Quick Look: Epistory - Typing Chronicles

Ahoy!

more typing QL minus grunting Dan

After yesterday's talk about the lack of typing games I was wondering if they were planning to cover this too, glad to see they are.

EDIT: Ah the QL curse of colour based floor tile puzzles.

Fuck these videos are quiet as fuck.

This would be cool if I didn't type transcription for a living. Ultimate repackaged wonderland, indeed.

@bathala: A huge loss.

.

"Oh word!?"
God damn it Austin.

It's like tearaway meets bastion meets mavis beacon.

That spacebar thing would ruin this game for me. That habit is way too ingrained to just suddenly stop doing it. A shame.

Is there really no way to rebind that?

Have an ice day.

This looks pretty nice and is not at all what I was expecting.

This seems a LOT more interesting than the typing game from yesterday

The whole "moist" thing is so irritatingly prevalent that I keep from using the word in groups out of fear of hearing someone's exacerbated moaning.

@hatking said:

Most people don't know that fatwa on Salman Rushdie was due to his overuse of "moist" in a particular chapter.

Same.

I've had to resort to downloading all Giant Bomb videos for the last few years due to this issue, VLC helpfully goes above 100% volume, and it blows my mind that it's as far as i can tell the only media player which does that.
Drew spoke in the past of not being able to make it louder, i don't know what other people do to make their videos louder but all audio and video content, and games, should be super loud, volume options let us take things down as much as we want but if 100% is quiet there's nothing you can do.

take it from somebody who oughta know: this quick look is yifftastic

This seemed really cool, but I pretty much lost all interest as soon as I saw those sliding ice puzzles. Why would they put that in a game that's ostensibly meant to be controlled entirely by keyboard from a not-quite-isometric perspective?

Typing is the motion controls of 2016!

@ohnooh: Indeed. I was really into this game right until the ice puzzle. Hearing Austin and Alex try to guide Vinny, colorblind or not, was frustrating. The control scheme plus the inaccuracy of WASD does not lend to a good game experience.

A lot of typing Quick looks lately! Bring back Typing of the Dead

I could use a typing refresher, this comment took 20 minutes to write.

I've seen these comments every now and then over the years, and I still don't understand what it is on other machines that makes it so quiet for some.

I've my systems sound level at between 25-30% for the most time, and that's often enough. If I'd crank it up to 100% my ears would hurt as hell.

So does that mean it's maybe an issue with independent hardware? I don't know, I'm not very knowledgeable with sound editing. I'm just not recognizing this problem at all.

It sucks that it's still a persistent problem for some people, though.

That's weird, I have had no problems using regular pc speakers (simple 2.1, cheap ones) plugged directly to TV headphone output slot. I am using similar levels as for game consoles plugged in the same TV for example.

On topic: this game looks like a cool idea poorly executed. Who thought making the world shifted 45 degrees was a good idea? Sure, it looks beter but when you implement puzzles which require diagonal movement, that's just not good design in my opinion.

TypingBomb.Com

Giantbomb.com: A website about typing video games

so what exactly is the moist thing ... at a loss here...

2 typing games in two days - was there a conference where someone said there were not enough typing games and people rushed out to fill the void? Of the two this looks the best for me as I dig the story aspect as well.

One thing this needs to add (maybe someone can mod it?) is a list of the words you have typed so you can look up any you don't know the definition of. Maybe make it so it only lists ones of a certain length or something so you it doesn't get overwhelming? Were a couple in both these that I wanted to look up, which was cool.

@quipido didn't play many old school RPGs did you? This 3/4 look is a pretty common thing in planescape torment and baldars gate perhaps the best RPGs ever made.

Of course I did, but in those you move using a mouse cursor, not a four-way key input method!! And then they put in some more movement imaring elements like ice!

Do they always need three ppl on these QLs? It's getting confusing and becoming less funny than the west coast videos... Still LOVE you, Vinny!!

