I started to play this some more today. After about 20 minutes, I went to play Deathsmiles instead.
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I’m probably going to play this, but I’ll only play it co-op
The game has an achievement named after this classic Fleischer short, nice to see it draw well-deserved attention to it:
Also, while I’m at it, here is my favorite Fleischer, albeit it has less connection with Cuphead:
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my co-op partner, who’s never played any kind of Contra, Metal Slug or really any kind of run and gun before, has now become pretty damn good at playing Regular stages with me. i hadn’t gotten very far when i started this topic, but now i’m seeing this game is actually surprisingly good about teaching you things
i really dig this
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I got to world 2 but every stage I tried destroyed me so I took a break. Still really liking it. Might go back and hone my skill by S-ranking world 1 though.
Ive almost beaten world 2. I like it very much. It doesnt have that sense of, like, “intellectually perfect aliens made this” that treasure games have but that’s ok, nothing does. i feel like the parry, as the only not super normal mechanic, feels a little dull. Could have done something more ridiculous imo. The damage flash on enemies when you hit them is possibly the best i have ever seen as far as not ruining the art goes. In fact, it maybe even enhances the art. (I do like ones that ruin the art sometimes though) I defs see myself beating this and liking it all the way through.
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wouldn’t it be preferable for the visual feedback for damaging an enemy to be an included consideration of the art design / animation’s responsiveness to begin with instead of resorting to a piddly blip to preserve the sterility of the disparate assets
…or for any of the weapons in what is otherwise a very conservative shooter to appear satisfying to use
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that the aesthetic theming and mechanical trappings feel so divorced from each other is already a big problem cuphead has imo. seems weird to treat attacking the enemy in a game where all you do is attack the enemy as some kind of visual inconvenience to negotiate, like the
interplay between the avatar and the threats are just a UI concern or something; noise to filter out.
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weird i don’t remember arcana heart looking like that
I have made fun of this games aesthetic before but honestly considering the source material it is a minor miracle that there does not appear to be any overtly racist caricatures in it
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There is a genie with I believe red skin whose stage is represented as a pyramid in the overworld
The Devil was precariously blackfacey in early versions
so they appear to have been conscious of the dangers.
Kinda sad to live in this time where people think film = grainy, washed out and blurry (and what’s with the weird RGB separation effect here?) (and VHS = busted tracking., etc…). World of shitty signs : ( Assumptions or delusions of progress??
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damn yeah I didn’t even think of this but you’re so right. film is so incredible and can look so much nicer and cleaner than any alternatives
like even tho I understand how film works w silver halide and all that, I still think of it as basically magic. because it is…a slide on a lightbox is infinitely more beautiful than a jpg on a computer screen. dang. yeah. would blood potion you twice if I could
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Hey, this just happened to me as well.
I’m glad I didn’t see screenshots or videos of too many of the bosses, as I like being surprised by their designs. I really like the pyramid scene, for example.
On the first island, I would have expected the scrolling shooter stage to be the easiest one for me. It was actually the one that took me the most tries. But playing through it several times allowed me to notice that there are variations, only one of which you see on each attempt. I’m guessing it’s based on how much damage you take before a certain point, but it might just be random. Either way, it’s fun to see how many unique drawings went into this game.
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i really like looking at degraded film and video so this didn’t even really occur to me, but yeah.
tangential and all but yeah check this out:
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There comes a point when the limitations of a medium become the symbol of and emblem of affection for that medium; hence the fixation on pixels, or scanlines, or polygon fetishism. I’m actually surprised we don’t see more deliberate use of static as aesthetic component, and I suspect one day we’ll see satellite feed glitchiness employed in a similar capacity. (Homestuck already did this somewhat during the “scratched disc” section of its story.) Nostalgic fondness seems more about romanticized flaws than focus on the superior qualities.
It’s not just romanticized flaws. It’s about caricatures and symbols. Using recognizable cues even if those don’t accurately represent how it was, just because it’s a representation people have learned to associate with the right thing.
It struck me while looking at a web series called Petscop the other day, which purports to be a forgotten PS1 game for creepypasta purposes. On a technical level this was interesting because it’s actually missing most of the visual cues that should come with a PS1 game (no texture warping, no vertex swimming, it had z-buffering and per-pixel lighting which the PS1 could not have) but just being low poly, 320x240 with a NTSC filter slapped on it is all the cues a modern audience needs to accept it’s supposed to be a PS1 game.