17May

Guild Wars 2: Back to Brilliant

Posted by Luley in Video Games | Leave a comment

gw2goty

Guild Wars 2, I’m sorry. There. I said it. Is everybody satisfied?

         People close to me know that I was quite the critic of Guild Wars 2 (GW2) for the longest time until I recently picked it up after my semester ended. Where did it go wrong for me, and how did it get right. Let’s talk about it. I was an early pre-orderer. Having participated in two of the pre-order Beta weekend events I had a good head start out of the gates with leveling to 80 after GW2 launched. I definitely wasn’t the first to hit 80, hell no, people who didn’t do beta hit 80 a few days before I did (I’m looking  at you venn.) but the fact of the matter is I had experienced all the game truly had to offer as soon as I had hit 80. So what else was there? Not that much. To start, WVW was a broken mess until, I dunno, a patch a few days ago. It still isn’t perfect but it is far more polished and runs much better. This had extensive testing and I do recognize how much effort went into all aspects of GW2. The game really is spectacular but the WVW was so ambitious that if there were twenty beta weekend events it would still need work because that’s just how online gaming works when ambition and revolution is your creed. On the subject of WVW, when I stated that it was a “broken mess,” I mean it was in desperate need of the revamp it got. MMORPG.com did a spectacular interview with Habib Loew, the WVW Coordinator and Principle Programmer. Some of the changes include World XP, and the removal of culling (in which the server wouldn’t display every character to every player). If you’re looking for a good example of culling, look it up in Phantasy Star Universe. Granted player information wasn’t removed, half of the player models one would see were fucking mannequins. There’s an added incentive to do well in WVW which is gone over well in the interview and I encourage everyone to read it.

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13May

Things Are Coming!

Posted by venn177 in Site News | Leave a comment

I apologize once more for the lack of updates plaguing this site. It’s more of the fact that there’s, ‘ya know, the whole college thing going on for me and Luley. The semester just started and we’re trying to get our shit in order before we continue, but that hasn’t stopped us yet! We’ve just completed recording on a new batch of videos that’s some of our best work.

Expect the next few days to be a lot of behind the scenes work, with the next week or so showing the payoff I’ve been haplessly promising for about two months now.

I sincerely apologize to all of you, but you can at least wait a few more minutes. Or hours. Or days. Whatever.

18Apr

An Official Announcement: Pokemon Purple (name pending)

Posted by venn177 in Pokemon Purple | Leave a comment

Everyone loves Pokemon games. LITERALLY everyone. No exaggeration here at all. But seriously, this is a project we tried once before that fell apart pretty fast and now we’re taking our time and working it out better (kinda like Branching Dialogue, hueHUEHUE).

Pokemon Purple is our take on a Pokemon game. It’ll have references that most people won’t get, and it’s just another romhack, but we’d like to keep it as authentic to the Pokemon experience as possible. There won’t be any new Pokemon, probably no custom tilesets, and the story won’t be hilariously complicated or original, but it’ll have the heart every Pokemon game does.

Some Backstory

This started out as me editing Pokemon Fire Red so that it had a lot more Pokemon in it and that they could all be caught in there. Then I recoded the beginning of the game so that you’d catch your own first Pokemon, rather than get one from Oak. But Luley wanted to make more maps and I am more than willing to do the coding once I’ve got the maps. So there you have it, we’re using a wiped game and rebuilding it from scratch as our own game with lots of Pokemon. We might be importing some Gen4 or 5 Pokemon, too. We’ll see how that goes. The last thing I want to do is make promises we can’t keep.

There’s not much to show right now but some concepts and a few finished maps, so fuck it. Once Luley has the first town finished (including interiors) we can get a playable demo out within a week. This isn’t a big project, and we should have it done within a couple of months once we get it all rolling.

Stay tuned for updates and more!

15Apr

Luley’s Weekly Roundup!

Posted by Luley in Weekly Roundup | Leave a comment

Hey guys, with a lot less professional formatting than the other owner of the site, here’s a roundup!

