Taylor

Have they made it so you can command throw after dash punch without a kara cancel yet? :/

I hear a lot of the new characters are broken. Broken in the not working sense with hitboxes in random places like a homage to ST T.Hawk.

But get hype for Cammy in a Vega mask for fifth character.

Ultra is it's a lazy update to a game I don't really play and I will buy it.

Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
This still feels like a Zelda game but is surprisingly unzeldary. There is a lot more freedom in the order you unlock stuff and your equipment is all available an hour into the game. It also has a weird mix of hardcore and casual: There are no tutorials and death is extremely punishing, but dungeons are amazingly simple... One has the boss key opposite the boss door. They don’t feel like Zelda dungeons but they’re still pretty fun. I like ALBW, but I could see it being polarising.

Path of Exile
I completed normal with a Witch and a Duelist with some friends, but I cannot be bothered to play through on Cruel and above. It’s got some nice systems, amusingly most of them originally from JRPG’s, but everything you see and do is so frightfully dull.

Yeah, there is a lot of Monty on the Run inspiration and I remembered one of the enemies in that is just a mug with an evil face on it. Amused me so I did the same... although they kind of look like cameras too. Game art is not my forte, unfortunately.

First Hour Superpower

The theme for this months Ludum Dare was You Only Get One. I was hoping Death Is Useful would win, because I wanted to make a Zelda-style game where Death followed you around like an over-excited Na'vi shouting "hey listen" and offering up the solutions to puzzles even faster than Naughty Dog. However, instead we have this.

Your character is capable of four 'powers' such as double jumping and becoming insoluble, however after the introduction you can only carry one of these with you. If you want to see all the rooms you'll need to play with all the powers. I made it in Unity (plus Photoshop, sfxr, and Abundant) but there is no Web Player version because of how I did my level structure.

Jam Page

This year I have made seven games. Eight if you include the one where I was employed for money and stuff.

I'm sorry but if you don't stop your negative energy I'm going to call Thrik.

Awesome screenshots.

I'm over the Moon.

No, fuck all that. What the hell.

Pendragon is another controversial figure that used to work on DotA1 but now works for Riot Games. When League launched he deleted the DotA1 site and replaced it with a League advert. Stay classy.

They recently added Jinx who was the first non-child female character not to have huge boobage, although she is flat as a board and in a bikini so it comes across as a fetish more than anything else.

Hahaha, mouse over the bullet point about shop items getting stuck.

Pretty cool patch. Legion Commander has now changed sex and race.

Everything looks impressive, but also like it's going to be unresponsive and frustrating to play? Could be wrong.

https://twitter.com/PeterMolydeux/status/409496273046102016

I think there are a lot of terrain extensions in the store. I only make stuff out of cubes and sprites myself. The building blocks of true art.

Only the bullets hurt you so you should be able to move through the fireworks going up. The collision detection is wonky though! I don't sweep test anything, so it only checks collision for the frames that get rendered. If you have a low frame rate or things are moving too fast you can potentially step-over a bullet. This is not ideal but saved time in the jam.

Err, everyone I hope. There’s some really good stuff being made in Unity.

Nah, there's no logic coming from the particle system, it basically works how you would do it in a 2d shmup: I have a bullet manager that keeps track of all bullet objects (sprite + particle) and their velocity, and each frame it steps them and checks if the player is within 5 units* and if a bullet should be culled. When rockets explode they input bullet into the manager with a hard coded** script. Some patterns are instant whereas some take a little while to finish. There is also a global rank value that feeds into the patterns so they get harder, better, faster, stronger.

* There is no sweep test! This is another game jam corner cut...

** Also bad! Game jam!

B-but rapidly changing colours means collect! It's in all modern games like Jet Set Willy.

... Yeah, I think if this was a full game I'd have some kind of explanation to what you're supposed to avoid and collect. 

I was briefly considering porting it over to iOS or Android but I imagine I'd make a big fat loss. I'm not even sure what I'd need to buy to start publishing on those platforms. Probably more than a Windows PC and ancient phone for starters.

