Habitica - Level up your lifestyle

Want to make a change in 2016?

Hey everyone, long time no see!
Like most people at the beginning of the year you may have decided to make some lifestyle changes for 2016. However most people, myself included, often find themselves with an initial huge burst of motivation that gradually dwindles away due to various distractions and laziness, we lose track.

There are a large number of apps and services out there to help you get organized but one in particular stood out for me - Habitica.
I freaking LOVE video games and Habitica offers you a way to 'gamify' your lifestyle, offering progressive challenges and rewards as you complete quests and tasks as you aim towards your life goals.

Previously known as 'HabitRPG', it is a free website service as well as a phone app. Anyone who has played an RPG before will feel immediately at home as you begin creating your avatar and as you level you can choose a class specialization such as a Warrior or Healer. You can defeat monsters, collect materials and earn equipment, skills and pets along the way!

Sounds good...but how in the hell does that help your productivity?

The key is in how you do damage to enemies and gain experience. In order to make progress you need to complete 'daily quests' as well as short term and long term missions. Above all, these are not provided by the game itself, they are created entirely by the character, you. Following the basic yet sufficient tutorial you can entirely customize your quests aka your 'to do' list in order to suit your personal needs.

A glimpse at my personal quest lines

Quests are split into 3 main categories:

1) Habits
These are good or bad habits that you passively want to encourage or discourage. Completing a positive task such as 'Wash up immediately after cooking' will reward you with experience and maybe an item. A negative habit such as 'Eat take away pizza' would cause damage to your character. With each 'consequential' completion the rewards/punishments will scale off in order to not be overpowered as it becomes an actual habit.

2) Dailies
These are the main focus of Habitica. These are habits and tasks that you actively want to complete on a regular basis. If these quests are not completed by the end of the day it will result in both you and your party taking damage for each individual task. It varies per person but it my case it includes tasks such as 'Review 3 kanji and its compounds', 'Exercise', 'Get out of bed immediately', 'Organize my work for the next day' etc. These can be as specific or as vague as you like.

3) To do's
These are your bigger, long term goals. Or those type of tasks that you won't get round to immediately but need doing. On my list right now I have 'Clean the inside of my PC' because it is WAY overdue. Other examples could be 'Pass license examination' or 'Lose 5 kg' and so on. These types of quests offer larger rewards depending the difficulty and if left to stagnate, gradually become more red compared to your fresher green tasks.

Each quest can be modified for difficulty or you can add time limits and specific days for them to appear. For example, '5 km Jogging' could be made to appear in your 'dailies' for Mon, Weds and Fri only.

Your character is displayed on the left, your party members on the right

Habitica has a very active community like any other good RPG. You can join parties and guilds and these allow you to challenge story quest lines together and defeat bosses with your accumulated damage. Other the other hand, if your party members fail a task, you will also suffer damage, therefore being in a party is a good motivator to complete each daily list!
The main positive aspect is that many groups are targeted to various lifestyles ranging from  office workers to fitness buffs or language students. You can help motivate each other and share tips for optimizing your goals, maybe make a real friend or two in the process! My current group contains an engineer, a law student and a tri-athlete!

The interface is relatively clear with cute pixel art, and the layout is constantly being tweaked to be more efficient. The party and social screens are a bit messy in my opinion but once you get used to it the navigation becomes second nature. Habitica could benefit from adding a separate chat tab as it currently displays party chat amongst the battle data and it feels a little disjointed.

But...does it work!?

Yes...and no.

Habitica offers a lot of incentives to help you stay motivated, equipment, special pets, exclusive pets and the damage system to name a few. The main drawback though is that there is NOTHING preventing you from cheating the system - whether by checking off uncompleted tasks to prevent party damage or creating trash tasks in order to boost your equipment and experience gains. Therefore Habitica's success strongly relies on the user's integrity, honesty and pure willpower to reach their goals.

Various monsters can be defeated with your group

I have been using Habitica for over 6 months now and while I started off really well, when my motivation began to slide I slowly fell into the trap of checking off a few uncompleted tasks just to prevent my party dying, DO NOT DO THIS as it totally ruins the purpose of Habitica.

There is a large wiki and forum that offers advice for optimizing your lists as well as various other tricks. You can also set yourself 'Rewards' that you can purchase with accumulated gold. For example if you lost 5kg then perhaps you could treat yourself to that take-away pizza...for 500 gold. Pass an exam? Treat yourself to a weekend spa...for 7777 gold and so on.
There is a mobile app to coincide with the website and it helps your to keep track and check things off as you complete them. It is nothing mind blowing but it gets the job done.

So many pets to collect! Each pet can also be turned into a mount with food, hence the progress bars.