  • I’ve been hard at work making maps for Pokemon Purple. Nothing I want to reveal too much of until a later date but you can take my word on it when I say I do some pretty good work and get frostier by the day with Advance Map. I CAN reveal that I will be doing a lot of the NPC work as well as planning and whatnot. We don’t exactly have a plot but who play’s Pokemon games for the plot? Regardless, when we do figure it out you’ll know very little and we’re looking at having a demo out soon.
  • Castlevienna: Aria of Sorrow is my next playthrough for Luley’s Den. I’d say it has it’s ups and downs in terms of jokes but so far it’s been pretty interesting I guess? I have a boss new opening thanks to my buddy Brandon, whom I love dearly for his efforts and support through that TRYING time of doing absolutely nothing but school for like three weeks. Now my Semester has kind of wound down to a close so you’ll be seeing a lot more work.
  • Fishing. Yep. Fuckin’ fishing. Me and venn have been chilling an unhealthy amount, possibly to make up not having seen each other in like four years. It feels like I catch more cool shit because- as you may well know- I’m a lucky mofo.
  • Dead Space? Did that ever happen? Indeed it did. There was an issue with hard drive space that I’m STILL dealing with, but I am happy to announce that production of Luley’s Den: Dead Space is back on track! I went ahead and bought a pretty boss ass laptop that I’ll port my raw footage too until it’s time to do something with it, at which point it’ll be ported back to my main battle-station so that I can process and upload it. It’s a laptop for school but I don’t see how education will take up even 10 gigs of a 500 gigabyte HDD. It’s a pretty sweet Asus, sturdy, has an optical drive, all-in-all I’m happy with the purchase.
  • Podcasts? If you see news that is just generally disgusting that relates to gaming, we probably agree.  There’s your podcast. The Frosty Recon Squad videos are also sort of on a pause, but that’s getting picked back up eventually. Right now a lot of energy is going towards getting a demo out for Pokemon Purple.

That about wraps it up for Luley’s Weekly Round-up. If you have an questions or concerns or want to get in my pants, by all means email me at Luley@Branchingdialogue.net, or add me on Skype, the username is Luleychan09er.

14Apr

Venn’s Weekly Roundup: 4/8-4/14

Posted by venn177 in Weekly Roundup | Leave a comment

Hey guys. What a great day today is! Not really, but at least you got a smile, right? Fuck you. This has been a pretty eventful week. No official announcements, but whatever!

Games Being Played

  • Pokemon All Of It: Me and Luley have been playing the SHIT out of Pokemon in preparation of a big project we’ve started work on. There’s definitely a lot to be said for the addictiveness of Pokemon games, it would definitely make me feel good to give other people that same feeling!
  • Castlevania Aria of Sorrow: Luley’s doing that whole Luley’s Den on this game, but I’ve been playing through it for quite a while now. I’m finally getting done with it and it’s still almost on par with Symphony of the Night for great Castlevania games. Still.
  • Torchlight 2: There’s a lot of shit to do in this game and we’re definitely doing a second playthrough for mods alone.

There’s a lot of BLECH and it hasn’t been a big week for us playing games.

Work Being Done

  • A Project I’m Not Sure If Luley Wants Named: We have spent a lot of time setting up the basics of a project that we’ll be officially announcing once there’s either a playable demo or some form of something to show along with it. With the amount of time we’ve already dedicated to it, there’s a good chance we’ll have something playable within the month.
  • Writing: I CAN WRITE ARTICLES ME. Specifically, I’m really fucking hyped for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

So we’ve got a week on par with our regular down weeks, but a lot more WORK is being done behind the scenes that should give some level of payoff eventually. Keep yourselves up to date and rate/subscribe/comment/rss this site and everything and this joke really doesn’t work here in the world of text.

Thanks guys I’ll have sex with all of you,

venn

11Apr

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon: All Of My WAT

Posted by venn177 in Video Games | Leave a comment

Far-Cry-3-Blood-Dragon-logoThis isn’t a review or preview or anything analytical, it’s just me being absolutely confounded by the idea of this game being made. Don’t get me wrong– it looks fucking awesome, it’s just… why call it Far Cry 3? If you’re releasing it standalone and already changing so much, the only reason for the name must be for selling power (not that that’s bad, I’m just harping on something that’s mostly meaningless).

I’ll be the first to admit that random shit like this (which from the screenshots looks like a 3D version of Hotline Miami) and I’m definitely not complaining that it’s made. With it being standalone, there’s a 100% guarantee that a lot of people will check it out. After all, a big name title plus a small price tag is guaranteed to sell like hot cakes, even if it makes no fucking sense.

This is just a post that, well, everyone should know this exists and check it out when it comes out. Expect a full review as soon as I’m able to put down this what-the-fuckery.