Review: Moon – This “Anti-RPG” Shows Its Age, But Is Still Worth A Look
It’s funny to think about how most RPGs absurdly handle the concept of ‘Experience’. Your hero’s quest is to fight the almighty dragon/dark lord/god at the end of the game, and usually, the game has your hero become strong enough to achieve that end by having them kill hundreds, if not thousands, of worthless mook enemies. That random band of giant crabs you come across in the woods? Better kill them all just so you can ‘learn’ how to fight better.
At the time that Moon released, pretty much every RPG in existence unquestioningly followed this trend, but Moon stuck out from the pack by weirdly billing itself as an “Anti-RPG”. And what a weird journey it is. Moon undoubtedly shows its age with some of its design and presentation choices, but the overall experience is definitely worth a look, especially for those who enjoyed Undertale.
Moon’s story begins as something of a meta-game, in which you play as a young boy playing an RPG clearly based heavily on Dragon Quest. After he’s told to go to bed by his mum, the boy turns the game off, but it immediately turns itself back on and draws him in, transporting him into the land of Love-De-Gard. Here, the hero of the RPG roams the land in an ongoing quest to level up, and he achieves this by killing random animals he finds and leaving their corpses to rot. The boy is shaken by this, but he’s soon visited by the Queen of the Moon and charged with the sole responsibility of retrieving these animals’ souls and thus spreading ‘Love’ across the land.
To say that the narrative of Moon is odd is quite the understatement; this is the sort of game that just becomes more deliciously unhinged the further in you go. A big part of this draw is the self-satirical bent of the writing, which frequently pokes fun at instituted JRPG conventions. For example, if you visit the town baker and try to enter his home – as you would do in thousands of other RPGs – he gets upset at you for being so rude and creepy and quite rightly throws you out. Goofy moments like this are then contrasted against abrupt instances of dark incidents, like when the boy watches the hero torch a quivering and clearly frightened slime with magic lightning. It’s a strange but effective balance between the two tones, and Moon strikes that balance well, making for a consistently enjoyable story from start to finish.
Though it’s designed as a satirical mockery of RPGs, Moon’s gameplay itself scarcely resembles that of an RPG. Instead, it’s really more like a point-and-click adventure. The world of Love-De-Gard operates on a set schedule that calls to mind the time-limited design of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and you have to plan each day of your week around the events that you want to achieve that way. Your boy has a stamina meter that governs how long he can be awake, and if it happens to drop to zero before he can get back to a bed, the boy collapses and it’s a game over. So, each day is ultimately a matter of hedging your bets on how much you think you can do with your limited time.
Talking to NPCs and interacting with the world often yields items that can be used for fetch quests and the like, and your ultimate task is to restore the souls of the various things that the hero kills. Upon approaching each of the fallen, you can check up on a brief log that summarizes the name of the creature along with a brief paragraph on its habits and mannerisms, which offer some vague insight into where and how you can find the creature’s soul roaming around. Once you fulfil whatever the condition is, a UFO (Unidentified Flying Octopus) will arrive and whisk away the newly resuscitated creature, while leaving you a thank-you bag of goodies to help in your journey. After doing this enough times, the boy will have accrued enough love to strengthen his resolve and this extends his daily stamina meter by a little bit more.
It’s an easy enough gameplay loop to grab once you get the hang of it, but this is also part of where Moon shows its age. The main issue being that Moon doesn’t do enough to explain even basic mechanics to the player, and this can lead to many frustrating moments where you either wander aimlessly or are outright punished for not knowing something. Case in point: the stamina system isn’t described to you at all in-game, which led to us losing all progress we made on the first day when the boy suddenly keeled over mid-step with no explanation. The localization team helpfully included the translated version of the game’s manual over on their Twitter feed, and a read-through of that certainly helps to better grasp some of the weirder aspects of Moon, but the fact remains that Moon can be a punishingly obtuse experience in many places.
