The Twilight Sun

Sorry about the long wait, but there’ve been some things that kept me from editing when I wanted to. I mentioned posting on Synaesthete next, I think? I don’t think it’s a complete enough game to warrant a full review, but it’s definitely worth posting my thoughts on.

Synaesthete is a small music-and-rhythms game, comparable to DDR in terms of gameplay, but more of a platformer than an arcade game. (And let me note, I don’t really understand "platformer" beyond it meaning "you pick things up and go through levels". Please correct me if I’m wrong.) You control a small Gumby-esque character called the Zaikman (named after Zach Aikman, one of the game developers) through three Visions, each with three Stages each.

To complete a Stage, you must travel along a rather linear set of rooms, clearing each room of enenies in order to procede. To do this, a "reciever"-esque item appears on screen when required, with colored bars falling from the top of the screen to the "receiver" spots. This is where it’s similar to DDR. You also have to keep moving, so as to not get damaged by the enemies, and you only have so much health before you’re defeated. To help with this, with around every stage you complete, you unlock a "spell", of which you get three of at the beginning of a stage. I found Equilibrium to be the most helpful of the spells, personally.

At the beginning of the game, you have two difficulty options, based on the RPMs of old-style records. After completing all three visions, and the final boss, you unlock the third and fastest RPM. When you complete a stage, the ring around the stage entry spot becomes the color of the highest difficulty you’ve completed it on: green for easy, yellow for medium, and red for the hardest.

It’s a great game, and one that definitely deserves one or two play-throughs. It lacks a lot of replayability however, except for completing all stages on difficult, so you’ll probably drop it after a few days. I wouldn’t just ignore it though. Try it out, you’ll be hooked for a few days.

Synaesthete Game Website

P.S. I almost forgot to mention, this game was designed and developed by a team of students at Digipen. Great job!

Hullo everyone, I’m writing from Las Vegas! Not exactly the place a "minor" would usually want to be, right? Usually. Except for the fact that for Christmas my sister got four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert here.

That’s right. I, Jonathan, have returned from a Hannah Montana concert, also featuring Aly & AJ. It was more fun than I thought it might be, though, considering who the star of the concert was. For one, Aly & AJ have some great songs on their Insomniatic album, which I had to pick up afterwards. For two, Aly & AJ "look awesome", to put it mildly.

We had pretty good seats, but my ears are still ringing from the loudness. Luckily I found out that the little flaps of cartillage up and to the front of your earlobes are good earplugs.

I didn’t enjoy Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus particularly. She’s not bad, but I’d much rather go to an Aly & AJ concert after seening them open Miley’s. Nothing against Miley, though!

A little trivia about me, in relation to the concert: In Aly & AJ’s Insomniatic album, my two favorite songs are Potential Breakup Song and Chemical React, and my favorite of of Aly & AJ (*cough*) is AJ.

Signing off (and going to play Synaesthete, which I’ll post on next!),
~Jonathan

Just a quick post to mention to everyone, on the topic of a rare few e-mails I got before pointing Jonathan.com to my blog:

Some people seem to have been bragging to their friends that they "own Jonathan.com". "Hey, look, this is my site. I’m so cool, aren’t I?"

Well, no, you’re not.

My father has owned this site for a long time, almost since I was born. You can check most any Internet domain registrar to check this, I believe.

And no, I’m not selling it, either. Sorry.

To the legitimate readers and visitors to Jonathan.com, thank you!

With the help of my father, I’ve added some pictures of me (and a car) to the top of the blog. While all three of those handsome guys up there is me, the car is just there to look good. And it does!

Also, this blog can be reached from several URLs, the three I prefer – in order of best to worst – Jonathan.com, Twisol.com, and twisol.squarespace.com. (Yes, I own Jonathan.com!) All three of those are the same blog, same me, so use whichever you like to come by.

Oh, and I’ve now had this blog for about a month! Woohoo!

~Jonathan

Alright everyone, sorry I haven’t posted lately, but you know what Real Life can be like. This is the first of five reviews on the games included in Valve’s The Orange Box. First off will be Portal, which is my second favorite of all five games. I’ll review Team Fortress 2 next round (my first favorite game).

.:Overview:.
Portal, while a relatively short game, really lives up to its motto of "Thinking with portals". The basic premise is that you’re a test subject in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, and you are sent through a total of 20 testing chambers, with a computer AI named GLaDOS guiding you. Along the way, you acquire the Portal Gun (to fire blue portals), and later additional functionality for the orange portal.

.:Gameplay:.
The game’s major focus revolves around Portals. With a portal in one location and the opposite portal in another, the two locations are merely a step away from eachother, even if they’re miles apart! This simple idea allows for a very unique style of gameplay, and the inclusion of "portal physics" (you retain all forward momentum as you pass through) creates some very interesting maneuvers, such as "flinging" – jumping into a portal on the floor and out of one on a wall – and a technique fans call "bouncing" – jumping into a portal on the floor and out of one on the floor.

.:Storyline:.
You might not expect a game like Portal to have much of a storyline, but it really does have an interesting backstory. Aperture Science seems to be a rival of Black Mesa, the government entity we all know and love from the Half-Life series. GLaDOS, the computer AI that guides you through the complex, seems to be the only sentient being besides you, which raises the question: where is everyone? And then there’s your character, who is named Chell (and is female). There is some speculation that she is/was a part-time employee at Aperture Science, based on some things GLaDOS mentions. (If you’re curious by now, GLaDOS stands for Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System.)

.:The Test Chambers:.
Alright, so we have Portals. Where do you get to use them? The test chambers, of course! During the course of the testing, you may be asked to place boxes on buttons, guide energy orbs into the receiver, or make your way through a room chock-full of aggressive turrets, and every chamber requires the use of portals. Flinging and bouncing are also common, and very, very fun to use. There’s 20 chambers in all, and at the end, you’re promised cake! What a reward!

.:Achievements:.
This is something I really like about Portal. After certain points in the game, you get an Achievement (such as when you receive the complete portal gun). If you manage to fling yourself far enough, you can get an achievement. Falling 30,000 feet also nets you an achievement – yes, thirty thousand. There are six Advanced chambers based on chambers 15-18 that are unlocked after you complete the main game, and every two you solve grants you an achievement. There are also three Challenge modes you can play for each of those six levels (except not Advanced): Least Steps, Least Time, and Least Portals. It’s a rewarding feeling to have managed all six Advanced chambers!

.:Conclusion:.
Some say Portal is the first perfect game. I don’t think there is such a thing, but Portal is the closest game I’ve seen to that point. Why is Portal not perfect? Everything is great, I haven’t said a single bad thing. I’ll first say that some levels are extremely hard - mostly the Advanced ones – and attempting the Gold Medal score on any of the challenge modes is enough to make you play Team Fortress 2 instead ((true story!)). On the whole, however, Portal is an awesome game, and I give it a 10/10. (Perfect, to me, is 11/10 – un-attainable!)