I dunno, giant enemy fights in souls are generally fighting the camera while you circle strafe around an ankle
2 Likes
yeah, thereâs really nothing interesting about any of them. theyâre just big HP blobs with giant attack hitboxes and occasional shields that you have to attack around.
Souls/BB giant enemy fights are incomprehensible half the time, though, because of the inadequate camera and/or bad design decisions, and if theyâre not incomprehensible they are often merely boring (Ancient Dragon, Ceaseless Discharge, Giant Lord). A lot of Bloodborneâs Huge Guy fights had me slamming R1 amid a flurry of screaming hair and vague anatomy (donât even get me started on the Bloodletting BeastâŚ). That said, Dark 3 probably handled its giant bosses with the most consistency of the trilogy. King of the Stormâs still kind of a mess, though.
I actually like EA Canadaâs 360-era output a lot particularly for how they were determined to use the thumbsticks in parallel for more interesting analog motion. Fight Night is my personal favorite (still the only really interesting 3D fighting game after soul calibur imo and I like that they sold the versus and campaign modes of the last game separately on PSN for like $10 each) but skate and new-SSX also did this in fairly novel ways
Iâm not sure what theyâre working on now, there was that UFC game which I ignored because I canât really get into UFC but I gather itâs similar
1 Like
Every game designer shouldâve realized that changeable palettes for menus were great.
Too bad that got utterly left behind in the dust after the PS1.
Also being able to name your weapons, as Vagrant Story allowed.
1 Like
I wouldnât count the Maneaters as large-scale bosses. Theyâre maybe twice as tall as you.
BOONER_CUTTER_69
invisible, inc
cart life
divekick
morrowind (as far as i can tell devs mostly learned the wrong lessons from this one)
english country tune
sword and sworcery
papers, please
Actually this is an outlying position: I donât think Sword and Sworcery is a game developers could learn anything from besides âutilize mood.â because Sworcery is a game more about cultivating a specific mood and set of feelings from the player than anything else!
i mean âmoodâ is definitely the coolest thing about sworcery, but there are a few things s&s does mechanically that i think more explicitly game-y vidcons could recognize and expand on: the battle system, little environmental details like the bushes you can play music on, stuff like that
Iâm never quite sure if Beyond Good & Evil is unique in being a perfect variety family platformer or if Jak & Daxer and Ratchet & Clank are pretty much the same thing.
FYI, Pac Man World 2 for the GameCube was always a constant seller when I worked at a GameStop in 2008. It was always parents buying for kids, so you might think itâs the parents recognizing the character. But I remember it being kid driven at least a few times. So maybe it just had the right cover? I dunno. But I remember at least one parent telling me that their kid loved it.
Mark of Kriâs multi-directional melee system is a dead end of game evolution.
It was created at a time when developers were trying to figure out how to have snappy combat in 3 dimensions. I think the inspiration for 3-D third person combat at the time was Devil May Cry, and games like God of War and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time tried to refine orâmore accurately, I guessâdumb that down.
Mark of Kriâs scan, then button-mash system was a little less automatic but still fairly accessible (moderately low-skill). But it was kind of slow and, I guess, clunky. Worked for the barbarian setting, but worked best with groups of enemies ganging up on you. All the other games I mentioned just had you snap to the enemy that it seemed like you wanted to attack, which worked fairly well, already.
In the end, Mark of Kriâs battle system feels kind of like an original turn-based JRPG battle system that isnât in a Square or Enix game. You think, âOh, thatâs a different way of doing it,â and you enjoy it in its context, but it doesnât feel like a brilliant solution to a question that everyone was asking.
2 Likes
i played this as a kid (and again as an adult, a few times!). itâs pretty fantastic. the best send-off for mascot-driven 3d platformers that era could have hoped for.
itâs full of brilliant little miyamoto-isms. the âfirst levelâ is actually the gameâs starting town, where you can go around talking to people, visit the arcade, run across the rooftops, etc (or, critically, you can leave and âwinâ the level in five seconds; itâs very clearly presented as a place for you to just Hang Out). it even leverages its Rare-style collectathon mechanics to build a sense of wonder instead of busywork: from the very start, thereâs a token placed on top of the tallest tree in town, towering over everything else, with absolutely no indication of how to reach it. in middle school i remember talking with other kids who owned the game and speculating about how anyone was supposed to get up there. years later, i pulled my ps2 out of storage and loaded my save file, just to figure out how to get it. and it was glorious. one of my favorite vidcon moments.
the gameâs also very clearly built with all ages in mind, in the best way. it has theme park style level design: one moment youâre ice skating down a mountain as fast as you can until you vaunt hundreds of feet across a gap in a subterranean cave and stick the landing, the next youâre in a submarine firing torpedoes at a monstro fortress. passing these challenges isnât all that difficult, but the designers threw in tons of items, speedrun challenges, etc to make sure the game always had as much to give back as you felt like putting in; youâre never pressured to engage in any of it, but when you do, it reveals the depth and polish they put into mechanics that only show up for ten minutes on a normal playthrough. and, you know, itâs fun too.
it is my go-to Feel Good Game.
9 Likes
Thanks for the write-up seven!
Think Iâll buy a copy when I think of it. ActuallyâheckâIâll just one-click buy it now, and have it sent to my parentsâ house to play during Christmas.
Hm. Trying to decide between the PS2 and GC versions:
In GameCube version, graphics are a bit polished from the PS2 version due to the GCâs superior anti-aliasing techniques and 8-pass bump mapping. Also, the game in GameCube version is essentially identical to its PS2 counterpart with only one noticeable discrepancy; ghosts no longer kill you upon contact, rather, damage is isolated to the loss of one health unit.
Huh. Interesting distinction.
Ohâhey! I actually already own this game, because I boutght it for Pacman Vs! Guess Iâll actually play it now. Pacman Vs. is a pretty fun family game, btw. Doesnât actually require GBA connectivity, and itâs just chasing a friend around as a ghost in Pacman, which is something I think everyoneâs wanted to try.
Wasnât the GC version also bundled with Pac-Man VS.?
ALSO MARATHON 2 + INFINITY HAS THE BEST SHOTGUN especially when you dual wield because of the hilarious impossibility of it
Dogs Days shotguns own : |
this isnât quite the focus of the topic but it feels like late 90s and early 00s FPS design was profoundly inconsistent in terms of which games learned from others, particularly across PCs and consoles. I think thereâs a tendency now to see many modern games as responses to others in some deliberate, productive way, but everything between quake and the first far cry is a total crapshoot. Halo and half-life particularly stand out because they were way ahead of their time in certain respects and somewhat platform-limited, but trying to ask yourself whether eg the bot AI in perfect dark is comparable to unreal tournament or if timesplittersâ CTF maps were only interesting because it was a PS2 launch title is a total dead end.
I wonder if that has anything to do with relative start up companies of dude-friends having long production times and thus not actually playing the games that they would follow a year later? Thatâs pure uninformed conjecture, though; I have no idea.
also, the soundtrack is pure joy. the first two worlds sound like they came out of some kind of summer vacation comedy
while the last world, which is halloween-themed, is tonally closest to "spooky scary skeletons"
the OST even pulls off stuff as weirdly specific as "a boss battle against a jilted yandere ghost piloting a giant robot in an ice-themed level"