As most of you know, I attend a few conventions every year. Central Florida Comic Con here in my home state is always a blast. And I’ll be hitting up Atlanta twice this year for the usual MomoCon and an additional DragonCon! (Don’t worry, I’ll talk about you all as you get closer.) But this year, I’m going to be able to add an exhilarating dash to a higher altitude and a different time zone. Drumroll please… (Yes, this is text. Just work with me here, guys!)
Believe it or not, actually not a surprise, but I heard about this delightfully geeky gathering from a streamer and fellow nerdy friend PlayingWithRemy. Who will also be visiting this con. I am looking forward to a local showing me some good food. (YOU KNOW WHAT IS EXPECTED OF YOU REMY!)
Now, as a lifelong east coaster, I never considered going to another timezone for a con but let’s be honest, the number of celebrities coming to this con is mindblowing. You can find the complete list on the site at the link below, but I am excited! https://fanexpohq.com/fanexpodenver/celebrities/
I am particularly hyped about Michael Dorn, Bonnie Wright, and Christina Ricci I hope I can get to speak to them. And maybe get my husband a few autographs while he pouts from states away.
I am also looking forward to taking some walks through the exhibition halls. I am a frequent buyer of the same products over and over here at home. I am excited to see what people have to offer in Colorado.
I’ll share more and more as we get closer to this convention. There is so much going on!
Also, I hate to admit this, but I have been spelling Denver wrong forever.
So another one of my new game obsessions I discovered at MomoCon was Dungeon Defenders: Going Rogue. It is a tower defense game where you run around fighting off waves of enemies. There are multiple characters you can play. So far as I can only play games in my downtime I have only managed to get so far. You start off being able to play the Squire or Apprentice and can unlock the Huntress, Monk, and Warden. So far I’ve only unlocked the Huntress but this is fine as I am really enjoying the Squire anyway.
Well as with the rest of my MomoCon coverage I wont go heavily in to detail myself but you can hear from one of the team all about the game in the video below!
Well, this is the last of my MomoCon coverage. While there was certainly a whole lot more I saw, I have only delivered you all the best I found. There is a whole lot more I collected that I need to play or read before I can give you all an honest view of the product!
Alrighty so lets address the title of this post first and foremost. Exciting games for everyone? There is no way that the creators of Emberwind also have a game that your children could enjoy. Well my dear reader, you would be wrong there.
I spent a lot of time at the Nomnivore table during MomoCon, probably more than my poor feet had any business standing around. And it was certainly worth it. I not only got to discover my new favorite table top game, but also a cute card game that I intend to pick up at some point. Some point soon, once I recover from convention and moving expenses. (Never move a week after a con, it hurts your wallet.)
So as I have done with my previous MomoCon posts, I will allow the dev of these super exciting games to tell you about them rather than try to explain them myself.
A little bit about the Nom Games! Who cute are these dinos?
Emberwind, I swear I don’t have an addiction to this game. (I do, I can’t help it.)
I strongly suggest you check out these games. Do it, you know you want to!
So I think I know what you are thinking when you read the title of this post. What the head kind of games are you picking up at these conventions you visit? Well, I will tell you. Ones worth keeping an eye on!
I watched a couple of friends play this one. And while I did not get a personal hands-on experience, my friends, both professional game streamers, had a blast with it. I was also able to have a chat with one of the creators of the game. You can listen to him in the video just below.
I may have messed up the first video by not recruiting. He was very kind about my total professional derpiness.
I plan on picking up this game as soon as it comes out. I hope a lot of you lovely readers will do the same. It will be a blast!
So finally home and for the most part only a little sore from being on my feet for ridiculously long hours I decided I would show off the various cosplayers I managed to get a picture of while I was at MomoCon. I stumbled on to everything from anime characters to video game heroes, to a few curious fashion choices and zombies. Check out the pictures below!
Next year I hope to get way more pictures of amazing cosplayers!
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So arcades and their games were a fairly big part of my life as a kid. There was an arcade in the local mall and I would stop in there any chance I got. My friends would play DDR but I, naturally, would be running off to shoot dinosaurs, criminals, or seeing if I could actually get Pac-Man or his Misses further than the first level. I’ve never been able to get very far in a Pac-Man game for some reason.
