What makes the Necrodancer soundtrack a bother to listen to outside the game is exactly what makes it effective within the game itself. The beat in each song is relentlessly punctuated and never stops, breaks, or lets up. There’s no dynamicity to it, even if the vibe of the song chills out a little, that relentless four on the floor just keeps hammering away. It’s like trying to dance inside a magician’s sword-trick closet.
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A big innovation in Cadence of Hyrule is the “area-cleared” quiet variants. It provides frequent respites from the nonstop beat, and it just feels right. It’s quite weird in Necrodancer when you are in an empty level with no threats and the music is still as intense as ever.
Unfortunately, in most other respects, Necrodancer is better. (Also, if it had them, it would be relatively infrequent to hear the “cleared” variants given its much larger levels, so it’s not a particularly good idea for a mod or anything.)
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That’s a good point. I did not like that Zelda game at all, I think they didn’t understand their structure and failure just resulted in muddling through.
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Agreed, but I also I didn’t fully realize the extent to which it solves the music issues with Necrodancer until this discussion. Its design also makes it so you constantly switch tracks in random order, so it doesn’t have the problem about hearing early tracks too much.
I get the impression they are insightful game designers who are also so ambitious they didn’t do the common-sense thing of just adapting their proven design to a Zelda skin, but wanted to try another ambitious push to something new. But the wicked complex of design problems created by some of the high-level decisions they made didn’t gel this time. And in some ways they were “carried” by the traditional roguelike structure they incorporated wholesale the first time, so Cadence was their first attempt to learn design skills involved in creating a longitudinal experience.
Even though their record is one out of two so far, I’m still looking forward to their city-building game (I’m waiting for out-of-early-access to try it, since too much early access Necrodancer made me prematurely exhausted with the game).
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Mostly playing Daimakaimura. Triggers being located separately from chests is nice, even when maliciously placed they never feel obnoxious. The treasure system itself is a little too static aside from the actual weapon drops.
The first stage can be easy if you ignore the 4th chest, the weapon it contains is usually a downgrade and you can only damage boost over it. I rapidly change Arthur’s direction in midair when jumping down to the first boss location, this feels better than jumping through screen transitions in megaman imo
Cerberus is easy and can be killed quickly, but I enjoy it because it’s sort of like being the mole in whack-a-mole
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I would have done the same in their shoes. Why not try a different structure? The real problem comes when you’re done and you can’t tell if it’s “good” because everyone seems to like it well enough, or if you need to ask the publisher for 6 more months to tear up the foundation…
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I think they might’ve justified it to themselves by saying they’ll add a pure roguelike mode so they’re expanding the appeal to a more casual type of player without really sacrificing anything. But that mode turns out to exclude 80% of the game’s content so why would anyone play it above Necrodancer
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Also, that reminds me of Star Control 2 which indeed has a totally different structure than SC1 and whose manual mentions that they precisely “asked the publisher for 6 more months to tear up the foundation”
Star Control 2 is not really considered playable nowadays either, although it was good enough to be a hit given the more patient and forgiving type of players that formed the audience on PC in 1992
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There’s probably a few issues that would keep Star Control 2 from finding new audiences:
- Resource gathering loop is grindy, slow-paced. I think you could just speed it up and make it work. The core player ask is to find planets with the resources you want, not spend time gathering them from the rover minigame, so shortcutting time spent in the rover shouldn’t damage the game.
- Space combat is brutal and hard-to-control. A rebalance of the enemy AI would do wonders here; make them half as fast, half as accurate on a new normal difficulty. I don’t think you could implement camera-relative steering without breaking the core game (because that point-to-move scheme doesn’t play well with rotation speed as a balance variable).
- Hinting is poor and players can break their campaign easily. I’m not sure this can be addressed without patronizing solutions, and it may just be best to encourage the community resources and guides.
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I will always love my memory of playing SC2 in 1993, and the sci-fi stories in it (perfectly executed micro-homages to many great sci-fi novels, some of which I still need to read) continue to form some of the building-blocks of my worldview. But I’ve given up either recommending any of today’s players try to play Star Control 2 or the hope that we will ever get a sequel/remake worthy of the name. Some things in life you just have to let go
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I think the unevenness of the combat is great for the most part and the resource gathering could be a lot more fun (they tried to do the exact same thing with mass effect 1 basically and everyone hated it then too) but I wouldn’t want to be in charge of designing it, the biggest problem with it by modern standards is that too many of the hard checks (eg outrunning ships early on) take way too long to stumble upon
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When I first played SC2 as a kid I spent so long futzing around aimlessly without getting anywhere. But that didn’t stop me, nor did the constant crashes in the unpatched 1.0 version I was unfortunate enough to have. Nobody said exploring the galaxy would be easy
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Yeah you can see the game knows what it’s doing and leans into this with how the Vux ship is balanced in particular. The whole gimmick with the Vux is that it uniquely begins the battle at close range and immediately seals a victory while the opponent is still disoriented from the sudden start of the battle (lacking the “ready, fight!” beginning of most dueling games).
All the opponent has to do is be on their toes enough to flee the Vux at the start and the Vux probably loses. But the gimmick is good enough to bring Vux above the lowest tier, and it’s delightfully trolly to pick against a human opponent now and then.
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I don’t know, Firaxis XCOM expects players to get hard-checked several times and restart campaigns. The signal is certainly clear when it occurs, but Star Control 2 has plenty of bits like emissaries that ought to be providing a similar check.
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It reminds me a Thing I Used To Think About A Lot is tier rankings for Star Control melee. It was cost-weighted, and assuming my house rule of “pick a fleet within a set budget, and can’t pick any ship more than twice”. I never wrote it down but it’s burned into my brain, so although I need to look at a list to remember the list of ships available in the first place, I recall how they play out in a fine-grained-enough manner to put them into a 5-level tier list:
S: Thraddash, Androsynth, Syreen
A: Shofixti, Kohr-Ah, Utwig, Orz, Slylandro (yes, Slylandro is an A!)
B: Chmmr, Ur-Quan, Pkunk, Spathi, Druuge, Arilou, Supox, Zoq-Fot-Pik
C: Vux, Chenjesu, Earthling, Yehat, Melnorme, Mmrnmhrm
F: Mycon, Ilwrath, Umgah
(I wouldn’t recommend anyone play SC2 melee against me. Not only if you are a beginner, but also if you are another experienced player, because I’m pretty sure high-level SC2 Melee can be nothing but degenerate cheese and endless standoffs where the first to lose patience loses. Once again, I love SC2 but this is not exactly the space version of Third Strike over here.)
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Banner Saga does a lot of things right but the battle system really makes no sense
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it’s barely even playable, I can’t believe it didn’t dominate the discussion of this game
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Would say Banner Saga only did one thing well, which is have decent art direction. Everything else fucking sucked, from the combat to the low-rent fantasy writing to the shitty bulletpoint choice and consequence system that feels tacked on without any care.
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I will say that I am engrossed enough that I noticed I didn’t take any screenshots, and that’s rare
I’m adjusting to the battle system but my brain inevitably breaks when something occurs that flies in the face of logic according to 30+ years of playing these things, and I just need to turn the game off at that point
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