I can get to the last stage of Strider no problem on a credit but the upside part fucks me up. I just found the optional triplet fight that allows you to more easily take an alternate path on the ceiling. I hate death pits, I might even prefer fall damage most of the time but that’s just me. It is pretty cool falling into the sky though.
The first time I fought the gorilla terminator I though you could only hurt its head like the first boss of Shinobi, playing under that assumption showed me the neutral jump’s height difference, the ceiling is juust low enough to reach, but then you’re too high to hit its head while you’re hooked on the ceiling. Turned out you can just hit his fists, which was a little disappointing because it was fun spacing my jumps forward and backward to hit its face. The flying cyborg in the Japanese version is more like this game’s version of the red arremer when you first encounter them, but they die pretty quickly anyway if you have a satellite. The biggest improvement in Osman is having doppelgängers as a power upgrade instead
sounds like you’re hypothesizing a ‘valley of gameplay’
with minimal gameplay there’s a focus on sound and art to communicate and interactivity is a viewing mechanism
in traditional form, game mechanics and loops created result in rich behavior and the mechanics can work together with the sound and art to create a strong aesthetic
but adding mechanics to anything without weakens the project until the mechanics reach a certain quality - BEWARE THE VALLEY OF GAMEPLAY
sometimes i wonder if part of the reason people hunt recreationally (aside from food) is just because it helps them process an aesthetic reaction it’s otherwise hard to know what to “do” with - like, yes, you can go crawling around a forest for hours until you see a beautiful animal. then what? the animal goes away, you have to go home. what do you make of the fact of having seen it? just another piece of the weird fluff that is experience, to be soon snowed under by more of the same. but if you do decide to take a shot at it, you instantly move from this unsatisfactorily hazy terrain into that of pleasantly sharpened win/loss conditions and everything they entails - improvement, technique, purposeful repetition, an initially stupid and aimless encounter sealed away into a prefab meaning vessel. from my personal experience, this is also why people end up voluntarily reading gamasutra articles.
to be honest at this point i feel like the valley of gameplay is more like a pit and that there’s nothing on the other side but a graveyard of abandoned fantasy machinery. if anything still keeps me interested in little hobbyist games it’s an occasional sense of uncertainty and dread, an awareness of being in the vicinity of something that has a vague power over us, without knowing what to do with it, and moving carefully around it step by step in case it disappears again. adding and subtracting parts, sketching things out, being taken in some weird ramshackle direction by the effort to follow. if anything truly horrifies me about gameplay it’s the bland assurance with which it flattens everything around it - on the smallest lapse of attention just an idea like “combat” can balloon into a whole raft of subsidiary problems to do with health kits and loss conditions and and maybe some enemies are quick but weak while others are strong but slow, etc. a wholly systematically balanced patch of dead earth. there are some games that come at it from their own weird angle, like droqen stuff or similar, but to be honest i think the main reason people move further in the direction of gameplay is that they’re just not sure what else to be doing. so it’s just kind of grim to me to watch this stuff re-emerge on cue, whenever there’s enough of a lull that people start saying, well, what AM i meant to be doing.
I mean, I love the other side, but I’ve dedicated years of my life to harnessing and controlling it to the detriment of other forms of expression I could be using.
It’s an enormous amount of work that is 90% failure by even the best practitioners and the culture that creates it doesn’t always cross-pollinate with the culture creating these contained audiovisual experiences, to the extent that workers self-segregate and specialize once they meet up and we have this morass of shapeless non-communicative mega-projects. And even within small scenes, the focus on exploring an aesthetic comes at the expense of language to implement and improve gameplay mechanics. Gameplay is poorly understand and the language around it is primitive and it’s not often a fruitful conversation.
Studios have a jargon within a ‘design’ ‘profession’ that’s semi-functional but it’s not well-replicated in smaller spaces and it really does inhibit growth along those lines. Heck, it’s barely consistent within a single large studio, and design groups clique from each other - missions, systems, narrative - and struggle to communicate goals and requirements to each other.