Anyway, with the slow extinction of arcades, and the world going upside down with COVID making it so no one really wants to go and touch the same controls as hundreds of other people, I was excited to find homearcadegames.com. Now admittedly, these home arcade games are on the expensive side, you there are payment options! I know I have a dream of picking up a totally awesome Jurassic Park game they sell.
I was lucky enough to get in to a recent Back4Blood beta and a brief look at the game. A fun game that resembles its predators, Left4Dead in game play but also differing enough to make the game feel like something new. Like the former games, you can play a co-op campaign game where you rush around slaughtering your way through zombie masses.
Beyond the game place, the characters you can play as are pretty entertaining, each has benefits that support the group in some way. I took a particular liking to Hoffman. I had to pick him up because the initial characters I wanted to play were taken by friends. (You know who you are!) But he ended up being my favorite, and I will probably continue to play him once the game comes out fully. I might dabble in others, but to be honest, once I find a character I like, I tend to stick to it.
Now, moving we have the particularly original, (at least for this type of game) deck building system. As you play, you gain points which allow you to unlock cards which you can make into decks. These decks have a variety of benefits for yourself and the people you are playing with. I had a lot of fun putting ammo benefits in to my deck.
So there is a lot more to Back4Blood, but I really think you should play the game to try it out yourself. And in case you could not tell with that suggestion, if you love a good zombie game, you will want to pick up Back4Blood once it goes live!
Paladin Dream is a turn based RPG in the style of all the old favorite classics. You play as a Paladin going on a journey to find out the meaning of a dream he has been having repeatedly over the years. He leaves the abbey where he has spent his entire life and heads out to find the reason for his dream.
The game was made with RPG Maker, which I know, can leave you questioning how good it really is. But Paladin Dream is a pleasant surprise. With about five hours of gameplay and original music composed by the creator, Paladin Dream stands out where many RPG Maker games may leave you wonderful what the heck you just spent money on.
With an original soundtrack composed by creator Matthew Myers, the music alone is enough to make one want to continue the game.
So is Paladin Dream worth playing? If you enjoy a classic turn based RPG feel with a nice story? Sure is! I would suggest you pick it up sooner rather than later.
I was lucky enough to be able to get some questions answer by the creator of Paladin Dream. Here is the Q&A I had with Matthew via email!
Tawny: How did you come up with the concept for Paladin Dreams?
Matthew: Creatively, Paladin Dream(singular, not plural) was inspired by a short story in high school during a King Arthur unit in English class. There are some significant changes and expansions from that story, but the concept of the dream duel to motivate the heroic quest is much alike. The main character, Josiah, is loosely inspired by personality traits of Christian athletes I was around at a job I had living in Texas. The areas he explores are influenced by my experiences traveling in Italy, which included cathedrals, castles, walled cities, mountains, fields, farming villages, and religious art.
When the COVID quarantine era around March 2020 started, I realized I wouldn’t be going anywhere for awhile, and took the opportunity to try something I wanted to do for years, which was to make an RPG. I also had family members who were sick at the time (they recovered, fortunately) so it was a stressful time when I was looking for an imaginary escape. The rest was learning, planning, and asking for help.
Tawny: What did you use to make it
Matthew : I used RPGmaker as an engine to develop the game. RPGmaker is a great tool for (surprise) building RPGs, where you can easily create exploration and combat systems without having to do any programming. It allowed me to immediately focus on what I was excited about, which was telling the story and building the world around it.
For me RPGmaker is a wonderful storytelling platform, even when the subject matter isn’t necessarily a medieval fantasy like Paladin Dream. Before this project, I was inspired by Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, which is essentially an RPGmaker-made documentary game about a real-world American tragedy. I appreciated the way that game handled mature themes while being truthful, and felt that if someone can turn a school shooting into an emotionally powerful RPG then anything is possible.
Tawny: How much of this game did you make yourself?
Matthew: I conceived the story and wrote close to 8000 words of dialog, designed more than 100 maps, devised the combat logic featuring over 50 enemies, and composed all the music myself. Before Paladin Dream, I served as a music composer and producer professionally for numerous games spanning a 15-year career. I also did all the bug fixing and other thankless tasks. I can’t take any credit for building the engine, the many modification plugins I used, or the art assets (whether licensed or commissioned), or the sound fx. I also (obviously) didn’t sing the female vocals in those songs.
