☽ Coraline Castell ☾

Second Update

A little bit late because I got angry at HTML and left this one in the oven for around 5 days too late.


Blood spilled

  • The Purring Quest
    The Purring Quest

    4 hours playtime

    23 of 23 achievements

  • Spoiler Alert
    Spoiler Alert

    3 hours playtime

    10 of 10 achievements

Now dead.

Last week I made a trophy out of two souls: The Purring Quest and Spoiler Alert. Both were annoying platformers with much room for improvement, albeit the love purred (pun intended) into the former does grant it some merit. The targets were found and killed in one day each. The payment was a significant increase in my avarage killing rate.

All in all, I recommend both games for those who enjoy and are good with platformers. If not, they might be too unforgiving to be hunt down.


Beaten to a pulp

  • Lume
    Lume

    66 minutes playtime

    no achievements

  • Puzzle Agent
    Puzzle Agent

    5 hours playtime

    no achievements

  • Tales of the Orient: The Rising Sun
    Tales of the Orient: The Rising Sun

    13 hours playtime

    15 of 16 achievements

Laying on the floor bleeding.

This week I went after a few targets in order to beat them. I succeeded at knocking out Lume (the quickest one to surrender), Puzzle Agent and Tales of the Orient: The Rising Sun. I still have unfinished business with Tales, however, but I shall leave that for some other time.

Puzzle Agent ended up being a lot more fun than I had anticipated, and I strongly recommend it. I can't wait to purchase the second installment. Lume was far too short and I didn't like the puzzle style. I still recommend it for its aesthetics, though. Tales of the Orient I played as much as I did for the achievements, it wasn't much fun in itself, nor innovative in its mechanics. Take that as you will.


Closer to death

  • Terraria
    Terraria

    2 hours playtime

    6 of 88 achievements

  • Hand Of Fate
    Hand Of Fate

    8 hours playtime

    9 of 53 achievements

  • Viridi
    Viridi

    4 hours playtime

    14 of 47 achievements

  • Borderlands
    Borderlands

    11 hours playtime

    21 of 80 achievements

Prey.

I finally moved past only one achievement in Terraria after playing it with one of my best friends, Sam. I finally get what it is about and why it is so much fun. He'll help me slit this one's throat in no time.

Hand of Fate is proving to be an engaging challenge, even for a casual gamer like myself it is still not more than what I bargained for. I finally reach 50% on story mode this week, killing half of the nasty bosses and another one.

Viridi I decided to kill this one by prolonged exposition to Mercury. Likewise, it's taking forever. Months, even. Oh well, if mercury could kill the amazing Amadeus Mozart in time, I believe so can I with Viridi.

Last but not least, Borderlands is a blast with my great friend, Arthur (~ Smoke Mid Everyday ~). We finally reached level 25 together, finished all Arid Badlands missions and some other cool stuff! Only took us a little over 10 hours. Whew.


I took a peak at...

One of many stunning views in Firewatch.

Playable characters in Blizzard's Overwatch.

Firewatch & Overwatch

At my friend Sam's house. Since we share Steam libraries, I'm hoping to play more Firewatch at my own house (if my computer can run it) and figure out what the heck is that game about. Seriously, it's a puzzle to me. I'm not ashamed to say I spent around 10 minutes laughing and picking stuff up and throwing on the ground much to my friend's dismay. It was worth it.

As for Overwatch, I don't think I'll be buying it any time soon (if ever). I mean, it is great fun, but far too expensive and computer demanding for me to acquire it. The characters are amazing, though. I enjoyed playing with D.Va and Soldier 76 especially; I strongly recommend watching the Overwatch shorts and digging into its backstory, I found it to be very very rich.

mandrill

Sorry, but I don’t think that worked out like you intended … since I (and I suspect most others) don’t have Bebas Neue or Open Sans installed, Chrome was nice enough to fall back to butt-ugly Times New Roman … yeah, not even a sans font. (And even if I had those fonts, changing font mid-page is not a nice thing to do … you really made me consider banning the font-tag from the markdown :P)

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

Don’t be sorry! I was so stupid not to think about that. I’ll see some more universal font to put there, or leave it in the annoying font everyone else uses hahaha
Very helpful for you to tell me! And I was wondering, did the other font work? Because it is slightly rounder and bigger than the one we use in the comment section and the rest of the website. (:

