Battle Axe is a neatly animated, not-quite twin stick shooter that requires Paying Attention Constantly from the second stage onwards. The third stage ( and also my stopping point, for now) features off-screen bullshit shenanigans that will demand some forethought
As for other positives it feels really good being swarmed but also totally capable of destroying mobs in the blink of an eye and a good example of HBFG. The player character variety is also sound with no one of the three choices feeling inferior to the others. Music is Mega Drive-y and, for lack of a more suitable descriptor, āclangyā
No idea how any of this plays out in a co-op scenario but I like to pretend multiplayer doesnāt exist because I have no friends
i kept having game dev people ask me if iād ever checked out Dreams. and iāve always felt reluctant to (beyond obviously not owning current-gen playstation consoles), mostly for this reason of stuff being trapped within that ecosystem. itās a lot of effort put into being stuck inside a particular framework that who knows how long will last. this is to me why fan modding communities are so much better, and why stuff like Dreams can never replace them even if itās more powerful and all that. like the experience of a fan mod might still be locked (no pun intended) to a specific game, but at least outside fans are preserving it and making it accessible out of their own affection for the game, rather than a company which could shut down its servers at any point theyāre not making money anymore.
i guess maybe this is hypocritical because i own Mario Maker 2 and got into it for awhile, but i was similarly kind of discouraged from continuing to make stuff much knowing that iāll just disappear anyway. it is nice to see what other people are making, but then the sadness of knowing itās locked inside these things just bums me out. at least Mario Maker is quick and simple, whereas Dreams seems to be going more for a more full-featured game dev kind of experience i suppose.
I really wish theyād made dreams a pack-in title for the PS5, especially given how much effort went into launching it late on the PS4 lifespan. it seems like it should be synonymous with playstation indie dev, net yaroze-style, to the greatest degree possible, and they arenāt quite pushing it there
I get the hesitance to want to invest creatively into any kind of closed platform ultimately owned by someone else but also, like, everything disappears eventually.
There are doom maps that are almost 30 years old you can still play. Mario Maker 1 is five years old and you can no longer download the maps. I think itās totally fair to be invested in something that has a lifespan of decades over something a corporation can snap itās fingers and shut off with no warning.
wacky to think doom and quake were essentially triple a high-end blockbuster games where the player was actively encouraged to play around with the source data and create stuff, run their own server infrastructure etc.
Obviously things made to be shared and born out of an open source ethos will easily outlast short sighted profit seeking organizations but, like, even Doom and Quake will disappear someday. It might only happen when people eventually disappear, sure, but it will happen.
That said, yeah total agreement that open source is the future. The only reason Doom and Quake are able to last as long as they have is because they were designed from the beginning to foster creative communities, something the contemporary corporate model will never be able to accomplish no matter how much money they throw at it. Because Doom was made by a handful of individual people whereas the hilariously misnamed Doom Eternal is the product of a faceless company that will likely live well beyond the people who started it and currently run it.
Also, yeah, Doom and Quake were indie to the core because they were independently produced, published and (at the beginning) distributed by the same handful of people who made them. They were triple a in terms of popularity, and the underlying tech had a production quality akin to highly specialized, complex machinery but I think what is currently recognized as triple a is only a product of trends that have occurred in the last two decades. Doom and Quake predated that and could have only ever been a product of the early information revolution that occurred during the '80s and '90s.
absolutely, yeah ā in this case Iām more grousing about the people who seem to be in charge of the PS5 strategy breaking from what I thought was a lot of nice groundwork with the PS4 (which, say what you will, has been easily the best closed platform for indies in history). dreams really is a great little platform but if it dies off because people canāt trust the stewardship, they have only themselves to blame. roblox isnāt open source and million of people love roblox; there are ways to keep the faith alive, but this isnāt it, regardless.
yeah iām honestly flabbergasted that more people in games arenāt paying attention to roblox? itās the closest to like, the wc3 custom map scene that Iāve ever come across and itās for kids
I think those who work on traditional console games have an attitude that theyāve made it ā they can make the types of games they want to play. They donāt want to play or know they want to play Roblox so they donāt care.
Those who view it like a business and got Roblox a fourty-two billion dollar valuation and set up Core (modern Roblox competitor) with $100m in seed money and those who run Minecraft with a similar user count and maybe a fifth of the monetization are absolutely paying attention
the dinosaur niche metaphor is extremely apt for big console development; evolved to be large enough to consume all energy in their chosen niche and unable to transfer to anything else. Being blind to the world helps tamp down on the fear of acknowledging the risk.
Someone put me in touch with that TikTok of the kid shouting about how her mom thinks she spends too much time playing Roblox, that is the best thing Iāve seen all year and the tweet i saw it in got deleted