Silent Hill camera racing game could be a fun novel concept depending on the players’ ability to laugh off punishment.
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yeah, every few generations, you get some idea that becomes solidified as “good game design” when really they’re just guardrails that help mediocre devs create something playable imo
since i’ve also been digging back into the PS2-era libraries, i’m also realizing there were a lot of good ideas that got left behind because “gamers expect _______”
like man, fuck gamers
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Playing this on Nightmare difficulty made it more intense than any of the recent run of REMakes (while also being Janktacular is the best/worst ways imaginable)
AKUMU can get fucked however
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this describes it perfectly to me i think. it’s there to meet the basic standards of what a game-ass game is supposed to look like during whatever cultural moment it exists within. what it does beyond that basically doesn’t matter. this leads to a lot of mediocrity, of course. i think i’m finally starting to see some broader pushback on this idea now and less people who look at you like you’re a crazy person when you try to make this point. or maybe i’m just wishcasting.
speaking of “bad game design” that’s not actually bad, started playing The Northern Journey. other than the combat being mostly grindy kiting encounters it has a ton of character and i’m enjoying it a lot so far. love the music too
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So due to ending up playing Void Stranger and Outer Worlds at the same time (both longer than expected, the former moreso) I haven’t had time to play any truly random tiny "what the heck are that?’ games for a bit, even now my other pick away at game is Dino Crisis 2 which is a good time but fairly different.
Anyways with Void Stranger finally behind me I am free to return to my roots, and tonight I got to play Lucid: Parables of the Ubermensch. A fairly amateur feeling 2d platformer (solid enough controls though!) where each brief stage tries to embody a philosophical idea the dev had at the moment that looks like this…
…and for an ending has a long, absurdly slowly scrolling kinda rant?
I don’t know that it is good but it is good for my soul. I missed these and am glad to be back to them.
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I’ve been thinking about the missing CNPP sign literally all day. The fact that they just removed the top of the sign while leaving the support base is fucking incredible to me. It’s what I keep coming back to, it absolutely kills me.
The stone cubes of shame
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Elden Ring:
Beat the capital city. Gold Frey went down in two and Morgott in one. So I was like what the heck, I don’t suck.
Leveled up to 106 and got the item to negate the curse. Kept running at Mohg. Just could never get him much less than half. He would heal off of my summon as much as if I hadn’t negated the effect. IMO he shouldn’t heal as much if is just the summon that is getting hit by the curse. If I took him on alone I couldn’t take more than 2 hits with 32 Vigor and max medium load armor.
I just got fed up abd wasn’t having fun. I was itching to see the DLC so I found a glitch cheese. All I had to do was get faith up so I could cast heal. It’s on Youtube. I cheesed Mohg and now I’m finally running around the DLC and doing fine. Learning and executing the cheese was way more fun than the alternative, I’m convinced.
edit - current level 112
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More Void Stranger plot stuff:
It is implied via ribbon that big-titted mommy Gray died of breast cancer. How droll.
This game is truly commited to its anime aesthetics, in that it is being subtly conservative and very weird about women.
Annoying because the structure of the game is very cool and the puzzles get extremely good in hard mode. Though these two aspects work against each other. It’s easy to skip puzzles or to trivialise them with optional tools, and so however well made and varied they are, they end up feeling like busywork in the way of more cutscenes and secrets. I don’t dislike this aspect of it, but it is very odd. The game wouldn’t be as intriguing if it were presented in a straighter, DROD-like style, but I would appreciate the actual design of the puzzles more. I’ll probably go through hard mode floor by floor without cheats once I’ve exhausted whatever there is still to find, assuming the game doesn’t double down on being dumb and creeping me out.
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i would have played a lot more of it were this the case. pretty early on i saw glimpses of the larger structure and thought “hmm i wonder how they avoid making this feel tedious” and was very disappointed to learn that they basically don’t.
i wish i had a better theory for why this is so offensive to me, bc I’ll gladly replay the same trackmania track for hours. i like steadily improving in games with dexterity elements, but i really don’t value solving the same puzzle again, even if the game rewards you for doing it more efficiently. and i can’t come up with a reason beyond ‘it feels boring and my brain doesn’t like it’.
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I can’t really explain why I haven’t been annoyed by this particular aspect much. I’ve probably been lucky in finding most shortcuts and tools quickly on my second dive, and I found it fun to see how much they can break the puzzles’ logic. Plus secondary goals like talking to stones and tapping chests.
