Hobby #5: Neverball
Sorry about the lack of updates recently. Today my hobby to show you is a little gem called Neverball. To describe this game, think Super Monkey Ball, but without the monkeys, and the bananas are coins. Something like that. It’s been forever since I’ve played one of those games.
On a red ring in outer space
Anyway, Neverball is a wonderful game, built off of an incredibly basic system (tilt the gameworld with a mouse, joypad, etc. to make the ball roll where you want, collect coins to unlock the goal, then make a mad dash for it before your time runs out). However simple it may sound, though, put it into practice and it can be unfathomably challenging with the right level design, and sometimes even brutal (like when you use many techniques you’ve learned on your own just to collect that last coin, but wait- the timer’s on 10 seconds and the goal’s all the way over there! You tilt the world like crazy, but you’ve tilted too much, and you miss the goal and fall off the edge! That was your last life, because you didn’t collect enough coins to get a 1-up, and now you must re-do the whole course again… Rather long example, eh? Well, it happens a lot). But this challenge and wonderful system combined with the 75 included levels makes for a seriously fun game, believe me.
You thought that would be the end of the post? No, not quite. Or should I say, Never! Neverputt, that is.
A comparatively simple Neverputt course
Neverputt is a game that comes along with the Neverball package, and uses the same engine, though instead of Super Monkey Ball-esque gameplay, it resembles the classic game of minigolf. The courses can be just as crazy though, but crazy at a slower pace. You use the mouse to aim a ball through the course and try to get it into the hole usually situated at the far side of the course. The game includes But you have go through many obstacles, usually, to get there, such as teleporters, walls, giant moving blocks, escelators of sorts and much more. These can sometimes get frustrating. At least it gives you time to think before you act, unlike its partner.
Pros for Neverball:
Very fun and addictive gameplay, as usual
Easy to learn, near-dang-impossible to master
Fast paced and action-y in a different way than most action games
Plenty of challenge
For both non-gamers and hardcore gamers
Cons for Neverball:
If you have trouble with motion sickness in general, you can’t play it. Period.
If you don’t think you have motion sickness, this game will make you re-think that 
Can be extremely frustrating
Pros for Neverputt:
Easy to learn, somewhat tough to master, all it takes is getting your putt strength, distance and direction down, and even though that sounds easy, it’s not
Much variety in terms of obstacles and gameplay
Fun for anyone who likes golf (and it’s putt-putt version) even the slightest
If you can’t handle the usually rather fast, race-agaisnt-time gameplay, but want something similar, try this
Cons for Neverputt:
Definitely not for the impatient type, though I suppose the same could be said about Neverball because of the difficulty
Pros for both:
They’re open-source! Whee!
Overall rating for Neverball: 9/10 – Though it can be tough, it’s hooks you the moment you start with it’s immense fun
Overall rating for Neverputt: 7/10 – While it is a wonderful engine and game, it just lacks some of that necessary fun, but that’s probably just me
Overall rating for both: 9/10 (not an average) – They both run on a rich and addictive system
Download them both at http://icculus.org/neverball/#download - don’t worry, it says Neverball but it comes with Neverputt too
Hobby #4: Roguelikes
There’s a lot to say about this one. Roguelikes are, possibly, the best genre of games out there. They also have the worst graphics other than, say, Interactive Fiction (which I will be writing about soon). What are Roguelikes, exactly? Let me explain…
An example of a roguelike
In the late-ish 70’s, the game “Rogue” graced personal computers, which were still pretty much just coming into being. It was a simplistic game, consisting of a main character (the @ symbol) trying to plunder the depths of an infinite dungeon that was randomly generated. This dungeon consisted of nothing more than walls (- and |), floors (.), monsters (various letters such as D for a dragon), items (more or less just symbols like { or /) and you. At that time, your goal was to loot the randomly generated dungeons while managing your health and hunger. Yep, you heard me. I said randomly generated. That essentially means you’ll never explore the same dungeon twice, ever. Thus the element of exploration is added in addition to survival and strategic thinking. “Strategic thinking?” you may ask. Well, to defeat monsters, you must consider many things, including but not limited to:
- What items are you wearing and which ones are in your inventory?
- What is your position in the corridor/dungeon compared to the monsters’?
- If you throw, say a harmful potion at the monsters, will it hit them from where you are?
- What about nearby traps? Any you could lure monsters into?
- What are the monsters’ resistances? What is there speed compared to yours? Their defense? Strength?
Not only does this quickly discovered strategic layer apply to monsters, but to the corridors and secret passages and etc. And one more thing: things in the dungeon, like monsters, only move when you move. Thus you may or may not consider it something of a “turn-based game”. Which reminds me: there is treasure galore in the dungeon, including but again not limited to: staves, weapons, armor, food, false items, potions, and most importantly: money. Money is your score in Rogue. If your second character got 75 levels deeper than your first characters, but picked up less money, they would be in second place on the high score list. Thus adding even more thought to this massive thought process, in addition to the many, many keyboard commands necessary to do specific things.
