this is such a spicy take, Dusk, while very cool, doesn’t hit nearly as well as Quake. The bestiary in Quake is still unmatched in terms of “how many permutations produce interesting dynamics”
Just about the only change I’d make is ban spawns from all levels that aren’t by sandy peterson (sandy peterson is allowed to have awful hordes of annoying enemies because its charming when he does it)
played a japanese indie vertical shooter called BulletGarden and i’m really enjoying it.
BulletGarden is all about the enormous weapon list. there’s hundreds of weapons you can get, and most of them do different effects than you’d expect. for example, one is a penguin that slides upwards and spits an ice crystal on first attack, looping around through the bottom if it doesn’t collide with an enemy. your ship can get up to 5 different weapons firing at the same time, all of them wild.
there’s two modes:
you earn meta-currency to unlock the weapons for your customized loadout by picking up “seed” powerups while playing. 5 seeds = 1 gacha pull. seems fairly generous, you can earn enough for multiple pulls in one endless session no problem, and you can always play full random or mission to try out weapons you don’t have yet.
the scoring system is thematic too. it’s about shooting your way through yggdrasil, and there’s a “seed/planting” theme, so scoring involves pumping enemies full of points with lower-damage attacks and then killing them to bank. like “planting the seed” and “reaping the harvest”. cool stuff.
super clever, highly recommended. saw it for $4 and couldn’t resist, has almost no reviews. says it’s not supported in english but that’s because the lore and armory descriptions aren’t. all the important gameplay stuff is translated into english.
I thought quake was boring as shit but I have no coherent criticisms of it because I don’t want to play more of it to find out. It wasn’t like…awful, but I just got bored and slightly annoyed.
I think I need to go back to Doom 64 honestly, that’s kind of what I was expecting from quake.
I did very much the same thing you’re doing while also playing the first two Gradius games in tandem about a decade ago and could only manage about midway on the 4th stage before wiping out entirely
I’m also possibly the only person who preferred the original to its sequel due to the announcer and soundtrack, but that also may be just a reflection on it being a bit easier to manage and importantly (for me) Baby’s First Bullet Hell
I stopped chasing the 1CC Dream when I eventually completed Gradius but I can still reliably Do the Don and get to the same point where the game flips the bird and denies me
mr driller drill land is adorable! finished the main story (unless there’s more later) and have unlocked the harder versions of stages. just loving the presentation and theming and how there’s cute flavor text to read about each attraction.
druaga dragon is precious!
Have been stuck on Drill Land’s lv 3 for months and just gave in and bought out the whole power up store with credits I accumulated from so many deaths. Felt so bad, but so good.
I think Quake levels feel abstract and byzantine and claustrophobic and suffocating but Dusk levels feel like they are more interested in cashing in on horror tropes and emulating early 3D games’ attempts to accurately represent quasi-real-world spaces. It’s really hard for me to ignore the artifice in Dusk where Quake’s spaces and architecture feel alien and bizarre in a way that’s hard for me to tie back to reality.
I would also agree that I think the enemy design in Quake is much more engaging!
I came into Heaven’s Vault expecting it to force me to eat my vegetables but it’s been surprisingly breezy, and immediately enticing.
You can get some of the very richest dopamine boosts in all of gaming by finding and translating new ancient text in this game.
Heaven’s vault is to translation what Yakuza is to fighting ; there’s no illusion that you the player are doing anything close to the real thing. It feels at times too simplified, but the game makes enough risky, offputting, disorienting choices elsewhere that a more austere translation process would have rendered it too unapproachable.
I also really didn’t expect me to get this involved in the lore but here we are. The writing is very good as expected - and the game is so crammed with dialogue it dampens exploration … In general I have 1000 other nitpicks I could vocalize right now but I like the game enough to ignore them
i love it when games do this and it’s easy enough to implement that it makes me wonder why more games aren’t
I think that’s what I like about it. More than anything I love the aesthetic of real-world spaces that don’t make any sense at all when considered for more than 15 seconds.
I also dig that they move from linear to open structures regularly. It’s fun!
But yeah I definitely feel like this is a Shovel Knight thing. I’m enjoying it but it ain’t the same as its inspirations at all. It’s too self-aware for that.
I have been playing this too! Any time Six makes the frowny face he sometimes does I love.
I’m trying to avoid the frowny face because I like Six!
But I see it all the time because the protagonist just hates robots too much and will drop some ice-cold lines about selling Six’s parts out of nowhere and I feel like trying to navigate Pac Man’s mood in Pac Man 2. It’s very good
Yeah it feels like true roleplaying in that the game will not let you think of robots differently than the culture Aliya is from. Which is interesting but I am constantly crying cause she is so teasing to Six ;__;
I’m really curious how y’all come away from Heaven’s Vault, because I’ve heard you can have really different experiences based on some of the choices you made. I made some regrettable decisions, and I wanna see if you do, too.
nvm this was just my 2am stoner delusion. scoring is entirely based on enemy type.
