’ Slash. I love that you exist. But I guess your stars are all a tiny bit misaligned.