not just on twitter
14 Likes
itās an interface to a new body
Thereās something perverse in using a controller with a joystick to move a cursor around menus. Something about it, or maybe that association at its birth with Mario 64 has forever labeled it a body manipulator and I love it.
We started with a ālegs, pairā and āarms, pairā controller and we kept adding buttons until we hit āthumbā and āleft armā and āthighā controller in the hopes that weāre closer into these bodies but weāre also in danger of flying into the Bad End of PC sim territory where every body action is mapped to an alphanumeric key for the sake of a pun, delivering language pleasure instead of kinaesthetic pleasure. Dire.
VR wands are something like three orders of magnitude more precise but you lose all the acceleration of action a more discrete input can provide. If I need to swing my arms in VR I get a 1:1 input:output of motion. If I press a button, or better yet squeeze a trigger, I get a lever action like swinging a bat so that only the end hits that tiny ball.
6 Likes
I just jumped into three of the most snackable GBA games there are: Mr. Driller 2, Guru Logi Champ, and Kuru Kuru Kururin. These are really nice treats and remind me of my favorite pillow.
The time attacks in Mr. Driller 2 are beautifully designed. Each presents a unique structure that demands a particular approach. Many push you toward specific routes that you need to puzzle out as the blocks fall. I miss them in Drill Land.
Guru Guru Logi Champ tickles my brain in the same way that picross does. I love how the image of the puzzle sometimes differs completely from the final painting. You might be creating what looks like a UFO but turns out to be a clownās nose. The jam that plays when you solve a puzzle makes me want to pump my fists.
Kuru Kuru Kururin makes me feel surprisingly chill despite being a version of irritating stick. The soft flute music and pastels do a lot of work in that regard. I love how the stick is actually some strange vehicle with a bird pilot in the center.
7 Likes
I just am not built for AAA games
Iāve encountered two relatively minor glitches in Control. The first was a tutorial that never showed up - this is slightly a structuring issue, as I was presented with Path A and Path B as equal options, but you have to learn something from Path B to be able to progress in Path A. But Path A pretty much lets you get to the very end of it before it tests you on this knowledge.
However, I actually did try Path B first, and was like āoh, this door is closed, guess I have to do the other one first.ā It turns out that was when I was supposed to get the tutorial.
(For people who played this, itās in the maintenance section where you can either do the coolant section [path a] or the energy converts [path b], and you need to know how to get the yellow cubes and put 'em in the panels to power shit)
That happens sometimes, okay. But last night I was stuck again in the research department - a big red wall blocked my progress. Previous experience had shown that I either needed to kill all the enemies OR cleanse a control point to get past this. I killed all the enemies - still a red wall. I couldnāt find any control points in my 30 minutes of wandering around hitting other dead ends, so I was like āwtf.ā Then I accidentally died by falling (I do this a lot) and when I respawn lo and behold, the big red wall is gone! Turns out killing the enemies should have done it, but it justā¦got stuck.
And thatās why I am not built for these AAA games. Glitches are fine. Iām used to them. But these games are so big and squishy and full of possibilities that I canāt even see if something is a glitch for upwards of 60 minutes sometimes. Iām just wandering around going āhuh, i guess iām doing something wrongā and itās retroactively infuriating to find out it was a glitch.
I dunno, I like Control pretty well so far but these two things have really spoiled the experience for me right now. I donāt want to go back to it because what if I get stuck on a puzzle legitimately, but assume itās a glitch and just give up? Or what if I do get another āI canāt proceedā kind of glitch and waste another 30-60 minutes? Iāve already wasted like 1.5 hours on them.
Gosh Iām a big grump today.
7 Likes
donāt worry, Control is properly a AA game and those glitches and miscommunicated objectives can be properly washed away with a higher budget where any inconvenience or confusion can be identified and removed in a blast of playtesting*!
*side effects of frustration removal may include removal of all personality and humanity and self-reflection
5 Likes
iāll go into it with this attitude, that helps. i keep forgetting this this gorgeous massive game is actually made by a smaller team than it appears
itās an odd one because itās so focused and gorgeous in mood and look, but it runs long, isnāt always as strapped-down as it appears
youāre either on the ride or youāre not and itās fair to bail when youāre not
2 Likes
what if you had to drive the cursor around like a top down view of a car
2 Likes
can I tell you how many people asked to fly the ship in Galak-Z with the thumbstick? itās just a shootcursor so why not
and each time we said, no, no, no ā thatās the heart of the game; treating this baby as a machine extending out of your body with impacts and tension and pushback is the joy entire
my biggest regret is that I never got it to feel fast, which is hard to square next to āagileā and āhighly visibleā
3 Likes
just spent about an hour with Outrun 2006 C2C. drift, baby, drift. appropriately my session ended when the game crashed, presumably from too much sweet drifting action. at the crest of a hill where the perspective shifts from sky to the downward sloping part of the track, I just got stuck there, literally bumping into a big blue sky for eternity. no retries allowed. reset.
Outrun 2006:C2C isā¦ the Truman Show
7 Likes
It feels like itās become expected that movement should be effortless and unobtrusive rather than a learned skill. I think thereās a balance to be struck for most games (god knows I hate how difficult basic movement is in Tekken), but games that emphasize a need to learn movement probably feel ābadā to most people.
