yeah i didn’t get the fuss at the time – i still found hotline miami 2 fun idk
definitely felt like the difficulty curve started from where the first game left off but that didn’t bother me much
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I think it’s gonna be about how the game was marketed when it came out. LOSS AND FIGHTING FOR REVENGE as opposed to like a period piece about a specific feeling and place
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God Shenmue Chapter 1 Yokosuka is so good.
Over here thinking how much of it is about this specifically Japanese port-town with this massive influx and influence of foreigners who have assimulated or are completely cutoff from “society”.
Or that this singular tragic-hyperdrama event happens to a son, but the city refuses to budge and inch for it and is saying forget it your life is this, not some tale of revenge. And through pure force of will he intends on going through with this deathwish.
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Speaking of Netflix animations based on vidcons
I was sure this just gonna be a thing announced for production and then never come out. It’s got a real weird look to me!
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and then shenmue ii is about him starting to learn that life is beautiful and his quest for revenge is a pointless waste of time that will only end up hurting him more than anyone else
or at least, that’s what he’d be learning if he wasn’t so absurdly stubborn
i fucking love shenmue
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Oh also Lan Di did the exact same thing Ryo is trying to do and look where Lan Di ended up, and the company Ryo is learning to keep instead of the friends he left behind.
And then 3 is high pitched mosquito sound, that you can tap A rhtymicly turn off for half a second, but only 10 times a minute.
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95% nickelodeon, 5% fleisher
there was some good stuff in the videogame, but the most remarkable part was how terribly designed the man character is and totally doesn’t fit with the pastiche. get the sense cuphead was the creators childhood cartoon character and they never let go of it
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I am so glad there is now a Cuphead cartoon just so that some far off Cuphead project can continue to be shown yearly at E3 for the remainder of my life.
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hoping for gangnam style reference
yeah i hate this deeply for this exact reason. it’d be fine 100% either way but it looks godawful with 2 seconds of decently weird animation followed by 3 seconds of a vector drawing of two cupmen rotating on the screen with no other animation. the contrast kills it
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honestly, i did completionist playthroughs of both games recently and the first hotline miami is both way harder and more fast and loose in the design department than 2 by FAR imo (PROVIDED you avoid using extremely mechanically broken masks that basically turn certain levels into story mode like tony and don juan, which like. judging by every youtube playthrough i’ve ever seen no one ever does lol).
i feel like a lot of people play through hotline 1 in a really brute force way where they just do whatever works to snail their way through a level, which is why a lot of people tend to compulsively call it a stealth game. hotline 2 is designed a lot more sharply around the idea of little sight-reading combat puzzles and as a consequence it really really resists that slow methodical playstyle that carried a lot of people through the first one.
hotline 2’s levels are designed gorgeously to me but they require being able to sight read when you need to use guns, when it’s a good idea to bait an enemy’s aggro around a corner, when you should throw your weapon, little situational familiarity things like that (it is extremely reminiscent of doom wads and mario romhacks in this way which is probably related to why hotline miami modding is still going extremely strong).
hotline 1 isn’t really designed in a way that necessitates this same kind of internalization of your different mechanical tools and when you should apply them, i feel like it didn’t give a lot of people a good idea of the language they had because a lot of problems could just be solved by putting on don juan and smashing everyone’s face with a door. hotline 2 kind of presumes from the outset that you’re starting off understanding what you’re mechanically capable of and expects you to be able to exercise it but a lot of people didn’t get it because they just got through the first game by repeating something that worked over and over again instead. this is part of why i maintain the first game is the more poorly designed, you can kind of clear it too easily in some circumstances without even being able to understand what you did.
i played hotline 1 in my teens when it came out but i ended up passing over hotline 2 because of how aggressive people were about it being aesthetically empty or smth so i actually only ended up playing through it recently, it blew me away how much it was doing but especially in the level design department. it’s really funny actually, the levels people seem to complain about the most are my absolute favorite. Dead Ahead (the pardo boat level) is an absolutely insane frigging top down quake map about being the scariest guy who’s ever breathed, and Blood Money is straight up one of the best heist levels in any video game up there with that one from Kane And Lynch Dead Men. it would take an entire thread to go into but it’s also one of the most in depth and direct games dealing with western psychology/why americans are soulless bloodless catharsis freaks with no critical thinking that i’ve played thus far lol. absolute top tenner for sure.
(i wonder if this is an age thing. i think ive noticed that people who grew up in the 90s/pre 9.11 enough to remember it have always passionately found it worthless, whereas for a lot of people my age who didn’t, a lot of us played and identified with it to the point where it’s become one of our ubiquitous cultural experiences, like if you tell someone who’s 25 and goes online a lot “this house looks like a hotline miami 2 level” they will know EXACTLY what you mean. idk if this is based on anything except that the older game critic people i was stuck living around when it dropped were really dismissive towards it in a way i still see echoes of)
anyway if anyone is more interested in how people have been exploring and iterating on hotline miami’s format, there are a lot of really sick and comprehensive mods. i highly recommend asire’s Make Me Real series which does a lot of really crazy glitchy particle shit with the visuals in this cool digital realist framing.
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Are there many hot men Musou like this?
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wasn’t that like the whole thing with Sengoku Basara?
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there was also a heroic legend of arslan musou, but it unfortunately used the boring character designs from the tv remake, not the hot ones from the 90s oav
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Arguably the mainline Dynasty and Samurai Warriors are hot men games.
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I guess I mean actively wink wink hot?
this conversation just makes me think about how I was watching twin peaks on netflix, and when I wanted to watch season 3 it was on amazon prime, but not just amazon prime, I also had to subscribe for a trial offer of showtime’s bespoke streaming service that sits on top of prime, and I ended up just buying the box set on blu-ray, which was marked down and ended up about the cost of a month and a half of the showtime thing. and now I can just watch it whenever I want.
of course playing blu rays on PC is still kind of pain but I still never looked back. we live in hell.
also it is telling that the baleful effects of fandom continues to be a throughline with nearly every controversy and negative industry thing that has happened in the past decade and a half. is there a falser false consciousness?
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the Hiromu Arakawa character designs in the remake are seriously so awful and bland, I don’t understand how anyone can stand her fantasy stuff because its pure greige
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this is great to know because while I thought hotline miami was cool aesthetically I felt like it was a miserable war of attrition experience to actually get through and when I finally beat it I never wanted to play it again. this is the first time I’ve ever seen my personal experience with it acknowledged like this, and it makes me want to play part 2 now.
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