So yesterday I came across a very basic loader for Tiled Maps (*.tmx) made with the Tiled Map Editor. It only supported the basics–Tileset loading and Layer rendering–so I took it upon myself to complete the loader by adding support for the rest of the features that were left out;

-added ProhibitDtd = false, so you don’t need to remove the doctype line after each time you edit the map.
-changed everything to use SortedLists for named referencing–so much easier
-added objectgroups
-added movable and resizable objects
-added object images
-added meta property support to maps, layers, object groups and objects
-added support for non-binary encoded layer data
-added layer and object group transparency

I created a simple demo to show off some of the features. You should see a partially transparent object with a resized image of Ness (Earthbound) on top of a partially transparent layer of grass with the words “Tile Maps Rule” written in rock with a pulsating opacity. Use the arrow keys to move Ness around. All objects and object groups can have their X and Y coordinates set dynamically, so you can do cool stuff like parallax clouds drifting overhead.

Download the Tiled Maps Loader

I was totally blown away by this fantastic game! It’s got style, it’s got game play and it’s got some actual challenge to it. It’s not hard, so much as it makes you actually think about what you are doing. It’s not just a point and shoot action game, you have to think about how you can most effectively stop your enemies form stopping you first. Once you figure out what you need to do, it’s just a matter of doing it, unlike many modern shooters that seem to be more based on luck than actual thought and skill. You feel a much greater sense of accomplishment when you figure out how to beat a boss in this than you do in other games when you finally manage to live long enough to fill the bosses with enough bullets to drop a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I could play this game for hours on end and completely lose track of the time. It’s just so entertaining. The consistently fast pace in this game keeps it very engaging and exhilarating–but be careful! You just might forget you should have been in bed seven hours ago!

You start off as a member of a rebel group, fighting their way through wave after wave of well-armed baddies scattered throughout a city in Japan in the post-apocalyptic future. The city is overrun by these strange mutant animals that resulted from an experimental species of animal created specifically as food and raised on the island of Hokkaido. In this post-war future life is peaceful, but as a result; overpopulation has rapidly accelerated and there is a rather immediate need for a more stable and replenish able food source. A group of sceientists genetically engineer a specific creature for the cause, but mutations gradually occur and these new creatures begin hunting their own hunters and eventually escaping the confines of Hokkaido and invading greater Japan. These creatures are referred to as the Ruffians.

Japan was in dire need of some saving at this point and commissioned the Armed Volunteers to save the country, however; they saw it more fitting to oppress the citizens and try to take control for themselves. The last hope of Japan seemed to be lost in the chaos, however; a strange rumor began to surface. A rogue group known as the Savior Group was on the hunt to take out some Ruffians and save the citizens of Japan. What was strange about this rumor was that all the members of the group were said to have been cured of various illnesses via the miraculous power of a mysterious woman known as Achi.

The story follows two teenage members of the Savior Group, Saki and Airan, as they battle the Ruffians and try to retake Japan from it’s seemingly hopeless state. They, like many others, received the salvation of Achi and were healed of their illnesses on the condition that they devote themselves to fighting the Ruffians and saving Japan from spiraling into a state of chaos and despair.

The game plays like a standard, arcade style, on-rails shooter, but it is very unique in comparison and has a much more prevalent story progression than most on-rails, arcade shooters. Everything is very anime themed, from the over dramatic story to the colorful and highly stylized graphics. So if you like a good epic scifi anime adventure this game will sure fill the bill.

Sin & Punishment was a hit Nintendo 64 game in Japan that, for various reasons, never made it to North America. But after an incredible number of requests for it to be included on Nintendo’s Virtual Console it finally made it to the finger tips of millions of Wii owners all across North America. This game was recognized by the game importing community for it’s english voice acting with japanese subtitles, which made it a very popular game to import. Flash forward a few years to the current and now you don’t have to import it! Just turn on your Wii, load up the Shopping Channel and download Sin & Punishment right off the Virtual Console section!

This game was created by legendary game developer, Treasure; a game company known for making some of the biggest cult classic video games, but they’ve laid dormant in recent years. You may know them for Gunstar Heroes or Radiant Silvergun and it’s sequel Ikaruga. They are the creators of many of the most sought after imported games of all time, and now they are back to finally bring their fantastic futuristic adventure, Sin & Punishment, to the western hemisphere!

If you like the good old arcade style rail shooters or epic scifi anime (or even both!) I very highly recommend you give this game a try! It is most certainly worth the mere 1200 Wii Points it costs on the Virtual Console. It is a rather challenging game, but in a way that makes you really want to keep trying to figure out what to do rather than just being frustratingly impossible. Current Gen game developers need to figure out that there is a difference between challenging game play and broken game play. >.>

Just now my Xbox 360 arrive in the mail from it’s quick trip to the repair center after my bazillionth RRoD since I bought the thing. >.>

…and by ‘quick’ I mean ‘did Microsoft buy out the Aperture Science labs? Because that was bloody fast compared to last time.’

