Quite a few months ago, I bought the full Affinity suite of products. Before you ask, of course they were on sale.
I have used Affinity Designer for a few years now, but up until recently, I haven’t had much reason to use Affinity Photo. I use Krita for most of my painting and image editing, and I still like it, but recently I have been working on my IPad more and more often. Drawing and painting directly on the screen has its advantages. Since Serif offered a single licence for Windows, Mac, and IOS, doing some image editing and painting in Affinity Photo was sort of a no-brainer. It’s fantastic. So I was a Photoshop and Illustrator guy. I used them both for almost twenty years. Professionally. I can honestly say that there are a lot of reasons that I prefer the Affinity suite. And no, it’s not just the price. Having pretty much the full toolset on the iPad is great. That I can use the same file on IPad and desktop is phenomenal. And, for the most part, the non-destructive tools are at least on par with Adobe’s, if not better. Compound masks are a must have for me now. I think they may have a little way to go with their brush engine, but I have been able to paint most of what I want to with very few issues or problems. The vector tools are solid, and if I ever find them lacking it’s pretty easy to hop over to Designer and build out a mask or text. If Photo has some decent vector tools, then it shouldn’t be surprising that Designer has some decent raster tools. Pixel paint brushes and patterns that an Illustrator artist would kill for. I used to promote Affinity Designer, because I used it nearly every day, but now, after using both Designer and Photo extensively, I can easily say it might be worth it for you to switch from Adobe products. Until something much better comes along, I will happily continue paying the very low upgrade price for the Affinity suite of products.
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Best Games - Money Puzzle Exchanger / Money Idol Exchanger
If you're like me, you think about Magical Drop 3 more than a person really should. Almost immediately after thinking about Magical Drop 3, you think of Money Puzzle Exchanger. It turns out, Face, the developer of Money Puzzle Exchanger, might be like me. The similarities between Money Puzzle Exchanger and Magical Drop are maybe what you might call legally actionable. Both games play very similarly. Circles that march down from the top of the screen and you as the player have the ability to grab one, or a similar group of those circles, pull them down to the bottom, move them to a new column and fire them back up to the top. If you make certain combinations of circles touch at the top, they will clear, or in the case of Money Puzzle Exchanger, they will be replaced by a circle of a different value. That’s the biggest difference here. In Magical Drop, making a line of three or more of the same color bubble will cause those bubbles, and any other similarly colored bubble touching them, to pop. In Money Puzzle Exchanger those circles represent coins and matching, say, five coins with a one on them will convert them all into a single coin with a value of five. Two fives make a ten, five tens makes a fifty, two fifties makes a hundred, and five hundreds makes a five hundred. Match two five hundreds and they will disappear, clearing them from the board permanently. While that all sounds sort of straight forward, imagine trying to make several matching patterns like that at high speed. Magical Drop can be difficult, but matching colors is trivial compared to that. On the surface, the gameplay of these two games might seem extremely similar, so similar that Data East may have sued Face over it, the experience of playing Money Puzzle Exchanger is very different from Magical Drop. There is so much more strategy and planning involved. The action is not as fast paced, but maybe even more hectic. More mentally stressful. In a good way. For a moment I thought that Money Puzzle Exchanger might have the wackier cast of fun characters, but they both post up a good showing in that department. So, Money Puzzle Exchanger is a lot like Magical Drop. And that’s great. But it also plays differently, and maybe is a bit more difficult. And that’s also great. It’s a lot like one of the other best games, but I don’t think that’s disqualifying. Money Puzzle Exchanger is different enough that I think it stands on its own as one of the best games. Every once in a while, I come across a game that I just don’t get. I can’t understand why other people enjoy it. This is very much a ‘not for me’ thing. I mean, go enjoy whatever games you like, I’m not going to tell you no, or tell you that you are wrong for liking it.
Almost always, I come across these games because someone recommended it to me. Or someone wrote an article about it. Or they talked glowingly about it on a podcast or YouTube video. Because they like it. They enjoyed it. And then I try it, and I don’t. The common public reaction seems to be to tell everyone who likes that thing, that they are wrong for liking it. I don’t and can’t subscribe to that. I know that there are things that I like that other people won’t. Usually I can try to articulate why it is that I like that thing, but I don’t actually expect my opinion to sway anyone. There are legions of games, and I won’t attempt to name them here, that I don’t enjoy, but I can imagine how someone else might. There is a much shorter list of games that I have a lot of trouble understanding who they are for. And yet, these games still have their proponents. I recently played a game, that I won’t name here, that came highly recommended. There are even some people out there calling it potentially their game of the year. I’m baffled. I played it. I think I explored it fully. I think I played enough to see what other people see in it… and I’m baffled. I hated almost every bit of playing it. No, the kids are not wrong. This is just something that is very much not for me. And that’s okay. I truly hope that the person for whom this is their game of the year, enjoyed every second of their time with it. I will be playing something else. There are so very many games to choose from. Last year I took part in a sort of challenge. Every weekend for five weekends write one story under 750 words. By the end of the challenge you end up with five stories (or six if you take part in the warmup round).
Even though I haven’t sold, or even finished rewrites and edits on any of the stories from last year, I’m trying it again this year (though 2 of them are very close). I did find that 750 words is not really enough for me. I had a tendency to come up with two or four thousand word stories and I would try to cram them down into 750. As you can guess, this didn’t always work. I think I will start being concise by ending this post here. After all, I already wrote a ~500 word story this weekend for the warmup round. Best Games - Asteroids
There is nothing quite like a game that lets you do battle with mans oldest foe. Rocks. Big rocks, little rocks, medium sized rocks that split into two smaller rocks. Rocks and void. The way it started. The way it was always going to end. Asteroids may have started as a way to create a single player Space War experience but it ended up as so much more. Asteroids may be the first real test of endurance for a video game. Several games had unending waves of enemies. Space Invaders is all about unending waves of enemies. But Space Invaders offers the player a shield to hide behind. Reprieve from the continuous assault of descending invaders. A moment to blink. Asteroids never lets up. There is always another rock to destroy or be destroyed by. Asteroids, while initially less challenging than something like Space Invaders, quickly ramps to test your perception and reflexes. The rocks drift smoother than any other game at the time. Your ship reacts with a realistic momentum and inertia. If you let it get away from you just trying to drive the ship will kill you faster than any rock out there. Occasionally a saucer will zip across the screen taking pot shots at you, but that doesn’t matter, your real nemesis is the rocks. All of the rocks. It’s Asteroids, you fight rocks, it’s one of the best games. |
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