dev, computing and games

The portraits you make on IR-7000 are not merely for spicing up your address book. They are integrated with a "game" and that game is called Brain Drain.

In Brain Drain you choose a portrait to play as, and face off against a different portrait using psychic abilities. It is a bit thin on gameplay and soundtrack but it is kind of fun.

Eons ago I wanted to see if the outcomes of the game were pre-determined based on the character features or if there is some RNG. So I cloned one character to see. It turns out, there is some RNG.

video making of
May 29th, 2020 at 4:17 am | Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

The mid-late 90s personal organizer. The big companies making them were Sharp and Casio, although there were a lot of other ones.

I still have mine, the IR-7000, made by Sega. Looks like this:

Still works turns out.

Like the standard organizer it flipped open and had a QWERTY keyboard. It could store notes, addresses, do calculator functions, time zone calculations, set an alarm and show you a calendar. Plus, a hilarious "human portrait" maker along with a simple game you can play with the portraits.

If two people had IR-7000, you could use its infra-red communication to exchange messages, but I never came across someone who also had this organizer. The industry was really fragmented toward lots of different organizers and everyone seemed to have a different one.

The modern equivalent today would be something between a cellphone or tablet. Cellphone and tablet subsume all of the functionality that these organizers had, but in much more general-purpose ways with fuller software stacks. I can understand why these fuller software stacks are desirable yet in my heart I'm always keeping a space for the long battery life and reliability of this specialized tool for specific things.

May 27th, 2020 at 5:38 am | Comments & Trackbacks (3) | Permalink

Finished Final Fantasy Legend (GB)

This is a spin-off to the Final Fantasy series and related to the Sa-Ga series made by Square Enix.

The whole thing with Legend is it's "a lot more epic than it seems like it should be". See the games I remember Game Boy original were fairly light in subject matter, emotional power and how the story is delivered. But, this game:
• Levels with a scary unkillable monster
• Real actual character death
• An ending sequence where you fight the creator of the universe
Confirmed the creator of the universe is wearing a top hat
It turns out the composer for this game is also Nobuo Uematsu the same as mainline Final Fantasy series except for XIII. If you listen carefully you can hear similarities to the rest of the series' music.

For the gameplay, you have the flexibility of choosing all characters in your party and their type (Human, Mutant, Monster). The game suffers from some balancing issues which make certain bossfights far, far disproportionally harder than others.

There is apparently an homage to Legend in Final Fantasy XIII where (spoiler) Orphan can be killed instantly by Vanille's Death spell. It is not 100% guarantee but there is a chance particularly if staggered. In the Final Fantasy XIII Scenario Ultimania book it says outright this was an intentional reference to Legend.

November 22nd, 2018 at 9:24 am | Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Finished Professor Layton and the Last Specter (3DS),
and the bonus game that the USA version ships with, Professor Layton- Little London

This is the fourth installment in the Professor Layton series. The puzzles seem, on average, easier (maybe too easy?) compared to previous installments. But there is enough variety to keep it interesting, and the side puzzles like the model train set are fun and worthwhile.

Little London looks and plays a lot like Harvest Moon, if you isolate it down to all of the cutesy character interaction and none of the turnip farming.

I have a big problem with Little London.

The mechanics of the game are as follows: you have two stats, Wealth and Happiness, whereby Wealth is accrued from working at jobs and fulfilling requests from the various townspeople; Happiness is acquired also by fulfilling requests, however-- when you buy anything that costs X, X/2 will be added to your Happiness. Therefore, after unlocking the highest Wealth-giving quests in the game (and also the train ticket job), it's just a matter of buying expensive things over and over and until you reach the Happiness desired. Optionally, you can sell things (for less than was paid for) and buy them again to streamline this grind late-game.

Is this the kind of value system we want to be broadly promoting to people? Materialism??

Your character begins the game with a home and basic needs met. The Wealth is just for buying frivolous things. New furnishings, new clothes. Cosmetic accessories. These are great, sure, but to directly, numerically link the resulting happiness they provide with how much they cost feels totally unrealistic. Am I going to be ten times happier with a $200 curtains compared to $20? Should I really spend $5000 on a golden stuffed animal? There are some material things I've purchased which made me *less* happy, for example the Lion King for Super Nintendo.

 

 

August 18th, 2017 at 7:36 am | Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

>"Let's start playing pokemon sun!"

> Hi let's get you acquainted with the game. To start, choose your trainer profile image.
> How clever! (Although a little presumptuous) It automatically detected a female profile from my Nintendo account or something, so it shows me these photo options
> I pick the one in the top row, third from the left
> Everyone in the game calls me "My boy..."
> mfw

December 30th, 2016 at 10:21 pm | Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

This might be the best game, ever. Reason: Can't remember the last time I've come across a game with literally zero grind. No repetitive action. For the 'meat' of the game, solving puzzles- each puzzle is different with no repeats, nor any cheesy reprising the same puzzle with an only-slightly-different flavor. Shouldn't be such a novel thing but it really is.

Also no puzzles that rely on pure anagrams, big-time number crunching, external knowledge of other languages / scripts.  Nice.

March 14th, 2016 at 9:09 pm | Comments & Trackbacks (0) | Permalink