My 360 has gone to game console heaven and miraculously been revived on it’s death bed more times than I care to recall, but every time the repair took at least a month from sending it initially to receiving the replacement. This time it took just over 2 weeks! I guess it’s back to my hopeless addiction to Eternal Sonata and Bioshock for me.

I picked up Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings when it came out and man was I ever surprised by this game! I’ve come to expect pretty much everything with the Final Fantasy name attached to it to be an instant classic, but even so, I still felt some skepticism of a roleplaying game on a handheld. Good handheld RPGs just plain don’t exist–or so I thought until I plugged this little plastic cartridge full of win into my DS.

Now before you start attacking me for making the generalization that all handheld RPGs suck I’ll just say that there have been some pretty good handheld RPGs, but nothing that you could actually call a truly epic RPG, nor that you could call anything more than good. Minish Cap, for example, was fun, but it was by no means as awesome as Twilight Princess or Ocarina Of Time. RPGs just don’t tend to lend themselves to handheld gaming.

Revenant Wings sought to change that, and it succeeded tremendously. Most handheld RPGs are basically time-wasters with a storyline, while Revenant Wings is an epic adventure with a quick and modular gameplay system, so you don’t have to play through hours upon hours of grinding to walk across a single map to the next story segment. The first FFXII was an excellent game, albeit plagued with the never-ending grind gameplay of FFXI.

Revenant Wings basically structures the game into ‘mission’ segments reminiscent of Tactics with it’s victory conditions system. Each map usually starts with an intro event where the characters talk a bit about what is going on, then there is a bunch of enemies to fight against and after that, a victory event where they talk about what they are going to do next.

The dialog is cleverly written to remind you where you left off in the previous mission and providing some depth of what will happen in the current mission. It has a powerful and intriguing story while still maintaining the handheld gaming style of being able to pick up where you left off easily without losing track of what was going on.

The graphics were also very beautiful. the DS isn’t as technologically capable as other handhelds in the graphics department, but many games like this more than make up for it in graphical style. Everything looks so cool and unique in the game and the epic landscapes from the first game certainly were well represented in this one.

The music, as with any Final Fantasy game, was fantastic. But I found the soundtrack to this game had a slightly different and powerful allure to it. It wasn’t just another rehash of the same soundtrack that has been used in every FF since the dawn of time. Much of the music was more radically expanded upon than in the previous games, which was rather refreshing to listen to.

If you have a DS and are a fan of RPGs I very highly recommend giving this game a try. I enjoyed every minute of it. I liked it so much that I made that nice shiny wallpaper for at the top from some of the awesome concept art I found for it on the net.

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My Xbox 360 has, once again, gone to game console heaven. I’m really starting to think I should just get this all over with and get a PS3. The Xbox 360 has better games presently, but I’m sure they’d be even more fun if I could actually play them instead of staring blankly at the box and cursing Microsoft under my breath. I guess for now I’ll have to survive on Crysis and Wii or PS2 games…actually, that doesn’t sound half bad. Maybe this time Microsoft will take their time and send me a new 360 that’ll actually work for more than half a year. I love my Xbox 360–but seriously, Microsoft; learn to build a less failure-prone game console.

If you don’t know what Crysis is you have probably been living under a rock for the past year; it is the biggest shooter in years. The graphics are like nothing else–but the physics are where it really shines; you can cut trees in half with bullets and leaves actually move around when they are shot at! Coming from the same studio that made Far Cry, it is to be expected that the lighting looks a little on the overly colorful, slightly fake side. It’s not really a problem, it still looks fantastic, but if you want that extra little bit of realism keep reading! I’m going to walk you through the Sandbox Editor that comes with the demo.

Let’s start with the lighting; lower graphics settings get rather cartoony looking. The above screenshot is apparently evening–doesn’t exactly look it, does it? How about now?

First, you’ve got the demo installed. Now go go to this folder on your computer C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/Crytek/Crysis SP Demo/Sandbox2 Installer/ and then run the installer file located there. After the installation has completed go to C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/Crytek/Crysis SP Demo/ and then, depending on whether you are running a 64 bit operating system or not, select the Bin32 or Bin 64 folder (If you don’t know how many bits your operating system is, it’s probably 32.) and run the Editor.exe file. You might also want to make a shortcut to it by right clicking on it, selecting copy and then, on the desktop, right clicking and selecting Paste Shortcut.

Now that the program is open select File, select Open and then go into the island folder and select island.cry. After it has gone through all the various loading procedures click the terrain menu at the top and select Time Of Day. A window will pop up with a menu on the side–select Import From File and use this file (Thanks to Seith from SeithCG.com). Poof! The lighting is now automagically much better looking!