Edit: I recorded a video but the quality is rather sporadic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PwI8_r4OJg

The theme for this Game Jam was to take the first game you made and remake it with the skills you have since acquired. If you ignore messing around with game listings or modifying other games you arrive at my Fireworks game - where you were a flying girl dangerously near a fireworks display.

Rockets rise from bottom of the screen, explode into a bullet pattern, and you have to dodge it while catching the extinguished firework. The game lasts 3 minutes, collecting fireworks advances time an extra 5 seconds and it gets rather difficult rather fast.

The original was made in C++/SDL but this version runs in Unity, everything was made in 48-hours, I didn't have time to add sound so there is no sound. Windows version is higher resolution than the Web Player but you'll get the general idea either way.

Jam Entry Page | Web Player | Windows

Eh, I don't mind if they've tried to ground the location by including some "Act 1" parts, because it stops each act from feeling like a themed Sonic zone, I don't think Pandemonium looks like Westmarch, and each D3 act so far has blown away D2 as far as environment diversity goes.

I really liked DmC despite some anxiety running up to its release (mostly due to fake rumours spread on NeoGAF. Where was that gun cooldown, guys?). It's definitely a different beast to the other games in the series as far as combat, characters, enemies, story, etc. go but it's a reboot and I think they did a great job all-round. You should also check out the Vergil DLC if you haven't.

It's easier than the other games for sure, DMC3 on international Normal is still harder than DmC on DMD/VMD in my opinion. I was hoping the HD Collection would let you play DMC1-3 with the DMC4 system, but there was no chance Capcom would do something like that. DMC1-2 feel really awkward now.

I used to be really hardcore into WoW during Vanilla and was probably the most decked out warlock on our server when TBC released. I also played on the US servers before the EU release and killed Ragnaros 35th in the world or something at 4am. I completely crashed during TBC because it basically removed all of my progress day one (I found about ten upgrades for my Plagueheart shoulders before I finally replaced them) and coincided with me getting a job I liked and generally becoming less of a loser.

I didn't even level my Warlock to 70 during TBC, at 68 rolled a rogue who was 100% PvP welfare gear, and when WotLK was announced I stopped playing. During all of this I was also playing with some old college friends and people we met through Diablo 2, and during Cataclysm we all came back and I played a Priest. I have a lot of problems with Cataclysm and I think most of them are summed up by this post on reddit. Someone linked it to me basically saying "this guy is you."

http://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1r4jbg/vanilla_wow_20042005_memories_and_good_times/cdjoq9z?context=1

My biggest problem with modern WoW is there's no sense of community at all, the people you play with you'll never see again, and the world is dead because everyone is sitting in a main town queuing.

I would also add to this that I hate the way PvP evolved. The original PvP system in WoW, that is to say NO PVP SYSTEM, was a lot more fun, more relevant to the lore, and made you remember people on your server on the opposite side. It was a tenuous pact, this means some people are indifferent or even sympathisers. There was no reason to actually attack someone you saw because there was no reward for doing so, and so being attacked was a lot more powerful and personal.

I also want to talk about the end-game and classes merging together but I'll resist.

None of these are bad choices, I see the logic behind them all, and I don't think it's a bad game, but it's a completely different direction than I would like. I've always thought the social and drama side of MMO's was the real meat of the experience whereas Blizzard have been trying hard to stamp this out since arguably TBC and definitely WotLK. 

Didn't play MoP. If my friends want to play this my arm could be easily twisted. New models look nice.

Level Select is an curious feature to add to a traditionally story-based game. Bounties and Nephalem Rifts (which are completely independent and could easily appear in campaign?) sound infinitely more fun than grinding cow levels.

So, what are the AoS games crowding this space? DotA, DotA2, LoL, HoN, HotS is five and one of those isn't released yet.

I'm not sure I'd count things like Bloodline Champions or Smite because they play a lot differently. It seems like for a "crowded genre" it's nowhere near the numbers of first person shooters and fighting game franchises out there. I can name single fighting game franchises that have had more than five releases since LoL appeared.