Parties in Elona are crazy affairs, but they tend to get stale once you have no trouble impressing even the toughest audience. When even Loyter is groveling at your feet at the first sound of your godly Stradivarius, it’s time to raise the bar. How about impressing the gods and goddesses of Elona in a party quest? I tried and succeeded, with a little trick.
Preparing for a divine party
Things you will need:
a handful of wishes (one for each god)
a handful of love potions (as above)
Contingency buff (optional, if you want to mess with the gods)
Things you will NOT need:
Performing skill
instrument
And this is how the party went down:
After starting a party quest, invite the gods by wishing for them by name:
(optional) Perform for the gods to see how much they like it:
If the above didn’t work out, throw a love potion at a god. They will glare at you, but their ‘love’ status immediately turns into ‘satisfied’, as if you pleased them by performing:
Profit:
So that’s how a divine party goes down in Elona. But if you feel particularly gutsy and have Contingency, you could aggro Ehekatl to have her Mewmewmew everyone into oblivion – including her fellow gods. Then pick up all their cards and figures and get your Museum to that #1 rank it deserves.
Recently I’ve got my hands on a set of 20 gorgeous Wind Waker icons that brought back some great memories from the game. Figured there might be some out there who could use them. If you’re one, feel free to download the file below:
Have you seen one of those ‘writing by an invisible hand’ animations? I think they’re pretty cool, and I wondered if I could pull off something similar with the method I thought of the other day. A couple hours later, I got the answer:
Click to Show/Hide
What do you think? I kinda like how it turned out, even though the animation as a whole is a bit rough around the edges. I can easily imagine using the same techniques to do calligraphy with a pen, or even just letters appearing written by themselves. It’s definitely a fun thing to play with, so tune in for more to come! ^_^
Once in a while an intriguing game comes around with even more intriguing secret goodies. Humbug is one of those games, and its secret items unlock a second, slightly cooler ending, seen here:
There are hardly any gamers out there who didn’t play games made in Japan. It’s often said that these games are best enjoyed in original, but those of us mortals who can’t tell hiragana from katakana have to rely on the ‘inferior’ localized English version. I’m not sure how good or bad they are in general, but the occasional mistakes can result in a hilarious outcome.
Take for example the game Tree of Tranquility from the popular Harvest Moon series. If you play the female protagonist, at one point a hunky guy professes his love to you in the following letter:
Wednesday,
top of the tree,
dynamite.
Erm… okay dude. But before we write this up as yet another quirky cultural thing that we could never understand, let’s look at the original Japanese:
Suiyobi Ki no ue de Dainamaito
Reading the bolded parts together gives Suki da = “I love you”, which makes more sense – a play with words that was butchered by the verbatim translation. It would’ve been much better if the translators were a bit more creative and gave us a similar wordplay in English instead (I… Lo… Ve… You…. – any ideas for this? Let me know in the comments.)
Take-home message: just because it’s in the game, it doesn’t mean we need to take it as correct.
Today while messing around with Bunni, I’ve discovered something: some workers have their favorite food that they run for like crazy when they become hungry.
This is best demonstrated with pandas. Normally they’re very slow, but place a tulip garden next to them, and once they become hungry, they run towards the garden faster than a fox could say ‘wow’. Now replace the tulip garden with the more expensive roses, and watch what happens next time the panda becomes hungry: it will slouch towards the roses with the same slow speed it uses for working. Picky pandas!
Here are the ones I’ve figured out so far:
Panda: tulips
Fox: tulips
Pirate: posies
But I really wanna be a miner!
They also seem to have favorite types of work that they perform faster than normal. Put foxes to Ironwood and they’ll chop them at double speed; pandas make short work of Maple forests, and monsters devour everything faster if it’s made of bronze, silver or gold.
Bunni is a goldmine of little secrets like this, which makes playing all the more rewarding.
Despite its popularity in the design world, Photoshop's options for importing animations are rather limited. It cannot import GIF animations and it doesn't recognize frames/states in native Fireworks PNGs. The exercise below lists an automated workflow for transferring these two common animation formats from Fireworks to Photoshop.
With the release of Knytt Stories 1.2 , custom objects (CO) have been introduced. This manual explains the basic usage principles of COs; how to create, configure and embed them into the game.
It’s 2011 and the world of gaming is as exciting as ever. From indie developers watching the long-awaited release of their games, to blockbuster sequels hitting popular consoles, all resourceful gamers will have their hands full with goodies. May there be actually enough time to properly enjoy them all!
Bewitching games since 1999.
Recently I’ve got my hands on a set of 20 gorgeous Wind Waker icons that brought back some great memories from the game. Figured there might be some out there who could use them. If you’re one, feel free to download the file below:
There are hardly any gamers out there who didn’t play games made in Japan. It’s often said that these games are best enjoyed in original, but those of us mortals who can’t tell hiragana from katakana have to rely on the ‘inferior’ localized English version. I’m not sure how good or bad they are in general, but the occasional mistakes can result in a hilarious outcome.
This is best demonstrated with pandas. Normally they’re very slow, but place a tulip garden next to them, and once they become hungry, they run towards the garden faster than a fox could say ‘wow’. Now replace the tulip garden with the more expensive roses, and watch what happens next time the panda becomes hungry: it will slouch towards the roses with the same slow speed it uses for working. Picky pandas!
With the release of 
