Review: Aragami: Shadow Edition – What We Do In The Shadows
Stealth is a difficult thing to get right in gaming, and it’s something developers have been trying to nail for decades. Do you go down the GoldenEye route and encourage the player to sneak around while still giving them the option to go all guns blazing should they so desire? Or do you go for a strictly stealth-only affair where players are punished the moment they’re spotted (bow your head, Ocarina of Time’s castle grounds)? Aragami leans more heavily towards the latter of these examples, though it isn’t quite as harsh.
You play as the titular Aragami, a shadow spirit who’s been summoned by a girl called Yamiko. She’s been captured by the Kaiho, an army that uses special weapons powered by light. It’s up to you to make your way through the game’s 13 chapters – using your numerous shadow powers to either avoid or kill the Kaiho standing in your way – as you attempt to reach Yamiko and find out more about what’s going on. It’s a fairly mundane plot at first, but it does get more interesting as the game progresses.
The same could be said about the actual game itself, in fact. When you initially start off, you’re armed with a single skill, the ability to turn into a shadow and instantly teleport to any other nearby shaded area. Before long you’re then given the ability to create temporary circular shadows on lit floors or walls, allowing you to teleport there, too. These are interesting enough mechanics, but they also mean that for the first couple of hours things start to feel a little repetitive. You do eventually get to upgrade and add new skills by collecting scrolls; some of these are minor but useful additions, like the ability to tag enemies so you can track them, or making bodies disappear so that can’t be spotted.
Others are larger upgrades that can change the way you approach each situation. The ability to throw kunai knives from a distance, or place bombs that can be remotely detonated, for example. By the time the game nears its end and you’re kitted out with a full range of abilities it’s a far more enjoyable adventure, but for the most part your initial time with Aragami will be spent with a handful of skills, teleporting around small stages patrolled by guards, meaning you’re going to need to have a little patience before things properly kick off.
Depending on your mood, you can choose to play through the game in one of two ways. If you’re the peace-loving sort, you can try to make your way to the end of the stage without being seen by the numerous Kaiho guards, allowing them to happily continue their patrols, blissfully unaware that you just infiltrated their defences. Alternatively, if you’re the sort of person who feels you aren’t doing your ninja duty unless all of your foes taste cold steel, you can choose to go ‘full ninja’ and stealthily pick them off one by one.
Whichever you choose, not being seen remains the order of the day; as we stated already, this isn’t a GoldenEye or Splinter Cell situation where being spotted just means things switch from a stealth game to an action game. Your enemies are armed with the power to fire huge waves of light from their swords, which kill you with a single touch; this essentially means that once you’re spotted, you’re as good as dead. The only exception is playing on the easiest difficulty, where they’re so comically slow to react you can run straight at them and plunge your sword into them before they have the chance to get their sword out – like that famous bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – which sort of removes any real sense of a challenge.
Aragami is very much a ‘hiding in the shadows’ type game, then, to the extent that its inventive HUD (or lack of one) is based on that concept. Aragami has an ornate cape hanging down behind him, and the design on this cape actually shows your current shadow energy and how many uses you have left for your special abilities. As you use your various skills, this design will start to disappear, and when you move into a shadow your entire outfit turns black and the cape’s design begins to fill in again. It’s an extremely cool look, made more striking by the game’s cel-shaded art style.
It’s not without its issues, however. The shadow teleportation trick seems to be a bit hit and miss at times, especially when you’re trying to teleport onto higher platforms and structures. There’s a (tiny) cursor that turns blue when you’re able to teleport, but during the odd occasion when you have to teleport in a hurry it can become quite frustrating trying to quickly determine which areas you can and can’t move to. Your complete lack of ability to jump or climb is also frustrating, and it can be particularly annoying when your hero – who’s supposed to be a ninja, lest we forget – can’t step up to a ledge that’s knee height.
Get over these niggles and you’re left with a pure stealth game that should appeal to fans of classics like Tenchu, even if it doesn’t quite surpass them. Even better, this Shadow Edition also includes the Nightfall DLC expansion, which includes a handful of new chapters and introduces a pair of new characters, helping to mix things up a bit and provide new environments for you to stealth the living hell out of.
