PixlBit

Always happy to hear from you, Tami :)

The brown creeper bird sounds like an interesting sight (if you can find it). If I was a bird I'd like to be something stealthy like that.

The semester is over finally and the second it ended I started getting back to playing games. I've been marathoning a bunch of Metal Gear Solids back to back.

Remember at the beginning of this year when I told you I didn't like my chemistry class? When all was said and done I finished it with a B somehow, and I hated every second of it! It was soul crushingly boring up to the bitter end.

Back when I use to do blogs regularly I had a series I did called Guilty Pleasures and most of those games I highlighted could probably be considered B games. My favorite B game ever is still The Hobbit game developed by Inevitable Entertainment and published by Sierra in 2003. In my feature on it I explained the good and bad in depth but to make a long story short the music is great, the progression of the story, levels, and even the names of chapters sticks quite closely to the novel, and the charm factor is through the roof for me.

It's a mix of platforming and 3D action-adventure in which all the elements are executed in a pretty rudimentary way but are solid and somehow cohesive in the context of the story and overall feel of the game. And there's a significant amount of stealth gameplay in the game to serve the aspect of the story where Bilbo gets the one Ring and turns invisible when putting it on. Since stealth games are probably my favorite genre in game history I'm the type of person that can find a lot of joy even in the types of elementary stealth that happen in games like The Hobbit or Beyond Good & Evil.

This was the right game at the right time for me and at that point in my life I was the perfect person to become of a fan of its particular charm. I still play through this on Gamecube once every two years or so.

Fun fact about The Hobbit, the Game Audio Network Guild rewarded it with Best Original Game Soundtrack at GDC 2004. Listen to the two songs at the beginning and tell me they don't belong to a pretty charming game. One of the best parts of the game is that it's all original artwork and music, no tie-ins to the movies.

The new microphone and software sound pretty great, it's a noticeable improvement.

Thanks for the feedback for Game of Thrones. I played the demo of the first episode and it definitely hooked me, but I couldn't bring myself to buy it and then grab the season pass. I also don't necessarily want to wait so long between episodes so I'll wait until the whole game is out on disc like they've done with their other games and get it all together eventually.

The semester is one week from being over and the final tuition payment for the year is behind me so I'm trying to find games to buy. I ordered Saints Row 4 and DMC Devil May Cry from 2013 from Amazon but those are still on the way. Like I said I grabbed Saints Row because of Julian, but I ended up ordering DMC because of Dan Ryckert and all the good things he's had to say about that game. As Julian knows I basically take all my life advice from Ryckert, especially when it's Taco Bell related.

Since I'm holding off on Game of Thrones I think I'm going to get the Metal Gear Solid HD collection. I only ever played Twin Snakes for Gamecube, in addition to the MGS 1 PS1 demo I talked about in the comments of the previous NWP episode, so I've missed out on the majority of the MGS series. If I can get a PS4 this fall I'm sure I'll want to play Phantom Pain, but before that I want to try and play at least some of the previous games beforehand. The HD collection only has 2, 3, and Peacewalker, but it seems to be well recieved for what it is.

What language did you use for the game? I remember you saying that when you started learning to program in college it took a while for it to eventually click for you and I'm having a similar issue with object oriented stuff.

For the last two semesters in DarkBASIC and C++ they have been teaching us procedural programming, but the last two projects of this year have been easing us into object oriented stuff finally and building simple games with classes. I'm halfway done with a Battleship game at the moment and it's twisting my brain trying to keep track of all the classes, functions, getters, setters, and what everything is actually doing lol.

I starting gaming around 7 and I think I started having game dreams ever since, and they only started to get more intense during highschool and the adolesence/puberty what have you during that period. As a child I had  countless dreams where I was like Mario but I was platforming in 1st person. In hindsight it might be one of the early indicators that years later I would end up loving Mirror's Edge so much; my brain had already been doing similar things in dreams long before. When I was doing the platforming I could jump super high whenever I wanted to, but the dreams always felt so real that once I started falling back down to the ground after a long jump my brain evoked the feeling of your stomach lurching up because of the negative gravity and it always caused me to wake up. So without fail that's always how my 1st person Mario dreams eventually ended.

