Haha ohhh I did not consider this. I wonder if that’s the case with AD, or its levels individually? From my experience so far, Nightmare has been pretty fair and challenging. If it’s just this level that is really tough I’d still recommend trying out the difficulty for a fun time.
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the glory of fan/user levels (that you see things in them that you’d never see in a commercial release) can also be their downfall sometimes. lol.
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Also no one will ever know if you open the console and type “skill” followed by a number between 0-3 to switch the difficulty on the fly.
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Of course one of the tricks is whether or not any given fan map actually has skill levels implemented, though some stuff will be affected no matter what, like in Quake Nightmare enemy aggression gets cranked way up even if their numbers are the same as on hard. Kinda surprised anybody would default to nightmare though, even if it isn’t the obvious bludgeon that Doom nightmare is.
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I used to default to Hard but then just recently played through some of the official stuff on Nightmare out of curiosity and thought the aggression was really exciting. It didn’t seem that much harder than Hard in the official stuff too, so I kept it up. My preferred difficulty in Doom has always been Hurt Me Plenty and I only just recently started enjoying Ultraviolence. Nightmare in Doom is too much for me.
For a long time I played these games through the copies on Steam which were basically DOSBox ports. Then I got into source ports and now I no longer play these games as I used to like ten years ago. I had no idea you could move so fast!
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I’m an “always play Doom on UV” person since I think monster changes ruin the pace of the game. Weirdly enough I actually prefer the new Nightmare setting for the Quake remaster. Making it the same as Hard but with a 50 health limit has recontextualized my relationship to health packs in an interesting way. In vanilla Quake I mostly played on Hard.
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i play the commercial releases on UV, but me moving past that “UV or bust” attitude some in the Doom community have and playing most Doom fan wads on Hurt Me Plenty has improved my experience of a lot of them. and even then sometimes levels are too combat grindy for me, but it def can improve things.
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Nightmare ruins ogres and death knights, imo. It perversely makes them too easy and too tedious at the same time, since you can just cheese them into ranged attack spamming forever, and quake is at its best when you cannot maintain the same engagement distance with opponents. Quake Hard is just so much better from a desigb standpoint.
Anyway, AD is very pretty but I often find the levels to be more tedious than not, its not my favorite level pack
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i played the original doom on whatever the default difficulty setting is and had a really good time!! just wanted to say that. i will never play doom on anything harder than that because i’m really bad at it!!
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I started nu-Doom on PS4, but it does not let me use gyroscopic controls and I felt alienated.
So I decided to install it on the Switch, and now I feel at home (on Mars, with demons… jeez…)
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Nightmare has been a good training ground for me, but I think if I stop playing levels on Nightmare it will be because of this. Four double shotgun blasts to kill an Ogre and like… 6??? to kill a death knight is obviously too much. After all this conversation I think I will jump down to hard.
Finished Castlevania Circle of the Moon and I think this game is actually very, very good. It’s not great, it never reaches that level, but it’s very good.
I do think the game was rushed to meet the GBA launch though, as there are many wacky things about it:
- The aforementioned DSS glitch where all combos are available right at the beginning
- The multiple palette swaps for the armors and demons
- The extremely imbalanced DSS system as a whole
- Almost no dialogue at all
- The battle arena doesn’t have any music?? feels like an oversight
etc.
But I think it’s a really good effort. Also, finding out that Igarashi didn’t direct this game made a whole lot of sense. It really feels like a reaction to SotN rather than an expansion.
Anyway, if there’s anything that will sell you on this game, its top-hat death:
Or maybe sexy skull demon lady
I think the word I keep coming back to here is Austere. It feels like a restrained game, for better or worse. The environments are designed around the moveset very well, but they are not very interesting to look at. The enemies are a little sparsely placed, but they seem purposefully placed. The DSS system feels added on afterwards, but it really adds a lot to an otherwise limited moveset. Etc.
A bunch of notes + screenshots
The “power curve” re: movement in this game is pretty incredible. To go from being a Simon Belmont-alike to a dashing, kicking, literally-flying character is really satisfying.
The DSS system is actually very flexible. I ended up testing about 10 different combinations against the final boss, and settling on switching between 3 of them depending on the attack/phase. I ended up taking heavy advantage of the massive invulnerability period during the “item crash” combo. Also, none of the cards are required to beat the game, but there are two cards that can grant you early access to certain parts.
Screenshot break:
The DSS system would really shine if I could use two at once though. Some of the passives would be nice to use with the alternative attacks. They don’t take advantage of this until Aria of Sorrow.
The odds of items dropping are fucking weird. I ended up with 30+ magic gauntlets completely on accident. You can only wear two of them!!
The summons are fucking absurd:
They do a good job of keeping the castle interesting throughout the game. After beating Camilla (the sexy demon skull lady) the easier areas suddenly get filled with extremely difficult enemies. I don’t think any other Iga-like has done this as gracefully as CotM.
Generally the difficulty curve is very good here. None of the DSS options trivialize the bosses, and they remain consistently difficult. The early enemies in the castle do eventually become fodder, but for the most part enemies do remain challenging to some degree.
Screenshot break where I’m a skeleton:
I did not do the battle arena because it strips you of your DSS capabilities, which is disappointing. I did, however, get to the second to last fight in it unknowingly. I will not be going back to try it again.
