Game review: Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

This game is a merge of two game series, Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright. It’s a sort of collaboration where puzzles and exploration is made like in the Layton games and evidence gathering and court trials are held like in the Ace Attorney games. The two companies who made the game, Level-5 and Capcom chose to bring in their own main game characters. You get to play as Professor Layton and some kid companion of his and Phoenix Wright together who is paired up with a female companion. The female companion is also somewhat young, but not a kid. Shortly into the game everyone is transported into a medieval world full of magic and witches. Normally in Ace Attorney you get to have trials in a world where stuff like fingerprints and normal criminal forensics exists. In this game however, people are reasoning like if they lived in the 13^th century and magic existed. This leads to the fact that you get to be the defense attorney for witches. And when you argue in court you need to reason given certain spells and such things. So, you get to use logic in a world where supposedly ‘magic’ can cause stuff to happen. On the professor’s side, you get to solve cool puzzles. I think the game may be a bit too easy on people not being able to solve the puzzles. You can namely spend coins to unlock hints for the puzzles. As far as I can remember the puzzles were fine in the game. It’s a bit ridiculous that the assistant to the Professor has such a friendly personality. You keep hearing 24/7 in the game that the assistant is a “gentleman in training”. Supposedly that should mean that he is not a gentleman, but trying to be? If not, then why would he be training, unless it means that most people besides him are not a gentleman and he is just boasting nonstop. But you get used to that nonsense as you play the game. When you have played a few hours, and heard the sentence “a gentleman in training” a thousand times your brain will finally go with it and not care.

Should you get this game? Yes. It is very funny, challenging, easy if you use hints and it has an interesting story/plot. Do not read YouTube comments or whatever for this game, or else someone will probably spoil the story. The catch is that you need a Nintendo 3DS or DS to play it. I borrowed a 3DS, and I also borrowed the game. I should consider getting a 3DS if they are to make a sequel or if I’m going to play one of the new Ace Attorney games. Is this game worth getting a 3DS for? I guess it might be if you have cash. You could just sell the 3DS when you’re finished with the game…

In the courtroom, the judge believes in magic and have no clue about modern forensic evidence like fingerprints. But he is possible to persuade using rational thought and logic. Even if the evidence is 100% based on magic spells and magical wands. As long as there are rules, the rules can be used to come to conclusions and prove which conclusions are correct. The witnesses are goofy and whatnot. They will lie and cheat, so it is your job to make that clear for everyone. In fact, you will see many suspicious characters everywhere in this game which is something to take note of. This game is one of the reasons, or perhaps the main reason, that I also recently bought “Layton’s Mystery Journey” that I also blogged about. I haven’t really played that game a lot yet, but I felt that the puzzles in this game “Professor Layton vs Ace Attorney” had better and more challenging puzzles overall. But yeah, the mix of puzzles and court trials in a magical world was top notch. Get this game.

Game review: Lifeline (recycling old post)

A long time ago I made a post on another blog called the boring blog. I haven’t really made many posts at all on that blog. I did make one game review however that I would like to recycle by copy-pasting it into this blog. It is written in a bit of a jokingly manner so read with caution:

Ok so this page is about gaming ON. A. PHONE.

The evolution of gaming has really taken a turn for the worse! awesome. However, every week Apple launches a "free app of the week" and sometimes that free app is a fun game... or a terrible children’s app with no imagination.

The latest free app of the week I got was called "Lifeline" and is a story (visual novel) game where you get to make binary choices from time to time, but instead of having a yes or no button there is sentences on the buttons instead of just "yes" and "no". It seems to be written by someone either pretending to be young or really is young. The character in the game is called "Taylor". Taylor is stranded on a moon in outer space. He was a student that won a lottery ticket and got to board some random spaceship that later on crashed on a moon. That pretty much sums up the introduction of the story line.

So in this game you make yes or no.... err I mean complex decisions that affects whether or not Taylor finds a way out of the moon and other moral issues. I died on my first try, and I slayed one of the people you had an opportunity to save (by accident of course). My impression of the game was that you run into various obstacles and then Taylor starts to whine about how difficult it is, that he can’t do it, its physically impossible etc. and you have to press the "do it anyway" button a hundred times. If you DONT press the right button one hundred times it only takes on click for Taylor to do something else. This was kind of an issue for me at first because I didn’t fully realize this, but when I did the game got a bit easier. And Taylors anxiety is very contagious. There are even some attempts to break the 4th wall in the game but not very successful ones imo. The game was quite good overall although a not very professionally written story, however the user interface was excellently, sorry if that isn’t a real word, made. What I really think made it look space-ish was that there’s like a graphically constructed glass overlay above the text so it looks like you’re looking at a monitor on a spaceship. I give this game 4 out of 5. I even got myself the sequel called "Silent Night" for approx. 1 dollar. The original game is better though. The game is unfortunately no longer free but it was sort of fun so I recommend getting it.