After Rogue came a game called Moria, which was basically its duplicate child, from what I’ve heard. I don’t know, I’ve never played Moria. But obviously it was popular enough to spawn…
Angband. Boy, this was a popular game in its time, which wasn’t exactly that long ago. Angband introduced, with the addition of things like new commands, items, monsters, “unique” monsters, and a “final boss” of sorts, a town level. This town included some random villagers that were moderately fun to practice-kill to get used to the very slightly revamped battle system that now included races and classes (like a mage with spellbooks and such!), and various all-purpose shops that would supply you with what you needed. IIRC, this was the starter of the “word of recall” scroll, one of the most useful items in all roguelikes.
- A screenshot of Zangband
Angband was popular enough to spawn many, many successors including what may be the most popular of the bunch, ZAngband (Capital A is no mistake). Oh, boy, to this day it is still one of my all-time favorite roguelikes. In addition to having a huge overworld in comparison to Angband’s rather-pitiful-in-comparison town level, it feature over 15-20(!) new races, and some great classes like Warrior-mage and Paladin, it also introduced many other things like the ability to make monsters into your loyal companions (Yay! I can have a Knight Archer be my friend!), and different “realms” of magic that most mage classes choose from inlcuding Nature, Chaos, Life and Arcane. Also, the newer versions of ZAngband have things like a randomly generated overworld (very fun) with random quests (can be tough but fun) and 100’s of different kinds of shops with a random inventory. Kind of in-depth, eh? Anyway ZAngband was popular enough to spawn things like…
Very fun
Hobby #3: Poke
This isn’t quite a hobby per se, but more or less a fun little device that works universally. What does it do? It allows you to cheat on any game in existance. And it uses the peek and poke system. Fun. Now, take a look:
- After choosing your application, and pressing “add”, enter the number of, say, the gold in your game here.
- That may take a couple of tries, but after it’s done enter the name of the location here
- Change this number to whatever you want. It says 9999999 cause I wanted maximum money.
- And here’s the results in ND 2! (see below post)
That’s basically all there is to it. Well, so it doesn’t work on *every* game out there (eg. it won’t work on multiplayer games, sorry), and FYI I’m not a “cheater cheater pumpkin eater” (cheating usually takes the fun away), but it is a handy and fun device. I can’t exactly review because it’s not a game or anything, but I give it a score of 8/10 for good integration of peek and poke and a handy interface. Some newer games, however, just won’t take it, and it was meant to have more features but was never finished. Oh well, it’s still awesome. It’s free, and the link to download is here: http://codefromthe70s.org/poke.asp
Hobby #2: Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 2 & 3
Thing with this one is, if you live outside of Japan (which I do), there’s about a 95% chance that you missed these wonderful gems. They’re for GBA, and just like, say, Tales of Phantasia for the SNES, were never translated. Oh well, guess that’s why we have patches!
- Exploring the dungeons in ND 3
The Narikiri Dungeon series are usually plentiful when it comes to characters. I’m not so sure about the very first one (never played it, probably will sometime though), but they always a huge amount of characters from other games, and most importantly, the costumes!!! Costumes in these game are basically the “classes” for your characters, and your two main ones can be anything from a swordsman/woman to a mage to a handy archer to a chef… there’s many, MANY different costumes in both games. And the boy and the girl are barely different expect for their looks. On the subject of looks, in ND 2, the “elements” of the certain costume are mostly there for a) cosmetic reasons and b) to make the roster look bigger. Aside from having slightly different skills (keyword: SLIGHTLY) and being weak/vulnerable to certain elements, there’s not much difference between each element of the costumes. The elements are removed in ND3, but in their place are awsome new classes, more skills and spells and TONS of cameo characters (and costumes for them!) from the other Tales series games! The battle system in both of these is almost the exact same same thing that you saw in Tales of Phantasia (IF you saw it). Basically, (A) sometimes along with holding the D-pad does physical attacks, and the (B) button along with the D-pad does special attacks or spells.
- The female Hail Knight attacks!
times the case, usually you have to strategically use skills and jumping and guarding (oops, forgot, guard with [L]) and such to win, say, boss battles. Overall the system is great and timeless, and is, IMO, even better in ToS and the new PSP TotW versions. In case you were wondering, the story of the game is like most of the stories of Tales games, and by that, I mean rather unoriginal and overall meh (but nothing is as bad as Tales of Symphonia’s story and voice acting. Nothing.). C’mon people, if you play the Tales series for their story, then switch to something like Kingdom Hearts. Final verdict: I love the Tales series :3
Hobby #1: M.U.G.E.N
Fight as or against characters from almost anything!
The character select screen is small to start with, but you can make it as big as THIS!
extremely time consuming, it’s worth a shot and is worth it once you have a character you can call “your own”. If you don’t like the style of Mugen when you download it, then you can download a “screenpack”, which is the style of your Mugen. Warning: the screen pack you start out with only comes with slots for 10 characters! Mugen can be downloaded at http://m-u-g-e-n.en.softonic.com/.
Pros:
Very fun, each character plays differently usually
Easy to learn but hard to master
Completely customizable, everything from characters to stages to screenpacks sound files can be changed
Co-op mode is especially fun, you can even do it without another player
Versus mode is not as fun with a lot of characters being broken (see below)
Most characters have good AI and present a challenge
Cons:
All the “arcade”-like modes ar a bit lacking
Single-player can be dull
Some characters are extremely powerful and are no challenge to play as but are impossible to beat
Overall score: 8.5/10
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