I have revamped my list again for 2016 and have vowed to be more strict with myself, the deaths of myself and my party members be damned! One of my new tasks? CREATE BLOG CONTENT!!
2016 will be a year of change!

Give Habitica a try, its a fun new way to help improve yourself!

Farewell Satoru Iwata

Today gamers across the world are mourning a great loss.
Sadly the CEO of Nintendo Satoru Iwata has passed away on July 15th at the tragic age of 55 due developing a tumour in his bile duct. He was unfortunately absent from E3 due to his condition worsening and its a shame that anyone should die so early.

I am not normally the type to mourn celebrities or post about their deaths but I really respect Mr. Iwata. Many company CEO's and people high up in the ranks of gaming companies, are often said to be disconnected from their audience, too focused on the marketing and profitability of things.

Flag at half mast at the Kyoto Nintendo HQ

One of his more famous quotes is as follows...

"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer."
- Satoru Iwata

Which is pretty damn beautiful in my opinion. He began doing programing work for HAL while in school before later joining Nintendo to work as the companies co-ordinator of software production. Some of his earlier projects included Balloon Fight, Earthbound and Kirby but he also helped do programming on the Pokemon series as well as also dabbling in the production of other fan favourites such as Mario, Zelda and Wario World.

After the release of the GameCube, Nintendo began to struggle against their rivals, however under his guide the company released the Wii and DS to critical acclaim and wide world appeal, Nintendo's stock price DOUBLED under his lead yet he never really lost touch with what was important...

"Video games are meant to be just one thing. Fun. Fun for everyone!"
- Satoru Iwata

Sure many people bash the Nintendo franchise for being a 'kiddy market' or making 'family friendly' games, but they also made some fantastic games for the more hardcore gamers out there too. Creating instantly recognisable characters that are loved by all ages worldwide, without all the edge angst that saturates games these days. He had a friendly charming character that incorporated the best parts of business with his programming and gaming background.

Despite only recently being announced, the internet has been flooded with tributes and I would like to share some of my favourites with you below.

R.I.P Sawato Iwata.

XCOM2 Details and Trailer Announced!

Welcome back, Commander.

2k games have been keeping quiet about any potential sequel to the fantastic XCOM Unknown Enemy, the successful 3D reboot of the turn based action strategy series. I was a huge fan of the remake, it was challenging and rewarding to see your recruits go from pathetic rookies who couldn't hit a Sectoid from point blank range to become battle hardened killing machines later on.
The permanent death aspect also hit you hard whenever a member died as you personally helped them grow...unless you were a save scumming bastard. (Which I was sometimes, no way was I going to leave a mission without my beloved Chinese support Li!)

IGN however have managed to get the first details about xcom2, it will coming to PC, Mac and Linux platforms in November 2015! No news has been released yet regarding a console version, so the 'master race' are probably feeling pretty smug right now. I personally think this is great news, isomeric strategy games just work better with a mouse and keyboard. Plus with all the internet controversy regarding The Witcher 3 and other games being being 'downgraded' or poorly ported from consoles, this gives 2k games a chance to make a perfectly optimized PC release. This is what PC gamers have been crying out for in the wake of recent multi plat releases. I'm hyped.

Check out the impressive first trailer below...!

It seems that things didn't end too well in the previous campaign and that the aliens appear to be the dominant race. In XCOM2, the XCOM initiative are now the aggressors, acting from a new mobile HQ and using their limited resources to evade and assault the alien oppressors. Recruiting soldiers along the way to create the ultimate resistance network.

There are some exciting key features that have been highlighted:

Procedurally generated levels! YES! Less predictability will make for a more unique experience and encourage more playthroughs.

Deeper mod support. Enemy Unknown's longevity was greatly enhanced by some challenging fan created tweaks and campaign mods such as 'long war', if you are twiddling your thumbs, go try that out right now! 2k games have apparently realized this and aim to support modders further. This can only be a good thing.

New content :
5 updates soldier classes.
Increased soldier customization.
More alien and enemy types.
Tactical combat and more. 

We could see a few of the new enemies in the trailer. I'm looking forward to tackling the constricting reptilian type, looks menacing and mobile. As for combat the trailer hunts at more CQC tactics by revealing the blade wielding soldier alongside familiar laser and plasma weaponry. I wouldn't be surprised if this was later announced for all platforms next year. I'll be getting the PC version for sure, if they build upon what they learnt making Enemy Unknown then I definitely won't be disappointed!

Corpse Party Live Action Trailer

Today after coming home from finishing at work at 11am on a Friday, my day was made even better by finding out that Japan has just released a trailer for the live adaptation of the Corpse Party horror game series!

Check it out!