Game review: Layton’s Mystery Journey

I recently started playing Layton’s Mystery Journey due to having a positive experience of another game that partially included the same game concept. That game was called "Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney". I may do a review of that other game soon. I have just begun playing this game and is far from finished playing it. In the game, you get to have some form of case given to you and your agency that you are to solve. As far as I have experienced it yet, you don’t really need to do anything but talking to people and travel to destinations pointed out for you on a minimap and the game eventually tells you that the case is solved. So not much problem solving in that perspective but that’s not why I bought the game. Btw I got the game for iOS. Furthermore, the game is childish, or at least kid-friendly. The game has mentioned a murder at one point so it being children-friendly or not depends on how sensitive you are. The game is rated age 4+. The game universe takes place in a jolly good ol’ place called London where everyone is really friendly. Just like in real life, friendly and outgoing Londoners, right? Not that I have ever been to London, but I can imagen that it may not be like that in real life. It being kid-friendly is somewhat part of the game concept I would guess however. Another thing I noticed playing on the phone is that conversation text is a bit small, I would like the text font to be bigger. It is readable but still a bit of a nuisance. Besides just having a too small text font it gets worse by the fact that the story is so far from action oriented you can get. No explosions or horrors or anything thrilling at all. So, in my view the reading conversations and following up with the story is not all that interesting in my view. Probably a very subjective thing if you like a story or not. The reason I got this game is because that this game has something surprisingly no other game tends to focus on. This game has puzzles, well-made ones, that required thinking to be solved. Some of the times at least, absolutely not always… Sometimes the ‘puzzle’ blurs into being a riddle perhaps.

What I can say about the puzzles in this particular game is that they have been OKish. Most puzzles have been way too easy to solve. This may be due to the fact that this game isn’t for adults? Some puzzles are harder though. What annoys me is that sometimes I get the impression that the answer to a puzzle is wrong, or that the instructions for a puzzle lack information or explains it wrongly. To give an example, one small puzzle with two options went like this: “Which path should you choose given this road sign if you want to avoid traffic? One path is always busy so everyone taking this road choses the quiet path. Chose the quiet or the busy path.”. My reasoning for solving this riddle was that given the instructions the busy path is always busy. We do not know how many other cars go through the path we are currently at besides us. Given the instructions we know that one path is always busy, and the other path may have a chance of being quiet. Therefore, I reasoned that the quiet path had the highest (or only chance) of actually being quiet. The answer was that you can never rely on an old road-sign to tell you if a path is busy or not. Then it also said that everyone chose the quiet path so it would be very busy and no one would take the busy path so it would be free of traffic because of it. I could comment on many things here, but what annoyed me is that I got the impression that the instructions implied or said that the busy path was always busy and not that the “old” road sign said it. Also, while choosing an option to submit as a result, there was a picture of the “old” road sign. All that was on the picture was a sign with two arrows with the names of the given paths. I have learned in this game to never trust the images. The images are very misleading and have made me try to reason given what I have seen being displayed on the image of a puzzle. On another occasion, the artwork for a puzzle showed digital numbers. So, I thought that I was to solve the puzzle given the numbers being showed on the image. It was later that I discovered that the digital numbers being displayed on the image were supposed to be “off”, i.e. not showing. When the puzzle was solved another image was showed with the digital numbers being lit as if the machines having the digital numbers were “on”. I must be honest though. If I had been smarter and understood the instructions better I could have arrived at the correct result by myself. You can spend “coins” in the game to use hints to help you solve a puzzle. After using many hints, I managed to solve this puzzle. The puzzle was good, it’s just that I was misled by the image and didn’t understand the problem sufficiently.

I guess the game is OK in general. Maybe a bit too happy and not so problem filled so far for my taste. Something that I haven’t mentioned that this game also has showed some anime clips that also were a bit long. Anime clips being long in a game is good in my opinion. Usually I have found them to be very short. There’s also tons of artwork in this game if you like that. They have focused on making pretty drawings. The characters in game are ugly/goofy or childish though. The puzzles are okay but sometimes a bit too easy.

Game review: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies

Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies is a visual novel developed by Capcom. As far as I understand most games in the series “Ace Attorney” are for the Nintendo DS game console. However this game is also available for phones, both Android as well as iOS. Gaming on a phone compared to a DS or 3DS is better in the sense that you have a HD screen (unless your phone is trash), as well as all the other conveniences that comes with using a phone. Portability being one of those conveniences, instead of carrying around both a phone and a DS you just need to carry a phone. So already this game gets a plus for being available for smartphones.

