Lord Moon: Geek @t Large: March 2017

Friday, March 31, 2017

Adventures for Children in the Lands of the Zoonicorns

It's been a long while since I reviewed anything for young children. Since so many friends and family members having children, let's change that! Here’s something so cute parents might even be interested! Let’s check out Zoonicorns.

"The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence." - Denis Waitley

What are Zoonicorns? Well, they are magical creatures that are part zebra and part unicorn that visit young zoo animals in their dreams. In those dreams, the Zoonicorns help empower the young animals that visit their dreamland and learn life lessons at the same time. The tales are told through three interactive stories on a tablet or handheld device and one hardcover book. All four make great bedtime stories since the adventures take place after the young zoo animals have fallen asleep. The three interactive stories have concealed bits that can play a little bit like "hidden object" games. Also for a small $2.99 in-app purchase the interactive books have "Read to Me" and "Autoplay" features.

"The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop." - Mark Twain

There are also three simple game apps that you can download for your children. There is Ene’s Matching Game, Aliel’s Hidden Objects, and Valeo’s Adventure. Two of the games, Ene's Matching Game, and Valeo's Adventure can be downloaded for free with in-app purchases for additional level packs at 0.99 cents each pack. Aliel's Hidden Objects is 0.99 cents for the whole game.

All three games are simply described by their title. Ene’s Matching Game is the memorization matching game where you are shown cards that are then flipped over and you have to find the matching pairs. Aliel’s Hidden Objects is a “Where’s Waldo-esque" game where you have to find hidden objects. Lastly, Valeo's Adventure is a 2D side-scrolling platform game patterned off the Mario Bros. Style games. In it, you have to get from start to finish, gather stars, and avoid bad monsters.

All three games are simple, yet challenging enough for young minds to be engaged while winding down for bedtime. I will say Valeo's Adventure does suffer a bit from the typical tablet control problems, the lack of tactile feedback means you never know when your finger is off the actual movement controls. But in my playthrough of the free levels, bad monsters seemed to be placed with that taken into account. Still, I can see some children could become a little frustrated at certain points.

Overall

Zoonicorns is a cute and cuddly universe filled with fun, but it seems limited at the moment. The main draw here seems to be the storybooks and the stuffed Zoonicorns. From an adult point of view, the games are short with a limited replay value. Though remembering my own childhood, some of the games I played the most often were similarly limited, it was more about who was playing those games with me. The Zoonicorn website is split into a children’s section and a Parent’s Zone. The children’s section has some coloring pages and typical maze, word find, and connect the dots activities that are all downloadable PDF files. The Parent’s Zone has an online shop for the stuffed toys, the one book and an ongoing blog with advice for activities parents can do with their kids.

It all seems to a nice start to an interesting multi-platform franchise for kids and parents, it just needs more. Looking at the current offerings it appears like the ongoing blog to help inspire parents is getting more updates than actual things for the children to be inspired by. Maybe that was the intent, especially for working parents looking for inexpensive ideas that would allow them to spend more time with their children.

Still, I know that the Zoonicorns themselves, especially the stuffed toys, will be the thing that really grabs the kids. A physical brightly colored, fuzzy toy kids can hug and have adventures with and then at night be read to sleep by mom or dad? It sounds like a solid beginning. I say check it all out and judge for yourself, or let your child decide for the whole family. As for the games, I give them all a 3 out of 5. They are good, but not great, yet.

For more information, you can see the Zoonicorns official site.

Or you can check out the Zoonicorns Parent's Zone site.

Friday, March 24, 2017

So Many Loot Crates

About eight months ago things went sideways in my life and some things were put to the side. I won't go into details of what happened, but they were enough that stopped doing some neat things I had going. One of which was unboxing Loot Crate mystery boxes and Loot Crate's LVL UP mystery clothing bags.

Well, the have been piling up and it's time to catch up.

Welcome to the unboxing of eight months of Loot Crate goodies. Enjoy.

Friday, March 17, 2017

Cleaning up the mean Streets of Rogue.

This week I'm doing something a bit different. I play through the first 45 minutes of Streets of Rogue single player as a preview.

Streets of Rogue is a rogue-lite styled single or multiplayer game that lets players complete missions any way they wish. The game is developed by Matt Dabrowski (@madguy90) and published by tinyBuild games.

Let me know what you think of this preview/walkthrough in the comments here or on YouTube, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

For more information on Streets of Rogue check out the official website.