Then there’s the overall plodding pace of Moon to consider, which serves as an irritant that never quite goes away. Elements such as the boy’s relatively slow walking speed and the glacial rate at which text moves prove to artificially extend the length of this (relatively) short game. You may wake up on a day and know exactly who you need to talk to and what you need to do, but there’s plenty of moments of dead air that are spent just watching your character walk across fields and mashing through lines of dialogue boxes that take their sweet time spelling out every letter. That former example is helped somewhat by the inclusion of a fast travel system later on, but there’s still an underlying sense that Moon is a much longer game than it needs to be. Your mileage may vary on this front, of course, but if you consider yourself someone who likes a game that gets to the point and cuts out the fluff, Moon most certainly is not your cup of tea.
From a presentation perspective, Moon borrows from many other 32-bit PlayStation games in how it overlays sprites over pre-rendered backgrounds, and this release does nothing to bump up the resolution or otherwise improve on the antiquated graphics. None of it looks outright bad, although it takes a bit of time to adjust to the different form of visual presentation here. Luckily, Moon is greatly helped by the kind of art style it employs, which comes off as a blend of impressionist paintings and Claymation, of all things, which can lead to plenty of scenes that prove to be quite visually captivating. There’s no mistaking this for a late ’90s title, then, but Moon does enough right that it’s not too hard on the eyes.
Conclusion
Whether or not Moon is for you ultimately depends upon your tolerance level for aspects of late ’90s game design and your overall interest in the RPG genre. As a standalone product, Moon has plenty of amusing commentary about RPGs, but much of this is likely to be lost on those who don’t much care for them. Strip away the satire, and you’re left with a mostly entertaining but somewhat simplistic point-and-click-style adventure laden with fetch quests. We’d give Moon a recommendation to those who are fascinated by its legendary status as a niche classic or to those who really enjoyed the narrative style of Undertale, but if you don’t fit into either of those groups, this might not be for you.
The footage shows off a 6v6 VIP Escort mode and gives some hints as to the direction developer Treyarch is taking with this year's multiplayer offering. For starters, it seems the low time to kill has been retained from last year's Modern Warfare, this time with health bars above opponent's heads so that you can see exactly how close you are to a kill.
The loadout system seems familiar too, with five attachment slots for weapons and evidence suggesting progression on a per-weapon basis. Each loadout also features a lethal, tactical, and field upgrade slot, as well as options for Wildcard slots. These are filled with perks, with the footage showing off "Perk Greed" which lets you double up on perks, and "Danger Close" which stocks you up with more grenades.
The following one-liner solves the problem in an elegant way using a fine understanding of more advanced Python features (source).
print('\n'.join('Fizz' * (i%3==0) + 'Buzz' * (i%5==0) or str(i) for i in range(1,101)))
The one-liner creates a string using the join function with the newline character as a delimiter. Here’s a short explanation of the function:
The string.join(iterable) method concatenates all the string elements in the iterable (such as a list, string, or tuple) and returns the result as a new string. The string on which you call it is the delimiter string—and it separates the individual elements. For example, '-'.join(['hello', 'world']) returns the joined string 'hello-world'.
So, what’s the iterable, you pass into the join() function? It’s a generator expression of the form: expression for variable in context. You go over all integer values in the context 1 to 100 using the range() function. So, you obtain the remaining expression for i in range(1, 101). What’s the expression part?
It consists of three elements:
'Fizz' * (i%3==0) — The modulo expression i%3==0 returns True only if the integer i is divisible by 3, otherwise it returns False. So, you multiply the string 'Fizz' either with True (=1) or with False (=0). As a result, you obtain the empty string '' in all cases except if the integer i is divisible by 3—in which case you obtain the string 'Fizz'.
'Buzz' * (i%5==0)— The modulo expression i%5==0 returns True only if the integer i is divisible by 5, otherwise it returns False. So, you multiply the string 'Buzz' either with True (=1) or with False (=0). As a result, you obtain the empty string '' in all cases except if the integer i is divisible by 5—in which case you obtain the string 'Buzz'.
You use string concatenation to glue together the previously obtained strings. In most cases, this will be the empty string. If i is divisible by 3, you obtain the string 'Fizz'. If i is divisible by 5, you obtain the string 'Buzz'. And if i is divisible by 3 and 5, you obtain the string 'FizzBuzz'.
or str(i) — In the case you obtained a non-empty string in {'Fizz', 'Buzz', 'FizzBuzz'} in the previous step, the or operation simply returns this string. This is called short circuiting—and it’s used in many programming languages such as Python to improve efficiency of logical operations.
