BVE Train Simulator 5/6: The Big English Guide On How To Use It, And Why

Boso View Express, or BVE for short, is one of those train simulators that have been around for a very long time but never quite managed to establish themselves at the top of the food chain, at least not here in the west. But if you want to simulate Japanese railways, BVE is essentially the holy grail.

You can find a huge variety of routes and vehicles, all of them with appropriate train protection and signalling systems courtesy of a highly-flexible plugin interface, for absolutely no money at all, but there is a downside: Basically the entire community is based in Japan, communicates in Japanese, and works on Japanese computers – which makes it difficult to get into the sim, or even to get it working, if you are not able to read and understand at least a bit of Japanese. (Google Translate, while definitely useful, often chokes on technical jargon.)

This guide aims to help you install the sim and addons, understand principles of how Japanese railways generally are operated and how they differ from what we Westerners would expect, and also point you to some up-to-date, high-quality add-ons.

My Games of the Year 2016

With only 5 hours to go, it’s my last chance to tell y’all which games of 2016 I liked best, which is apparently a thing many people do. So, let’s go. They’re not ranked, I like all games on this list equally.

Overwatch

Me, about to get fragged

Not including Blizzard’s newest franchise on a GotY list is apparently a game crime, so let’s get it out of the way first. It’s good. The characters are diverse, colorful and likeable (except for Reaper, who’s kind of a dipshit). Gameplay is extremely well-paced, fast-flowing and deep yet intuitive. But you probably knew that already.

Pocket Card Jockey

Continuing with something a bit more obscure, Game Freak’s most recent project outside the Pokémon franchise was so engrossing I spent like five hours with the demo alone. This brilliant mix of Solitaire and horse racing may at first seem a bit silly, but then you realize how well all the different mechanics tie in together to create an experience defined by strategic risk/reward choices, challenging timed puzzles and just enough randomness to keep you from thinking about them too much. I highly recommend you check it out.

War Thunder

My favourite Berlin landmarks are the Reichstag and the huge watery pit.

Truth be told, I first played Gaijin’s WWII-themed vehicle shooter several years ago, but considering the game’s official release not even two weeks ago, it definitely deserves a spot on this list. I’ve been a fan of this kind of game ever since my first World of Tanks match in 2012, and I’ve been following several games in the genre for a while now. War Thunder, with its brutal, unforgiving and incredibly dynamic action-focused tank battles, is a hot contender for the spot of my personal favourite – it’s not quite there yet, but I’m excited what the future will bring.

Pokémon Sun

(I guess Moon is also probably good.)

It’s a Pokémon game.

What, you expected me to say more? Oh, okay then. With Game Freak’s new-found willingness to slaughter sacred cows, this was the first Pokémon game I was hyped for in a long while, and it fully delivered. The trials are so much fun! True, the difficulty curve in this game is all over the place, to an even worse degree than in previous games (yes, I’m looking at you, Emolga). But the series has never been a place for those seeking a fair and well-balanced challenge, and the sense of wonder that drove me through Generation I and II in my childhood is back in full force with this one. I truly hope Game Freak will continue to experiment with new design ideas in future Pokémon games.

Ladykiller in a Bind

Aside from everything else, the UI looks really good!

I’m a bit hesitant to include it on this list, because it is, y’know, kind of… um… erotica (and therefor not even on Steam). But Christine Love’s latest visual novel was my most anticipated game of this year, and… yeah, it delivered. I did like most of Love’s earlier work, including the brilliant gut punch that was Analogue: A Hate Story, and at this point she could write a VN about watching paint dry and I’d still buy it.

LKIAB is not about watching paint dry. It’s about a lesbian crossdressing as her brother on a school trip (which just happens to be a cruise as well), having lots of kinky sex, making some awful Metal Gear Solid references and getting caught up in a slightly Danganronpa-esque, but significantly less violent game of treachery and social manipulation, as well as in a weird kidnapping scheme by a shady group of definitely-not-bad-guys. The game is funny, sexy, occasionally challenging and intriguing. It also has some of the more interesting gameplay I’ve seen in a VN, and as most of Love’s work is highly nonlinear and interactive – something I often miss in other VNs.

