Cuphead finally came out!
i downloaded it earlier today and have been playing 2-player for a few stages. i have some loose thoughts.
Cuphead is Contra: Hard Corps with Max Fleischer skin.
Seriously, there is a lot of HC/general Contra DNA in this thing. Similar weapon slots, similar run and gun sections, the fact that it’s pretty much just boss fights, a “life stealing” mechanic, maybe even a couple of patterns lifted from older bosses??
One difference is that you can tag your partner back once they die using a jumping Parry attack (which also works on any pink projectile) and that keeps thing moving nicely, and it feels good when you can chain multiple pink enemies & objects in a row.
Scratches the action game twitch itch that i have with replaying small/quick stages again and again for better scores,
Which is good because everything is just so goddamn wonderful to look at.
Replaying stages isn’t a chore because i find new details in every deliciously detailed frame of this Felix the Cat/Betty Boop/Popeye meets Sinbad-style weirdness. Absolute dedication to the aesthetic and easily worth the price of admission.
I have played a lot of HC & Metal Slug & similar run & guns and while I’m not what you’d call “very good at videogames”, i have to say this game is fuckin’ hard. My second player doesn’t have so much familiarity with this genre, so we switched to playing on “Simple” on some stages, but even then, with two people, even on the very first stage, it gets a bit hectic. But i’m sure y’all are much better at this than we are.
Stick movement felt a bit too sensitive, especially during some platforming parts. A good D-Pad does wonders, I’m sure.
I’m playing on Xbox One and the load times are just plain bad.
Not sure if it’s just some launch day hiccups but it’s also pretty buggy? The game crashed on me quite a few times, resetting the console & eventually just leading me to redownload the game. Not sure what that might be about.
The music and SFX are tonally appropriate to the visuals and that’s cool but when enemies die they make this weird, hollow “pop” noise and that sort of throws me off a specific “run and gun” rhythm, and it isn’t as satisfying as it should maybe feel.
Default controls are a bit confusing but thankfully you can remap the buttons.
I’m trying to convince myself that I actually want to to play this rather than just watch a video of it. The price is reasonable enough that I will probably impulse-buy it at some point, even if just to support what they are going for.
I assume that it’s not like Metal Slug in that you can just add “credits” all you want without being sent back to an earlier checkpoint on dying. Normally, the consequence for that in such games is a score reset, but I can’t tell whether this game even tracks score.
But as I say that, I realize that it’s kind of a shame that I have so many games to choose from these days that I don’t have the patience to “earn” the right to see additional content through skill. Or at least I think that’s a shame. I’m not sure.
There’s an in-game world so you can walk around to select a stage to play. I…think non-boss levels are checkpointed but the bosses definitely are not; you die there you end up replaying the entire fight. The bosses look like fun, the stages sometimes have neat ideas but are often boring and sloggy.
You get a ranking based on your performance in the stage, no scoring.
this is a less good Alien Soldier, which just means instead of being 68000 HEART ON FIRE, it’s good. but it also doesn’t have filler stages (which, yes, I know, serve a purpose in AS but Cuphead doesn’t tie super to health sooooooooooo) (yes, Cuphead does have filler stages but you don’t need to do them and also they’re fucking terrible). I know a bunch of people are using Gunstar Heroes as the point of reference (which is fair, the game is Treasure as fuck considering it’s about fighting bosses) but mechanically it’s pretty much AS.
from what I’ve seen, it seems like they saved The Good Stuff for the expert versions of fights
the game is incredibly, almost kind of refreshingly bare of mechanics that don’t help you kill bosses, so why have score. the ranking is enough, since you need to not take a hit and kill the boss super fast and still get enough parries to get an S rank and if that’s not proof of mastery, I don’t know what is
The guys I’ve been watching have consistently managed every single metric except for no-hits and for that one they have always got 0/3. Good enough for a B rank!
I think a fair bit of the bitching about his game stems from the fact that a good bit of the Youtube streamers playing the game didn’t grow up playing Gunstar Heroes or Contra.
I went ahead and got this game, with the understanding that I might not get to the end. (By the way, I reached but did not beat the last bosses in Cave Story and La-Mulana.)
I finished one of the side-scrolling stages and acquired one of the contracts without too much trouble, and I came close to beating a couple other stages. The only upgrade I have tried so far is the “Chaser.” It sounded helpful, and it is.
gamers seem to be pissed off largely because of the coverage for this game consistently compares it to Dark Souls in the public eye
mostly because gamers are 35 year olds who played Contra Hard Corpse on he original Sega and are upset that the public has a different category of things that they can quickly name-drop to communicate Tough But Fair If You Build Right that exist in a more contemporary spectrum than what they’re used to
as usual grown men acting like fuckin crybabies, news at 11
if they didn’t want any vaguely difficult game to be compared to Dark Souls, they shouldn’t have fetishized the challenge and built the cult of Git Gud
they have only themselves to blame for the conversation around the game and are too dumb to know
motherfucker none of the people complaining know what a Genesis/MD is, let alone that it had a Contra