But if the string is empty, it is interpreted as a logical False. Thus, Python returns the second operand of the or operation. The second operand simply is the string representation of the integer i.
A very interesting implementation of the FizzBuzz problem indeed!
FizzBuzz One-Liner 2: Slicing
An alternative is given in the following nice one-liner (source):
for i in range(1, 101): print('FizzBuzz'[i*i%3*4:8--i**4%5] or i)
Wow—what a short and concise one-liner solution! But how does it work?
You iterate over all values from i=1 to i=100 and print a string. So far so good.
You use the or operation and slicing to determine the string 'FizzBuzz'[start:end] or i generates the output.
You use the property of short circuiting in Python: If 'FizzBuzz'[start:end] is empty, the integer i is returned, otherwise, the non-empty string is returned.
You carve out a substring from 'FizzBuzz' using slicing as follows.
Slicing is a concept to carve out a substring from a given string. Use slicing notation s[start:stop:step] to access every step-th element starting from index start (included) and ending in index stop (excluded). All three arguments are optional, so you can skip them to use the default values (start=0, stop=len(lst), step=1). For example, the expression s[2:4] from string 'hello' carves out the slice 'll' and the expression s[:3:2] carves out the slice 'hl'.
In the example, you have the slicing operation 'FizzBuzz'[i*i%3*4:8--i**4%5].
start = i*i%3*4 — Note that the multiplication * and modulo operation % have the same priority, so they are evaluated from left to right. If integer i is divisible by 3, i*i is also divisible by 3, and the start index is 0. In all other cases, the start index is 4. Thus, the slice either starts with 'Fizz' or 'Buzz'.
stop = 8--i**4%5 — This is 4 in all cases except if the number i is divisible by 5, in which case this is 8.
So, there are four cases:
The number is divisible only by 3: start=0, stop=4 –> 'Fizz'
The number is divisible only by 5: start=4, stop=8 –> 'Buzz'
The number is divisible by both 3 and 5: start=0, stop=8 –> 'FizzBuzz'
The number is divisible by neither 3 nor 5: start = 4, stop=4 –> ''
Phew! This was a hard nut to crack, wasn’t it?
Python One-Liner 3: Map + Lambda
You can find detailed tutorials on the map and lambda functions here:
Those two functions can be used to solve the FizzBuzz problem (source):
print(list(map(lambda i: "Fizz"*(i%3==0)+"Buzz"*(i%5==0) or str(i), range(1,101))))
It’s similar to Method 1 and by now you’re able to figure it out. Think of the different values the integer i can take.
Python One-Liners Book
Python programmers will improve their computer science skills with these useful one-liners.
Python One-Linerswill teach you how to read and write “one-liners”: concise statements of useful functionality packed into a single line of code. You’ll learn how to systematically unpack and understand any line of Python code, and write eloquent, powerfully compressed Python like an expert.
The book’s five chapters cover tips and tricks, regular expressions, machine learning, core data science topics, and useful algorithms. Detailed explanations of one-liners introduce key computer science concepts and boost your coding and analytical skills. You’ll learn about advanced Python features such as list comprehension, slicing, lambda functions, regular expressions, map and reduce functions, and slice assignments. You’ll also learn how to:
• Leverage data structures to solve real-world problems, like using Boolean indexing to find cities with above-average pollution • Use NumPy basics such as array, shape, axis, type, broadcasting, advanced indexing, slicing, sorting, searching, aggregating, and statistics • Calculate basic statistics of multidimensional data arrays and the K-Means algorithms for unsupervised learning • Create more advanced regular expressions using grouping and named groups, negative lookaheads, escaped characters, whitespaces, character sets (and negative characters sets), and greedy/nongreedy operators • Understand a wide range of computer science topics, including anagrams, palindromes, supersets, permutations, factorials, prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, obfuscation, searching, and algorithmic sorting
By the end of the book, you’ll know how to write Python at its most refined, and create concise, beautiful pieces of “Python art” in merely a single line.
