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 On 08/22/2018 at 11:09 PM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
I went to The Franklin Institute in Philly today to see the Game Masters Exhibit. Then I ran through some more PS2 games to see if I still wanted them. Finally, I got back to Banner Saga 2, trying to get to the end of the story.
Game Masters Exhibit:
This is the whole 3rd floor of the museum and featured seminal games from master developers across all time. The first area was 80s arcade cabinets. The next was developer showcases from the 90s to the present. Here’s some pictures (not very good ones) to act as talking points.
Concept art for Psychonauts
Warren Specter's collection of Mickey memoribilia
Warren Specter's Toon pen and paper game.
Castle British, I think, from Ultima II
A very large model of the tour bus from Brutal Legend.
I also sampled some indie games, even though you could play a lot of classics on PC or on console. I tried this indie game Botanicula where you control some plants walking around on tree branches collecting feathers. It had a beautiful art style I couldn’t avoid. Then I tried Blueberry Garden, which was a doodle art, 2D adventure/platformer. I thought it was interesting. I tried From Dust which was a kind of god game where you, as a spirit, have to help this ancient tribe navigate a landscape and complete tasks. I also played a local indie game, Why Are We Running. It’s a top down game where you run around a city and collect gems and avoid street thugs. There was also 8bit Ben Franklin, a Mario Bros style game with Ben Franklin collecting keys.
I also watched some people play stuff like Fruit Ninja on a giant TV, Dance Central, Singstar and Rock Band.
I think my favorite part was seeing a lot of concept art for games like Psychonauts and Ico/Shadow of the Colossus.
I wanted to try some VR in another part of the museum, but there were too many kids in line, so I passed.
At Mark’s place later, I started my PS2: Here’s a pic.
Theme Park Roller Coaster. A fine sim game where you build a theme park and manage its funding and keep it maintained. I think I like Zoo Tycoon a bit better for ease of controls, but you can do a lot in Theme Park Roller Coaster, like build a roller coaster and ride it.
Kessen, but it didn’t work. Probably a bad disc.
Maximo: Ghosts to Glory. Great action platformer in a 3D world. I was calling it God of War for the younger set. Thing is, I couldn’t figure out how to get it to save. Without saving at checkpoints, I couldn’t stand it.
Blood Will Tell. Great cut-scenes in this Japanese, Sengoku period, adventure, sword fighting game. Controls are pretty good. There are power up attacks and you get a helper along the way you can give commands to. I played this the longest. The object is to reclaim 48 of your body parts from demons. I got my vocal cords and an eye back. The story is pretty good about a father who sells his first born to demons for worldly power. The demons take the boy’s body parts and he’s left with something, I wondered what. A stranger takes the boy in and gives him prosthetics full of weapons. When the boy grows up, he goes in search of his real body parts. Some aspects of this game reminded me of God Hand, especially the power up attack where you have to hit buttons in a special order to activate it. Oh, and you have two swords for arms, legs that shoot rockets, and an arm that also shoots bullets.
Back to Xbox One and Banner Saga 2: I played a lot of it, getting to chapter 13 or so. I think I’m closing in on the end of the game. I’m getting quite frustrated with the battles. I may be winning, but I leave a lot of bodies on the field that I think could’ve been saved. I’m especially annoyed at my archers getting killed. Seems I can’t keep them out of the melee no matter what I do. I’m still amazed by how good the music is and the animation. Cut-scenes are like the coolest animated TV show ever. The story is super grim though, and so many characters get killed. You’re constantly escaping by the skin of your teeth and taking heavy losses. It kind of weighs on you after a while.
Tomorrow some more. I’ll be ripping through more PS2 games and trying to finish Banner Saga 2.
PS: Just a thought. Is this web site falling apart? I can't update my profile and the blog buttons are in the wrong place. I wonder how much longer this will last.
A lot of my PS2 favorites - FFXII, FFX, and Okami in particular - are on PS4 and Switch, in the case of Okami. I wish DQVIII would get a PS4 or Switch remake.
I was kind of interested in Maximo as a 3-D follow-up to Ghosts 'n' Goblins and Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, but I never picked it up.
in keeping with the series, Maximo is no cakewalk. Game is about patience. I don't think a Souls comparison would be out of place this time around.