Friday, March 10, 2017

Adventure and troubles await in Trulon: The Shadow Engine

What do you get when you take a book, a musical play, and a dash of steampunk then mix them together? Well, it seems you get a turn-based, card combat, traditional role-playing game (RPG) influenced game. Finnish developer, KYY Games, took that blend to give us Trulon: The Shadow Engine. Let's take a look.

"Life is either a great adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller

In the kingdom of Tripudia, things are not right. The normally lush and peaceful countryside has seen an uptick in vicious monsters. Young monster hunter Gladia ventures forth to investigate why, after her father is injured. It’s not long before she discovers the source to be a crashed zeppelin. The design hints at it coming from the neighboring kingdom of Maelon and it’s leaking Dolorum, a magical energy only found in Maelon. With this information, Gladia rushes to tell the Tripudia prime minister who plays down the crisis but vows to create a committee to investigate the crash site. Seeing that the prime minister is not fully interested in problem Gladia decides to go to Maelon herself and find out more.

If you find yourself curious to learn more about Gladia’s world, there are a lot of tie-ins to the original novel, Trulon: Shadow Gears, written by Johan Lillbacka and Jak Koke. It follows the adventures of Tripudian prince Neo and his friends. There is also a musical that was performed at the Finnish amusement park, Powerpark. The story for Trulon: The Shadow Engine stands on its own, but it's nice to know that if players wish to seek out more, they can.

"Adventure is worthwhile in itself." - Amelia Earhart

The gameplay for Trulon: The Shadow Engine has a slightly retro feel of traditional turn-based RPGs. You have a leveling system with equipment you can use for stat bonuses or additional magic effects such as stunning enemies with a successful hit or setting them on fire. The difference here is the combat is card based instead of action based. At the beginning of combat, you will draw your hand limit of cards, one wild card, and a default attack card. Your hand limit is based on your current character level. Everything is random except for the default attack card, which will be the same for each character.

You start with a small smattering of cards and gain more from winning battles, rewards for completing quests or finding some in hidden chests. Some cards will be character based, but many can be swapped in and out of various character decks. Learning the combat system is easy. The hard part is deciding what cards you should have in each character's deck. In combat, the draw is random so the more cards you have in a characters deck the less often the cards you need come up. For example, when your health is low you want your healer mage to be able to heal, but if they haven't drawn the cards yet, things may get a bit nerve wracking. The same can be said for the more powerful combat cards. Luck, it seems, has a heavy influence on the flow of combat. On the plus side if you are defeated the game drops you at the point just outside the encounter you lost. This allows you to go right back in and try again or go do something else.

"Sure, give me an adventure and I'll ride it." - Melissa Auf der Maur

The retro feel echoes throughout the look and sound of the game. Battle animations have a pixelated 16-bit era look that is juxtaposed over the static anime art of the story scenes. In the lands of Tripudia, everything is bright, lush, and colorful while in the neighboring kingdom of Maelon everything takes on a more downtrodden brown and industrialized gray tone.

Music helps reflect the character’s origin kingdom and teases with drama in the combat. Cheerful, upbeat, and happy melodies for Tripudia, while mournful and sad tones represent Maelon, and an energetic rock song plays while in combat. There is no voice acting, every conversation or story part is text based.

Overall

When I started Trulon: The Shadow Engine I wasn’t sure what I was in for, but soon enough I was exploring the world and enjoying the adventure. The story, coupled with the fact it has a real life musical, makes the game seem to be targeted to tweens, yet even I was delighting in it. It made me remember the enjoyment I had with old Final Fantasy, Lunar, and Phantasy Star games. Even combat, with its random element of luck, took on some elements of strategy when deciding what card to play, which cards to put in decks and even what stat or combat bonus items to equip. That thoughtful strategy element does come into play when the difficulty curve of enemies takes some serious spikes up as you play through the game. Your options are to get lucky or grind it out in the overworld map hoping to find random encounters to help level yourself up. And it should be noted, random encounters are few and far between, so have whatever lucky token you swear by sitting in your lap.

Now for the bad news, when “it” happened. The game breaking glitch.

At about the five-hour mark, one of the side quests I was on froze the game. I'm in combat, the music is playing, my characters and the enemy are lined up ready to go, but no cards are drawn. I have no controls. I can't even get to the options menu. So I do the only thing I can, drop to the Xbox home screen and quit the game there. I restart the game, pick my save file, and damn it. The game autosaved right at the beginning of the encounter so I can't back out of it and move on.