one can dream tho…
After a month of feeling totally apathetic about (playing) video games, I’ve returned to them thanks to, of all things, golf. Add binge watching vintage PGA tournaments to my long list of random quarantine phases. This led to some cosy late night CRT sessions with Mario Golf (getting as far as earning Metal Mario) and now, after a visit to Pink Gorilla, Tiger Fucking Woods: PGA Fucking Tour 2004. What have I become? Who is this person? A golf liker, my god! I guess when it comes to sports, I find that golf translates into one of the more interesting video game experiences for me. What I like most about the irl and virtual nature of the game is getting the lay of the land and squaring off with The Elements. And then, willing infinite and infinitesimal considerations of physics and geometry into a tiny ball by hitting the shit out of it with a metal stick. It rules.**
Both games give you a different sense of autonomy. Things like power, accuracy, and point of contact on the ball are all presented explicitly (visually) in Mario Golf. Often you’ll find yourself holding down the ‘Z’ button, pulling back the analog stick and tapping the ‘A’ button simultaneously, all to get the ball off the tee in a very specific way. In Tiger Woods, these equations are hidden inside a single almost-foreshadowing of Wii-waggle gestures: pull back the analog stick to set your power and push it all the way forward (veering left or right depending on how you want to slice it) to determine accuracy. Oh, and you can mash a button during your backswing to fill a power gauge. That button, on Gamecube, is the ‘Z’ button and it feels terrible! You also want to mash while the ball is in the air, using the analog stick to add spin, for when it hits the ground.
This kind of superhuman influence over the ball post-swing seems like sacrilege coming off Mario Golf where you do all your homework up front and then Hail Mary. In a way, it’s the gamier video game but…it’s also closer to a simulation…while Tiger Woods feels like a video game in a way that is less simulation and more an evocation of the PGA. At EA, it was deemed important to translate that post-shot feeling of talking to the ball (“Get to the left, to the left!”) into a braindead Mario Party-adjacent QTE while it’s in the air. When you get to the green in Tiger Woods, you have a caddy giving you “advice” which is almost exactly how you oughta putt (“Try 2 inches left and 3 feet long”) and you better listen because you don’t have much in the way of visual aids. In Mario Golf, caddies don’t exist (the PGA doesn’t exist! (golf is just a thing that will come about in any society with enough time, like Shakespeare and monkeys, the Mushroom Kingdom proves this)). You are left with an undulating grid to divine the topographical treachery between you and your target which builds this (eventually (but also maybe never exactly) deeply felt intuition about how to play with the lay of the land. It’s less forgiving, it can feel incredibly cold and cruel and frustrating but ultimately it’s more rewarding.
But Tiger Woods is a golfier golf game and that’s fun in its own way, too. It’s the one you’d probably recommend to your dad or uncle. It’s got the human players, courses, gear and…you can win product endorsements, too? I find it more insulting than not to win a tour and be congratulated with a text box explaining that Adidas wants to sponsor me and I can now wear their clothing at the store, but OK. Things are getting more difficult so perhaps there’s more depth to grapple with, a different kind of intuition I have to build up in this game. Still, Mario Golf’s more nuanced mechanics mean that it can push things beyond the realms of real world golf and ask you to play with gale-force winds, 5-foot greens and insane ring shot challenges. It’s great. Maybe after I’ve run out of PGA broadcasts I oughta search out trick golfing or something. Is there a Harlem Globetrotters for golf?
I will say, opening this game with DMX bought Tiger Woods: PGA Tour an almost bottomless bunker of goodwill.
**As long as I can put out of mind how much the sport is built on privilege and wealth and environmental wastefulness… I’ll admit, my enthusiasm took a big hit yesterday when I saw a YouTube comment reference Jack Nicklaus as a Trumper. No! The guy was so fun to watch (the ‘86 Masters!) and seemed like the epitome of decency but sure enough, leading up to the 2020 election, he gave a wildly disappointing endorsement of Trump and I have to be reminded that this sport is kind of cursed. God damn it.
the way they were approaching the setpiece design by XCOM 2 and its expansions was genuinely bad at times, they were pushing artificially inflated stakes just to force resource panic on the player, and as much as the geoscape layer adds to the completeness of the experience, it was also much too solvable (and punishing if you didn’t optimize it properly) compared to the original classics. I still think of that era of firaxis’ work as being too beholden to eurogame design in a way that doesn’t feel satisfying in a long campaign…
kingdom battle, otoh, has a ton of personality, the little block puzzles in between battles are fine for what they are, and the challenge is pretty good without being dramatically overtuned. I might agree with this take! honestly, I’m glad they kept putting it on sale month after month after month lately, because I didn’t really think I needed more xcom, but I had an entirely pleasant time with it. the worst thing I can say is that it’s not really trying to be anything other than a by-the-numbers modern strategy game, even if it’s a much more playable one of those than was readily available 5 or 10 years earlier (cf prey 2017). I guess it’s missing a trick, but so is gears tactics, and kingdom battle’s presentation is more fun.
Star Wars Pod Racer is a lot easier than I remember. Probably because I am playing it on Xbox One and not a disintegrating N64 controller.
Finally getting around to trying out AM2R. I laughed out loud when the intro cutscene started with this:
Sadly not everyone can be a Robert Landalt
