Welcome to Pages of Fun!

This is the personal Web site of Robert Wm. Gomez. I am an artist, musician and nerd living in Chicago, Illinois who has been maintaining this site (in one form or another) since 1996. Enjoy your visit!

Bravely Default on Nintendo 3DS (7/10)

Posted on

I picked up this 3DS JRPG because of one novel feature: the ability to turn off random encounters. For the most part, I find Japanese RPGs to be fair to middling at best and the constant random battles and grinding everywhere has not endeared me to the genre. Being able to turn them off is a blessing. There’s nothing worse than conquering a dungeon only to have to keep fighting random grunts over and over just to pass through that area again.

Bravely Default does actually have some interesting combat mechanics in which you can bank turns in order to attack in bulk later on. I really didn’t mind the random battles that much as I was leveling up and learning new class skills. That said, there’s a point about halfway through the game where there is a time/multi-verse shift and you are forced to play through everything all over again… and again… and again. I very quickly got tired of it and turned down the difficulty and the encounter rate. A more clever game would have done a better job of making each world reset seem different than the last in some meaningful way, but Bravely Default is not that game.

The story eventually does make a turn and leads to a fairly satisfying ending with a nice, albeit predictable twist. Most of the plot is your standard “stop the evil that is corrupting the world” that feels like it was written for immature 10-year-olds (and Gen Z’ers… but I repeat myself). You’re often forced to read intra-character “party chats” that are just time-wasting filler. Your party’s characters are established in the opening cinematic and never really grow beyond that. But it’s a JRPG, what did I expect? Ultima?

QBob Progress Report #8 – Launch Day!

Posted on

After almost eleven months of hard work, today is the day we are releasing QBob: Remastered to the world!

The last bit of content in the game was getting John in the “booth” to record new dialog for the final boss. There are a dozen or so new insult, taunts, and mad ramblings to which QBob will be subjected.

Most of the past month or so has been spent building up our Steam Store presence with tons of graphical assets, creating a few trailer videos, undergoing lots of Valve content reviews, and porting the game to other platforms. Much of the hardest work her on this final stretch has been building the game for MacOS and Ubuntu. Craig did all of the work getting the MacOS game working. Apple makes it very difficult to create anything (despite what hipster Web devs may say). I handled the Ubuntu port using a virtual machine and it was easy-peasy. In theory, that build should run natively on Steam Deck™, but I have no way to test it.

Finally, I created a thirty page manual for the game. I would like to have a few of these printed up to distribute, but that’s going to be kind of expensive.

So now, without further ado, here are the links to everything QBob: Remastered that is being released today!

Buy QBob: Remastered
Buy the Soundtrack (Steam)
Buy the Soundtrack (Bandcamp)

The Deadly Tower of Monsters on PC (5/10)

Posted on

The premise of this game intrigued me: you play as a character in a 50s sci-fi B-movie whose actions are narrated by the director’s DVD commentary track. The design is supposed to be retro-futuristic but you see strings and bad rubber masks, etc.

Turns out that this premise is not executed very well. The voice of the director is completely wrong. There’s a winking, self-aware DVD producer voice that ruins any sense of immersion. Creatures which are supposed to be bad stop motion, just look like sloppy game animations. The characters just look like the monsters they are supposed to be and never feel like actors in costumes.

On top of all that, it feels like hardly any effort was put in to making the actual game play fun. It’s sort of twin-stick shooter-y at times, and point at bad-guy and button mash at other times. This is the sort of game mechanics that you would create if you were following a “let’s make your first game in Unity” tutorial. If it’s any consolation, at least the game was short.

QBob Progress Report #6

Posted on

After having finished the bulk of the game (see the last QBob report), I have been spending the last month or so getting the game ready for distribution on Steam. And, as of today, I can finally announce that the game has its very own live Steam page!

Before I dig into the details, I’d just like to say for the first time (and definitely not the last): please go to the QBob: Remastered Steam page and add it to your Steam wishlist. Wishlists play a big role in getting new games noticed and, even if you never buy the game, adding it to your wishlist will be a great help.

As of this writing, it’s very much a work in progress. But you can’t imagine the amount of effort it took to just get this far. I couldn’t have done it without Craig, who helped with gobs of corporate paperwork. The other bit that took a bunch of effort was generating the dozen or so new art assets for every possible store location the game banner can appear in.

One of the biggest new features that I have added to the game are achievements. There are twenty-two total and they range from super easy (RTFM, flip through the entire manual) to well-nigh impossible (1cc the game on hard difficulty). Each achievement has a custom icon and they have been successfully linked to the Steamworks API.

There is also an in-game fallback if the build of the game isn’t linked to steam. You can’t believe how excited I was when I saw that little floater pop up in the lower right corner for the first time.

I also did a full gamepad support pass to allow the entire game, from menus to high score entry, to be accessible without the help of a keyboard or mouse. Now, I fully admit that playing the game with a gamepad is not ideal, but Steam really pushes gamepad support, especially for making titles compatible with Steamdeck.

There are still a couple of items to complete. I’d like to get cloud saves enabled, which, in theory, is just a matter of mirroring the GameMaker local storage folder to Steam. I also need to make a short game trailer video which is going to require me capturing a bunch of gameplay footage and editing something together. Then there’s the soundtrack and game manual PDF. Back to the grind.

The Circulating Lifeblood of Ideas: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints by Holly Borham (7/10)

Posted on

This is a rare instance where the writing in the art book might be the most interesting part of it. Sure there a ton of prints featured here, but they tend to be small reproductions that are lacking needed detail. Steinberg’s use of prints, especially copies of paintings, as a metric for gauging contemporary ideas and beliefs is a fantastic way to appreciate printmaking. It really elevates the importance of the print in art history. Now if only everyone could read this and then boost the sales of my prints!

Cat Quest on PC (5/10)

Posted on

I initially liked the no nonsense action-oriented combat of this RPG but I soon realized that it was just the same thing over and over again. I think the biggest hook here is not the insipid cat theming, but that the entire game is played on the over-world map. Other than that, the story is immediately forgettable, there is no actual “role playing,” and there is no variety or strategy in the battles.

Whom Gods Destroy by Clifton Adams (7/10)

Posted on

This was a depressing crime story about a loser who returns to his old home town and tries to prove himself by becoming the biggest bootlegger around. He ends up succeeding and burning every bridge along the way. The story was frustrating because the protagonist was just unlikable and always made the worst decisions. Initially you want to root for the guy but that sentiment fades about a quarter the way through the story.