Thoughts about the RPG Maker and some unusual games

After my rant last night, I have a more relaxed and positive post here. It’s about the RPG Maker, a tool for making your own old-school, old-console RPGs. I’ve owned and used the RPG Maker (in various versions) for several years now, having fun with it and, most of the time, getting caught up in figuring out aspects of a new project instead of finishing it.

While you can really make a professional game with the tool (check Amaranth Games for a lot of those), it’s actually cheap enough for a non-professional to buy and easy enough for a non-professional to use. You paint your maps with tiles, add a few events with pre-defined commands (which are pretty straight-forward), and export the whole thing as an installation file you can share with whomever you want. You can add your own tiles (there’s free ones as well as sets to buy in the shop), your own music, your own characters (the ACE, the newest version, even has a character generator), and your own scripts to make the game do something different.

And this is where this post actually starts for me. You can’t just make RPGs with the RPG Maker (although you can surely make those and they can be a lot of fun), you can also make other games, if you can script. I can’t, but I can appreciate those who can.

Three of those other games will feature in this post, two I wrote about before and one I never mentioned so far.

The first one is “Madame Extravaganza’s Monster Emporium” by John Wizard Games. It’s a monster-gathering game of sorts. It has turn-based battles like a regular RPG Maker game, but you buy your monsters from Madame Extravaganza and earn money by going into randomly-generated dungeons and fighting your way through normal monsters and one boss per dungeon. After you won the boss fight, you get rewards (you can also find stuff in the dungeons). There’s different types with different monsters which unlock as you level up (so will your monsters). You can customize your monsters by choosing which attacks they will use and you can exchange members of your group whenever you’re in the town and not in a dungeon (if you have more than 3 monsters, of course). I admit I haven’t finished this game, because I just can’t get two of the orbs I need to unlock the last area and I just can’t get some of the special rooms in the dungeons I need to spot all monsters (you need to fight a monster and defeat it once before you can buy it). That’s the downside of Madame Extravaganza.

The second one is “Our Love Will Grow,” also by John Wizard Games. It’s a game like “Harvest Moon” or “Animal Crossing.” You have your own farm, you start growing crops, you get new seeds in a while, you also can pick stuff in the forest, keep animals (cows, sheep, chicken, bees, and a dog), mine for stones, iron, silver, gold, and gemstones, and find the love of our life. There’s regular parties in town where you can meet several different women whom you can woo. If you manage to get one of them to marry you, you can even have a child. This, of course, requires a top-kept farm and a big farmhouse instead of the small hovel you start with. I haven’t finished that one, either, but I did a lot of farming and I had a lot of fun with it so far. And one of those days, I will get all I need to propose to the girl of my character’s dreams and they will have a kid and live happily forever after on their farm.

The last game is “Fortune’s Tavern” by Michael Flynn (available on Steam). It’s not an RPG and it has some aspects from both games I already mentioned. Like “Madame Extravaganza,” it offers various pets for you to raise and keep. They accompany you into the forest behind the tavern, where you go working on quests (usually ‘find this’ or ‘find out about that’). Your main job, however, is to run and to renovate the tavern itself, so you get more guests and make more money and can do even more for the tavern. There’s three fractions you can cater to, there’s different additional buildings you can rebuild and put to use. On the whole, you can do a lot of stuff in the game and they just added a DLC where you can take over the job of Mayor for the nearby town of Fortune, as well.

All three games are a lot of fun and not the usual RPGs you might expect. And they show that with the ability to use the right scripting language, you can make a lot of different things with a relatively cheap and mundane tool.

Interesting effects

can be created for well-known pictures. As this one:

I’ve posted it in this blog before. It’s an old painting I found printed in one of my books. But with just a little help from this page it can look like this:

Cool, huh? It doesn’t cost anything, there’s various effects available and you can play around a lot.

Why don’t you give it a shot when you’ve got the time (and the right picture)?

Update on "Anno 1701"

I've written about "Anno 1701" quite some time ago, about how great I found the game and about how little it was like those violent games everybody was talking about at that time.

Now I've got a few happy moments in "Anno" which I want to share with you.

The first is the very happy moment when I gained independence from the queen and she came by to celebrate it. The game I was playing ended after that ... I had set 'gaining independence' as the goal for my game. This is how it looked close up:

This is my Palace ... well, the first part of the Palace I build, it's gotten quite a bit larger. I mostly have noblemen living on my main island now and they pay a lot of taxes - for a lot of stuff they want in return:

This finally is my lighthouse. Building a lighthouse in the game allows to toggle the night-mode, meaning you can see the streets of your city and the farms and everything else by night, a very charming sight. It's also important for gaining independence, because the celebrations include a very nice firework which can only be seen at night:

And I can proudly say to anybody who still thinks all computer games are evil: I didn't fire a shot, from a cannon or otherwise, or let any of my people wield a sword to achieve this. I've gotten along with everybody else around, too.

The complete opposite to a blood-thirsty game

And so here's the second game I wanted to write about. It's a German one, actually, called "Anno 1701". Unlike "Jaws Unleashed" which is rightfully not for anybody under the age of 18 (that's the highest level anything can get in Germany), "Anno 1701" is free for everyone from 6 years onward. I'd say that a 6-year-old kid may find the game quite difficult, but I can go wrong about that.

"Anno 1701" is the third game in a series of games in which you have to build up a settlement. This seems to be what German game designers are best at, as the other widely known game from Germany is "Die Siedler" ("The Settlers" would be the best translation). In such games you have to build up a settlement by creating production chains. For example to get bread you need a few farms, a mill and a bakery. The game has been one people here in Germany have been waiting for a long time, especially since the second one of the series ("Anno 1503") had a lot of rather useless features and was hard to play.