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Amazon stops Flex drivers gaming system by hanging iPhones from trees
Amazon has fixed an issue with its Flex contract delivery driver app that allowed savvy drivers to pick up more orders for delivery than others, a trick to game the system that involved hanging an iPhone on a tree near Whole Foods stores.
Amazon Flex is the major retailer’s app-based service for on-demand deliveries, but one used by drivers who actually make the deliveries rather than customers. If a delivery is to be made for Amazon’s Prime Now, Amazon uses the app as a dispatch system, alerting potential drivers to a delivery that can be picked up and delivered.
According to a report fromBloomberg, some drivers savvy to how the system worked were able to secure more deliveries within the dispatch system than others, by hanging iPhones running the app on a tree near Whole Foods and Amazon depots that offer same-day deliveries.
By keeping the smartphones near to the depots in Chicago, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C. areas, this made the driver seem to be far closer and more immediately able to pick up the delivery than others, even if they were in reality miles away. As each delivery was worth $15 to the drivers, plus any tip, the competition led to some Flex drivers coming up with inventive ways to be picked.
Previously, this included hanging around in Whole Foods parking lots, though Amazon warned drivers away from such behavior in June. “Waiting in the parking lot or using the store Wi-Fi is not an effective way to increase one’s chances of seeing an instant offer,” Amazon said in a statement.
To combat the gaming of the system, Amazon has changed the way the app works, with one source familiar with the app claiming it only required a “few lines of code.” Though the actual changes were not revealed, it appears that Amazon didn’t simply create a dead zone around store locations to discourage phone-hanging and stalking the parking lot, as doing so would increase delivery times for consumers.
Welcome to this edition in our series of spotlight articles
where we’re examining Stasis via each of the three Guardian classes in Destiny
2. In our previous edition, we featured the Warlock Shadebinder. Here, we’re getting to know the Titan Behemoth.
—
Titan. Smash. Two things that simply go hand in hand. There
are few combat situations in Destiny 2 that can’t be solved – or at
least made better – by a quick Titan punch to the face. When Beyond Light
is released this November, Guardians who prefer the Titan class will discover a
new subset of Stasis powers that allows them to harness the power of Darkness.
And yes, fisticuffs will be part of it. But it’s not the entire story.
As we discussed in our previous edition of this series, each
Stasis subclass will embody a facet of Stasis. Warlock Shadebinders emphasize
freezing enemies and, as you’ll learn more about next week, the Hunter Revenant
is a specialist at slowing the action down. The Titan Behemoth uses Stasis as a
means of both creation and destruction.
With the Behemoth, we wanted to put an emphasis on the
ability to use Stasis to create crystals that can alter the battle by changing the
very ground beneath your feet. Control the ground, control the fight. As a
result, the Behemoth can use their Stasis abilities defensively – such as
creating crystalline walls to block enemies and gunfire – or offensively, by
using crystals to freeze enemies.
The Titan Behemoth can unleash a powerful melee attack known
as the Shiver Strike. Here, the Titan lunges forward, launched by a Stasis
explosion at their feet to propel them towards an enemy. While in mid-air, they
summon a Stasis gauntlet that covers their fist and then slam into their foe,
sending them careening backwards and slowing nearby enemies.
The Behemoth’s Super, Glacial Quake, begins with the Titan
forming a mighty gauntlet on their fist. They can then slam the gauntlet into the
ground, sending out shockwaves that form Stasis crystals which freeze nearby
enemies. Covered in an armor of Stasis crystals, the Titan temporarily becomes
an unstoppable wrecking machine, able to jump higher, faster, and farther, all
while blasting enemies with greatly increased melee attacks.
If frozen enemies are the bowling pins, think of the Titan
Behemoth during their Glacial Quake Super as the bowling ball, able to
instantly shatter enemies as they sprint or slide through them. Running amok in
a crowd of bad guys and shattering them like a perfect tenpin strike is a fine
strategy but there’s a degree of subtlety there too, if you want it. For example, you can cancel out of a slide into a massive Stasis-powered
leap, only to cancel that just at the right moment and direct the
Behemoth downward into a devastating slam. So punch if you must, but know that
Stasis has plenty more to offer you, Titan.