If you like, you can play around with the graph things in the miiddle of that window to make your own tweaks. As you can probably see though; there is quite a bit you can do to the light and you could mess it up pretty bad if you don’t know what you are doing. Good thing you can just open the file again if you mess up the settings!

Now the lighting looks fantastic…what now? How about we play with the water a bit? Don’t you think the water in Crysis is a little too eerily transparent green looking? I’m not sure whether to think those boats out there are dumping toxic sludge or that the ocean has a really great water filter. Here’s what it used to look like;

A little to green, I think. How about now?

It’s quite easy changing the basic ocean appearance. In the Rollup Bar on the right of the screen click the second tab with the green icon on it, then click environment and a bunch of settings will be displayed below. Under ocean, try changing the FogColor value to something a little more blue, I used 31,75,105. Now try and change the FogColorMultiplier and FogDensity a bit. Water is usually much more murky, so I moved the Density up to 0.3, but that makes the color quite a bit darker, which is where the FogColorMultiplier comes in. I moved it up to 0.25 and voila! Nice, pretty and real looking water!

Now that you’ve made Crysis look even better in the Editor you need go to File and Save it and then select File and Export To Engine, or the game itself will stay the same as it was before!

PS: While you are messing about with the spiffy Sandbox Editor, you might want to check out the Tornado. They make everything very, very dangerous…and yes; that is the ground at the top left of the screen.

Behold! 57 Hummers exploding in fiery mayhem!

Sometimes you can walk into a music store and listen to an album to see if you like it, or download a demo of a game off the internet to see if the game was actually fun–sometimes being the key word there. For the most part, this simply is not the case. How can you expect someone to buy something that they don’t even know they will enjoy? And for such unreasonable prices, I might add!

You know how much it costs to have DVDs pressed? Approximately $0.50 per disk. The current generation of video games costing between $50 and $70, that’s over a 10000% profit margin! The production budget of Halo 3 was less than most major blockbuster movies like Spiderman 3, so why does Halo 3 sell for $70, while I can find Spiderman 3 DVDs all over the place for $20? Greed.

But I said that piracy even helps the economy didn’t I? Well, yes; I did. If it weren’t for piracy I never would’ve found Serenity or Casshern, two of my favorite movies, I never would’ve found about 90% of the music I listen to, I never would’ve found out Gitaroo Man was such a fun game.

Would you deprive me of my enjoyment in hopes that I buy your product? That doesn’t exactly seem like a very effective marketing strategy to me…

Open Source is the future, in all respects. You will never get anything back if you never give in there first place. I’m not saying we should all turn commie and live in identical mud huts, but we should have the freedom to support what we want to and only IF we decide we want to. We should be given the chance to experience it for ourselves before deciding if we want to fork over $50+ for it, these things should not be concealed. You know what my greatest regret is? That I actually paid for Beyond The Beyond. That game was so horrible I snapped it into little pieces and melted it, so no one else would make the mistake of inserting that cancerous disk into their poor defenseless Playstation.

I have plenty of pirated stuff, yet I, on more than one occasion, have donated up to $100 to some random programmer on the internet for programming fun games independently. They released the games for free to anyone, but I felt it was deserving enough of my support, so am I still a thief for downloading a game I never would have paid for anyway? Tell me that.

So why is piracy so much more rampant now than way back in the olden days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth? It’s not. There is a greater number of people involved in the piracy scene, but there is also a greater number of people in general. The ratio has actually decreased rather significantly. How many of you couldn’t dig through your house and find an old mix tape lying around somewhere? That was piracy. Everyone had mix tapes back in the day, piracy is not a new thing at all. It just got easier because that’s what time does; it improves things. If, in several decades, the efficiency of piracy had not improved it would be nothing short of an miracle.

Piracy isn’t a bad thing though; sure, it adds a bit of unbalance to the equation, but more often than not, it gets you more attention. Everyone likes free stuff, even if it’s not ‘technically’ legal.

That having been said there is one simple reason why piracy still exists even when it shouldn’t; everything sucks. That is the first expectation anyone has until proven otherwise these days, because that is quite often the case. The market has been flooded with so much mediocrity that it becomes nigh impossible to sift through it all to find those rare, hidden treasures. Thus is the dark side of the technology age. But with the technology age many of these hidden gems wouldn’t even exist because even the companies producing all this mediocrity follow the mindset that everything sucks until proven otherwise. You can’t go to a game company and say, “Hey! I’ve got this cool idea for a game!”, because they’ll just tell you to buzz off. That certainly doesn’t help to promote creativity. I don’t know about you, but I’m not really looking forward to Burnout 17.

