Review: Bloodborne

Now that I’ve had enough time to actually finish playing through Bloodborne and its DLC, The Old Hunters, it’s high time that I offered up my thoughts regarding the game. But first, some history.

It’s quite possible I would have never played Bloodborne had I not discovered Dark Souls 2 while watching a particular streamer on Twitch (who is quite possibly the series’ biggest fan) a few years ago. You see, I never owned a PlayStation 3, so I never really knew about Demon Souls and Dark Souls up to that point. After watching him play the game for an extended period of time, I decided to buy the PC version. I was hooked, playing through the game multiple times myself. I went back and tried to play the PC port of Dark Souls (Prepare to Die Edition), but was unable to finish because a particular part of the game suffered from such low frame rates for me. Fast Forward to Bloodborne!

Where is it now? DayZ Edition

I first heard about DayZ over three years ago when it was still just a mod of ARMA 2 from Bohemia Interactive. Created by Dean Hall who, after the popularity of the mod skyrocketed causing an increase in sells of ARMA 2, joined Bohemia Interactive as the project lead of a standalone version of the mod. Supposedly, work on the mod version has been continued by the community, though I’m not sure how much the two versions differ at this point.

I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I know very little about DayZ at this point. I have not been following the development of the standalone version. I was interested in the game back when I first heard about it, but didn’t want to buy ARMA 2 just to play a mod, so I waited for the standalone to become available. After seeing the price of $30 (it’s now at $35) slapped on it, I was immediately turned off on the idea. There just wasn’t enough to the game to justify the price in my eyes, especially after having just been burned on other certain alpha releases like Cube World.

Where is it now? Cobalt Edition

Cobalt from Oxeye Game Studio (www.playcobalt.com) is another perfect example of a game that has had a really long and drawn out development. So long, in fact, that I had completely forgotten about the game until looking back over my old blog posts. I first heard about Cobalt back in August 2011 when a publishing deal was struck with Mojang (yes, the same Mojang formally owned by Notch, but now owned by Microsoft). The game looked like it would be quite fun, so I decided to throw some money at it once the alpha went public in December of that year.

I don’t recall playing it that long at the time, as there wasn’t much to do. If memory serves me correctly, that was local multiplayer deathmatch and a survival horde mode. I mainly purchased the game because of the promise of a campaign/story mode. I believe I last played the game in May 2012, on alpha version 105, where I tried out the map editor that had been added in a previous version. I hadn’t really been following development closely, and I last thought about Cobalt in October 2012, where I saw it was on alpha v115, after which it faded into time and space.

Where is it now? Starbound Edition

Starbound from Chucklefish (www.playstarbound.com) was another sandbox game that I was greatly looking forward to a few years ago. I first learned of it because of Terraria, another sandbox title from Re-Logic and a game into which I had poured hundreds of hours. Tiyuri (Finn Brice) was the main sprite artist working on Terraria until around the beginning of January 2012, after which he started up Chucklefish and work on Starbound began.

My love for Terraria at the time, along with my general love of science fiction, had me salivating over anything related to Starbound, though it would be well over another year before I could play the alpha, which became available in December 2013. I promptly threw money at the screen, downloaded it, and got a few friends to get it as well to play together. I left a server running on my local machine so they could play while I wasn’t around, which contributed to my inflated playtime on Steam.

Where is it now? Cube World Edition

I figured as a way to break back into this whole blogging thing would be to look back on some of the games that I mentioned in the past, one of which is Cube World. Now if you are familiar with Cube World at all, then I’m sure you know about its, let’s call it, “situation.”

Last time I mentioned the game, it was before its alpha had become publicly available, which occurred in July 2013. Needless to say, I was super stoked about the game and eager to throw my money at the screen, which I promptly did as soon as I could do so. I had a blast for a short while: the game ran smooth, felt good to play, and the world generation was nothing short of amazing. There wasn’t really much to do yet other than explore, craft, and kill enemies, but what it had was great.

Unfortunately, this public release of the alpha was also where the trouble for Cube World began. Wolfram von Funck (AKA. Wollay) was never known for keeping people in the loop on the development of the game, with sparse updates even up to this point, and coupled with the fact that it was also more of a hobbyist endeavor and his perfectionist tendencies, things quickly went from bad to worse. After the public release, Cube World received a grand total of one patch on July 23 that fixed a few bugs, and then there was none.

Oh my, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

It’s been 2 years, 9 months, and 19 days since I last posted something on my blog. I’ve spent the past few days painstakingly recovering the contents of my old self-hosted WordPress website, omegastormproductions.com, that closed its doors in 2011 and transferring the contents of my last wordpress.com blog over to here. Sure, transferring the contents of the wordpress.com blog was easy; just export, then import. The old self-hosted WordPress website; however, was a bit more involved, as I only had an old database backup courtesy of a backup plugin I used that emailed me a backup on a regular basis.

WordPress can import a variety of formats from various platforms, and uses a XML file for itself, but I had a SQL database, which would have been fine for setting up another self-hosted website and restoring the old database, except now that we’re on wordpress.com, that’s out the window. To put it basically, I recreated each and every post and page from scratch by going through the database tables and picking out the published posts (ignoring past revisions). Everything I needed was there: Title, Content, Post Date, etc. It was just time consuming.

ImpactJS Demo

I have recently begun tinkering with the ImpactJS framework. As a learning experiment, I am currently working on a recreation of sorts of the platformer demo (dubbed Control Alt Shift, for no reason whatsoever) I did in Flash quite some time ago. This is to get myself familiar with the ImpactJS framework as well as get myself more familiar with javascript. Once I get the functionality available in the flash version fully working in this one, I’ll post it for your viewing pleasure. In the meantime, here’s a screenshot for you to enjoy!

ImpactJS Demo

Still Alive

It’s been quite a while since I last made a post on here and you’re probably been wondering if I’d fallen off the face of the planet or something. Have no fear for all is well.

I started my new job back in November and after having spent a month going through training, I went live just after Christmas. I then spent the next month doing my job in what you might call the “newbie area” where we had support to help us get started. Dell has a vested interest in making sure you succeed, that’s for sure. Well, I’ve been moved out of that area for just over a week now and I’m still going strong. I’m still part time as of yet, but I am doing my best to increase my chances of going full time.

For the better part of two months, I’ve had little to no internet access, which is one of the contributing factors to me not posting here, among other things such as “just having other things to do.” No worries though. I plan on getting back to posting here on a regular basis.

News Flash: Job Offer

Well, well, well… isn’t this good news? After almost 2 months of being unemployed, I have finally received a job offer from APEX with Dell. Granted, it’s only a part time position (with the possibility of going full time), but that’s still more than I’ve had for the past 2 months. I would be silly to not have accepted the offer. I expect you probably already know what the job entails: I’ll working in a call center as technical support for one of their clients.

This is wonderful news, all things considered. I wish it would of happened a bit faster than nearly 2 months, but that’s how the cookie crumbles. The next step is to prove how awesome I am and get hired on full time.

Cube World Landscape Screenshots

Wollay just released a new batch of screenshots showing off some of the improvements he’s done to the landscape generator and the rendering engine over the past few days. I must say, the game looks absolutely amazing (not to say that it didn’t already). The terrain generated is so much more interesting than the terrain has ever been in Minecraft and the use of bright colors makes the world way more vibrant. You can also see the world map in a few of the pictures. Check them out below!