1 Like
Learning involves failure and can be scary and emotionally taxing and people pick up games on multi-valent factors: the world-fantasy, the promise of long-term success, social needs.
Mainstream control schemes arenāt necessarily easier to learn than other ones as much as they are already learned by a significant portion of the audience. We definitely watch every control deviation we choose in our game for the mental burden it creates, because deviations are a real cost to accessibility, and this is an acknowledged burden on doing new things!
Of course, if these standardized schemes arenāt better, just already learned, it becomes really hard to understand the cost on truly new players, and way too easy to creep just one more button function until even people so game-obsessed they post on a forum named after a deprecated controller button complain. The fish donāt know theyāre wet.
9 Likes
Got around to starting Dragonās Dogma. Having not payed too much attention I seemed to usually see associations made to Dark Souls but it strikes me more as the Elder Souls Hunter of the Colossus. Only they made your party all AI because Capcom didnāt want internal competition with Monster Hunter.
I certainly appreciate the way they stuck treasure chests and shit in all these little nooks and crannies, properly anticipating the wanderous fucks like me who go nosing around everywhere instead of running to the biggest obvious landmark. Never anything fancy stashed but itās nice. They also handled the compressed world idea notion well too, limiting the towns means they can be decently sized without cluttering up stuff, though you still run into stuff like sizable goblin groups and bandits hanging right outside the capital walls within eye and earshot. Though the inkeep back home does complain the capital guards spend most of their time in bars.
Probably the biggest issue I find with cluttering the world is actually the monster encounters, in a lot of places itās irritatingly easy to get in a fight with one bunch and it spills over into another bunch that becomes more than you can handle, especially early on, lots of attacks sending enemies flying donāt help either. Also has some interesting jank at times, a couple of places Iāve literally seen hobgoblins blink out of existence entirely on my approach apparently they stood upon loading ley lines or something, in one instance it was one I was actively fighting, in another when I got close he vanished, with him gone I moved away and he reappeared still shouting obscenities as if he never left, and this just repeated until I let him be.
But maybe more than anything it gets me thinking on gamey tropes and how they can get amusing and also kind weird with higher fidelity, like when a mage pawn shouts āGoblins are weak to fire!ā and chucks a fireball and said goblin is now on fire and flailing around and it occurs to me I donāt know many organic creatures that exactly thrive when immolated. And then in this game and many others how many ice spells and attacks involve just impaling something with ice shards, Iām just imagining some dude with an icicle jabbed between his eyes and sticking out the back of his head, and as the blood oozes from around the wound he just smiles and give a thumbs up saying āItās okay, Iāve got 100% ice resistance.ā
18 Likes
Iām here to fight slavery
Iām impressed how little rockstar can add to the game with its updates while still managing to break every other thing in it. red dead online is a separate thing you can buy for like five dollars now, but you might want to wait for a patch since right now I stopped getting money for missions, I canāt clean and maintain my guns, I have to alt tab out to raise the volume in the windows mixer every time I start it to hear the game etc. This game tries to nickel and dime you to death with gold bar currency that takes forever to grind or you can buy. GTA5 doesnāt have this problem but they seem to have no problem making a fortune off and constantly updating that? Itās never enough for these people.
It has itās moments though. so far Iāve made friends with someone whose character is dressed like jill valentine from the re5 dlc who communicates entirely by voice lines from some sort of tactical game. and I ran into someone who was, somehow, a giant robot and doing a robot voice on microphone asking if anyone needed assistance. I was with someone who decided to attack it. they uselessly punched itās metal body for a second and then the robot just choked them to death and said ābzzzt I AM NOT HOSTILE. BUT I WILL DEFEND MYSELF.ā I reckon that fool pardner of mine done brought that fatal outcome down on their own damn self. thats just the kind of antics you get up to roaming the prairies
I havenāt even really seen anyone going around just murdering other players like an asshole. Thereās a lot of fools but not a lot of psychopaths just trying to wreck things. I even accidentally shot another player in another posse (didnāt even realize other players were there, they were mixed in with some hostile npcs attacking a posse member of mine) and they didnāt even get mad or retaliate
14 Likes
started up Romancing SaGa 3, again. last time i played, i chose Khalid and then didnāt know where to go after a couple hours and fell off.
this time, iāve gone with Julian, as he seems like the less-interesting-but-more-accessible starter character. however, just got to the part where everything opens up again, so maybe iāll get stuck again.
iād really like to stay with it, though. this game feels so much like some kind of strange cousin to Final Fantasy VI, that i feel really compelled to at least complete one playthrough.
7 Likes
Thatās Software Developmentā¢
4 Likes
I have wondered if the wild west fantasy is just not so easily extendable as the Fast and Furious fantasy that GTAV relies on, yāknow, to explain in part why RDR2 Online has struggled to take off in the same way despite how many people own a copy of the game.
well, people have to play it toā¦ be able to know that thereās an online mode?
thatās basically what happened w/ my brother, he was looking foward to play RDR2, but kicked it to the curb after a few hours, either because the ship has sailed a long, long time ago, or because they managed to kill the fun part of playing cowboy.
Yeah I think that game is pretty damn boring, but there are definitely some mad mad people out there having fun with puppeting their cowboy avatar who controls like a reanimated corpse through gun fights and as they fumble to open drawers for pomade. And some of them still seem really ambivalent toward the online mode.
1 Like
Best ad Iāve seen for the game yet!