yeah some of those stages are quite long and linear, and it’s easy to accidentally miss one of those little Ewok things and kill him at the end of the stage, thereby completely invalidating your attempt. not good! esp when they really didn’t need to do that at all
This is one of the first times I can remember ever thinking “They want me to go do all this work? Fuck that” and abandoning a game. And that was at a time in my life when I didn’t really have an income so the acquisition of new games was still rare and I stuck through some pretty shitty games as a result.
7 Likes
Sekiro again. The bridge boss was giving me some trouble initially, but last night I beat him on my first try. And then tonight I finally beat Lady Butterfly. I don’t think I necessarily improved significantly as much as collected several upgrades since my last attempt.
Now I’ve come across a boss that appears to be unblockable (just as much vitality damage when I block as when I don’t). But he seems to be optional. And, of course, there are still several others I’ll potentially come back to later.
I often go to great lengths not to fight any enemies in a straightforward way. While that’s clearly one intended approach, I feel like it’s not preparing me for the major battles.
3 Likes
Seriously, would it be so unrespectful to the game (which I liked) if I skipped killing the final boss? 
repeating such section is a chore…
By the way, I tried to shorten my quoted text… why is the quote broken now? 
Sounds you are letting the game play you. You’re playing the game by yourself there is no cheating or failing the game.
2 Likes
i think the [/quote] part needs to be on a line by itself
i dont know why, other tags are fine in the middle of lines
2 Likes
So, this morning I was fresher and going to the boss is not too tedious, as soon as you recognize when the metroids are going at you, and avoid that they bump you down from the floating platforms… and I beat the first form of the boss at first try, and I must say it was a lot of (blasting) fun. By refusing to comply to normal shooter controls, during the more tense battles, Metroid Prime gives the feeling similar to arcade shooters.
Well, the final form of the boss managed to kill me anyway, because I was unprepared to how to fight it.
I might give it another go tonight. In any case, I can say I have seen everything.
Btw, thanks for the tip regarding quoting messages!
1 Like
kill the “full:true” flag and that will fix it.
2 Likes
Done!
nioh 2 is more nioh, excellent
the new counter mechanic reminds me of mikiri counter, possibly my favourite videofriction of the last few years
also into how in this lodoss war search action joint deedlit’s slide is a straight up cannon drill/spiral arrow
6 Likes
i hated nioh, but been loving nioh 2 recently. idk if it’s that much different, but having a character creator helped a lot. i also wanted a loot character action game this time, rather than expecting a souls game, so maybe that’s why it’s clicked for me.
that counter is very satisfying, you don’t really get punished too bad for sloppy timing, but feels great when you get it perfect and take no damage.
4 Likes
I enjoyed playing Nioh 2 as a petite lady with a massive axe.
3 Likes
Bugsnax is very cute. You explore friendly 3D environments and use a selection of traps to capture little food-themed critters. With its simple but satisfying ecology-inspired puzzles oriented around capturing what are essentially pokemon, it feels a lot like an off-rails, modernized Pokemon Snap. It has the kind of slightly-twee mid-2000’s indie folktronica music I have a sort of guilty pleasure soft spot for. So far I haven’t heard that Kero Kero Bonito song in it yet, but maybe it’s the end credits theme.
5 Likes
I’ve also been messing around with the action roguelike Noita. You’re basically exploring and fighting monsters inside one of those early 2010’s flash physics simulators where you could manipulate different kinds of sand and chemical powders. It feels great to play and the chemistry/physics simulationism actually does add a lot to the experience.
It’s so close to sucking me in and becoming one of those forevergames like Spelunky, but its magic system is far too complicated. I mean, look at this:
You can collect up to four wands, and each one has 8 inscrutable stats. You can equip each wand with various spells, each of which has its own long list of similarly inscrutable stats that interact with the wand’s stats in ways that you’ll need to do a bunch of arithmetic to figure out. I had to watch about 40 minutes of youtube instruction to even begin to understand how wands work, and I think I’d need to watch many hours more to feel like I know what I’m doing at all.
The game is constantly presenting you with high-stakes decisions you have to make about which wands you want to keep and which spells you want to put on them. It’s far too much cognitive overhead for an action roguelike where you might puzzle over a decision for ten minutes and then die five seconds later.
It’s too bad because aside from that, I really like the game.
11 Likes
Archetypical under-design. All those stats are important variables to consider when creating explosive weapons but it’s not great to dump that on the player! It’s the designer’s responsibility to, after establishing a space and the parameters a system will express in, make decisions which consolidate the player’s choices into meaningful, cognizable chunks. The designer approaches the problem from the full perspective of intent and all other game variables, so if they shy away from it and dump it on the player they’d better have a really good reason to do so (sim games are a good reason, in which the aesthetic of learning to how a complex machine operates is intended and information failures are beneficial).
6 Likes
I heard an interview with the devs and they said the wand system came about as a solution to the extreme flexibility of the physics system leading to degenerate one-note gameplay. As an example if they gave players a simple tunnel-digging ability in testing then players would start to dig everywhere and cheese all enemies from their tunnel haven. So instead, digging winds up as a particular wand attribute that might have limited charges and also be tied together with antisynergystic attributes.
It sounds good on paper and probably it’s also good for advanced players but I had the same reaction to wands as OSB and stopped playing. Part of the problem is if you just pick up stock wands and don’t try swapping their spell elements you can’t succeed, and if you start swapping things at random you don’t feel like you learned anything from your experiment, so you really need to Hit The Wizard Books at that point in your Noita journey.
5 Likes
I completely agree. This game makes me feel like I’m living in its debug mode. While debug modes are cool to visit, I don’t want to put down roots.
2 Likes
It really gives the impression of a cool fun engineering toy that was hammered into game-like shape. Luckily it escaped the fate of a rigid level-by-level action game it might have suffered before 2012, but I wonder if a softer building game structure, like Terraria, would have fit better.
1 Like
Funnily, I was thinking exactly what could have saved it would be to make it a tight level by level action game where you need to use your limited toolset in complex situations.
2 Likes
I’d approach that problem as, how much can I predict player behavior? And how much can players predict the outcome? The melting & substances is inherently complex and surprising and the magic for a player is getting interesting outcomes beyond what you predicted.
So that makes it really difficult to craft levels that challenge a player’s knowledge, because players will be able to overcome challenges just by semi-randomly banging on different outputs and getting through, with wildly different levels or learning the underlying systems (similary, Noita as a roguelike is super-variant and lucky runs can take you far beyond your normal skill level). And that also makes it really hard to make it tight because as a designer you don’t have good insight into what the player who’s made it to level ten knows.
Teardown and Scribblenauts seem like similar comparison points that use level structures. In Scribblenauts, vocabulary and linguistic creativity are the main player skills and that’s almost entirely knowledge carried into the game, so you’ve got wildly variant player skills (well, the other player skill is learning the property tagging scheme the designers use so you can anticipate consequences, but I think that type of player knowledge actively makes the game worse). So Scribblenauts sets its levels more like creative prompts to the player.
Teardown judges the player by a time limit and imports stealth mechanics so it really becomes a high score game; they don’t need to punish the player by death and the open exploration segment of each level, pre-alarm, has that nice function of building anticipation that can be entertainingly disrupted by physics afterward. It lets them off the hook for having tight constraints when all they need to do is come up with a plan, set that as par time. Players can do much better with un-anticipated solutions and it reads great and feels like the player pulled one over on the devs. I guess Blast Corps had levels that worked this way, too, for a similar loose design problem.
7 Likes