In Ace Attorney you follow up with certain characters who are attorneys in the same agency. These people are named Phoenix Wright (age 33), Apollo Justice (age 23-25) and Athena Cykes (age 18). Phoenix Wright also has a ‘daughter’ Trucy Wright (age 15-16). Athena Cykes is a ‘new’ character in this game has supposedly just recently finished her education as an attorney and earned her badge. Due to her young age, most people don’t believe at first sight that she’s an attorney.  As an attorney in the Wright agency, you get to defend clients in court. Defending in court is the main part of the game. Usually before you end up in court however you get to investigate a crime scene and interview various individuals before the court starts. This is very important in order to gather evidence (you can’t skip this anyway, but still very important nonetheless) and to get some idea(s) of how things looks like regarding the current case. When you are in court you get to listen to either the defendants or some witnesses’ testimonies. When that is done their testimony is split into pieces which you can press the person being cross-examined for further information. 90% of the time your job is to check what evidence you have available to you and present one such evidence to the part of a testimony that contradicts the given evidence. If you get it wrong you get a so-called penalty by the judge. Too many penalties and you lose the game. This isn’t really a problem because the game lets you just continue back from where you left if choose to do so.

What is different about this game is that you need to think and figure things out before you can make progress. You need to listen to what is being said and be able to work out what is correct and what is contradictory yourself. Often testimonies and evidence change or is added which means that you must rethink everything that you once thought were correct. This is a very common occurrence in this game unless your Einstein and can figure out what happened before the trial begins.

The game is well made, like many Japanese stuff. You get to watch anime clips every once and a while. Watching clips helps you to get a mental image of the story, and it is also entertaining. All attorneys have a special power. This power can be used to help you during tough times in court or when investigating. Phoenix can untangle mind locks, Apollo can sense twitches as a reaction to a lie or an uncertainty and Athena can hear emotions. In court, you get to use Athena’s power to find contradictions between a testimony and the emotions being felt. All in all I found this game fun to play and hopefully I also learned a thing or two about debating and objectivity. This game is worth the money. If your still hesitant getting the game moneywise, you can buy one episode at a time. The first episode is also the cheapest.

It’s kind of hard to talk about what happens in the game without spoiling the story. There is a red thread spinning across most episodes in the game which is good. It makes you want to investigate more and keep playing new episodes. What I can say is that the bonus episode is sort of weirdly both not connected to previous episodes as well as a little bit connected at the same time. I guess they wanted to keep some stuff as obvious without spoiling the story in the game. Or, the bonus episode just takes place in some sort of strange time period in between the normal episodes. I liked the bonus episode but the normal ones were a bit more exciting.

Gaming & Runescape

At the moment, I’m not playing that many games. This is sort of supposed to at least partially be a gaming blog. I have an Old-school Runescape account that I log into like one every other day. All I do on that account is buying and selling at a place called the grand exchange. Which all in all takes about 10 seconds, but I sometimes stay on for 2 minutes anyways and then I log out. After all, you have to report the bots and expose all scammers you see before you log out. Many times, I have traded with bots who are begging and just after they select to accept a trade I decline it, which often results in the bot saying something and then logging out immediately. When I started buying and selling stuff I had about 250-400k. k means 1000. Probably a shortening for kilo. Everyone knows what a kilo is except for people living in the US which are using the imperialistic measurement system. I earlier thought that as a funny reference to Star Wars but surprisingly it’s called that. Anyways, now, today, I have some more money. I have just used all my money to buy stuff that I will sell but when I have done that I will definitely have over 5m, 5 million. I got perhaps at least 300k in between this time from a drop party that occurred though. And maybe another ~150k from some people dropping rune armor. It’s surprising how many events you can bump into from just logging in for a brief moment every now and then. If I keep buying and selling using all my money at a time I estimate that I eventually will make 2.7m each time I do so. But it’s still a bit of time before I get there. 2.7m is what an old-school bond costs which can be redeemed for 1 week of membership. So, when I earn that much money I will have free membership forever and ever. Not that I plan to play too much Runescape anyways. I may however try to increase my ranged level in order to “pk”, that is kill other players (pk = player killer). The thing about Runescape is that it takes a lot of time to level up various skills that exists in the game. I mean a whole lot of time. Some people easily spend over a year in gameplay maxing their stats (besides socializing, questing and whatever you do in the game). Taking time is no issue if the game is fun though, right? The problem is that it is extremely BORING to level up and extremely repetitive. For instance, to level up your “mining skill” you have to click on rocks in the game, wait for the player unit to do some animation and repeat this process many, many times. When your inventory is full you may also want to place the mined ores you get from the rocks in the bank. So, you must waste time running back and forth to the local bank. I bet banking is easier for members however in the game. To put it bluntly, Runescape is not worth your time. I saw that a game from the Professor Layton series is available for iPhone so I might buy that game in the near future. 

