jdodson1

Joined 01/23/2012

I'm an Engineer and built the video game community Cheerful Ghost and text based mini-MMO Tale of the White Wyvern.

2753 Posts

During Nintendo's E3 event today they dropped the news that Wind Waker is coming to the Wii U in HD. The visuals in the video looks incredible and the remastered version looks great. This is a nice addition to the Wii U and for people that love this game and have the console could see this as a must buy!


After reading caffo's post about Gunpoint a few weeks ago I waited for the final release and then noticed there was a demo available to try. Gunpoint is a 2D stealth based action game where you play a secret agent of sorts that goes on missions of increasing degrees of difficulty. A game I have played recently that it feels like is U R Not A Hero but Gunpoint doesn't feature a frenzy of gunplay.

The game has a interesting story that you experience through reading messages sent to your phone. When you first start the game you are seemingly thrown from a window and land on the ground and are immediately called by someone in a building. She is murdered while you are making your way to the top of the building to talk to her. As you flee the scene you are contacted by someone that wants to help you by having you wipe information from servers that link you to the crime.

I played through the demo and at no point did the character I play shoot anyone, which was refreshing. To accomplish missions you have a pretty wide jump, climb buildings and cling to walls to make your way through each building. Each building has security guards and you can use a few tactics to take them out so you can find computer terminals to hack. To take out a security guard you have to jump on them and punch them once to knock them out. The game features a fun sense of humor and after I repeatedly punched a security guard in the face over a hundred times it started mocking me and counting the number of times I had punched him. These bits of humor are sprinkled through the game and its story line and offer a really fun style to the game.

If you are interested in Gunpoint there is no reason not to check it out as the demo is available for download on Steam right now!

http://www.gunpointgame.com/


Typically I don't nab a console for one game but Destiny looks so good I might make an exception to that rule. Since I have never owned an XBox I haven't played any of the Halo games and Bungie's next game seems like a re-visioning of that universe.

With the Steam Console being on the unknown horizon and the PS4 seeming to support the Indie scene as well as it claims, I might get a next gen console much quicker than I thought.

What do you think, does Bungie's next game look interesting to you? If so how do you plan on playing it?


New trailer released for Wolfenstein New Order. More of the plot details come out loaded with shooter frenzy.

ConcernedApe the developer of Stardew Valley dropped more game updates about in game rings, boots and minerals. He also talks about other game mechanics and options for how you can play the game.

http://stardewvalley.net/mini-dev-update-6/

Plants VS Zombies 2 will drop on iOS before PC an odd choice considering it was the other way around for the first game. It will also launch as a free to play game as well so if you wanted to play it and keep a few bucks, now you can.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/06/03/plants-vs-zombies-2-blooms-on-ios-july-18-is-free-to-play/


http://i.imgur.com/9oVIdWd.jpg
I have been eagerly awaiting Scrolls, the new Collectable Card Game by Mojang for quite some time after it was announced. I wanted to tuck a bit of time under my belt before writing about it and feel like now is a good time.

After buying Scrolls I needed to merge my Minecraft account into my new Mojang account. This makes sense as what Mojang is doing now is having an umbrella Mojang account be the set of credentials that gets you access to all your games. So now, I can access Scrolls and Minecraft with the same information. After you get that all sorted out you can start playing Scrolls.

Scrolls is a 1 on 1 card game where the goal is destroy 3 of the opposing players idols. The game is played on a hexagonal battlefield broken up into 5 lanes. Scrolls differs from other CCG's in that you don't start with energy, you must sacrifice cards to obtain it. Its a interesting mechanic and I like it quite a bit.

Each new player starts by selecting one of three pre-constructed decks and I selected the green deck. As you play matches you win gold and you can spend the gold in the game store for cards or packs. I seriously recommend saving up for the packs as you get more cards for the gold you spend. You can drop real money to buy shards and coupled with gold allows you to buy the other pre-constructed decks or specific cards. You don't need to spend real money to get all the cards as you can stick to buying packs with earned gold.

I have been playing practice matches on Easy and find that offers plenty of challenge for my current Scrolls skill. Even in easy, the game isn't trivial even if the computer isn't too smart. Sometimes the luck of the draw can really hinder your win, just like in any CCG.