 

What is corpse party?
Corpse party is a survival horror game that was originally released in 1996 and was made using the RPGMaker software, you may have seen many other games made with this becoming popular on steam. 'To the moon' is another example. Despite the simple graphics, it is possible to create an effective emotional narrative whether it is the poignant reminiscent feelings of 'To the moon' or a creeping sense of terror in 'Corpse Party'.

My first experience with Corpse Party was on the PSP, there has been several remakes since, one of which was even released on IOS! It has since led to a series of spin off games, manga and anime adaptations, now its time for a live action movie! I really, REALLY, hope that this doesn't suck. I really enjoyed the Japanese voice acting from the original game and how the characters interacted with each other. It managed to blend terrifying scenes with quirky humour, I'm intruiged to see how this will play out with real actors.

In the game there were a variety of endings, mostly bad that were based depending on the player's decisions throughout the five game chapters. Corpse Party is set in a Japanese high school that was built upon the grounds of an old elementary school that was torn down after a number of murders and disappearances took place. After conducting a ritual to ensure that a group of friends 'stay together forever', a freak earthquake transports the students to an alternate dimension where the elementary school still exists and is haunted by the murdered children. The students must find a way to escape, many of which die a gruesome death in the process.

I'm most intruiged by how they handle some of the more quirky dialogue scenes. The english translation was renowned for having some obscure OTT dialogue lines...the most famous of all is the 'butter up my pooper' line, which sounds completely ridiculous.

The original scene depicts one of the girls asking for medicine as she hasn't been feeling good, aka constipation. In Japanese the line can be read as "Thanks I'm going to apply some of the medicine real quick!" But the English translator decided to go with "Thanks! I'm gonna go butter up my pooper with it real good!" I mean, who says that!? Honestly?

The trailer actually seems to have a lot of potential, the effects seem a little tame so I hope they don't become too jarring against the real actors. There also seems to be a ju-on esque element too with the young children ghosts.

Pooper butter scene or not, I'm excited to see whether they can truly capture the morbid atmosphere of the games, or whether it will just turn into a generic low budget horror flick. 

Nintendo and Universal Studios Japan collaboration announced!

Mario ponders about what to ride in future USJ.

This week it was announced that Nintendo will now be introducing its characters and games to Universal Studios Japan (USJ). The press release stated that“The immersive experiences will include major attractions at Universal’s theme parks and will feature Nintendo’s most famous characters and games,”. This is fantastic news because USJ has a proven track record for teaming up with famous video game and comic book company's to provide amazing attractions that bring our favourite video game worlds and characters to life.

Past attractions such as Monster Hunter themed areas as well as the spectacular Raccoon City Halloween special which included a realistic shooting game that brings the zombies of Biohazard to life. It was extremely popular with tickets selling out shortly after the park opened, every single day. Not only that, but it wasn't a casual experience either! The first iteration boasted an impressive 0% survival rate for guests, yes, zero. Some people I knew didn't even get past the first section. This year too, a Biohazard themed zombie escape again has also proved to be a success, challenging you to cure yourself of the zombie virus before it is too late while exploring zombie infested areas. Utilizing current technology such as ipads to deliver a great interactive experience.

Despite being immensely popular the pass rate was 0% in 2014.

With Nintendo's abundant range of characters and licenses there is so many chances for exciting attractions to be built, just imagine...

• Mario Bumper Karts / Real Kart Racing - although I guess there would be safety issues!
• Hybrid 3D roller coasters - Similar to Spiderman this type of ride could easily be adapted to the Starfox, Metroid, Mario Kart, F-Zero, Pokemon series and more.
• 3D Dark interactive shooter rides - These would be FANTASTIC for Starfox, although could also work for Luigi's Mansion, Metroid, and so on!
• Interactive water rides - Pokemon Snap, Mario Sunshine, the new Splatoon series etc.
• Platforming Playgrounds for all ages - Donkey Kong, Mario, Yoshi, Pikmin...would be great fun!
• Themed Restaurants - Cooking Mama, Kirby, Character themed dishes and drinks.
• Haunted Houses - Luigi's Mansion, Bowsers Castle, a montage of spooky areas from all of their games would work well too!

An on rails dark 3D shooter for Starfox would be great!

I'm personally super excited to see what they will announced. The release added that “More details will be announced in the future, as the Nintendo and Universal creative teams work to create specific concepts.” Fingers crossed they use series beyond just Pokemon and Mario. Whilst these two series would undoubtedly prove popular and be fun to visit, there is so much potential to be used from series that have been quiet as of late.

I'm hyped about the idea of a Starfox on rails shooter or 3D F-Zero rollercoaster, how about you?

The 360 degree racing world of F-Zero offers tons of potential.