"Anno 1701" is much better, it's easier to build up a working settlement with houses for the settlers and production chains than it has been before. You still get to build tools yourself quite early (that's important because you need tools as a material for all kinds of buildings and you don't get that many of them in the beginning), but a lot of the production chains have been made a bit easier. In addition the realistic, but rather useless idea of sending a scout on the islands to find out what to harvest or mine there (certain things like cocoa, tobacco or flowers are harvested while gold, iron, marble or clay are mined) has been cancelled. You only have to approach an island with your ship (and not even that if you play without the fog of war that's usually covering the parts of the map you have not been to) to get all necessary information.

The game looks extremely good, too, you only have to play the free demo to find out about that. If your computer is up to it, you can get very realistic oceans with waves slowly running up the beaches, the palm trees of the southern islands move in the breeze, the animals run around and feed - until you build up a hunter to get food, that is - and your settlers gather in the village square to buy stuff or chat, sometimes also to watch or meet a special guest. This isn't just so the designers can show off how good they are, though, but it's useful. You see, while playing a game like that you'll always have some times when you can't really do a thing, because you still lack enough building material to build the new marketplace or to build a harbour on another island to be able to farm for certain goods there (you have to do that sooner or later because you'll never find an island you can harvest everything from). With game graphics like those you can spent that time watching your settlers or your workers or - later in the game, once you've established trade routes - your ships zooming in and out of your harbour to deliver or pick up various goods.

You don't even have to wage war - though keeping a couple of warships is nevertheless wise because of the pirates - to win a game. You can train and command troops, but that's just secondary to your other tasks. Once you've got enough noblemen (and -women, of cause) in your settlement, you can gain independence from the queen and start your own empire. You can later on build an enormous palace if you want to, fill your main island with a teeming city holding over 100.000 people, make a lot of money or just become a master of trade. The game offers a lot of different goals you can either define at the beginning of a new game or just set up for yourself.

"Anno 1701" is the anti-thesis of everything computer game critics go on about. It's not violent, it makes you think about and calculate your actions (which island to build a harbour on first, strike that deal with the pirate or rather risk more of your ships being attacked?), it's very nice to look at and it's something you can spent a long time with before you might get bored.

Musings on a blood-thirsty game

Something new for the computer game-haters has turned up yesterday. At least the game I'm going to write about (one of two, actually, but the other one's much nicer) confirms their believes of how blood-thirsty and brutal computer games are these days.

The game is called "Jaws Unleashed" and - as you could expect from the name - it's about a certain shark that has featured in 4 movies going by the name "Jaws". And just as you would expect, there's a lot of blood in the game. I - as somebody who's been fascinated with sharks for quite some time - would say that comes from living things having blood in their bodies and sharks not exactly having the best table manners (but it's hard to use a napkin without hands, to be completely fair). Critics who see computer games as something evil might say that it comes from the game industry trying to get people to buy the game because of the violence. I didn't buy the game because of the violence (although admittedly I like giving those American hotheads, who decide that the first thing to do to a shark swimming close to the beach is shooting at it, a bit of a fright and maybe take a bite or two out of them...) but because after years of waiting it's the first interesting underwater game I've come across. The last was "Eco the Dolphin", definitely a game without much blood, even though Eco munches on fishes as well.

In Germany you have to be 18 to buy the game, and I think that's exactly the right thing. I've not come far - the game's not easy -, but I've already seen quite a lot of blood and, yes, I've already maimed and killed some people ... and some sharks ... and even some jellyfish, though probably nobody is going to complain about them.

Fact is that the Great White Shark is a predator and it doesn't look as cuddly as a lion or tiger. It's got a lot of teeth set in a very strong pair of jaws (hence the title of the movies and the game) and it's not afraid to use them. And even though there are only very few people killed by sharks in reality (and most of them are killed by Bull Sharks), the Great White Shark has had a shady reputation even before the movies ... or this game.

To a critic going on about the violence and level of blood in this game I'd like to ask this question: What do you find worse: a human shooting other humans or a shark just acting on it's instincts? And the shark looks and moves damn good, too...

To me "Jaws Unleashed" is a very good example of a game not belonging into the hands of kids or teens, but it's nevertheless interesting. For one thing there's a whole section about the animals you may encounter, giving you a lot of information about the underwater life, and in addition to that during the loading screen you get a lot of interesting information about the movies and the incident from which the idea came.

Ever tried out Google Earth?

As I've been going through my posts, I've realized that I've been moaning and bitching around a lot. I don't mean to just go on ranting about the bad things in the world, though, therefore I'm going to add a post about ... Google Earth.

This morning, while I was checking the internet for various other things and going through the forums I post in regularly, I stumbled upon the new version of Google Earth and - being the computer-crazed girl I am - downloaded it. I installed it right away and found my own home - my actual house, really - within minutes, even though the picture isn't completely accurate (there's a bunch of newly build houses missing, even though they have been there for a couple of years now). For me, who at the moment doesn't have the money to actually travel a lot, it's quite interesting to scan the streets of New York or London from my home - and I was finally able to put the right coordinates in my moon-calendar to get the right times for moonrise and moonset in my hometown.

This might not sound like something important, but for a werewolf it is (just joking, I'm definitely not growing hair and fangs on a full moon). Actually I just like knowing about the moon. Sunrise and sunset are a lot easier to see, for one thing.