The game features a pretty robust deck builder and you can build a seemingly infinite set of deck variants on the cards you own. After opening a few packs now, I have some interesting choices and plan on making a few variants on my pre-constructed green deck.

If you love collectable card games and want to try a well polished take on the genre, you should give Scrolls a look.


Recently the Starbound roadmap was updated to cover the updated progress of the project. Many of the high level sections are at 90% complete but some still need more love. If you are interested in checking it out, check it out.

http://www.playstarbound.com/roadmap/

The Starbound team has been pumping out daily updates on their website and Starbound News collected all the past week reveals into one video linked above.

This screenshot was released this morning.

http://i.imgur.com/dZv7wZJ.png


http://i.imgur.com/SSIzONC.png
A few days ago I launched a few new features for Cheerful Ghost events that I want to talk a bit about.

moderated events

All the events created with Cheerful Ghost events to this point can joined by anyone. This is a pretty awesome default and will remain so, but occasionally we all might want to create an event that we want to be bit more selective with. Intro moderated events. Moderated events allow the event creator to approve people to join the event that request access.

server support

In the past Cheerful Ghost has run game servers that last a month or so and as such events now support that use case. You can now put in your Server URL and Server Password into the event and if someone successfully joins an event they can access the URL and password. The reason this information will only be available to people that join the event is so you can keep this information secure to avoid griefers.

Moderated events in conjunction with server events will run the next Terraria 1.2 Cheerful Ghost server. So basically people will ask to join the server and when you are approved you will get access to the server URL and password. This will make it easier for us to communicate when we pop the game into hardmode as well as ensuring we don't overload the server. Over the lifetime of the server, the password may change as well and keeping this all in the event will make this much simpler.

Creating moderated and server based events are only available to Cheerful Ghost Members. If you are interested in becoming a Cheerful Ghost member read about it here:

http://cheerfulghost.com/membership


I want someone to remake The Dark Knight in Minecraft. Not just the trailer, the whole film. Its cool, I can wait.


http://i.imgur.com/EBTWKdx.jpg
If you were wanting to wait to dive into the world of Skyrim, now might be a good time to do that. Bethesda released the Legendary Edition that wraps up all the Skyrim expansions into one game. Featuring Dragonborn, Hearthfire and Dawguard this should keep you in Dragon slaying heaven.

If you buy large game tomes, Prima is also releasing the Skyrim legendary edition Game Guide. Last game guide I bought was for Fallout 3 and all its DLC and was quite large but this looks like it covers much more stuff. You know, if you were into reading game hints on actual... paper and all.

http://store.steampowered.com/sub/28187/
http://www.primagames.com/pages/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-legendary-edition-game-guide


Hey Paisanos! For retro Tuesday I decided to talk about a television show I watched the hell out of as a kid. It is a show I rarely ever missed and had a blast watching each episode. The Super Mario Brothers Super Show was the first taste I got of a video game theme show and quickly became my favorite of its era. Watching Mario, Luigi, the Princess and Toad foil Bowser over and over again never seemed to get dull. The plots were interesting and they seemed to add in the right amount of Mario-ness to the show. I even liked the live action set pieces between animation.

Each season of the Super Show is available on Netflix and YouTube now, so if you are interested in watching this again, its available. Some things I loved as a kid don't age well and The Super Mario Brothers Super show straddles that line. On one hand, the voice acting is done well but on the other hand not every aspect of the show holds up. Its not the aging quality of the visuals either and surprisingly I think the live action set pieces are some of the stronger parts.

If I can take point with the show now, and its not a huge point, is that the plots of the shows are a bit lost on "older jdodson." Each show is a take on a old fairy tale or some kind of folklore. Like Mario in Camelot, Mario and the Beanstalk and Mario in the Old West. None of these set pieces I find interesting and honestly I would prefer if they just had to stop Bowser or Wart in the plain-ol Mushroom Kingdom. Because of this, I point to the first episode as some of the best of the episodes because they simply exist in the Mushroom Kingdom without a fairy tale or folklore backing.

That said, the show is still fun in all its gloriously cheesy Mario-ness. I love the intro music and can still sing it by heart and get excited when the teaser for the Friday Zelda episode plays.