Typing is not just a city in China.

@mythdark: As long as I've been on the site (6 years) and as far as I remember, GB videos have always been quiet. Through multiple systems, they've always been considerably quieter than other videos.

It's not really an issue though, I just crank it up and turn other stuff down if I need to.

Really liking these typing QLs. There needs to be more typing games.

This is very much a personal preference. I think that the Austin/Vinny/Alex quick looks are some of the best on the site, and can't help feel a tad disappointed when one of the three (any one, to be clear) is missing from a GBE QL.

@zaldar: It's a weird phenomenon where people just have a really negative reaction to the word. They're like disgusted by it. And it's such a common response that you'd be hard pressed to drop the word in a group of people without at least somebody making a point to protest it. I don't get it. Sure, there are words I don't like, and words that'd I'd probably avoid using, but nothing I can think of that causes some sort of visceral reaction in me.

You must be an amazing dad.

"Typing of the Makai Kingdom" when the chapters change.

Man color blindness is a terrible affliction. Poor Vinny.

I wonder if you could genetically modify a fox embryo to have three tails. I imagine if you were able to clone the first "tail cell" two more times in the same spot, that all three tails would grow as normal, right? Please tell me that is possible.

Oh god that sliding ice puzzle was torture. Why would they do that with an isometric view and WASD controls? What an awful design decision.

Yip

It just sounds weird to me since I don't get that at all. I usually keep my volume levels at the same for whatever I'm looking at and listening to. Doesn't matter if it's a Quick Look or a trailer, or random video on Youtube, or Netflix or whatever.

Isometric WASD ice puzzles... the game lost me right there.

Wow, that's the most extreme colour blindness issue I've ever seen in a game; they must have picked exactly the wrong hue for such a bright colour to look exactly the same to Vinny. We really need a toggleable filter for various forms of vision impairment in editors, or even a composite filter that does all common impairments simultaneously. There's a free filter on the Unity asset store for dichromatic colour blindness, but it doesn't appear that there's anything really comprehensive and useful. I want a toggle on the editor toolbar to do this.

Ah fuck it. I've been thinking about this problem for years and I have the time, so I'm working on a package to integrate this into Unity 5 as tightly as possible, and I'm making a sample scene for "The Impossible Puzzle" where the squares you have to select are indistinguishable with the selected form of visual impairment filter. It's just stupid that this is 2016 and we still haven't made accounting for variation in visual capabilities a standard in games.

Maybe there's stuff like that in Unreal 4; I haven't looked deeply into it.

It's really not as bad as it looks in the video. The guys from Giant Bomb often mention in the Quick Looks how hard it is to play a game while trying to explain what you are doing to others. So you shouldn't judge the difficulty of the game based on what you see in the video.

I bought and played the game right after watching the quick look. I don't often get to play games where I can enjoy the fact that I've learned to type blind. The game actually proposes that you use the E F and J I keys to move around (though you can also use the WASD and arrow keys) and though it took me a couple of minutes to get used to, I have no problems getting around. They actually make more sense to use, since their layout resembles the isometric view. I blew past those ice puzzles, much quicker than they did in the quick look. And that's including a couple of ice puzzles they didn't show in the quick look.

@mezwaan: The EF/JI configuration definitely sounds like it would make it much better, but those puzzles still do not look like a lot of fun to me. Dif'rent strokes.

@whitegreyblack: I won't argue that, I didn't have a lot of fun sliding around on the ice. But it wasn't as hard as it looks in the video. Since you can't slide off an edge or into something that can kill you (so far at least), it's just a minor annoyance and not something that'll stop you from getting on with the game.

"I think you mean yiff-tastic."

That's it, I'm done.

@dim499: meh i wouldn't say it's terrible at all, looks like it can easily be lived with. Merely bothersome. Terrible would probably be something like late stage cancer.

Wow this game looks incredibly boring.

Pink?