The Aristocrats!
8 Likes
the atmosphere of this game is like if someone took the train ride scene from spirited away and extrapolated it into an entire continent
7 Likes
this game is so frustratingly hard yet if anything i only wish it were harder to force me to sort out the clutter of my abilities and figure out what works
i just beat hornet’s second iteration and it was the first time i felt like i learnt anything about what the combat expected of me. i got really mad running into it frenetically trying to deal a bunch of quick hits! i had to come back later in a more relaxed state of mind and take my time trying to maintain the proper distance (more involved than it sounds)
side note: it occurs to me that sleeping on these kinds of games may be actually necessary in terms of the way we form muscle memory and undergo synaptic pruning, so when i say “take my time”, it could be that i’m actually perceiving time slower due to a more laser-like focus on the things i know i need to be doing.
with most of the other fights it just seemed like the game arbitrarily took mercy on me at some point after banging my head against it enough times. for all i know given the minimal feedback it could have been silently tuning the difficulty down until i fudged my way through. i never came away with a distinct feeling of progress or insight into How To Play; each boss is kinda doing its own thing and there’s a huge rift between the skill sets invoked in those fights and in the level navigation (to be fair, fromsoft aren’t great at bridging this either)
3 Likes
yes, i love games that ride the line between difficult and welcoming so finely that it digs its hooks into your subconscious forcing you to literally fall unconscious so your brain can ignore everything else and focus on getting better at this game. dreaming about SSX3 and waking up with a longer combo living in my hands.
6 Likes
first time I noticed this I was 11 and stuck on the hovercraft boss in Didd Kong Racing and then my dad took my N64 away for two weeks
and when I got it back I destroyed that pig
7 Likes
I’ve noticed the high-skill type of “variety streamer” on Twitch can just grind without taking breaks for 8 hours and win a difficult game they’ve never played before without hitting a plateau. They probably have a version of the same thing at a higher (postgame/speedrun) plateau, but it still makes me think most of what’s going on is stubbornness and avoidable tunnel vision during the original long play session.
1 Like
I wonder if they’ve built a high-level all-purpose “Video Games” skill whereas we’re all working on individual game skills like chumps
4 Likes
Yeah I think speedrunning is one of the things that builds that skill.
One thing I learned from this type of streamer for example is that they don’t rely on vaguely developing muscle memory by grinding things over and over as much as I tend to, they consciously pinpoint specific visual or audio tells, then time their reactions against the appropriate tell. I might have been unconsciously picking a distant or ambiguous tell when I use my “muscle memory” and making things harder for myself. It made me a little bit better at action games in general when I understood that.
3 Likes
Yeah, I think the trick is that they can tap into the muscle memory they learned for another game once they consciously map it.
Like, I play a bunch of Melee but not many traditional fighters, so I plateaued pretty fast on Tekken and had to sleep before the movements felt “natural”. When I played Rivals of Aether on release I felt like I was continually get better without resting. Like, I could practice a certain combo in Tekken over and over and get more consistent in training, but it wasn’t until the next day that I was able to summon that training at will when the situation arose. But I’d learn a combo in Rivals and could implement it pretty immediately.
This effect was maximized, too, because I was learning to use an arcade stick for Tekken.
If two games use the same input device, well, I think there are only so many possible movements you need to learn on a single controller. It’s not like playing different sports e.g. Tennis v. Soccer where there are some movement you do in one that you’d basically never do in the other.
2 Likes
Yeah, this is a great skill to have when learning action games. Instead of just vaguely trying to get the timing right, try to figure out concretely if you’re pressing too early, too late, whatever. Do some experiments with different potential cues. Think of the relationship between the buttons you’re pressing. Is it simultaneous or staggered? Negative or positive edge? What order?
Playing a lot of Melee (and I assume fighting games in general) makes you pretty aware of your button presses and how they relate in time. It eventually becomes second nature and subconscious, but you gain the power to focus on it and consciously change it when you want to.
2 Likes
been coaching a new player through this (I’ve never played it past the first few minutes, too grey). discovering via guides that down-attacks are critical, wondering how to explain “you must practise and master this move that has no signposting or use currently so later you’re not hard-blocked”
there could have been an NPC talking about how punching the bouncy mushrooms gets them delightfully sick air
console media capture is so helpful for this, we can review a boss fight, pause, “what’s going to happen next”, play, “count the attacks, 1 1-2, 1 1-2”, “how far across the screen did that charge attack go, ah so where’s a safe place to stand”, etc
biggest struggle so far is to convince them to use the d-pad instead of the stick
9 Likes
if you’re on playstation it’ll fucking wreck your thumb
i also had to map attacks to the shoulder buttons cause with all the times you have to repeat-attack and jump-attack i was getting RSI within hours
3 Likes