As a really young kid I remember having dreams about Metal Gear Solid after I played the demo on some demo disc I happened across. The grittiness and maturity of the game really struck me at that age. I specifically dreampt about the section where you get into the hangar I think, and you're crawling in the vents and you see a woman being held captive and I think you release her. I don't remember, but it was a really memorable demo stylistically and substantively, especially seeing it so young.

Once I was in high school I started having dreams about imaginary areas, basically level designs and art styles, and many of them I dreamed about repeatidly over the years. There were at least a few dozen different places I kept coming back to, some of them I started forgetting the important details of in the years since. Most of the time there was no action in the dreams, it was just a place with an atmosphere and I was wandering around. Once I was out of high school and into college up until now I actually started having more dreams about actual designs and action.

The most recent one was some kind of stealth game where the player was in third person with an Uncharted/Tomb Raider reboot feel to the movement and camera dynamics. In the dream I was in a dark dilapidated three story house which was hanging on the edge of a cliff and some malevolent force was searching the house for you, and the whole place was destructible so the entity was ripping entire sections of the house down to see if you're there. And as the player you could hide in between walls and creep into all the nooks and crannies of an old house that you could imagine. At the end of the dream the spirit tore off one whole side of the house, the side looking out over the cliff that the house is hanging onto. There was some kind of vast grey melanhcholy vista and the sound of rain and then I can't remember anything else about it.

These days since I went back to college I haven't been dreaming about games as much but because I'm doing assignments and projects almost all week and even through the weekends I dream about math and coding all the time, at least once a week. I have dreams where I'm doing trigonometry assignments, and working on projects and games from my C++ class.  I have Tetris dreams all the time too because I play a lot of that while I have downtime at school. I play it before bed a lot as well so that's probably the biggest factor.

Any game I'm really into will make me dream about it at some point. When Fable 2 came out and I binge-played it for a couple weeks I dreampt about it almost every night vividly with the music, art, voice acting and everything. I had dreams about whole matches of Civilization Revolution one time.

To wrap it up, the scariest nightmares I've ever had were because of video games. I had the worst dreams of my life while I was playing the F.E.A.R. story expansion packs for the first time. Alma genuinely terrifies me in that game and they ramp it up significantly for the expansions. And being in first person makes it feel like I'm right there with her and I can't escape.

I also had a pretty intense and visually robust dream about Dead Space 2 where I was one of the helpless civilians running around during the intial outbreak of necromorphs on the Sprawl space-city. I didn't actually die or get attacked, I was just in a triage center hiding with other people and some of the wounded patients started turning into necromorphs and we all ran for it.

This was really great, and the finished production wasn't nearly as bad as Julian said it would be, you must have cleaned it up really nicely. It was fantastic you guys were able to get Mr. Klepek on the show. I watched him and Alex Navarro do the morning podcast on Giant Bomb twice a week for about a year and I was always interested in his view. Most importantly as a huge fan of Souls games I think Patrick is a great ambassador for the games and he knows how to talk about the games in terms of their strengths and faults alike.

One mechanic I want to see in more games is not really a mechanic but ever since Halo 3 I've wanted to see more games do big outdoor levels with huge machines that you can board and fight inside like the mobile Scarabs that had their own AI. Every Halo game since 3 has lacked that sense of awe and action in the mission design.

Every time the scarabs showed up in Halo 3 it was like the Halo version of Shadow of the Collosus. It was some of the best fun I ever had playing co-op; driving around a huge encounter space with a lot of angles of attack, experimenting with tactics, and seeing all the crossfire and shenanigans that happen when you have dozens of combatants on the field and some giant AI robot in the middle of it all recking havok. A machine which you could board in multiple ways if you got creative with it. It was so good. Halo action has been scaled back ever since then and they've gotten away from the big action sandbox designs that made those levels in Halo 3 fantastic, in my opinion.

Every blog I write is puppy gate, and I bring the pics to prove it. When I actually blog that is. Been a few months.

This week we are on spring break at the college and I don't have any homework over the break, so I've finally been gaming again. I finished the Lonesome Road DLC in Fallout New Vegas and I'm about to do the final quest of the main game. I beat my high score in Spelunky and set a new personal best at $760,400 in loot on a full run through the main game and the secret level & boss.