Honorable Mentions

• I loved Danganronpa, which finally got ported to the PC this year. Monokuma is a great villain who elevates the game from solid murder-mystery into the realm of awesome, truly WTF surrealness. Surreality? Eh, who cares.
• Shenzhen IO by Zachtronics is a good game. Full stop. But a) it’s still in Early Access, and b) it doesn’t quite live up to the creator’s previous TIS-100, which has a similar premise but is a lot more focused in its puzzle design. Maybe next year, though?
• Fire Emblem: Fates didn’t quite make the cut because it’s too much of “more of the same”, and the “one game for the price of two” principle of marketing can go die in a sewer for all I care. Also, the game is focused on your choice of either siding with a bunch of decent people, or with an insane, power-hungry maniac, and the writing seems to entirely gloss over to ethic iffiness of the second alternative because, uuuuh… they’re both flawed, I guess? Who wrote this game – CNN?

Danmaku Unlimited 2

So this was my first step on the way down the rabbit hole called “Bullet Hell”: Danmaku Unlimited 2, easily available on Steam (current price: EUR 4.99). There are versions for Android and iOS as well, but because I don’t really have a gaming phone, I will focus on the PC version here.

What I like…

The first thing that catched my eye was the music. Wait, that sounds wrong. Anyway, the soundtrack by Japanese indie band Blankfield is what I like best about this game. I suck at categorizing music, but it’s some metal industrial thingy. Look, it has electric guitars in it. The entire soundtrack is on Spotify and probably other streaming platforms, so just judge for yourself. It is loud, it is fast, it is exciting.

And so is the game. You essentially have three attacks on your hand: The basic shot, which you will use all the time. The beam, which destroys enemy bullets and transform them into a higher score modifier. And lastly, Trance Mode, which gives you a huge boost to damage and score modifier for a while, but needs to be charged by “scraping” bullets – i. e. bullets hitting your ship but missing the hitbox (which is, as per Bullet Hell conventions, smaller than the actual ship and displayed as a big glowing dot). Using those special attacks at the right time is crucial to getting a good score and adds another layer of complexity over merely beating the game without dying over and over. The pacing is tight, enemies don’t take too much time to eliminate and bosses don’t stay at the same pattern for too long, either.

That being said, Danmaku Unlimited 2 is very forgiving when compared to other Bullet Hell games. Usually, you have three to five lives and if you get hit just once, you die. In Danmaku Unlimited, a single ship can take up to five hits before exploding on the sixth one, and you can have five lives – giving you the ability to eat thirty bullets in a single playthrough! You do have to give up a lot of firepower for that, but even in a balanced build, you still can take way more damage than in other games.

But that does not make the game easy: It makes up for that in the design of its bullet patterns. They are varied, creative, good-looking and hard – especially those of the later bosses (or “Valkyrias”). My personal favourites are a couple of patterns where a handful of bullets “eat” other bullets and clear your path through another, nigh-undodgeable pattern.  But of course, those vaccum cleaner bullets will still damage you if you hit them.

I played through the first three levels just now just for this one screenshot. Not sure if fail or win.

…and what I dislike

When I played this game first, I found it overwhelmingly good. Today, I am a bit more ambiguous on it. Yes, I still like it and yes, I still recommend it, but there are other Bullet Hell games I like better.

My quarrel with the game is that it looks a bit bland. The backgrounds are completely forgettable and the enemies somehow all look the same. The game does have a high level of visual clarity, which is certainly a good thing, but it does have some disadvantages. Also, the sound effects don’t really give you the feeling of sitting in a space ship and shooting other spaceships, but rather sound like shooting a Nerf blaster at a concrete wall. Believe me, I am an expert on shooting Nerf blasters at concrete walls. Especially in contrast to the great music, those sound effects just are a bit… meh.

Still, it is a really good game. Just not the best one I ever played.