A quick search of forums and websites show that this is a known bug in the game. KYY Games is aware, but for now, advise everyone to ignore the side quest. The worst part is that particular side quest is also tied to a secret achievement. So while you could avoid the quest and finish the game you still won't "finish" the game completely. Not to mention those of us who have put in quite a few hours into the game already, only to have to start over and play through everything again. It was fun the first time, but it's lost a little something the second time, plus now there is the worry of, will this happen again with a different quest?

In the end, I want to finish the game and I do hope KYY Games fixes it soon, but the glitch casts a dark pall over the game. Enjoyable, but currently broken I give Trulon: The Shadow Engine a 3 out of 5 for now, with the option to bump up the score if the game gets fixed.

For more information check out the official Trulon: The Shadow Engine website.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Emerald City ComicCon Artists; What caught my eye and one review.

Over the weekend I had the privilege of attending the Emerald City ComicCon. Four days of comics, cosplay, tabletop gaming, and pricey photo/autograph sessions. The main draw though is the Artist Alley areas where the largest to the smallest comic creators have their booths to meet and interact with their fans.

I took a day and just wandered the alley and photographed anything that happens to catch my eye. Most artists were fine letting me do my thing. I had only one artist stop me from taking pictures, which is fine. In this day and age, I know some have had their work stolen by various "fly-by-night" online t-shirt and print dealers.

As I wandered I formulated an idea of what I wanted to do and this is the result. A collection of the photos linking back to artist sites where possible with any thoughts and conversations I had at the time with them.

First up is Sheika Lugtu. Her Cat in a Jar piece caught my eye.

Art by Sheika Lugtu

Talking to Sheika she asked me what I liked about ComiCon. I told her it reminded me of the days when I did collect comics and that I with the last two how much I missed reading the stories and enjoying the art. She asked me what I used to collect, I said Spawn, Evil Ernie, and before I could continue she lit up all happy. I continued to list various titles, but she came back to Spawn and related that her favorite comics were Spawn, Hellraiser, and other titles of the same genre. While that was what she got into art for she found that while in art school she learned that her personal style was more cutesy.

Art by Sheika Lugtu

Even so, she did still have a surreal avant-garde artist inside her that wanted out and so she created Theodore.

She noticed my press badge and asked about it. I explained my situation of having worked for NWCN and that while it was off the air I was approved by ECCC for the badge while we were still on and that I was doing my own blog. Sheika then asked if I could do a big favor for her; review her Theodore books. I said sure.

Art by Sheika Lugtu

In what could be best called a surreal dreamworld, it is Theodore's birthday. Yet Theodore is alone at home and has run out of cereal bowls. He leaves the house to look for his parents. Along the way, he garners the help of some strange and not so strange characters.

The two books remind me of the old "ashcan comics" publishers would make back in the day. They are simple, almost pamphlet like. The art here is rough still. Often you can still see sketch lines that weren't fully erased; this lends it a sort of stream of consciousness on top of the odd bizarreness of Theodore's world. The two books together start Theodore's adventure which I hope Sheika continues at some point since I am curious to see where she goes with it. I will say it isn't for everyone, it wanders into territory that will make some people wonder what she was smoking or drinking. Still, it reminds me of those moments when you are just alone with your thoughts near a sleepy haze when the mind takes a step outside reality.

To see more of Sheika Lugtu's work visit her website at sheikalugtu.com

Next up is Ashley Erickson. We talked a bit, mostly about my beard, but we did chat about her book, "Pets in Armor."

It is an ongoing commission series she is doing for people's real pets.

She seems to have a talent for the storybook apomorphic animals.

If you are interested in more or would like to see your pet in armor check out her website at cloverkin.com

It isn't just "paper and pen" artists that were there. Chainsaw artistry was on display as well.

Batman by AKWoody

His business card is a bit fuzzy so I can't quite make out his name.

He brought his Superman carving last year and showed me a photo of his Spider-Man carving he did for the Rose City ComiCon. He also has taken to doing busts.

Busts by AKWoody

From here on out most of the artists were either busy with fans, working on sketches, kept to themselves, or I don't remember the conversation. Still, it is art to enjoy. For those that have a website, I will post a link with their art.