Super Fighting Goat

Once upon a time I once took on a fangame project called MegaGoat. I believed I worked on this back in 2003 or 2004. You can check it out at TwinSky Games if you feel the urge to play this magnificent title.

Spritesheet of Mega Goat

I think my logic at the time of working on this project was that I was a huge Mega Man fan at the time and the best way to get your hands dirty into making a game was experience, and one of the best ways to learn was to imitate something else just to see if you could do it yourself.

The Robot Masters

Mail>Weather>Fisher>Muffin>Ice Cream>Mail, the logic being mailmen are supposed to able to weather through any storm to deliver mail, the weather can ruin a fisherman's day and be unable to fish, fish can ruin muffins, I'm not sure how muffins beat ice cream but ice cream can ruin mail.

All those art assets was a lot of work! On top of doing backgrounds, there was a lot of animation work that had to be done. I had never really done animation before so it was kind of daunting!

Some interesting things I remember was Mail Man's stage was supposed to be based off of Paper Boy to an extent and a Grim Reaper enemy was planned for the stage. We also got Retarded Goat Man (a recurring gag with a yellow/purple color scheme in Tim's games), a Paper Man enemy and a Weather Man enemy.

This particular enemy was inspired by a game with two funky aliens

Some generic enemies like the Giant Jumper as are common in Mega Man games were made too. I liked the Frying Pan enemy because it was supposed to be like those birds in Airman's stage and we wanted to play on Player expectations where when the egg breaks, a bunch of mini enemies pop out to bombard the Player but instead we'd just have an anticlimactic sunny side up.

Anyway when I was feeling nostalgic about this I recently decided to draw some art based on Mega Goat!

Looking back at it I can totally see how I would draw and shade and animate some things differently. Maybe someday the game will be finished! Kickstarter's all the rage these days isn't it? I hope we'd be protected under parody!

Graced With Your Presence

The Mario Galaxy games are great stuff. Everyone should play them!

I recently finished Tales of Graces f, the main campaign anyway. I didn't like it very much. My main issue is the story and how overly dramatic and unbelievably optimistic they are about certain things. Partway throughout the quest, one of the main hero's friends starts doing evil bad things because he's slowly being consumed by an evil spirit (you later learn that said evil spirit has a tragic backstory), and his actions are causing the world to die. The party wants to save their friend without killing him, which is fine and dandy but everyone is always reluctant to fight him because he's their friend and fighting a friend is something that seems to cause a lot of anguish among the party members in this world. His actions are causing everyone else to be miserable like no more water for the desert folks or no heat for the snow folks for pete's sake! This also extends to one of the main characters who has the power to destroy the evil spirit but at the cost of their own life, but everyone is yelling at said character to not do that because they say her self sacrifice won't solve "anything" despite that it would end their problems with evil spirit dude. Eventually everything pans out so that things are conveniently hunky dory and no one has to die, but it feels like there's a lot of forced drama and unrealistic optimism when it comes to solving problems with unknown solutions rather than solving a problem with the solutions they do know, however tragic the known solution may be.

Dungeons are pretty boring to look at and lack personality. There are a couple of dungeon that're supposed to be complex laboratories but they feel overbloated with many rooms and halls that don't seem to serve for any scientific research save for maybe 2 or 3 small rooms in each dungeon, with many rooms looking the same. You'd think laboratories this big would house more than one scientist (there is only one scientist managing one giant laboratory that's supposed to research the problems of an entire city)

There's some cute chemistry between the characters but otherwise the main cast of characters are pretty boring despite their character interactions. The Discoveries are also a neat addition, where you can find many worldly curiosities and it records the discovery in your log and helps flesh out the world with wonders. Associated with the Discoveries are optional skits, which I liked because they fleshed out the characters. One memorable Discovery was a Salt Stone that had a sign that said only people who aren't true to their heart will taste something other than salty about tasting the stone. Everyone has a taste of it and they all think it tastes salty except for Cheria Barnes, who is actually one of the most vocal of the group but has some unreciprocated love for the main character. She tries to hide the fact it doesn't taste salty to her so she doesn't have to feel like a weirdo.

In the end I give this game a -10/π chest hairs.