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What Is Amnesia’s Hard Mode?

A year ago we brought SOMA to the Xbox One, and along with it the Safe Mode. The optional mode removed the hostility of enemies and let players explore Pathos-II in relative peace. Most  players were pleased with it, and at best it meant that players that hadn't dared to traverse the Atlantic ocean floor before now had a chance to experience it.

Now finally releasing the Amnesia: Collection on Xbox One, and decided to also spice it up with a little treat. We bring you the polar opposite of the Safe Mode: the Hard Mode!

Amnesia: Collection will be released on Xbox One on the 28th of September, after which the mode will be available on Xbox and PC.


What is the Hard Mode?

It is really just as the title suggests: a mode that makes it harder to beat the game. You know, in case The Dark Descent wasn't stressful enough for you.
The Hard Mode has the following features:

- Autosaves are disabled, and manual saving costs 4 tinderboxes
- Sanity dropping to zero results in death
- Less oil and tinderboxes throughout the levels
- Monsters are faster, spot the player more easily, deal more damage and stay around for longer
- There is no danger music when the monsters are near.

So in summary: the environments are harsher, the monsters more unforgiving, insanity is deadly, and death is final – unless you pay a toll.

You can pick between normal mode and Hard Mode when starting a new game of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The mode changes some fundamental elements of the game, and therefore can't be changed halfway through.

A Machine for Pigs and Justine do not feature this mode.


How does this affect achievements/trophies?

Beating the game on Hard Mode will earn you a new trophy called Masochist. Because, you know, you pretty much have to be one to complete the mode.

The mode affects the Illuminatus achievement, which you can't get during playing in Hard Mode as it reduces the amount of tinderboxes throughout the level.

The Masochist achievement.

Will it be on all platforms?

Yes! The Hard Mode will launch on Xbox and PC versions (Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle) simultaneously. We have started working on the PS4 version with our porting partner, and hope to have it out soon.

Extra

Want a Hard Mode wallpaper? Download a 4K version with and without the logo on our public Drive folder.

Coming Back To Warmachine

Things have been quiet on here due to life in general and also because I had been playing a lot of Guild Ball instead of Warmachine.  What's going on right now is that I've started to really miss playing Warmachine and am going to start up again – though I'm going to try and keep playing both games fairly regularly.

It's only been a few months since I last posted about playing Guild Ball, so what happened?  

Besides feeling the Guild Ball itch there were a few developments that changed things up for me that made Guild Ball my primary game: 

• ·         Our Warmachine community has shifted to play mostly in a Scrum League, and ironically I can't afford to play in that with my work and family situation. 
• ·         One of my best friends picked up the Guild Ball Kick Off set, and would come over to play when my wife would have a girl's night out.  It was very easy to play him while also taking care of the kids, also only having 12 models max on the table made it easy to get a game in under 1.5 hours.
•  ·         My wife started playing some Guild Ball herself, and we got a bunch of games in as well.

I should point out that the Scrum league isn't really a problem, it's not hard at all to get matches for Warmachine, it's just a little different to setup when I'm not in the league.  

Other things are changing now as well: my youngest daughter is now big enough where I can't just strap her to my chest to play wargames. She wants to be out and about, which requires a lot of supervision on my part. So gaming with friends while my wife is out isn't as much of an option.   

Also while my wife did enjoy playing Guild Ball, my youngest being more active means that we are more tired at the end of the night once both girls are in bed.  Plus if she does get time to relax, she'd rather do her actual hobbies.

What has been odd this whole time I've been playing basically Guild Ball is that I've never stopped liking Warmachine. I've still followed what PP has been doing via CID and I think they're doing an amazing job.  

It's weird because while our Guild Ball group has grown it's cannibalizing some of our Warmachine players or at least some of them are down on WM but up on GB. I'm certainly not in that category, I see both games as a bit distinct with advantages and disadvantages to both.  I can certainly say that after probably 3 months of near exclusive Guild Ball play I'm really missing WMHD.

So now I want to get back on the WM train and though I've had a bit of faction ADD (I also own/play Legion and Khador, who also just got CID's) I've decided to get back on the Troll Train and continue my Tour of Trolls. 

I've got my eyes on Borka2 to give a try, though the last game I played with him using a Hooch Hauler in Storm of the North didn't work as well as I'd have hoped.  In fact both times I've tried a Storm of the North list with the Raider+Hauler package (Full Northkin Raiders, Hooch Hauler, Full Stone + UA) it hasn't worked out well – the Raiders were too short ranged and were able to be shot down before I could really get work out of them.

Part of the problem in those cases could have been the list not being a good drop vs. my misplay into a list that had more shooting than I did.  My gut tells me that the place to really make the Raiders + Hauler shine is with Snipe, aka Gunny or Grim2.

That said, I have to admit that I'm very tempted to steal Tim Banky's tournament winning lists for Madrak1 and Borka2, especially his Borka2 list. It strikes me as very weird to play, but as a beast brick it's highly intriguing:

Borka2

-Runebearer [0]

-Rok [19]

-Mulg [22]

-Earthborn [14]

-Earthborn[14]

-Axer [10]

-Storm Troll [9]

Whelps [0]

Whelps [0]

Stone + UA [12]

Swamp Gobbers [2]

It feels strange to be playing without Rage, but Primal should be able to do most of the work while also giving a nice hit buff.  I believe I'll give it a go, even though I'm tempted to run a Pyre instead of the Storm troll to give Borka a damage buff to put his personal output into "I definitely kill a heavy" range without having to get damaged first.  As I understand it, the Storm Troll is there for lightning immunity vs. Cygnar.

