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| Friday, December 6, 2013 09:14 PM |
| I made a dumb new game |
 by Fëanor |
Clickety!
Had an idea, threw it together. Might make it better some day. Click away!
I have another idea for a much more complex RPG that I'm finally returning to after some years. It will probably be some time until I have a version of that that's ready for play-testing, but it will need plenty, so you'll probably hear from me again then! |
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| Wednesday, December 26, 2012 09:07 PM |
| (Last updated on Friday, January 4, 2013 10:35 AM) | | LEGO Lord of the Rings (Wii) |
 by Fëanor |
I got a video game for Christmas! And poppy and I played it for a while today! Crazy!
The LEGO video games are all pretty similar, but all pretty solid fun. You play through a series of story-based action/platforming levels collecting stuff. There are fun cut scenes in between with a silly sense of humor. You unlock new playable characters and new abilities as you go. This means you can go back and replay earlier levels to collect even more stuff, and replaying those levels is actually rewarding and fun because now there are new things to do and new sections to explore. If all you want to do is beat the game, by which I mean, complete every level and see the end of the story, you can do that pretty quickly. It's collecting 100% of the stuff that's the real challenging part.
Some things I really hate in a video game: if it is punishingly difficult; if it makes you redo long portions again and again until you get them exactly right; if it makes you play for a very long time before you can safely save and quit (I don't have a lot of time here, people!). The LEGO games do not have any of these problems. Not only do they auto-save often, they also give you the option to manually save pretty much whenever you want. Also, although you can be "killed" in the game, there are no consequences to dying beyond losing a handful of the studs that are the "money" in the game; you immediately respawn and keep going right where you left off.
This particular game has all the advantages of your standard LEGO game, with the added advantage that it's set in Middle-Earth! It starts with you playing as Elendil, Isildur, and Elrond fighting Sauron himself!! That's how it opens! Of course, it quickly jumps thousands of years forward in time and acquaints you with Sam and Frodo. I was a little disappointed that you don't get to explore Bag End (UPDATE: we've discovered since that later on in the game you do get to go back and explore Bag End, although only a limited portion of it), but you do get to wander around a surprisingly expansive Hobbiton, and then down the road to Bree, and out into the Wild. When you pick up the rest of the Fellowship at Rivendell is when things get really fun. Legolas, Gandalf, Gimli, and Aragorn are all bad-asses (especially Legolas; bow and arrow! Jumping and swinging and climbing!), but even the hobbits have all been given useful and unique abilities so you often find yourself jumping between many different characters to get through a particular puzzle or sequence. Something they've added for this game that I haven't seen in the previous LEGO games I've played is that each character actually has an inventory and can carry multiple objects at one time. The way it works is a bit awkward (every time you pick something up you have to immediately indicate which spot in your inventory you want it to sit in; why not just have it automatically go to the first empty spot?), but still, inventory!
One of my favorite things so far: not only can you pick up Gimli and carry him around, you can also throw him at things! And not only can you do this, you actually have to, and often! It is pretty hilarious. Oh, and also? I got to rocket down a pit in Moria, jump on the back of a Balrog, and hack at him with Glamdring until he was dead. That was awesome.
UPDATE 1: Now that we've played a bit more, I can reveal that the Balrog was not dead yet! They split the Balrog fight into two sections, and the second part is pretty great, too. Also, you eventually get to play as Ents, which is fantastic. Once you're that big, you don't even have to fight the Orcs anymore; they're just little scurrying things that you sometimes step on.
UPDATE 2: We've now gotten to the end of the story in the game, but haven't even collected half the things yet. Last night we built something called the Disco Phial. You owe it to yourself to seek out this item and equip it. Then sit back and witness the hilarious awesomeness.
Of course, the game has its problems. For one, it's a bit buggy. Even in the few hours of play we put in, twice we ended up stuck in a dead-end where the game would not let us continue because the thing we needed to do to move forward had become impossible. (In the first case, a rock we had to push over to move on got stuck and would not go any further; in the second case, the creature outside the gates of Moria became invulnerable.) We had to quit out and go back in to get things going again. Luckily, like I said, it lets you save often, so we didn't have to repeat too much, but still. Also, although the game is often good at giving you onscreen tips and hints so you can figure out what to do next, sometimes the path forward is highly counter-intuitive and frustratingly difficult to discover. (Fighting the troll in Moria was particularly annoying.) Finally, the way the game splits the screen so each player can see their own surroundings is sometimes either confusing or simply doesn't work at all; for example, while we were fighting that troll in Moria, I sometimes couldn't see myself at all.