Conclusion
It takes a while to get going and it has its fair share of annoying quirks, but as it progresses Aragami becomes a solid stealth game with a compelling story. The addition of extra DLC chapters gives the game a welcome boost in longevity, and though its temperamental mechanics prevent it becoming an unarguable gem, its stylish look and the range of abilities you acquire by the end mean fans of stealth games (and fans of stealth only) will still have a fun time with it. Eventually.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-15-2019, 01:50 PM - Forum: Windows
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Forbes: Microsoft’s Power Platform aims to ‘make other people cool’
A selection of PowerApps built by London Heathrow Airport, UK.Microsoft
Microsoft has always had to straddle an arguably difficult position in the software trade. The company has always needed to appear technically intricate, granular and powerful in the eyes of hard-core software developers. At the same time, the company has always had to present its software to market with a user-friendly ‘anyone can use it’ out-of-the-box style and approach.
There’s a little of that duality in the firm’s latest power play, which is a combination pack of technologies wrapped up under the Microsoft Power Platform brand.
This is all about presenting a selection of heavyweight backend technologies to hard-core developers and data scientists, but also to would-be so-called citizen developers who are typically businesspeople with an interest in getting applications and data to work the way they want them to work.
CEO Satya: be cool (to others)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has tried to explain to his developer team that it’s not always about being the most amazing software engineer that creates the next big thing. Instead, it’s about creating amazing software power and putting that power in the hands of people who need it.
“You join here [Microsoft, the company itself], not to be cool, but to make others cool,” said Nadella, in a comment that has been widely reported internally and officially referenced here on c|net.
What Nadella meant was: build something so amazing that it empowers other people. This, of course, is a platform play, not a product play i.e. he wants people to use Microsoft technologies to create something great, rather than use an existing Microsoft technology to be great per se. It’s a logical enough strategy i.e. software products come and go, but platforms are more foundational and expansive… and so (typically) form a better long term business bet.
Microsoft Power Platform
The component parts of the Microsoft Power Platform have all previously existed as more distinct entities. This is essentially a coming together of Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow as a more unified offering available on top of Microsoft Azure cloud services.
“Our Power Platform – spanning Power BI, PowerApps and Flow – enables anyone in an organization to start building an intelligent app or workflow where none exists. It is the only solution of its kind in the industry – bringing together no-code/low-code app development, robotic process automation and self-service analytics into a single, comprehensive platform. And it enables extensibility across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 as well as the leading third-party SaaS business applications,” said Microsoft CEO Nadella, in a press statement.
So just looking at the component parts again and explaining their functions, we have Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.
Microsoft Power BI is self-service Business Intelligence (BI) app that works to connect and analyze business data and present a graphical visualization of it on screen. It supports 43 languages and the data it ingests can come from an Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list, an Oracle database or from an SAP or Salesforce application. Nearly 10 petabytes of data are uploaded to the service each month with more than 10 million report and dashboard queries executed against that data every hour.
Microsoft PowerApps forms the company’s citizen application development platform. Theoretically ‘anyone’ (says Microsoft) can use PowerApps to build web and mobile applications without writing code. There’s also a natural connection between Power BI and PowerApps so that users can put insights (from Power BI) in the hands of maintenance workers and others on the frontline in apps built using PowerApps.
Lastly here there is Flow. This is Microsoft’s user interface that allows users to work with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a technology designed to help automate simple tasks (and reduce operational errors) through automated workflows.
Data flows, everywhere
Corporate vice president in Microsoft’s business applications group James Phillips explains that the team’s vision for Microsoft Power Platform started from the recognition that data is increasingly flowing from everything, and a belief that organizations that harness their data – to gain insights then used to drive intelligent business processes – will outperform those that don’t.
“We also recognize there aren’t enough programmers, data scientists and tech professionals to go around. So our goal was to build a platform not targeting these technology experts but for [ordinary] people – and the millions of other frontline workers who see opportunities every day to create something better than the status quo, but who’ve never been empowered to do anything about it,” wrote Philips, in a lengthy Microsoft cloud blog.
Philips and team say that the guiding vision for Microsoft Power Platform was a framework they called the ‘Triple-A Loop’ i.e. a closed-loop system allowing users to gain insights from data (Analyze) used to drive intelligent business processes via apps they build (Act) and processes they automate (Automate).
Why play platform games?
We might stand back and ask why Microsoft is so focused on its new and wider approach to platform games of this kind — and there are three fairly reasonable suggestions we can make here.
First, Microsoft has always done platforms i.e. Windows was and still is a platform and you run other things (apps, databases and other computing services) upon it.
