Touhou ~ Age of EthanolsIn the previous article I stated the game was broken and glitched and it was unable to be played. I have to take back those words because the following happened.
One of the authors from Neetpia actually came all the way over to #shrinemaiden on IRC, to ask me why the game was glitching. We got settled into a research to detect why the game was glitching on my computer. The author has provided me two weeks long of test material versions, in order to solve the issue. Unfortunate, nothing seems to help and the game kept on going high-speed for me.
After few days when we were having another conversation, I remembered something inside the XML code (note: game editable with certain values). We Europeans use a comma to indicate decimals. Japanese and American people use a dot. Due to my windows running Dutch local, it was ignoring the comma which the game thought 2.5 was 25 and my units would walk with that speed. Notifying and explaining this to the author made him jump around in joy, as we never imagined the solution was this simple.
It was quite an honour for me to actually come in touch with one of the authors and get to help out/test their things. As you can read above I was somewhat of use so I hope my sins got cleansed this way. Also the most funny thing is: I get to meet them in real life. That is right. The creators are taking a Europe tour and their first destination is The Netherlands. Boy, talk about
fate.
Now, let us switch to the article which I revised slightly to remove the false information.
Official site:
http://neetpia.sakura.ne.jp/index.htmlNew trial movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDT-9PLrxNc&hd=1IntroductionAn obvious spin off of Age of Empires 1, that is what this game is. It falls automatically under the Real Time Strategy category and is played by point-and-click method. The game provides currently single play for now and possibly suspected Netplay, but I haven't found out about that yet. It is like 30mb large and getting the run the game cost me quite some effort because you had to update three things on your computer to get it running without throwing errors at you. That was horrible.
First impression and looksAn identical HUD displays your resources, units and diamond shaped map. Though the menu button seems to be missing and I tried all F-buttons but the only one I could find was F10 which is pausing. The spriting however is damn good and I enjoyed the details on the buildings, map and units.
The music is enjoyable and peaceful without disturbing you too much, however it doesn't really adds the feeling of war to the game. Hopefully more soundtracks will be made with different tunes. The game unfortunately has limited sound effects which are for clicking buttons, upgrading and winning/losing. When you are battling, you are doing it silently. But things are looking promising as the author confirmed future versions will have expanded sound effects.
Civilisations! Select your faith.The game currently allows you to select three teams. They all come with unique 'hero units' which can be trained once. These are:
- Shujinko ( Hakurei ) - Reimu, Marisa, Suika
- Komakan ( Scarlet ) - Remilia, Flandre, Sakuya
- Hakugyokurou ( Netherworld ) - Yuyuko, Yukari, Youmu
Each civilisation has their own bonus and so, but lacking the language skills, I cannot write stuff about that. Also each civilisation comes with their unique 'town center' appearance. For Shujinkou it is the Hakurei Shrine, for Komakan it is the Scarlet Mansion and for Hakugyokurou it is the Palace.
On the left Town Center of Shujinko and on the right Komakan. Your resources in this game are mushrooms, beer, shrine gate and points which are wood, food, gold and stone respectively from the original game. These resources are gathered by training 'worker fairies' at your 'towncenter'. Below here the original sprites from the game where to send your workers to.
Mushrooms -> Forest ( wood ) -
Beer -> Spring ( food ) -
Faith -> Jinja ( gold ) -
Point -> Cave ( stone ) -
What made me laugh in this game was that mushrooms are collected by "chopping trees". Neverless, I think the authors are trying point out that you seek mushrooms in the forest. So even one tree in this game means an entire forest. Same goes for beer as you relax and have sake while enjoying a typical hot spring.
Resources are gathered instantly, meaning they are added directly and continues to your stock. In Age of empires 1 and 2 ( and probably many RTS games ) they are dropped at a 'storage pit' and such. Here they are not. This gives of course benefit of gathering resources quickly, but it is annoying when you are being attacked.
It is also possible to advance to the next 'difficulty' ( Age in the regular game ). You start out in Easy mode and can advance to Lunatic mode to have more tougher and stronger units. That brings us to the combat section in this article.
Combat system, arm the me-.. I mean girls!The combat system is extremely easy. There are no special formations and you just click and point on your enemy to attack. Your worker fairies (white) can create three types of 'spell circles' which are offensive buildings. These are red ( melee ), blue and green ( ranged ). Each type of fairy costs a certain amount of mushrooms, beer or faith. Hero units, trained at the town center, cost points.
Hero units are obviously tougher and stronger and have the ability to invoke special attacks. I have seen Marisa blasting master spark and Remilia using spear the gungnir.
Flandre and Reimu as hero units.Each unit is marked with an E, N, H or L for it's level. Logically the higher the difficulty, the stronger the unit. In each difficulty level you increase with your town center, the upgrades become available. The combat in this game is pretty straight forward. Using the rock-paper-scissor method the units will have advantage over other units. Now that the weird glitch is also fixed
Though there is one major downside to the combat system, the author seems to forgot giving enemy units a distinctive colour, like some aura or something. Every unit looks the same and trying to figure which unit is an enemy is a pain in the ass. PatchCon for example did have a border colour around the units.
About the AI. The AI in this game is
extremely difficult. The only difficulty between the modes is the rate of speed the enemy charges at you. They come in mass numbers and totally destroy you within a few moments. Even when I had Lunatic units, I was still getting spanked hard by the computer because somehow Reimu seems unfair with her special attack. Same goes for Marisa as well when she is blasting her master spark across your entire army. And because there are no formations, they are all clutched together and take the full hit.
Conclusion, a slight disappointmentNow that my game isn't running in glitched mode, I can conclude this game a little better. Either way, as I stated before the game is still unfinished and in development mode. The available units are bit off-balance and the game is fairly simple at it self. I hope to see more sound effects, bgm tracks and perhaps more buildings and technologies, so the game turns into a pretty large scaled RTS.
It seems the author(s) have been focussing more on the looks of the game, rather than the gameplay it self. I can understand the difficulty of programming a game from scratch and making it work proper. I have no knowledge of such things so I'll take it as the author(s) did their best.
So why should you or shouldn't you play this game?
Play- Small download. ( ~30mb ).
- You are a RTS freak.
- Hardcore Touhou freak that plays any fangame.
- Enjoys the spriting and work.
Don't play- Game is trial in development.
- No matter what AI setting, you will get spanked.
- Dislikes RTS
-Helepolis
Thanks to:
- syousa, one of the authors from Neetpia, for allowing me to help out testing
- Acidus, for testing the old version with me
- TranceHime, for some basic information and translation.