A word on smartphones

Danmaku Unlimited 2 is actually a port of an earlier mobile game version – and it doesn’t feel like that for a bit. It looks great on the big screen (with the issues I mentioned before) and works great with both keyboard and gamepad controls. That history does, however, take a bit of an edge off my earlier criticism, because clearly a high degree of visual strategy is far more important on a smartphone.

And yes, the game actually works on Smartphones! I gave the demo a whirl and even though my phone lacks the power needed for a decent gameplay, the controls actually feel far more smooth than I expected. I still think touch controls are not really the way to go for games like this, but if you are a mobile gamer, you might still want to check it out. Otherwise – I recommend getting the Steam version. For five bucks, you really get a good game with a lot of long-term fun included.

Next game to be reviewed: Crimzon Clover WORLD IGNITION.

Welcome to Bullet Hell!

For some months now, I’ve been playing a bunch of Bullet Hell Games. For those unfamiliar with the genre: It’s a subgenre of 2D shoot’em ups, characterized by a whole bunch of bullets being on screen all the time. These games require pattern recognition, concentration, dodging skills and some memorization. Also, they are totally awesome and you should play them, which is why I will review every single game of the genre I played so far in the coming days. But first of all, I’d like to tell you why I, personally, like the genre so much.

They are hard, but not frustrating.

I have heard of Bullet Hell (or Danmaku – Japanese for “Bullet Curtain”) before, but quickly got the impression that it was for really good video game geniuses, and I do not consider myself one of these. But it turned out it actually is possible to play them without a diploma of gaming handed out by Dark Souls U. Yes, all of these games are really, really hard and even on the easier difficulty settings, beating a game on the first try is not something that’s going to happen. The elusive 1CC Run (beat the game without using Continue) and the even more elusive No Miss run (which is a non-indicative term for not being hit even once) are completely out of reach for hacks like me.

But even when getting smashed in the face, I found I still enjoyed every second of it, because usually there was a sense of progress. With every run, I get better and reach something I haven’t reached before. Got to chapter 4 for the first time, learned how to use my least favourite ship, no-missed level 2, and so on. And after twenty hours, I was actually able to 1CC Crimzon Clover on Novice difficulty. Yay me.

Also, the games are easier than they look – your ship has a tiny hitbox, and you usually don’t need to focus on single bullets – just on the lines, cones or circles in which they move. And once you’ve gotten the hang of a level, you can make it a lot easier by saving up your special attacks for those enemies that give you trouble, or evade their danger zones entirely.

A whole bunch of stuff happens in them.

With all those ever-changing bullet patterns on screen, “popcorn” enemies that explode after just one or two hits, your high rate of fire and at least one special attack in every game in the genre, those games never have a boring moment. Well – some of them have, but I will come to that later. Also, these games are all about presentation – there is, apparently, a law stating that they have to have awesome art and awesome soundtracks and lots of explosions with lots of noise. The soundtracks can be in any genre – orchestral arrangements, industrial metal, trance, anything really.

They are highly diverse.

Not just music-wise, Bullet Hell games are “anything goes”. They do have a certain formula, yes, but each has their own approach to level and boss design (multistage? multiple hit zones? focused on popcorn or on minibosses? timed bossfights?), to special attacks (beams, rockets, firepower boosts, shields) and to their visual style, and all this means that Danmaku Unlimited 2 and Crimzon Clover (two games I am going to review) are about as similar as Team Fortress 2 and Modern Warfare.

And they have a plan.

Sorry, but I couldn’t resist making that lame joke. Anyway, that’s about it. If you haven’t played Bullet Hell stuff before, I hope I could make you a bit more interested, and I certainly will try to get you to buy some stuff in the next days.

(Title Image: Danmaku Unlimited 2. Review incoming tomorrow.)

#GamerGate: Time to leave the bandwagon?