Next week, we’ll be going deeper into Stasis with our look
at the third and final subclass, the Hunter Revenant. How do you make the
quickest class even more deadly? By slowing down everything around them, that’s
how!
Come back on September 8 to learn more and check out the Stasis hub page
in the meantime.
Review: Manifold Garden – A Remarkable Spectacle Undermined By Benign Puzzles
First-person puzzle games are not a fresh, new concept. The likes of RealMyst, The Talos Principle and Superliminal (amongst many others) represent the genre on Nintendo’s venerable hybrid console, and they’re a high bar to clear. We don’t feel as though Manifold Gardenquite reaches those highs, but it’s a game with a lot to offer – especially if you appreciate its bizarre, sweeping and somewhat alien perspective tricks.
The visuals are pretty spectacular, in terms of their sheer creativity and the unfolding enormity of its vistas. Moving through its bizarre, M.C. Escher-esque locales never ceases to be interesting; the sense of scale is often daunting, and moving from the game’s initially claustrophobic environments to the sudden vastness of its outdoor space inspires genuine awe and more than a little vertigo.
Progressing through the game is easy and intuitive; controls are kept as simple as possible in order to avoid tripping the player up as they navigate the spatial puzzles that make up Manifold Garden’s core gameplay. The A button interacts, hitting switches or picking up boxes, while tapping ZR will plant your feet on whichever surface you’re aiming at; basically, you’re able to re-orient yourself on walls and ceilings in order to get around.
You’ll need to, because the puzzles here involve picking up and placing boxes on switches, some of which are found at completely different orientations to the state that you may enter a room in. The catch is that you can’t manipulate said boxes without being at the correct orientation, and gravity will only apply to them as long as you remain in such a position. Flicking between walls, ceilings and floors to manipulate multiple elements in order to get a single box where you want it isn’t just common – it’s pretty much all you do.
Every puzzle is essentially a block puzzle, though the goals aren’t always the same. Figuring out how to manipulate gravity in order to “freeze” boxes in mid-air so you can stack further boxes atop them is a headscratcher, and sometimes finding your way through the labyrinthine structures to get where you need to be is a challenge in itself. Thankfully, while difficult, Manifold Garden is rarely frustrating – its rules are extremely clear and it never breaks them in an effort to trick the player. There’s also a refreshing lack of hand-holding; it’s up to the player to figure out exactly how the game’s elements work together, and how to solve the conundrums that arise from its building blocks.
Traversal is both helped and hindered by the fact that the game’s world is looped and mirrored – in outdoor spaces, it’s easy to accidentally fall into what seems like a never-ending void, only to find yourself landing on the very platform from which you tripped. Given you can’t traditionally jump, this is actually the easiest way to cross gaps in the environment, which can lead to a thoroughly exhilarating fall as you wrap around from top to bottom, gradually making your way forwards.
Less impressively, we found that the consistently remarkable spectacle of Manifold Garden is a little at odds with its relatively benign and straightforward puzzle-solving. That’s not to say it’s bad, or that said puzzles aren’t fun to figure out, it just struck us as being a little detached from the presentation. Your goal seems indeterminate – you’re effectively opening doors to move forward, yes, but it can be somewhat jarring to move from these outrageous, surrealist landscapes into a smaller room with a bit of glorified Sokoban to play. The gameplay doesn’t match the ambition of Manifold Garden’s visuals, and with some of the trickier to execute puzzles we found ourselves just wanting to get them over with so we could get back to the cool stuff.
Performance is adequate, running at what feels like a consistent 30fps framerate, though the resolution doesn’t hold up so well in handheld mode, leading to some shimmering edges. It’s totally playable, though, and the game doesn’t chug when you navigate the enormous outdoor spaces. It’s responsive to control and generally pretty chill – right down to the ambient soundtrack which makes some of its finickier puzzles less irritating than they could be.
Conclusion
It almost feels like Manifold Garden might have fared better as a “walking simulator” at times; its infinitely-folding environments are works of art from any angle, and it’s a little difficult to appreciate them when you’re solving yet another samey block puzzle. Still, it’d be churlish to mark it down for being a game when solving its riddles isn’t unenjoyable by any stretch of the imagination. We just found ourselves a little impatient to be done with them so we could hurry into the next astonishing panorama of abstract, impossible imagery. Manifold Garden is a lovely game, but sometimes the “game” bit gets a little in the way.
