Splatoon is the best Multiplayer game of 2015

I figure if clickbaity titles work so well, why not? Anyway yes I’ve been playing a lot of Splatoon lately, and it’s probably the most fun I’ve had with a multiplayer shooter in a long time. And it’s made by Nintendo. How weird is that? I don’t know how it happened but in the last year or so Nintendo went from not having a clue how to do good online to figuring it out and putting out an amazing new IP that has taken off despite the lukewarm critic reviews.

I can’t really think of a shooter as colorful as this right now except maybe for Team Fortress 2 but TF2 still deals mostly in greys and browns for its environments, whereas Splatoon is colorful. Most of that of course is thanks to the large quantities of ink that both sides end up covering the playing fields in, but even the environments normally tend to feel lively (though Bluefin Depot suffers a bit from being a bit too rusty and brown in most spots). Even better, for Splatfests when the matches take place at night, everyone’s ink is bio luminescent which is super cool.

Aside from the graphics, the gameplay is also really good as well. Matches are fast because they’re all timed, so regardless of whether it’s  a entirely timed mode (Turf War) or a mode that involves points (Splat Zones, Tower Control, etc.), the match will still pretty much end when the clock goes to zero. This let’s people quickly jump in and play a game, or two, and not spend any more than 10 minutes doing it. Other benefits in gameplay include no voice chat so people who think they deserve to have their horrible words heard by everybody cannot do so. This has also had the effect of creating a community that seems very light on any sort of terrible stuff even though this is a game with Miiverse support. Speaking of, the Miiverse stuff is integrated in a pretty cool way. If people draw Miiverse posts, they’ll show up in-game as grafitti art, signboard art, and also as art in the background of the splatfest hub world during Splatfest. It adds some liveliness to an already lively world. Plus some of these Miiverse artists are great

I also feel that with Splatoon, Nintendo has finally realized a multiplayer shooter ideal that they kind of started to get towards with Steel Diver: Sub Wars for the 3DS. The matchmaking system feels similar, as does the lack of voice communication and the rigidly timed (and fast) matches. The difference of course was that Sub Wars was not really advertised at all, wheras Nintendo went all in with Splatoon and knocked it out of the park. Maybe Sub Wars was a prototype for this kind of online gameplay, we’ll probably never know. Either way I’m glad Nintendo has created a great multiplayer shooter that can’t be destroyed by an awful community, and with them continuing to add free weapons and maps and modes to it constantly, they’re clearly ready and willing to support it for as long as they can.

 

Steel Diver: Sub Wars – A 3DS F2P FPS You’ll Probably Never Hear Of

So my hiatus became a bit longer than I thought. There’s a few reasons for it and it’s not like i didn’t do any work, but I am planning to have something up and possibly downloadable regarding Shuffle Breaker this week. That said, let’s talk about the Nintendo 3DS. Despite Nintendo’s financial woes regarding the WiiU, the 3DS is still going pretty strong which is good for me since over the last year I got into it big time, playing a lot of the big Nintendo releases as well as some sports stuff like Pro Evolution Soccer 2012. But I’m not talking about those today.

A couple weeks back (or so) Nintendo did a Nintendo Direct where they announced (to the confusion of many I’m sure), a free-to-play Multiplayer submarine combat game called Steel Diver: Sub Wars. Not only was this not related by gameplay to the Steel Diver that had been a 3DS launch title, but the idea of Nintendo releasing an online multiplayer anything surely seemed odd.

I think what’s more odd is just how good it is, and how few people are going to know about it. More after the jump

Sliding into 2014, Shuffle Breaker Dev Blog

So 2013 is at an end, and I’m still working on Shuffle Breaker. This is good because it’s probably the longest I’ve stuck with one of my little game projects, having tinkered with it over the last six months, but bad because I was hoping I’d be a bit further along than I was before. Anyway, here are a couple screenshots, now showing off the new floor for the “environment” complete with some normal mapping.

See you all next year, hopefully with this little project growing by leaps and bounds.

Insomnia: Shuffle Breaker Dev Blog

I can’t sleep so now is as good a time as any to put up some more screenshots. I had rather stupidly said in my last post about Shuffle Breaker that it was hard to convey “I have a two-player mode” in screenshots. Well I think it gets across a bit better when you have a New Camera Angle!

 

Ok maybe it’s not that impressive but still. Also implemented is the option to switch control methods via the options menu

Still pretty minimal-looking but I do plan to expand on it once I have more of the core functionality down (and option permanence). Keep watching this space for more updates!

In Which I Bemoan the Loss of Skill

Mechwarrior 4 still has a steady multiplayer community, unfortunately that community is full of campers and cheap pilots who’s only idea of combat is to strap as many PPCs as they can onto a mech, then hit their enemies so that the electronic interference from said PPCs makes it impossible for return fire. Yes it’s essnetially become a sniper battle with giant robots. This is not, nor will ever be, how mech combat is supposed to go. Personally I partially blame MekTek for creating new weapons that have faster recycle times, but I also blame the players themselves, who have forgotten the tactical nature of Mechwarrior and instead reduce themselves to popping up from behind hills, taking a potshot, and then hiding again. It’s like fighting a submarine if the submarine was walking and had long distance weaponry. And it is cheap.

There’s no longer any balance, and I dread how this may flow into Mechwarrior 3015.