I’ve tried for a long time to ignore this whole #GamerGate thing, but I can’t go on with it anymore. The movement has become a serious threat to variety in games, to independent game journalism, to freedom of speech on the internet, and to everybody who dares to stand up against them. At the same time, there is a lot of justified, well-researched criticism of the movement, the criminal network at its very core, the methods used by the more rabid GamerGators (a word I just made up. Neat, huh?) and the impact they have on the gaming community. This, however, is mostly limited to private blogs of devs or journalists, while the big gaming websites either completely ignore it or try to cover it from a “neutral” standpoint.

Unfortunately, the time for neutrality has passed. GamerGate is a mob and has been a mob pretty much from day one. The things they do – threatening murder and rape, telling people to kill themselves, harassing critics and attacking their revenue streams – are amoral and for the most part criminal, and they do real harm. By looking away, the big gaming press allows the GamerGators to continue with what they do while still being able to pretend having the moral high ground. That is shameful.

This post will be filled with a lot of rage, so I would like to address some things first: I do not believe everybody in the GamerGate movement is a criminal, amoral scumbag. But I do think that the movement is so rotten to the core that no good will come from it, ever. If you genuinely believe in a free, independent press and that’s the only reason why you are a Gator, get out. Now. Not only are you supporting the aforementioned criminals by standing with them – you are supporting a movement that harms the very ideals you are fighting for. That’s right – I think GamerGate does not do any good for an independent press, because they have a completely screwed up definition of “independent”. More on that later.

Again: If you are fighting for a good cause, you have no need to associate with criminals. Don’t do it. Go somewhere else. Create your own movement and hashtag. I bet many game designers and journalists alike would love to stand with you. But if you are with GamerGate, you are with a mob that operates via Nazi methods, and you should not support people like that, ever. They should stand isolated and alone, and they need to fail if freedom should win.

The Global SJW Conspiracy

Now, let’s move on to why I despise the GamerGate movement so much. Well, apart from them being a mob of criminal, amoral scumbags who threaten murder and rape, tell people to kill themselves, harass critics and attack their revenue stream while hiding behind a shield of good-willed but naive people with partially overlapping goals.

At its very core, GamerGate is a conspiracy theory.

Game Jammin’ and so on: It’s alive!

…aaand the game is online. In fact, it has been since Monday (one day later than I wanted it to) and you can play it at Kongregate. Finding good names is always hard for me, so it’s called “Snipe’em up”. Enjoy!

What I’ve learnt: Integrating social APIs is far easier than I feared it was – or, at least, it is with the Kongregate API. Unity is awesome, but I knew that before. Getting visibility (and, thusly, feedback) on Kongregate is pretty hard, unless you actually make it to the very top of the rankings. This looks a lot simpler on other browser game platforms, like Newgrounds and Armorgames, and I might actually go elsewhere with coming games.

On the technical side, I’ve finally gotten some practice with Colliders, something that doesn’t come up too often in my main project, and got some new ideas on how to structure code, especially for very small projects that don’t need much reusability.

And finally, on the game design front, I had some time to ponder how the Danmaku genre works, which was interesting. I’m pretty new to this genre, which I only checked out a couple of weeks ago because slowbeef talked about it on Retsutalk and it sounded interesting and far less hard than it was, so I got Crimzon Clover WORLD IGNITION on Steam. It’s actually a fun journey for me and I feel like I’m getting better all the time.

But enough talk about good games, let’s go back to Snipe’em Up. What would I do different if I had more time? Some nice pixel art instead of the quick&dirty shapes I’m currently using. I suck at pixel art, but could probably manage something acceptable for those few sprites I need in a game of this scope. And the music isn’t really what I wanted to have, but I had to go with what I could got. So, have some epic orchestra music with your black&white GIMP brushes.

Anyway, since I don’t have a usable idea for my next project (with a slightly bigger scope, this time – maybe about one month), I might as well try my hand at a better looking, smoother, longer and more varied Snipe’em Up II. We’ll see. My other ideas are a Horror Metroidvania Thingy, or maybe a purely sprite-based 2.5d train driver arcade game in the style of Densha de Go!. But so far, neither of those two really seems like the right game for me, because both would require substantial amounts of artwork and my artwork sucks, like I said before.