Disrupt the Past, Change the Future in Strategic FPS Lemnis Gate
Hello everyone and welcome to your first look at our exciting new turn-based combat strategy shooter, Lemnis Gate! I couldn’t be more thrilled to finally show off all the hard work from everyone here at Ratloop Games Canada.
As you’ll see in the trailer, Lemnis Gate is a mind-altering turn-based strategy shooter where skilful mastery of weapons and abilities meets genius turn-based strategy over several time-bending rounds. It plays a little differently to what you might be used to, so let me explain a bit about how it works…
Our game takes place in a time loop. You have 25 seconds to make your move, whether it’s blasting an enemy, capturing an objective, or defusing a dangerous situation. Your opponent will then take their turn and try to counter your moves (which are now infinitely looping). Round by round, you and your opponent pick different deep-space operatives to throw into the mix, building to an epic climax at the end of the final round where an entire team of your characters faces off against an entire team of your opponents! It’s a fresh, four-dimensional take on a popular genre, which we think you’re going to love.
What’s really interesting about Lemnis Gate is the moment to moment gameplay, the way you think as you play is truly something new. In a regular shooter, your eyes see what’s on screen and you react to what’s happening in that present moment. In Lemnis Gate, you have to consider what happened in the past, what’s happening in the present AND what might happen in the future. It’s four-dimensional combat.
Imagine something simple like a grenade: you throw it into a room and it explodes. In a time loop, unless interfered with, that grenade will go off in THAT room at THAT time the same way over and over until the end of the match.
You can use this to your advantage and anticipate where your opponent might be in the future and throw some well-placed grenades at critical junctions in the map. Your opponent might find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and be obliterated by that same grenade you threw in the past (this is immensely satisfying, by the way!)
But it doesn’t end there! Your opponent, seeking revenge, can then intercept your character BEFORE you threw the grenade, changing the timeline, eliminating that grenade from existence in the first place. This would in turn mean that the opponent’s character killed by your grenade never died! Yes, mind = blown!
Time travel and causality are a core pillar of Lemnis Gate’s gameplay. It’s some pretty mind-bending stuff. You must learn how to perceive time differently and strategize in new ways as you begin your journey towards mastering the game.
There are also many different ways to play. Dive into a match online, execute audacious strategies, master your hero’s abilities, and think several moves ahead to achieve a victory that reverberates across time itself. Or jump into offline play where you can challenge a friend locally sharing the same screen and controller. Get ready to disrupt the past and change the future! Only the smartest will survive.
Lemnis Gate launches in early 2021, and we can’t wait for you to play it.
With profit and revenue on the rise, CD Projekt heaps praise on The Witcher 3
It’s been over five years since CD Projekt Red launched The Witcher 3, and even still the game remains a key contributor to CD Projekt’s earnings.
This H1 report is however, barring another delay, the last quarterly check-in CD Projekt Red will release before its ambitious role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077 launches, meaning The Witcher 3‘s reign as CD Projekt’s top earner may very well be nearing its final days.
Closing out the first half of its 2020 fiscal year, CD Projekt reported 364 million PLN (~$97.2 million) in revenue, up nearly 70 percent year-over-year while its net profit hit 147 million PLN (~$39.3 million) and nearly tripled last year’s net profit of 51.5 million PLN (~$13.8 million).
Much of those increases were, unsurprisingly, driven by sales of The Witcher 3. The game itself received a helpful boost in visibility due to its Nintendo Switch launch late last year, while other properties in The Witcher franchise helped boost H1’s numbers as well.
Namely, Gwent boasted its best H1 in history thanks at least partially to debuts on iOS, Android, and Steam, though, following in Q1’s footsteps, The Witcher spinoff Thronebreaker is also named as a notable contributor.
In a brief earnings highlight, CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz also notes that GOG.com closed out the six month period with its best H1 to date, reporting 109.8 million PLN (~$29.3 million) in revenue and 5.6 million PLN (~$1.5 million) in profit.