Still, even with the flaws, the game has overall been fun so far, and I'm looking forward to jumping back into Middle-Earth as soon as we can. |
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| Monday, September 24, 2012 02:19 PM |
| Recyclotron |
 by Fëanor |
Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
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| Tagged (?): Art (Not), Avengers (Not), Clothing (Not), Comedy (Not), Dune (Not), Harry Potter (Not), LEGO (Not), Links (Not), Lists (Not), Mario (Not), Mashups (Not), Monsters (Not), Movies (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Shirts (Not), Tolkien (Not), Toys (Not), Video (Not), Video games (Not), Weather (Not), Web comics (Not) |
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| Sunday, August 5, 2012 09:16 PM |
| Game On! |
| by Fëanor |
Hey there! Remember Japhex? That's that online game I made where you're a spaceship and you shoot things. Well, I made a small update that knocked out one of the more annoying lingering issues with the game: the long load time when you first brought it up. A lot of the file loading now goes on in the background, so you can start playing almost right away. As always, please let me know if you have any issues, and good hunting! |
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| Wednesday, June 27, 2012 12:44 PM |
| Recyclotron |
| by Fëanor |
Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
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| Tagged (?): Advertising (Not), Animals (Not), Art (Not), Automobiles (Not), Cartoons (Not), Celebrities (Not), Clothing (Not), Comedy (Not), Commercials (Not), Diablo (Not), Diablo 3 (Not), Harry Potter (Not), Hayao Miyazaki (Not), Highlander (Not), LEGO (Not), Links (Not), Mario (Not), Movies (Not), News (Not), Photography (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Scooby-Doo (Not), Shirts (Not), Star Trek (Not), Star Wars (Not), Toys (Not), TV (Not), Video (Not), Video games (Not), Web comics (Not) |
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| Friday, June 22, 2012 03:57 PM |
| Recyclotron |
| by Fëanor |
Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
- New Hark! A Vagrant!
- A panda enters.
- There a whole lot of blogs involving artists redrawing/reimagining other art, but... well, here's another! It's a series of artists redoing all the character portraits from The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe.
- One of my favorite artist/bloggers, Noelle Stevenson, has launched her fantasy web comic Nimona. It's pretty good!
- The very last Life In Hell strip was recently printed. Never really got into this strip too much, but definitely feels like the end of an era.
- This guy is redoing Blade Runner as a series of watercolor paintings, which is insane.
- A teaser trailer for the Monsters Inc. prequel, Monsters University. Looks like fun!
- A few drinks while you're pregnant is not going to permanently damage your baby. There's science now to back this up. So let's all calm down just a little bit.
- Here's a trailer for a movie called Prototype, which is about an experimental robot going rogue. Or a human being who turns into a robot? Or something? Looks neat.
- Apparently the best predictor of how well a movie will do at the box office is online buzz.
- There's going to be a Sesame Street movie! Who knows how this will turn out, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
- Apparently Hobotopia did a series of Lord of the Rings-related comics. Nice! The 2000th entry of that strip is coming up, which should be fun.
- Hey, Sin Titulo started updating again.
- The ISS re-cut The Avengers.
- A chart explaining the evolution of the alien as described in Prometheus. (Spoiler alert!)
- Crazy video of a dude killing bosses in Diablo III in ridiculously short amounts of time. Like, he polishes off the Skeleton King in less than a second. (Via)
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| Tagged (?): Aliens (Not), Animals (Not), Animated GIFs (Not), Art (Not), Avengers (Not), Business (Not), Cartoons (Not), Comedy (Not), Comic books (Not), Diablo (Not), Diablo 3 (Not), Links (Not), Movies (Not), Muppets (Not), News (Not), Parenthood (Not), Parenting (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Robots (Not), Science (Not), Tolkien (Not), Video (Not), Video games (Not), Web comics (Not) |
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| Wednesday, May 16, 2012 03:05 PM |
| Recyclotron |
| by Fëanor |
Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
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| Tagged (?): Animals (Not), Animated GIFs (Not), Art (Not), Cartoons (Not), Celebrities (Not), Comedy (Not), Comic books (Not), Diablo (Not), Doctor Who (Not), Hulk (Not), Links (Not), Lists (Not), Movies (Not), Music (Not), News (Not), Photography (Not), Pixar (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Superman (Not), Toy Story (Not), TV (Not), Video (Not), Video games (Not) |
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| Friday, April 27, 2012 04:33 PM |
| Recyclotron |
| by Fëanor |
I didn't have time to do my usual thorough examination of the entire internet for this entry, but I figure I'll post what I have now and maybe add more later, we'll see.