Second, Microsoft has invested heavily in its own Azure cloud platform (which features as a key element of Microsoft Power Platform) and, over and above that, the firm has for a long time now been working to make large portions of its stack (such as Office as a platform, which we detailed here in 2015) big enough to be considered platforms in their own right.
Third, Microsoft (under CEO Nadella at least) appears to understand the power of platforms both inside the Microsoft universe and outside of it. Be that other platform Linux, be it Android or be it a major vendor’s data platform suite from the likes of SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and so on.
This is a world where data comes first — sometimes from databases, sometimes from AI computations, sometimes from the Internet of Things (IoT) and its devices and sometimes from actual users — even before the actual software applications that will feed on that data. That core fact very arguably makes any platform play strategically smarter for long term success… if perhaps not just a little cool too.
You are a traveling painter, exploring the island of Eastshade. Capture the world on canvas using your artist?s easel. Talk to the inhabitants to learn about their lives. Make friends and help those in need. Visit cities, scale summits, unearth mysteries, and discover forgotten places.
A doomed sailor is shipwrecked on an uncharted island. In fog-shrouded valleys, where grinning, mossy corpses cling to rusted arms, shambling figures begin to stir. Beneath crumbling, salt-worn structures, labyrinthine passageways lead to unspeakable evil, long forgotten by man.
Salt and Sanctuary seamlessly combines fast, brutal, and complex 2D combat with richly developed RPG mechanics. Discover, craft, and upgrade over 600 weapons, armor pieces, spells, and items as you explore a cursed realm of forgotten cities, blood-soaked dungeons, desecrated monuments, and the fallen lords they once celebrated.
From Ska Studios, the award-winning indie studio behind a long list of stylistic, visceral, and brutally executed action titles that includes The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, and Charlie Murder, comes Salt and Sanctuary, the studios most ambitious title to date.
Join the new heroic duo, Scribbler and Patch, in an epic battle to save dragons and defeat the villain, Eir, who is controlling dragons to carry out her evil plans.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-15-2019, 10:55 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Alt.Ctrl.GDC Showcase: Ruins Climber
The 2019 Game Developers Conference will feature an exhibition called Alt.Ctrl.GDC dedicated to games that use alternative control schemes and interactions.
Gamasutra will be talking to the developers of each of the games that have been selected for the showcase.
Ruins Climber has players rapidly tugging on a circular rope to climb a wall, hopping from side to side to avoid hazards that dangle along their path.
Gamasutra spoke with Takahiro Miyazawa, developer of Ruins Climber, to talk about designing a controller and then creating a game around it, the difficulties of making a controller with rope, and the appeal of creating games that are as fun to spectate as they are to play.
Born from a pulling motion
I’m Takahiro Miyazawa. I made this project alone. For about 20 years, I have been making browser games.
I wanted to make a game about pulling something. When I thought about something fun to pull, I thought of a rope. The rope made into a ring shape, so it can be pulled endlessly.
Creating controllers players will instantly understand
I don’t want to provide a description about how to play my games at game shows because it’s so busy.
So, I always design games that don’t need a description. If the game character makes the same gesture as the player, explanation is not necessary.
The mechanisms of climbing ruins
Ruins Climber was made with Unity and Arduino. The rope was made by rolling a towel. The frame uses a water pipe.
The challenges of making a controller from rope
The rope had to pull freely with a light force. And it had to be durable. I made 4 prototypes.
Creating the controller, then a game for it
I always make a controller at first. Next, I make a game for this controller. So, the game design is determined naturally.
Fun for more than just the player
I think that unique controllers can entertain not only the players, but also the audience. It is very important for the audience to have fun.
The appeal of designing unique controllers
I like to watch everyone’s reaction at the event. And it is fun to provide play that you have never experienced yet.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-15-2019, 10:55 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Get an inside look at The Division 2’s advanced rendering tech at GDC 2019
Today’s game makers are doing mind-blowing things with graphics, and at the 2019 Game Developers Conference you’ll have a unique opportunity to see how some of the industry’s most jaw-dropping games are built.
Together, Ubisoft Massive technical director Calle Lejdfors and AMD developer tech engineer Raul Aguaviva will walk you through how Ubisoft’s upcoming online action-RPG is built to run efficiently on the company’s powerful Snowdrop engine.
