fuck how am I still losing
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Ruiner had problems. I finished it on some hard difficulty and never thought that it got to feel as satisfying as its visual style. Actually, I wrote a long review, basically in a negative but overall just disappointed tone that was lost to a page refresh. Donât remember the whole content of my critique in that piece of writing, but the experience of losing it was certainly as hollow feeling as was playing the game. The best part of my time with Ruiner (the cool helmet and condescending anime girl) was the licensed Susumu Hirasawa track, which got me to listen to more than just the Berserk soundtrack by him.
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You need Mookie
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I keep playing various sim games just so I can make it snow. the other morning I was playing dirt 4 exclusively on frozen-over swedish wastelands, and I just had it like, hailing in citi field
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Yeah, I already knew I wouldnât like it once I was done the tutorial level when Akane, a $1 game with similar mechanics, just has a way more satisfying feel
I found the writing completely distracting and out-of-place for a Zelda âjust leaving townâ segment; itâs so much when itâs in a little box drawn on top of a character forced to stop running around.
It read to me like a production process based in Twine where rich descriptions are necessary and valuable but distracting and overwritten when transposed directly onto fully-arted game. Itâs a good question to ask, though: can you replace often-poor game dialogue with often-good Twine dialogue? Turns out, no!
I remember a blurb about the Sable creators being shocked at the attention they got, scrambling to turn their visual toy into a game after publishers started begging them for a sellable product. Looks like they just adopted Breath of the Wild, at a fraction of the budget, which â if youâre interested in expressing an aesthetic and someone asks you to make it a game, first, donât, but second, copying the big games is less and less feasible as the entire model of AAA development has shifted to purposefully most-expensive-and-luxe content to price out competitors, infinite-content open worlders. These publishers ought to have three vaulted doors between any studio that tells them theyâre solving problems like a modern open world game would because thatâs specifically insane, but just like BioMutant and accidentally No Manâs Sky (who didnât intend to play in this space), players continue to believe something small and lovely should play like something huge and trough-style, and what remains of a media ecosystem is happy to feed it back to them.
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Not to repeat myself but I genuinely think that kind of writing could work well in this kind of game, Heavenâs Vault is pretty good, but making me read jarring paragraphs at the bottom of the screen with sudden font switches between each segment was a really poor choice. If the writing was broken into smaller segments, maybe floating above characters heads in the world where I could still move around while they are talking? Iâve seen it work well with âtwine-likeâ writing.
I love the term âtrough styleâ im gonna steal that.
1 Like
Heavenâs Vault is a slow adventure game with a 3rd-person camera; I expect to dig into a conversation when I walk up to a character. I think itâs a different context and that makes it work. Similarly, a talk-heavy western RPG like Disco Elysium can pull it off.
A Zelda or JRPG pace where characters mostly serve as flavor dispensers, where the character has little or meaningless choice in dialogue, without expressive roleplaying, and where the dialogue interrupts movement and looking and exploring has a much tighter budget. I have to be careful here because Iâm operating on my carried expectation which can be wrong and can be retrained but it had the same jarring feeling as a cutscene interrupting a fight in an action game - I wasnât ready for it and it wasnât where my brain was leading.
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the ucsc g+pm masterâs is predicated on the students becoming professionals at the end of it and like, i so badly want it to be anything else because âthe market is a difficult place for grads of these programsâ is something i want to plaster onto the side of the building, and itâs rough watching these students be really excited that theyâre in a place with peers and faculty who are just as excited and interested in the space as they are and knowing that in 2 years theyâre gonna be thrown out into a space that doesnât care about anything they have to say, and theyâre either going to have to suppress anything interesting about them to stay in the industry or quit it
i had a student who was one of the more promising students in the program, who ended up creative directing a VR game about the police brutality in the philippines and she was filipina
she ended up getting a job at sony santa monica and like, literally doesnât post about anything but how fun her job is and how great santa monica is to live in and i feel like at least one of us is being gaslit
i donât blame her for getting that bag but if graduating from one of the top games programs in the country and having the portfolio that she had couldnât liberate her from having to work in the industry it looks pretty dire for everyone else and i wish anything about this would change
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Just popping in to say this all resonates and the situation is basically the same in the UK. Undergraduate games students desire going on to masters to basically prolong their inevitable struggle with industry. Many students erroneously think doing a masters will actually prepare them better for industry after having done team game development for 3 years.
Students tend to treat these postgrad courses more like a womb they donât want to leave than either:
a. a serious but difficult route to industry
b. a potential route to self-actualisation
c. a route to academia
Many tutors I know would crave this slogan in their institutionâs marketing materials.
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Myst and Mario 64 had good portals. Both games take the oddity of traveling to themed worlds and develops that into a cool part of each gameâs setting and premise.
Played through all of Wave Race 64 which is something I got as a kid for 50 cents and always thought was kind of stupid. I think I had a hard time dealing with the buoy system, where you had to be on the left or the right specifically as you drove past them. Turns out the game is basically perfect in every way.
It reminds me of Pilotwings in that both of these are games I found boring as a kid because of the focus and singular enthusiasm on the novelty of 3D movement, and I wanted games with campaigns. Revisiting these games now though I find that enthusiasm and focus really appealing. I also really adore the blue sky aesthetic that both of them have.
If Advance Wars is coming back then so can Wave Race and Pilotwings
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Paging @meauxdal, resident WaveRace master
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which ending is considered the 2nd ending?
A strong claim to best puzzle video game of all time
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doing puzzle games âco-opâ is actually one of my favorite ways to play them. really cuts down on making âobviousâ mistakes and provides a much more natural flow than my brain alone which inevitably gets stuck or bored or both.
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iâd love to do this more often
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100% true, I played Quern on stream a couple years ago and I loved the kind of collaborative puzzle solving experience of folks watching suggesting things or pointing out obvious bits I missed.
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Yes, and roleplaying, everyone played themselves posting on the forums and investigating this archeological site together. It shipped with a traditional single-player campaign and a hangout space; the later content had group puzzles but it petered really fast.
The forum was the best part of the multiplayer
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recommend @OneSecondBefore 's recent documentary series and the episode on Uru for some cool insight about this!
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Aw, thanks! We talked with a guy whoâs big in the Myst fan community. He gave us a great sense of what the game was like to play back when it was most active (and in the years following).
It was essentially a 3rd-person puzzle-solving adventure game where you could have other players join you in the levels, but you rarely actually needed them in order to progress. It was also a huge roleplaying community; players were more into that side of things than most MMO communities. The wildest part to me is that Cyan actually had paid actors playing the role of NPCs within the game and on associated forums.
Later on, fans figured out how to create their own levels, and had a grand old time with that. We checked out a bunch of those in the doc.
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