I will be getting my first game in some time in tonight and I'll be looking to pair a different Band of Heroes list with this and see how things play out.

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Fixing NES Headers And Converting Them To NES 2.0 : Putting Theory Into Practice!

In my last blog entry, I announced the creation of an evolving database of NES ROM headers, focused on cartridge accuracy.  However, while I can make a spreadsheet for easy accessibility, spreadsheets are not the best way to organize data for use by other programs.  I cannot expect someone wanting a full set of proper NES 2.0 ROMs to manually edit the headers of over 2,900 separate files!

There has to be an easier way, right?
The task of manual fixing isn't slight.
Well, if you read further now,
I'll be happy to tell you how.

Read more »

You say "obsessed" as if it is a bad thing.

Goodbye To Chess

Chess was important growing up. When I finally got my own room as a kid, it was the former den, filled with my father's chess trophies and books from his time on the Penn State chess team. I wasn't terribly into chess, but I read all the books in the den, mostly sports novels (ugh), chess strategy and how-to books. For a while in high school, I brought my chess set and played in science class, where the game was socially acceptable. My player's handbook stayed at home. I was a solid, thinking several moves ahead kinda kid, so the chess books were mostly aspirational. I felt like I wasn't quite smart enough to go full chess, like a wannabe wizard with an eight intelligence. Magic missile was just out of my grasp.

When I opened the store in 2004, I had a very respectable collection of chess sets, amazing really, for a 940 square foot store (amazing equals dumb for non retailers). These were all on full display, and about once a week, I would remove the pieces of each set, dust the board, and put them back on. My father was impressed when he visited. When it came to chess, I knew how to represent. This was all incredibly time consuming and eventually I lost several boxes, making selling them pretty difficult. Oh, and then there were the missing pieces. Realizing the queen is missing from a $250 Egyptian chess set will make you seek out boxed chess sets pretty fast.

As the display sets sold, their replacements tended not to get re-opened, and eventually not re-ordered as the plain white box did nothing to help move them. Chess sets sold poorly. They have always sold poorly. They sell poorly now. Stores in the region who do much better with chess, who dominate with chess? They sell poorly there too. It's a legacy item, an item that says "games" to the general public. It's a touchstone for me and my father. But chess, to be honest, is a complete waste of space.

That's not true everywhere. There are stores in the Midwest that do gangbusters with chess. But here? The serious players buy their sets online, often through chess organizations or just Amazon. In the store, I think it's enough to have a tournament size Staunton set and a roll up travel set, but beyond that there are hundreds of themed chess sets that will make you crazy as customer seek them out. Civil War? Simpsons? Harry Potter? You could stock an entire store with what's out there ... and promptly go out of business.

I used to special order sets and it was time consuming and unrewarding, unlike the work with other types of games. Help a board game customer and you may have created a regular board game customer and maybe even a board game hobbyist. Help someone with a chess set and you've sold them a chess set and you'll never seem them again.

I've watched my classic games numbers stagnate, even when I double or triple my selection. I've tried more and less and different and boxes with pictures and on display and nope, none of it works. It's dead here. I've been foolish not to drop it sooner. I would look at the corner where our "classic" games reside and fantasize about what I would put there. Frisbee golf. A coffee kiosk. Anything but chess.

With 25% Chinese tariffs, I'm extremely concerned about board games. But then there's chess. All those classic games come from China, really. I had forgotten. It's not even on my radar anymore. We just didn't re-order classic games after the holidays and nobody seemed to mind, except the occasional random customer who has clearly never been here before. We send them to the regional store that has a better selection and also doesn't make money selling them. Then that classic game space got taken up with profitable stuff. So with tariffs on the way, a better use of that space, and performance numbers that I use an example at trade shows of what you should drop, I think it's time to say goodbye to chess. Sorry dad.

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Experimenting With Outlines

I posted recently about how I often do one-week projects to learn and experiment. I don't have a strict one-week time limit. Sometimes I'll extend a project or come back to it after I've learned something new.

Ten weeks ago I had a one-week project in which I wanted to draw outlines on an isometric view of a dungeon game. I didn't want to outline each block, which could be implemented easily by editing the sprites. Instead, I wanted to outline the larger units. Here's a comparison:

Outlines around every sprite vs around walls

The second thing I wanted to do was to implement all of this in shaders. My first attempt was to draw a "surface id" to a texture, and then draw black outlines whenever the surface changes.

Draw a black line whenever the surface id changes

There were lots more details to implement, including outlines around billboard sprites, field of view, and lighting of wall blocks beyond the outline.

Dungeon map with outlines

I was pretty happy with that, even though it had some glitches, and I decided that project was finished.

A few weeks later I re-opened this project to explore a different approach. Instead of drawing the lines in a post-process step, I wanted to draw the lines as the sprites were being rendered. I posted some images on Twitter and got a suggestion from @Rezoner, who had made a version where some lines were white and some were black, depending on camera direction. I took that idea and ran with it, making white lines where the player could see the walls.

Dungeon map with lit and unlit outlines

I was pretty happy with this version too. I then merged the code together into one unified demo, with a toggle. Now I think I'm finished. But who knows? Maybe I'll re-open it later.

Take a look at the demo!

Things for me to keep in mind:

• The one-week self-imposed deadline is just a rough guide. I don't have to follow it strictly.
• Sharing unfinished work can lead to more ideas for improvement. I should share more things early.
• Sometimes all I need is a proof of concept. I don't need to make everything work perfectly. If I actually use this in a real project, I can work out those details then.