I binge watched the 4th season of Game of Thrones last month so I'm all caught up on that. I'm over halfway through A Dance with Dragons and I'm trying to finish it before spring break is over so I can talk to my friend Jana about it, since she just finished it recently.

In our computer science class I finished a dice game called Pig in C++ that you play against the computer and it's actually pretty fun. I ended up enjoying playing my own game, it was neat. People say that games are always huge shit shows up until the last sliver of development time and that's how everything has been so far for the games we've been programming. My Pig game didn't even work for two weeks (it was only supposed to take a week at most in the first place), it was a huge mess until one random afternoon everything came together, then I spent one more day on polish and presentation, then I turned it in. I'm going to write a pixlbit blog soon and I'll have some screen captures of it to show everyone.

This second half was definitely worth the wait. It might not be the funniest NWP episode but it definitely feels like the best one, and the title of the episode encapsulates why. As a person that's been listening since the beginning and never missed a show I've always felt pretty intense currents running beneath the personas, especially for Julian. Life events and mental health have been topics that have been brought up on many past episodes over the last year or more especially, but not in any detail till now. Over time things seemed to be getting darker and darker behind the scenes, and Julian opening up to us in this show puts a lot of it in perspective now, and most importantly is a great catharsis we can all share in a way. As dark as this episode gets, it ultimately comes out the other end with an incredibly hopeful and powerful light. Julian, Patrick, Angelo, and Liana all get internet hugs for being so open and supportive. It made for a really important show.

I've played a lot of Mass Effect 1 over the years and that game made me contemplate who I am in real life. I play that game by saving before every conversation and immediately reloading if I feel like I made a mistake. At first I thought about it purely as a game mechanic. I also play Splinter Cell games in a very perfectionist way, and I obsess over all the details, saving constantly and reloading constantly. In Splinter Cell those habits are based around a binary stealth system where you're either hidden or not, but in Mass Effect my obsession with doing things exactly how I wanted was now in a context of interpersonal relations, ethics, and values. I loved exploring every single possibility and following the dialogue tree in every direction until I knew exactly what my Shepard should do next.

By the time I finished the first Mass Effect I had saved the game hundreds of times, mined out every conversation, made my decisions, and crafted essentially the "perfect" Shepard. It made me proud to look back at those choices, and look back at my fictional character that I role-played for 60 hours, but there was a disconnect and a sadness there that I didn't catch onto until long after. In real life I was sad that you can never be that video game hero. You can't save everybody, make all the right choices, always know what to say, or reload your save when your mess up. It was the age old disconnect where you're comparing the way you wish the world was and the way it actually is.

Psychologically it wasn't until Dark Souls and Spelunky came along that I started seeing video games in an entirely different light, and to some extent the real world. Those two games are some of my favorites, moreso than even Mass Effect, and in those two games the only way to appreciate the immense depth and reward they offer is to concede that you're not perfect, and to know that the world of each game will push back against you harshly. You're not the stoic hero in either story. And regardless of what kind of combat style you role-play in Dark Souls, or what power ups you come across in Spelunky, you still have to die and keep trying like anybody else. In Dark Souls and Spelunky you have to fail in order to learn, and you have to be willing to lose things and move on despite almost all of video game history conditioning us to behave the opposite way. No reloading saves or endless do-overs in dialog trees.

When I play those games I feel less stressed out, less of a desire to be "right", and the satisfaction of making progress or surviving a dangerous situation is much more empathetic and relateable than the feeling I'd get from role-playing a "perfect" character in Mass Effect.

That's why I defend those games so passionately and get upset when people say that they're just overly difficult games that elitist nerds use as a badge of honor.

I've played Spelunky over 2,500 times, and I've only "won" 15 times, but I've loved every session I've sat down to play. 2,485 "failures" have never felt so good. And I'll keep throwing myself at it for thousands of more sessions.

When I play Dark Souls and Spelunky I feel like it's okay to just be exactly who I am, pick up the controller, and try my best.

I played it on 360 and it was great. I played a couple hours on PS4 and the only difference is the visuals. The load times are longer on next gen as well. It was just fine on 360 and there's only one disc so nothing about it is a hassle thankfully.