With the RPG genre, it seems inevitable that people will compare it to something enormous like The Elder Scrolls, and there’s no way one person in their spare time can do the work of a huge team with millions of dollars. For me telling a short but polished story was more important than churning out hours and hours of quests both as a developer and in terms of what I’d want to play. To that end I was inspired by Dragon Quest 4 in particular, which features a few small adventures that feel like they could be their own small game.
Tawny: Being a turn based RPG, it’s easy to guess you may be a fan of that genre what’s your favorite video game?
Matthew: I’ll answer this question with a shout-out to an obscure title I grew up fascinated by, which is Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders Of Khazan. Imagine something like the original Final Fantasy on NES, but with more of an open world and more effort placed on the writing. The encounters featured prosaic passages of text like a visual novel, and the combat system was wonderfully deep. The graphics were generally primitive, but the incredible lore and logic breathed life into the world. Sometimes the best graphics are the ones you imagine in your mind, right?
Tawny: Were there any particular influences when you deigned Paladin Dream?
Matthew: I lived in Boston when Bioshock became popular, so Irrational Games creative force Ken Levine was a big influence on my game design philosophy. Comparable to Bioshock, Paladin Dream has no cut scenes to passively watch, everything that happens in the story is a playable event. Also similar is that the player explores a relatively small region of a world rather than a full globe. My favorite Levine quote which I’ve taken to heart is “If you want people to follow your plot, then it has to be really f***ing stupid.” If you watch Indiana Jones and pause the film at any moment, Jones is looking for the ark. Similarly, if you ask what Josiah is doing at any moment in Paladin Dream, he’s looking for the meaning of his dream.
Tawny: Do you intend to make anymore games?
Matthew: I am still under publisher contract to provide support and updates for Paladin Dream for a number of months, so I’m trying to keep focused for that reason. I have several other game ideas that would be cool, so we’ll see what happens in 2022. 🙂
Night Book is an interactive full motion horror video game. A choose your own adventure movie where every action you make has some sort of effect on the outcome of the story. Think of it as playing through a horror movie with fifteen different endings!
Now full motion games have been around for a very long time. There were dozens of them back in the 90s. I will not go through listing them, but if you google FMV games, you will find a list you can work your way through. Many of them are horror.
Night Book follows a pregnant interpreter dealing with an apparently mentally ill father while working night shifts. From there, how she comes in contact with a cursed book having its contents read out loud can vary depending on what choices you make. Which allows for this game to have a lot of replay value. I have played this game a lot, and each time has been a little different.
Now the real question. Is this game worth playing? If you enjoy horror and interactive fiction, I would have to say yes. Though because of the type of game this is, it is certainly not for everyone. But like most games, I say you should at least try it! And if horror is not your thing, the company that made this game has similar ones of different genres!
With the New World come to an end. It’s time to look back and consider what I think of Amazon’s new MMO which is slated to come out at the end of the month, after being pushed back from the spring of last year. Now this will be far from an in-depth look in to the game. However, I will state my honest opinion about the upcoming game.
First New World has your usual general MMO feel, quests, PVP, PVE and so on. Though the setting, while fantasy based, has a realistic feeling to it in the clothing and armors. While there is magic, none of the clothing seems to have strange floaty or glowy things that tend to make no sense.
Having done both the alpha and beta, I can say the game has improved beyond a doubt in the last year. The character creation has a fair variety of options. While no Black Desert Online level of character creation, it has several options. Even allowing the ‘female’ body type to have facial hair.
The game play is mouse based, your main attack is on the right button and your block is the left. If you have played The Elder Scrolls Online you may be familiar with this basic concept. There are also talents locked to keys and numbers. The combat has an ESO or Neverwinter feel to it, though with the ability to dodge being much more fluid than the other MMOs with moused based combat.
New World also has a heavy focus on crafting. You are expected to craft your own tools by gathering items around the world. You can also set a respawn point by setting a camp in different places around the world. In these camps you can do basic crafting and even make food. Other MMOs have done some highlighting of crafting such as Archage, but I believe New World has managed to fit it more comfortable with in its overall game play.
So the final verdict. Is New World worth playing? Very much so. Amazon has created a perfectly playable MMO. Which is great given the recent mass exodus of players from World of Warcraft looking for a new home after lawsuit conflicts.
My one complaint. You can’t swim. You walk along the bottom of bodies of water.
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