Oils and fat

I have recently read a book from 2007 about fat acids and oils and their health affects on us humans. I learned that we consume way too little omega 3 in correlation to its opposite called omega 6. The book also brought up some other general stuff and it compared different oils and how the author thought they were good for us or not. Examples of oils mentioned in the book was rapeseed oil, olive oil, coconut oil, sunflower oil etc. Some oils were good but most of the ones mentioned in the book were apparently bad. Coconut oil is good for frying since it can handle high cooking temperatures well without having the fat acids break or turning poisonous. I also read from a source outside the book that coconut oil shouldn’t be mixed with sugar since it will increase the likely hood of gaining weight and in long term make the body more insulin-resistant. As a rule of thumb, cold pressed oils are healthier since they will not have trans-fat. Trans-fat is created when refining oil because of the heating process involved. Usually this will only cause about 0.5-1.5% of the fat turning into trans-fat, but nonetheless trans-fat is still not healthy. Natural trans-fat from wild animals are according to the book okay to eat however. In general, the author claimed that the organs in human bodies tries to protect itself against trans-fat as much as they can but every now and then small amounts slip through anyways. Trans-fat is poorly structured building blocks for cells unlike proper fat. It increase the likely hood that cells will turn malignant.

There is saturated fat, unsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat. It’s not like you should stop eating fat. Otherwise the body will start its own production of fat. Polyunsaturated fat is sensitive to heat and light. Oil should be stored in a dark place, no higher than room temperature and sealed from air. Preferably oil should be stored in the fridge if you don’t consume it within a week. Polyunsaturated fat or unsaturated fat is fat that can contain omega-3 and omega-6 acids, as well as many other types. Most often these acids are found in creatures living in the sea. The sea is cool, mostly oxygen free and protected from sunlight which means that polyunsaturated fat can exist there without going bad. So to consume more omega-3 you should eat fish and seafood. To get enough omega-3 you should eat fish almost daily. I don’t do that so I have started taking fish oil capsules twice a day as a substitute. Hopefully that should make me healthier.

Book review: Programming in Lua, Fourth edition

I have read a book called Programming in Lua, fourth edition to learn how to code using Lua. My aim has been to integrate Lua with other languages, in particular C++. Because when you code in C++ things quickly become messy and you must write a lot of redundant code that also pollute the project file tree. In C++, you are sometimes forced to create two files for a class, one header file and one source file. In most other languages that I know of you only need one single file to store a class. Lua also offers an automatic garbage collector so that one doesn’t have to fiddle with freeing up memory in a program. I should of course mention that it is usually favorable to divide objects into two files in C++ by default. Lua should in theory simplify things and let me make modifications to a program while it is running.

I have therefore read the book cover to cover to learn about Lua. Presumably I have some insights about the book that could be good to know before reading it. I did not read the last 2 or so chapters properly however. This book has provided me with a solid overview regarding lots and lots of important details about the language and how to implement it. The book also has exercise tasks that are good to do to get an even better grasp, but I didn’t do any of those. Yet I feel like I’ve learned a lot. Personally, I have already from my past have had quite extensive experience of programming and computer science in general, as well as math. This book is like an information shotgun with tricky code examples to explain some of the info. Not only does it tell you everything at once but it also does so in a way that can be hard to read unless you really pay attention and focus. And even then, it can be difficult. Out of the blue this book often assumes deep insights of specific areas in mathematics or computer science without providing any details, which all piles up to the difficulty of reading the book. Luckily though for the reader is that Lua supposedly is an easy programming language. Some parts of the book are easy to read, probably because there is no need to over complicate simple and straight-forward information. I guess that is also the case when people in a normal context would teach Lua.

To stay motivated to keep reading this book and not stopping after the 1^st chapter, you need a true interest for learning Lua. But even that might not be enough so you need to make a deal with yourself to read at least one chapter a day. Or else you may never finish the book. Now why is motivation a problem for this book? The answer is that this book is all about difficultly presented information without exception. I read this book as mentioned cover to cover and I did not come across one single joke in the entire book. Some books at least have an inspirational quote at the beginning of each chapter. Here it’s all about having a serious face all the time.

To sum up: this book was difficult to read. On the flipside, I might not have learned as much if it wasn’t difficult to read.  If you want to make sense of this book you also should make sure to read the chapters in chronological order starting with chapter 1. Each chapter pretty much assumes that you know everything written in previous chapters. So, make sure that you at least decently understand a chapter before you read on. I am glad that I read this book because it provided me with so much information. When I started reading I knew basically nothing at all about Lua. When I finished reading it I felt like I was a pro at Lua, despite not doing the exercises. It goes without saying that this book is not for everyone. Although I believe everyone can understand the most basic and fundamental topics about Lua explained in the book. As mentioned I really don’t recommend continuing reading upcoming chapters if you don’t understand the one you’ve just read.