I’m sure you anime fans know piracy all too well. Fansubs are treading on mighty thin ice, and could quite easily be interpreted as an immoral practice. They continue to be released because someone loves the shows so much that they feel others deserve to see the show too–even need to see the show too. We’re it not for piracy, I would never have experienced the greatness of Makoto Shinkai’s or Hayao Miyaaki’s works, I never would have experience anime at all. This blog would not exist. The several thousand people that read this blog would likely be in the same position. It is unfair to conceal such a powerful art from such an expansive audience.

Art is to be shared, not locked away for only a privileged few to experience.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. If you know any employees of the entertainment industry send them the link to this post. This is a message that needs to be seen, before the entire entertainment industry simply collapses into itself from such anti-creative methods.

It’s rumored that the extra video in the secret ending of Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix is a trailer of the next Kingdom Hearts game, Birth By Sleep for the PSP. This rumor actually has some strong backing based on the various details revealed at the Tokyo Game Show.

Plot Synopsis quoted from Wikipedia:

Birth by Sleep focuses on the story of Keyblade masters before Sora from the original Kingdom Hearts game and is a prequel, taking place ten years before the original Kingdom Hearts. Nomura has stated that though there are three scenarios, there is not one singularly important scenario or character, but that the main theme is Ven’s identity. It is also believed to be connected to the unlockable trailers at the end of Kingdom Hearts II and Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix. The story revolves around three Keyblade apprentices in search of a missing Keyblade master, Master Xehanort, and his apprentice. Their disappearance foreshadows a great disaster. The game will take place entirely in Disney-themed worlds, both new and old, and will reflect the time difference between this game and the previous Kingdom Hearts games.

The basic translation of the video is;

“The sealed tale of the truth.”
“There is no such thing as coincidence in fate.”
“All the fates have been set.”
“After a long time, each fate…”
“Will await the awakening of a new tale.”

So what do you think of the concept for the next Kingdom Hearts game? Yay? Nay? I think it could be good, though it seems quite a bit darker than the other games so far. It apparently takes place entirely in Disney Worlds, so maybe I’m wrong; but the trailer didn’t really give me much of a Kingdom Hearts feel aside from the heart moon. Mind you, the second Kingdom Hearts was a little darker and realistic than the first and I preferred it, perhaps I might like a darker atmosphere in it. Maybe it could mean more screen time for the good old Pumpkin King.

Yasunori Mitsuda, known for his legendary composition in the famed Chrono series, has been commissioned to arrange 2 pieces of music for the upcoming Wii title Super Smash Bros Brawl. One can only speculate, at this time, what his involvement could mean. But considering Mitsuda’s previous compositions on Nintendo platforms it is entirely possible that he could be updating the theme songs of your favorite characters from Chrono Trigger! Who wouldn’t want to hand out a generous portion of pain as Crono or Frog?

This is of course just more churning of the rumor mill, but considering Square Enix has expressed interest in having their characters used in the Smash Bros franchise and Yasunori Mitsuda is arranging music for Brawl; it’s entirely possible we may yet see Crono as a playable character. Certainly the fans have been begging and pleading for it. It seems like every second forum post I see in all the “Who would you like to see in SSMB” threads around the interenet asks for Crono.

So of course, I must ask the obligatory question; Who would you like to see in Super Smash Bros. Brawl?

Pre-order your copy now at Play-Asia.

Gitaroo Man is a very odd game but is, quite possibly, the best rhythm game of all time. It is so very Japanese it hurts. I’m sure the development team we’re all tripping on acid when they made this game…it certainly feels like you are when you are playing it. The game starts off with you playing as a regular kid named U-1 having troubles with school work, girls and bullies that has just arrived home after a long and arduous day at school. Suddenly your dog, Puma, speaks to you saying that you are the heir to the legendary Gitaroo-Man legacy and that you need to learn how to use the power of Gitaroo to save the universe. You are the only remaining Gitaroo-Man, so you must journey through space battling Gravillions to take back the other Gitaroos they have taken.

Gravillions vary in form and finagle, but all are undoubtedly members of an evil organization bent on collecting all the Gitaroos. They range from a skeleton trio to a mechanical hammer-head space shark to a rather obvious Micheal Jackson mockery. The characters are all very unusual and entertaining, as are their personalities–to but it bluntly; every character in this game is utterly insane. In battle against these Gravillions you use to power of Gitaroo, which is the power to play a really awesome guitar solo on your futuristic guitar known as a Gitaroo. The music in the game is very, very awesome guitar music and I could listen to the soundtrack on repeat until the day I died.

If you like rhythm games or even just music I highly recommend this game. But be warned, this is a very challenging game, it’s hard enough beating easy mode–if you ever beat Master I will worship you. I don’t mind the challenge of the game though, simply because I get to listen to the great music longer if I lose a level.

Gitaroo Man may eventually be available at Play-Asia. For now, enjoy a video of the totally awesome final stage!

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