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Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
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| Tagged (?): Animals (Not), Animated GIFs (Not), Art (Not), Avengers (Not), Batman (Not), Celebrities (Not), Comedy (Not), Comic books (Not), Fantastic Four (Not), Fringe (Not), Hayao Miyazaki (Not), Language (Not), Links (Not), Movies (Not), Music (Not), News (Not), Photography (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Sesame Street (Not), TV (Not), Twitter (Not), Video (Not), Video games (Not) |
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| Wednesday, April 4, 2012 11:05 AM |
| Recyclotron |
| by Fëanor |
Man, it's been a while, huh? Let's fire up the old Recyclotron again for old time's sake and see what comes out.
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Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
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| Tagged (?): Animals (Not), Animated GIFs (Not), Art (Not), Books (Not), Celebrities (Not), Comedy (Not), Craft (Not), Game of Thrones (Not), Links (Not), Mashups (Not), Monty Python (Not), Movies (Not), Obama (Not), Photography (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Song of Ice and Fire (Not), Star Trek (Not), Star Wars (Not), Technology (Not), Tolkien (Not), TV (Not), Video games (Not), Web comics (Not), Wonderland (Not) |
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| Monday, February 27, 2012 10:34 AM |
| Recyclotron |
| by Fëanor |
Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.
- Fun with lyrics!
- A wonderful animated gif of an amusing moment in one of Mr. Eddie Izzard's stand-up routines.
- A real, solid, scientific explanation of why cats purr.
- Mr. Hipp mashes up Star Wars and Super Mario Bros.
- Ridley Scott explains the connection between Alien and Prometheus. I'm still a little confused, but okay.
- The evolution of "Weird" Al.
- We can print robot dinosaurs now?? Awesome.
- Here's a computer case made to look like Link.
- Amazing, gigantic Lord of the Rings family tree. (Via)
- Tongue-based computer controller!
- Hey, that dude from The Killing might be Robocop.
- A couple of interesting pics of Benedict Cumberbatch on the set of Star Trek 2. Looks like he's getting the ol' neck pinch!
- When I heard they were re-releasing the universally reviled Phantom Menace in theaters in 3D, I was really curious what kind of audience it would have. I mean, everybody says they hate this movie! Why would anyone pay extra to see it again in one more dimension than before? Then again, it's Star Wars. Star Wars has a certain cache. And nerds are famous for paying for things so they can then complain about them endlessly. Plus, there's the kid factor. Kids don't know they're supposed to hate The Phantom Menace. Well, looks like the nerd and kid factors won out, because the 3D version made $73.4 million in less than two weeks and pushed the movie's overall box office total over the billion dollar mark to make it the 11th highest grossing film of all time. Wow.
- Speaking of Star Wars, here are some rejected Star Wars products. Also, in the upcoming Star Wars game for Kinect, there will be a Slave Leia dance-off.
- Cute Wizard of Oz cupcakes.
- Here's a little boy piloting a mecha suit.
- I love this stamp.
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| Tagged (?): Animals (Not), Animated GIFs (Not), Art (Not), Celebrities (Not), Comedy (Not), Computers (Not), Craft (Not), Dinosaurs (Not), Food (Not), Links (Not), Mario (Not), Mashups (Not), Movies (Not), Music (Not), Oz (Not), Photography (Not), Products (Not), Recyclotron (Not), Robots (Not), Science (Not), Star Trek (Not), Star Wars (Not), Technology (Not), The Killing (Not), Tolkien (Not), TV (Not), Video (Not), Video games (Not), Zelda (Not) |
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Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