Being able to select a “class” at the beginning of this would be preferable to having to play them all in order. The Wizard in particular starts with all the cards unlocked and, while I understand this being a bad decision for a new player, it would have been cool to play this way. I am not going to though, because I don’t have the appetite for a second playthrough of this game.
I think the screen at the end is gorgeous and, once again, restrained:
Harmony of Dissonance comparison + more screenshots
I’m playing Harmony of Dissonance now, and the word “restraint” is not in this game’s vocabulary:
I’ll obviously make a longer post about HoD when I play it more but god damn this game is gorgeous, especially in comparison. Iga is back baby, and he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing except Making Cool Shit.
The biggest and most immediate difference other than aesthetics is how totally disinterested in balance this game is. The difficulty curve is absolutely fucked - the boss I just beat (about 3 hours in) was a big slime that has no attacks and you just…hit it a bunch. Many of the the magic combos trivialize enemies and bosses, except when you hit something that fucking destroys you. It’s weird.
I really appreciate how starkly different these games are. I actually kind of prefer the reserved, almost introverted feeling of CotM versus the explosive, gregarious, and uneven feeling of HoD. But I really do love how cool everything is in HoD.
Remember when games were fucking cool? This game is cool as hell, it’s the only thing it is concerned with. It is bursting at the seams with radical energy!! It’s practically radioactive.
But it’s definitely not as fun to play, and traversing the castle is already a chore, because the enemies I fought an hour ago are now totally powerless against me. One of the joys of CotM was finally finally getting the Very Tall Jump and going through the castle to find all the odds and ends. Revisiting each area with this new skill (and greater arsenal of DSS combos) never quite trivialized the enemies, but it offered a different approach. It was certainly easier, but never entirely painless unlike HoD.
The dash being mapped to L and R also means I’m just smashing those buttons constantly and, I dunno…I just don’t like it.
But I’m having a decent time, and I really want to see what else this game brings to the table.
So yeah, in summary I think CotM is still worthwhile in 2021. It makes a very bad first impression, but overall I really dug what it was attempting to do. It’s not perfect by any means, and it requires a bit more grinding than I would have liked to get the best DSS combos! but it is neat.
If I were suggesting it to anyone who is interested, I would likely say to find a cheat that lets you play as the Wizard right off the bat, especially if you played this game before and didn’t dig it that much. That’ll let you really utilize the DSS combos and should be fairly challenging, and will basically get rid of grinding except for just leveling up on occasion. Neat game and I’m glad I replayed it 20 (!) years later.
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I think this is my favorite part of Harmony of Dissonance, but like most Igarashi parties, the enemies are only sporadically aware of this. Still, once the player has the backdash, why not give them a forward dash and make it work in the game?
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the answer is: not enough buttons on the GBA
lemme use the R button for magic instead of not being able to use subweapons without a menu tax
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ah, it’s so hard for me to give up movement in favor of actions
but moving faster? and with extreme agility? It’s so anti-Castlevania
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My favorite thing in CotM was sequence breaking into the poison area and just toughing out the health drain and beating it by a hair. It’s not a widely known sequence break because it’s not useful in the speedrun, or really for any other reason, but it sure is fun to do it just to see if you can
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I think I did that when I originally played, actually!! I did not do it this time but it’s a really cool way to fuck with the game. Fairly certain I thought you just had to tough it out though, I was an extremely rockheaded 14 year old.
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even better how the structure of a Souls game makes you imagine you’re sequence breaking when they mean, no, have fun being poisoned, it’s your lot in life
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oh, and as with every game with leveling, the sweet spot is “just below where you’re supposed to be”. I made it a point to only grind for items, never levels, and that was a great difficulty curve right up to the end. There are enemies near the end who do incredible damage if you never did any grinding, which is exactly what i want. Challenge me!!
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Finished Psychonauts 2 last night. I do think it’s being overrated quite a bit, though I really like a few things about it. Most disappointing to me is just how conventional the levels are, in comparison to other platformers, but even just the original game. Raz’s movement is the main focus of all the level design, which means you get nothing really as weird as the war gaming level or the Milkman conspiracy level from the original. It’s basically all Meat Circus but just less frustrating. The formula is also really tedious after a while. Some of you called this out really early on, but all the way to the final levels you are just completing three tasks to then return to a central hub and fight a boss. All of them are like this. I was really bored by the end of it.
I do really like parts of the story, even though in order to strike the confident, more serious tone they do it seems like the game is less comedically absurd than the original. They pull off a pretty satisfying Getting The Gang Back Together kind of narrative with the much mythologized original Psychonauts team. And each character is nicely realized as an individual but also as a person with a history and relationships. It’s a shame that the Intern psychic kids don’t really get any treatment like this at all, and when they show up on screen again after a long period being away, it’s basically like meeting them for the first time every single time. But my absolute favorite part of all this is that Raz’ ethnicity and the history of his country, including a diaspora, are huge parts of the game and his character. Grulovia is not a real place but it relates to Raz like a real ethnicity, which is super cool. There was some of this in the original Psychonauts but it was really fleshed out in this game and it made me respect the synergy between Raz’ style as the main character in a platforming game and what you learn about him from the story.
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