You’ll get a full, frank look at the tech, as though you were being brought onboard to join the Snowdrop team right after GDC wraps up. You’ll also learn some of the tricks and techniques The Division 2 team uses to achieve maximum performance on both PC and console, like how to structure a frame so asynchronous compute can get the most out of the GPU.
You’ll also walk away with unique insight into how Snowdrop devs use multi-threading, intrinsics and even a trick to submit command lists faster than usual. It promises to be a fast-paced talk, so come caffeinated and ready to learn!
It’s a great example of the kind of technical, in-depth talks you’ll find in the Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial, a focused day-long look at how to create cutting-edge game graphics for game developers targeting the PC platform. For a full list of what to expect, including talks from Nvidia, AMD, and developers like Wildcard (Ark, Oasis) and Ready at Dawn (The Order: 1886), check out the Tutorial’s full talk lineup!
Further details on these talks and many more are available now on the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler. There you can begin to lay out your GDC 2019, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Bring your team to GDC! Register a group of 10 or more and save 10 percent on conference passes. Learn more here.
Everyone at Chucklefish is blown away by the response to Wargroove. It’s been truly fantastic! That said, we know the game can get pretty tough, so we’re here to offer you some tips. We hope they help you on your way to becoming a groovy Commander!
Knowledge is Power
Each unit in Wargroove is unique, with unique stats, abilities, and critical hit conditions. Make sure you brush up on your unit knowledge by making good use of the tile info and codex. You can access the codex in the game directly from the tile info screen.
Critical Hits Are King
Critical hits are a very unique part of battles in Wargroove. Each unit has a critical hit condition that boosts their damage in a major way! Make sure you’re always thinking about the best way to set up critical hits and you’ll overpower even the strongest battalions.
Get into the Groove
Each Commander has access to an incredibly powerful Groove ability. These abilities are often powerful enough to turn the tide of battle if used correctly. Make sure you’re building your Groove quickly by finishing off units with the Commander and look for the optimum moment to unleash your Groove!
Finding Balance
Your Commander is both your most powerful unit and your biggest weakspot. Don’t be afraid to use your Commander aggressively to advance and build up Groove meter quickly. Make sure the Commander always has an escape route available and be careful not to overextend.
When All Else Fails…
If you get stuck, remember there are difficulty sliders in the game’s menu! You can always come back to a tough mission later and try something new.
With these tips, we hope you’ll be well on your way to strategic victory on the battlefield! If you haven’t picked up Wargroove yet, it’s out now on Xbox One and Windows 10.
In a mood for a little journey to a colourful world full of unexpected events and crazy characters? Jump into a feel-good adventure with rogue-lite elements, where action meets cuteness and powers come with friendship. A love letter to anime and quirkiness from two indie developers.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-15-2019, 07:37 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Dragon Quest Builders 2 Finally Gets A Release Date In The West
Alongside the announcement of Dragon Quest XI for Switch, we also got confirmation for the western release of Dragon Quest Builders 2, which released in Japan late last year. It's coming to the West on July 12 for both Switch and PS4.
The news was confirmed during Nintendo's Direct presentation and subsequently on Sony and Square Enix social feeds. Though, for all the news from the Direct presentation, be sure to read our news roundup.
Much like the first game, Dragon Quest Builders 2 takes place in an alternate reality of an existing Dragon Quest game where the main antagonist defeated the heroes and left the world a barren wasteland; this one specifically focuses on Dragon Quest II. You play as a Builder rescued by a mysterious boy who's tasked with rebuilding the world back to its former glory.
The sequel sports an array of new features, which includes four-player online and local cooperative play, underwater exploration, an optional first-person view, a dash ability, and more. Owners of the first Dragon Quest Builders also get some nice perks, being able to unlock the ability to craft the original protagonist's clothes and the Dragon Lord's throne.
For a closer look at the game, watch the trailer above. Otherwise, if you're curious about the first Dragon Quest Builders, be sure to read our full review. GameSpot gave it an 8/10, concluding that "the excellence of Dragon Quest Builders illustrates the versatility of this 30-year-old franchise as much as it speaks to the engrossing appeal of Minecraft-inspired creation. The story-advancing draw of quests goes hand-in-hand with the depth of a crafting system that cleverly uses monster drops as some of the game's building tools. Whether you want to focus on completing assignments or build with no specific purpose, the game is feature-rich enough to suck up untold hours, even if this happens to be your first Dragon Quest experience."