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

There! I checked this website and a few others and figured that “Impact” would probably work. So Bebas Neue is now Impact, but Open Sans is still Open Sans because it was commissioned by Google and I believe it would at least work on Chrome. Better? :D

mandrill

The headers are ok now, but the paragraphs are still Times New Roman. So … Google or not, Chrome doesn’t care about Open Sans. The font still has to be either installed locally or served as a web font by the site, and … well it isn’t :P
I might consider using a webfont for a consistent appearance though … because actually this site would like to be Helvetica Neue, but since no one has that installed, most people will just see plain old Arial. (Although I think you have to be something of a font hipster to care about that difference :P)
I think I’ll play around a bit with some of the free Google Fonts and see if I like them … although I’d probably go for Roboto or Arimo, not Open Sans. And then I’ll have the markup remove all your evil font tags. Because of reasons. \o/

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

You have been of great help, thanks! I wonder how you know that much. And it is a well-known fact that Helvetica Neue is a paid font, so that’s just downright retarded of the site. (I do care, actually haha hence why I use different fonts on my posts, I dislike Arial)

Roboto is a fine choice indeed. I’ve never used Arimo for anything, but I’ll give Roboto a shot.

And why would you do that? Font tags are cool.

mandrill

Well the site just uses the default bootstrap theme, and I was lazy and didn’t really change anything about it (only made some small tweaks where stuff wasn’t working at all). I did plan to make a custom theme, but that wasn’t high priority in the beginning, I’m not much of a designer, and … well honestly I didn’t expect the site to be this “successful” :)

I have no idea why the bootstrap guys chose Helvetica Neue for the default, but using Arial as a fallback for that is sensible at least. Most people can’t tell them apart anyway. (Well actually it’s not hard to guess why they chose Helvetica. They are font hipsters. ;)

Font tags are not cool at all :P Any document / web page with more than one font (maybe a second for headlines) is strainful to read. In the best case it just looks a bit silly, most of the time it’s tiring, and in the extreme cases it can be downright painful. (Comic Sans is so great on it’s own, it must be really awesome when mixed with Times and Courier! Oh and better throw in bold italics for random highlighting.) So … since your posts aren’t really displayed on their own, but either along other’s posts in the feed or framed by your profile, you always add that uneasiness for the reader when you use font tags :/

But meh, I’m old enough to remember when all of the Internet looked like Geocities, so I don’t think I’m shocked that easily. I’m still not sure if my math professor was serious or if that was just a joke about the 90s … and there’s still some awesome sites today … Heck, I just remembered that I could do this :D

DakotaThrice

I’m not exactly a wizard when it comes to html or any sort of coding but I can manage the basics. A local group asked me to redo their website as they were all old and technologically incompetent. When I saw that their existing website was basically a Geocities site I wasn’t sure whether to break down in tears or just rejoice that anything would be an improvement.

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

That’s a funny story! And I guess I wouldn’t be sure myself either. I remember doing some translation work last year or so and redoing someone else’s mess of grammar and what not. I had that same feeling you had there.

Were they happy with whatever you did? (:

DakotaThrice

Nah, they just moaned about what they wanted changing, despite never actually telling me what they wanted in the first place so I just gave them all the details and left them too it.

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

Aw, that’s sad to hear. Hopefully, you’ll get finer clients in the future. After all, a gamer’s gotta game.

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

Boostrap is a great name. And I wouldn’t be so quick to label you lazy. The website is pretty and it works great. You did a fantastic job. Despite the occasional annoying lag (that I’m quite sure has nothing to do with your design choices) everything works just as well as it should. I guess no one expected 250 members, but here we are! (:

Yes, for the general public that fallback is a wise decision indeed (hah! “Font hipsters”.)

Hm, I partially disagree with your third paragraph, unless you mean different body fonts on the same page. Because different fonts for headers, body and a side menu do no-one no harm. I love this website to do some font combining for presentations and other things. Plus, I really like Bebas Neue, and each font has a section there and website examples of use; some of the Bebas Neue ones look quite sweet. Also, if you think Comic Sans is amazeballs, you should check this font out. Thank me later.

The Ling website gets me every single time. The best part? The more you scroll down or click about, the better it gets. It never stops. I almost feel like renting a car, despite the fact that I don’t live in the UK, I don’t have the money to spare and I don’t have a licence to drive it! And, you know what? After seeing that amazing alternate-90s-version of BLAEO, I no longer think you did a good job on this one. That’s what we should be striving for, man! Not this… this… 21st-century minimalistic bs.

mandrill

Yep, different body fonts is what I meant. A second font for headers often does look great, as long as those fonts go well together. But having a different body font for every post in the feed would make me go crazy (bonus points for mixing similar fonts to make everyone dizzy).

But actually this conversation made me use my lunch break for some experiments … well, there’s more going on than just a different font, but I really like Arimo so far. I’m not fully convinced with Kaffeesatz for the headlines, but it doesn’t look to bad either. (For my taste, Impact is too heavy for the headers; haven’t tried Bebas Neue yet, I generally like it, but I’m not sure about using an all caps / small caps font for every single (sub) headline.)