But I care about it because I really care about those experiences where it does work and even if it’s impossible to create those I can still dedicate to the effort
i got monster farm jump and hyakuju sentai gaoranger today, both on ps1. both have beautiful polygon fetishism graphics! monsyer farm jump isn’t much of a game, though i suspect that as i play it more, it’ll become more addictive. disappointingly,though it’s an arcade port, there doesn’t seem to be a regular arcade mode where you just play through with one set of lives and when it’s over it’s over. instead, you start from the last stage you got to each time you play, unless you want to make a whole new save every time. it also has a stage editor that i haven’t tried yet, too.
gaoranger is pretty much exactly like the hurricanger ps1 game i reviewed years ago, but it’s a lot cheaper to get a real copy of. lots of great-looking low poly monsters and robots <3
I mean I probably wouldn’t get rid of whichever weird part of myself sincerely gets a kick out of e.g. dragon quest crafting systems even if I could - I think it’s just feeling able by now to identify a dynamic where the people making games feel uncomfortable talking about just what it is they actually desire about those games, especially if they’re young and hungry enough not to want to deal with that right now. So it’s like the default becomes, constructing a robot out of game mechanics to desire for you, laundering that original embarrassing moment of ambivalence and uncertainty through this outside shell, so that the human gets the set of chores (improve flashlight system) while the robot gets to be and dream of whatever weird combinatorial closure robots dream about.
The dream of this robot, the robot that either has sex with you (galatea) or shoots you in the head (the terminator), is I think the deepest and most lasting of the videogame form and has sucked up most of my free time for the past ten years. It feels melancholy to watch this thing absorb the ambitions of yet another generation, but I also feel like maybe the most that anyone can hope for is a brief sense of perspective about the basic weirdness of the situation.
We’re ten years into ‘walking sims’ as a concept and we still don’t have a clear cultural understanding that games are engaging through looking, listening, exploring, thinking – so they retreat to conflict.
We have plenty of champions to say these new experiences are good and people are interested in adding their own voices to it, but the culture is missing firmament of verbs and jargon and youtube explainers about how they work. These instruction manuals and the pedagogical masonry is really important to defining how people approach craft, so without it, they’re implementing partially-understood Game Mechanics that don’t serve their goal but are understood as something Game Designers do.
I just realised the initially bizarre seeming default currency formatting of “26B461M330KJPY” is just a translation of the Japanese numbering system where it would be, I think, “264億6133万円” - neat!
Lilly Looking Through is a cute, fairly standard point-and-click adventure game, but I will say it does one thing that feels notable. Some objects that you need to interact with, rather than going into your inventory, you just immediately move them with your cursor, and you don’t need to actually position Lilly in the right spot. Need to take a pointy stick and pop some bubbles? Just click on the stick and move it over to the bubble and it pops. It was a nice little quality of life thing and it also made it feel superficially more interactive.
This game also has a sort of completely inscrutable story. Like the core elements are obvious enough – magical mischief befalls Lilly’s brother Ro and you go rescue him. But then there are some twists and an extremely abrupt ending. Feels sort of like the developers didn’t really have an actual narrative in mind and had to find some flimsy way to string some puzzles together. And fair enough! At least the game can be completed in about, oh, 90 minutes? It doesn’t overstay its welcome although you will start to roll your eyes at how long every animation takes.
i have been playing Kirby Super Star for some reason, has anyone written a thing about how much the Smash Bros games owe to the Kirby franchise? I never really realized it until now. I would argue that they are Kirby spinoff games more than anything else at this point.
I don’t really like playing Sakurai games for very long but I think his stuff has the greatest menus in all of gaming.
I don’t know if he deserves credit for them but Kirby, Meteos, Smash, those are all unlike other game menus, they feel very good to click and to peel and to admire, and they’re all loaded with all those extra fluff modes, I wanna know who’s responsible for all those cool menus.
We shoulda played that samurai duel game from Super Star on a CRT at one of the meetups. Done a little gauntlet with it.
continuing my re kick with re3, a game i have never finished until today. this would be a better game if it maybe didn’t front-load everything with about 80 zombies in tight hallways that move like sonic the hedgehog. would also appreciate if the dodge move that you’re expected to master immediately actually worked, instead of leading to still get chokeslammed by the nemesis mid-dodge, or watch a mercenaries run come to an end because of a hunter attack that i got points for avoiding.
i unlocked the gatling gun in mercs and now i am getting my revenge
all the good ass menus in those games from the late nineties on are michiko sakurai, ive wanted her to make like a jrpg or some other menu intensive game since i found out about her