I'm working on my patience but repetition really grinds my gears.
I would love a console port of DQVIII. I thought it was strange to put it on 3DS. It's has such a world that should be on a big screen. It needs that symphonic soundtrack too.
Maximo: Ghosts to Glory seemed pretty good. I just wanted to save at all the checkpoints in the world but it wouldn't let me. I have the other one, Army of Zin, and will try that too.
hey I'm gonna email Nick tomorrow about the blog page being messed up and I will mention you can't update your profile.
Matt did email and I got the blog page fixed up. Looks like wherever you originally write these posts and then paste them in here it carries all sorts of styles that wind up breaking the site lol. It's not too tough to fix now that I know what's wrong, but I did edit your post to fix the styles.
I'd say I'd permanently fix it, but I'm rewriting the whole site, so I probably won't bother. Eventually it'll all change anyway. As far as the profile editing, let me know what error you're getting (you can PM it to me, if you're getting one). Otherwise, give me some more details and I'll see what I can do for a short term fix.
Well, I've been writing in Word on OneDrive and pasting from there. That seems ok to me. The part that's weird is when I go to the page where all my blogs are on Pixlbit and the "post new blog" is out of the right column and all the way at the bottom of the page.
The profile updating is weird. When I added new content to my profile and saved it, it didn't appear. But it's there when you click to edit it. I've noticed this also happens sometimes when I try and edit a reply to a comment too. The edit doesn't appear when I update it.
Oh yea, and I wanted to change the font size in my blog posts, so after I pasted it in from OneDrive, I went into the HTML and made the 11pt, 12pt. It didn't seem to change anything, though, which is weird.
That sounds like a caching issue in your browser. If your browser cached the page with the content looking a certain way and it reloads, it might pull from the cache rather than get a fresh copy of the information from the server.
Looks like OneDrive is probably adding the style stuff that's breaking the site and making the column drop down. It adds a div with a style that pushes the right box down. I could probably figure out how to sanitize the text in the paragraph and get rid of the styles of the sake of display on that page, but like I said, at this point I probably won't. I'll fix it up in the new version of the site.
I'm on a school computer right now, so I'll try and update my profile from here and see what happens.
Microsoft does it again. Maybe I'll write it in Word locally and paste from there instead of from Word Online. I'll see if that works better, or maybe fixes the problem.
Thanks for all your work. I love the design of your site. It's why I'm still here. I wish I could figure out how to make it grow.
Thanks sir, very much appreciated! Growing the site isn't easy and it definitely falls a bit on me for not keeping up with it as much as I should. Hoping with the rewrite I can build in some better SEO stuff so we rank a bit higher and attract more organic traffic.
I was able to update my profile on another computer and I think I know what you mean about Word Online breaking the site. Something in the HTML made the text too wide somewhere and bumped the right panel to the bottom of the page. So it seems that every problem I had, I created myself. Ha! I'll try not to break the site next time.
Thanks.
I think the website will be fine, and I'm looking forward to what Nick does. You should PM him about the issues, as he said.
I really need to get to the Dallas Video Games Museum. I'd probably be looking at all the concept art as well, assuming they have a decent amount. I don't really know what's in it.
I thought it was great they had so many playable games there, even old classic PC games like System Shock.
That video game museum sounds cool. It still stings that the video game museum 10 minutes away from my house wouldn't hire me.
Did you know that I met Warren Spector and got to sit with him in a roundtable with other media people at PAX one year? That's one of the feathers in my game reviewing cap!
Maximo is a neat 3-D spin off of the Ghosts N Goblins series. It's really hard, though, just like the originals. I think they even make it hard to save your game. I think you have to collect coins to give to Death to save and continue. The neat thing about Maximo is that I know one of the guys who worked on it. He also worked on Pac-Man World and was a Disney Imagineer at one point. I still keep up with him on FaceBook. Right now he's mostly designing board games. I want to review the one he recently came out with, Pantone. We'll see how that goes.
Meeting Warren Specter would be great. Lucky you.
Ghosts N Goblins, that was the game I was trying to remember. I knew it was taken from that just the name escaped me.
Having to earn a save is kind of cruel. I'm not doing it.
I recently played Pac-Man World 1 and 2 on GBA. They weren't too bad.
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