Edit: Oswald might be a nice alternative to Impact.

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

I understand what you mean. I have since removed all font tags from my posts & profile except for the headers. Lovely article you got there, the one about the different Rs in Helvetica and Arial is also fine.

Arimo is good looking, I have to agree. I also like Lato or even Roboto or Chivo for the body. One font I always seem to obsess over is Montserrat.

As for headers, Kaffeesatz is pleasing to me as well, but I’m not fully convinced myself. Impact is too… impactful – that was just me picking the first header font that popped to mind. I think Bebas Neue mightn’t be the best for the whole website, it’s too remarkable. Oswald looks awesome! But in case you’re not too sure about it, I think Fjalla One also fills the bill.

You don’t strike me as someone who delights in articles full of fonts suggestions, but here are some in case you run out of ideas down the road: ////.

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☽ Coraline Castell ☾

BLAEO went insane and posted my same comment a billion times. Sorry about that.

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DakotaThrice

Fun Fact: The achievement you’re missing from Tales of the Orient originally required 500 games.It was after I informed the devs just how poo I thought that was that the requirement was changed to 200.

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

No way blue jay! That was absolutely lame indeed. No one can play that came for that long. I had trouble getting as far as finishing the game. Thanks so much for not only spotting error but for going out into the wild and trying to fix it. It is much appreciated, at least (but I’m sure not only) on my end. <3

DakotaThrice

I’m not inherently against grindy achievements but my argument in this case was that replaying the same level another 400 times in 15 moves wasn’t an achievement but rather mindless, repetitive grind. It doesn’t even offer random levels, not that that would have been much of an improvement.

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

Couldn’t agree more. I’ll only face that game again when I’m able to forget it some.

DakotaThrice

Personally I’d say just smash through it.and get it out of the way then you can forget about it forever. It might be a bit of a drag but each time you put it off and come back it’ll likely seem worse and worse. You’re already halfway there and the last half will be quicker as there’s no specific requirements other than the number of completed levels

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

That was something I was confused about. All I should do is replay it, then?

DakotaThrice

You could do another full run but the quickest option is just to replay the first level.

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

Thanks so much for the tips and all else! Cheers (:

Ghostie

Puzzle Agent and Terraria are awesome!
Are you building any traps in Terraria? I built a few, mostly lava pits and spikes you can activate. So fun. >:3

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

They are indeed, Akantha!
No, not yet! This is so amazing to know. I bet my friend knows how and considering we’re going to play more today, I’ll surely suggest. >:3

uguleley

Wow, those titles suggest you’re really going heavy against your backlog. It’s like reading a script from a Tarantino movie.

…keep up with the progress, I suppose? :D

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

I adore Tarantino, so that’s a huge compliment to me! Did you know that his Hateful Eight script is legally available for free online? Worth the read (not alllll of it, of course; it is a three hours movie) if you ask me!

Trivia: before the movie was even on filming grounds, the script leaked. Tarantino got so mad he swore he wasn’t going to release it anymore! However, he found a way around it by changing the ending, into the one that went into the actual film. That being said, the script linked to you has a different ending… and I truly suggest checking it out after watching the masterpiece.

Thanks for the encouragement!

uguleley

Oh that’s nice! I just pictured scenes from his films when I saw that text. And yeah, I remember the script leak too. It’s a shame when something like that happens, many years’ amount of work spoiled by such ignorance. Didn’t know about the changes in the script though, but I’m happy that Tarantino came around and ended up releasing the film.

I’m yet to see Hateful Eight, actually. Wasn’t it the one that was shot on some really old film reel equipment and was premiered on a few old theaters that still supported it?

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

It’s fantastically well written, and golden to any movie enthusiast. Script leaking is a very unfortunate event indeed, under any circumstances.

That’s the one, albeit a small correction: it also premiered in regular theaters, but with the regular format on those. Since I live in a faraway land (Brazil) I had to resort to seeing it in the less-than-fancy manner. It was marvelous even so.

Do watch it as soon as you can! It became my favorite from his (and I’ve watched all except “Jackie Brown”). It recently got itself on Netflix as well, in case you’re subscribed.

PS: friendly tip:don’t watch it by yourself, you’ll want to share some reactions during or after the movie… even if you happen to be the silent type.

uguleley

Oh yeah, the worldwide release was in regular format for sure! I just remember them using the old film too, which was a really cool thing to do. :)

Thanks for the tips! I’ve got Netflix but looks like it isn’t included in my location yet. I’m sure I can rent it somewhere.

☽ Coraline Castell ☾

Glad to be of help to a fellow kitten (:

I hope you enjoy it!

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