ERROR_END_OF_STREAM_OF_CONSCIOUSNESS – blogpost aborted

Game Jammin’, the antisocial way (3)

It’s been a couple of days since the last update, and I’m making good progress so far!

The game looks mostly like I want it to look (except for the player ship that’s going to get a reworking tomorrow). Collision detection works, garbage collection works, the basic game script is in place. I’m still missing the final boss, and also the miniboss I’ve got so far is probably the easiest opponent in the whole game.

The whole thing can be played through in about two minutes – that’ll probably go up a bit with said final boss, maybe to three minutes. But I don’t think somebody who has never played a shmup before will beat it on the first try.

What’s still also missing is a scoring system that actually produces reasonable results and makes getting a high score actually challenging. So far, every run that makes it to the end will have exactly the same score – that’s not really interesting.

Kongregate statistics integration is mostly there and already debugged. Music is in place, as are some sound effects – though one or two of those are still missing.

In total, I have spent about 10 hours with this project, which is less than I hoped to do, but I’m still dealing with The Move™ and searching a job, which takes up some time as well and is the reason I gave me a whole week of time for this. Five hours or so are still missing until the whole thing is finished, I guess.

On a side note, the script that spawns enemies is probably the worst bit of code I ever wrote and I really, really have to share it with you.

Game Jammin’, the antisocial way (2)

Only one devlog for the first two games of my challenge, because I haven’t gotten around to do much. It’s weekend, dammit. Also, I’m still recovering from The Move™.

Progress so far:

Those stars spawn one bullet every .1 second from one of their tips, and rotate clockwise through all the five tips. Also, the whole star is rotating at variable rates. They’re the only enemy I have so far and were inspired mostly by the Star brush in Gimp. THIS IS ART DAMMIT!

The player can both shoot opponents (which then explode, unless they have hitpoints left), the opponents can shoot the player (who then dies). That’s not much, but it’s a nice framework.

Tomorrow: That parallax-scrolling I wanted to get done today, plus scoring, plus an “encounter script” that controls how which enemy gets spawned. Also, some variation in the enemies. Sounds like fun to me!

Game Jammin’, the antisocial way (1)

Great, just great. I missed another Ludum Dare because it coincides with moves, sicknesses or important tests every. single. time. So here’s what I’ll do: As an aspiring antisocial game dev, I’ll just do my own game jam. Until Sunday, September the 7th, I will develop a game and I will publish it whether I think it sucks or I don’t. With about eleventy RPGs, video games, board games et cetera I have started and never finished, it just seems like the thing to do.

So I’ll develop a minimalist Bullet Hell game. With maybe a couple of twists, which I will try out and see if they work. Not sure with what I will come up exactly, but I’m coding to find out and you’ll be able to read all about it on this very blog.

I’ve already begun working today, but couldn’t devote too much time to it and mostly did really boring stuff: set up Unity project, initialize Git and push it to BitBucket, do basic scene setup, create basic scripts for bullets and moving a character around. Routine stuff, simply put. At least, bullets can already hit the player and the player can fire bullets.

Planned for tomorrow: Actual enemies that spawn bullets in reasonable patterns, and maybe some graphics that don’t look like shit. Also, parallax scrolling because parallax scrolling is kinda awesome.

▶ Let’s Play: Dinoropa

My first videogame ever was this weird edutainment thing called “Dinoropa”. It was co-funded by the german ministry of foreign affairs, and it tried to make children learn stuff about Europe, in particular about the twelve members of the European Union. Did I mention this game is old? Also, there are dinosaurs, which have nothing to do with anything.

Unfortunately, this game doesn’t really seem to have a spot in gamers’ hearts nowadays. Probably because it is not really good even for 1994’s standards. But still, I think there should be at least something about it on the Internet. So I did a quick Let’s Play on it some time ago.

It’s only in German, because the game is too and I don’t feel confident enough about my English for translating everything on the fly. If you don’t speak German, you might still enjoy the weird minigames and the onboard speaker representation of the national anthems of all the twelve EU members.