I’ve actually found the game surprisingly player-friendly for how much people say they’ve been turned off by the cruelty!
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i think framing it by “content” (i’ll play THIS content for hours, but THAT content bores me if i have to re-do it) is misleading. trackmania remains fun because it’s engaging you. you might have played the track before, but you haven’t “solved” anything. assuming you haven’t played a literal perfect run, there’s always more of a puzzle to solve, even if you’re already the fastest player on the leaderboard
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i don’t think the framing is that different though! you can slap a move counter on a puzzle game to turn it into a game about constant improvement and efficiency but that almost never compels me to replay it either.
like void stranger puzzles give you different tools as you play or you see the same puzzles in different contexts or with new goals but my brain just can’t be assed to care about any of it.
some people like improving move counts in DRoD holds and some people like looping void stranger but both are aggressively boring to me.
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hmmm. i don’t actually know anything about void stranger or DRoD so i’m limited here, i just spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the sort of things that make speedrunning/time attacking/score attacking specific games enjoyable while replaying many/most games is boring as fuck
i am of course biased! i find a lot of things that people do repetitively in games boring as fuck, and many people find the kinds of things that interest me boring as fuck as well
but for me, you cannot solve a puzzle in trackmania by thinking. certainly not by thinking alone. if these other games are more cerebral and less dynamic and intuitive, i can see that being a factor. i’m bound by ignorance of the referenced games!
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And this can prove more engaging even for the “thinking” parts of the brain. Because you aren’t reasoning only about the problem on the screen in front of you, but also (in some sense) how best to train the other parts of your brain to implement the solution to it. ‘Which parts of this do I need to practice more? What cues should I learn to look for to see whether I am overshooting or undershooting?’
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yeah my intuition w/ dexterity games is that there’s “more” there. but there are puzzle games that hit a complexity level where room for improvement is effectively infinite (tactical nexus) and even that starts to wear me down when i have to replay a tower.
i also have a sense that dexterity games are more “playful” and i think that’s true to an extent. you can pretty easily be presented with a situation that you haven’t experienced or considered before in an action game just through the chaos of playing, while getting new insights or situations or ways of thinking in a puzzle game often takes measurable effort beyond just participating. you can more often stumble into the novel parts in dexterity games instead of having to intentionally root them out.
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There’s a compounding pressure to shaving time off something like trackmania that isn’t shared by (turn-based) puzzle games. If you’re having trouble optimizing the first part of a track and you puzzle out, oh I’ve got to start drifting here instead of there and I can skip and get back on my line, the process of - > can I do this - > this works → i can do this reliably, is more involved. There’s still a variance to success because you need to be able to maintain execution within a larger window.
Part of the appeal of turn-based games is that comprehension generally skips the need for dexterity/execution demands & so there’s more room for logical complexity. Something like Portal splitting the difference
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Has anything even done kinetic 3D puzzle action like or as well as portal since portal?
I think the danger and twitch aspect set movement strategy apart from a dry logic puzzle. Youre getting a steady stream of challenge and feedback from racing. You can also turn mistakes into miracles with creative use of inputs. Maybe you fail the challenge over all but that sick save made it worth the run.
Most puzzles are figure it out and then the doing is really just showing your work to the game. In a movent based thing like racing you are mainly showing your work to yourself or an adversary (I think the clock is an adversary). But then maybe the puzzle game itself is an adversary?
Most puzzles games are CORRECT / INCORRECT where as in racing you can get close(r) and thats also rewarding.
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i think this can be boiled down to the classic “Hit Button Feel Good” dynamic. sometimes it feel good to hit button in game, and other times it not feel good.
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And they hated on the “press a button something awesome happens” guy from dragon age 2…
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for something to be “ideally”* replayable to me on that interactivity axis (rather than some other asset i’m appraising) the buttons feeling good is a potent factor, but not the only one
the game also ideally allows, entices, and rewards mastery. games with bad buttons can do this, and games with great buttons can fail to do this, and it’s a pretty big factor.
a good example (for me personally, see asterisk later) is super mario 64 versus super mario sunshine. sunshine has god-tier buttons. as a novice, they probably feel even better than SM64’s? idk. but the game doesn’t entice and reward mastery the way SM64 does.
it appears to me that in concert, you may get a positive feedback loop in some players (like me) if mastery feels (significantly) better than non-mastery. ideally non-linearly, in that mastery has an outsize influence on exactly how good those buttons feel to press. as you get better, the game feels better and better, which compels you to play more and get even better
*really just speaking to my personal preferences here
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