Finally played that awful submarine level in starfox 64
4 Likes
Hallo Knight update #1:
Played this for an hour. Seemsā¦ okayish.
Unorganized Thoughts
The text is a nightmare to read on a 720p display.
Canāt believe they copied the concentration-heal move from Other M.
Not sure what to think of the art style. Despite the profuseness of detail, it feels bizarrely difficult to take a mental snapshot of a room. idk
It has the Shovel Knight dirtpiles, except some of them are even on the ~ceiling~.
I like being able to pogo on spikes with the downslash.
The NPCs that emit ambient vocal noises range from mildly charming to absolutely grating.
I suppose there has to be some Lore Reason why some bugs are nice but most are okay to murder. Feels weird.
The first boss isā¦ something. Just a Big Guy who is patterned after the slightly smaller Big Guys you encounter in a couple other places. But this Big Guy is so Big that if you hit him enough he falls over and takes a few seconds to get up (because heās fat, get it???). And then he falls through the floor, accidentally impaling himself in the process, allowing you to slice him to death while he helplessly makes very amateurish-sounding blubbering noises (because heās fat, get it???). Your reward for beating him, the first boss of the game, is a key.
hrmph
7 Likes
FYI, the second area in Hollow Knight (the one that youāre about to enter) is the most uninspired in the game and then it quickly gets better after that
1 Like
Been wondering if developers of open world games ask themselves how is this space, these activity loops, and frequency of encounters contribute (or donāt) to a sense of time for their players. In linear games, I think time is felt as it emerges from the length of levels, cutscene-to-gameplay transitions, in the duration spent in one part of a level and the speed with which you pass through another. But these specific elements in open world games are sometimes things developers try everything to stop their players from noticing. An example of this is my experience playing Witcher 3 for 100 hours, which by my memory mostly feels like a frictionless gliding through a completely empty space before arriving at points of curated time in the form of important enemy encounters, level spaces, dialog scenes. Each of the many times I have returned to my Witcher 3 save these past five years I have been greeted by Geralt standing in the middle of so much open world and it always feels like there is just no way to get back to the feeling of what it all meant to arrive there before I quit the last time.
The activities thing built into the PS5 OS that lets players jump to the starts of missions at any point during a game like Spider-Man has me thinking about this. When it comes to just popular reception about games, I wonder if itās this feeling of time, accomplished through a videogame form of film editing, that appeals to most players. Peopleās willingness to skip the fun movement gameplay of Spider-Man, of all open world games, makes me think itās the pace of time that people value instead of the felt pleasure of moving a character through spaces and playing with things. And that surprises me cause I consider the feeling of movement to be a very significant part of videogames to me. Because of this I wonder if there is a stronger language of videogame time that could be created by developers of open world games, and if movement throughout them felt significant in a tactile way, then at least there would be a lot less burden put on quest and narrative designers to grant these games significance and people could find the fun of dwelling in time and space, like, without feeling the anxiety to see the story content in order to engage with these massive fokin virtual toys.
13 Likes
Botw has me approaching mario 64 and sunshine in a whole new way
And i dont know if this is a new take (prob not) but botw feels more like a mario game to me
1 Like
hi
2020 is terrible and has left me with a lot of free time and a lack of funds for discretionary purchases
thus, we return to 
so the game actually keeps track of which characters youāve cleared a level with an S+ rank and if you S+ a level with every character, it gives you a nice purple S+ on the map instead of blue
25 levels, nine characters, 225 times you have to beat levels without dropping the chain or getting knocked down
the process involved a lot of āhey this character needs some balance changes, no wait, actually theyāre goodā, failure and wrist pain
I have the sound effect of glass shattering deeply embedded into my psyche now
but Iām glad itās over
ā¦whatās that, do it on the console ports? Campaign+? never heard of it
12 Likes
One thing I think about a lot is what if St Peterās gate will open based on a rather arbitrary criteria such as a skill test on one particular obscure videogame. I hope for your sake that it is
7 Likes
But what ifā¦ What if you, too, would fail the test. What if heaven stands deserted and Godās radiance will shine forever into an empty sky
4 Likes
I did not think the Rice Planting Game ( Sakuna) would be a morally complicafed work
CW: Child Abuse
The context (deep breath) is you are banished to Onishima island (translated to something else here even if like Onishima is something of a know thin-) with 4 children, a big dumb ex-samurai-bandit-farmer, and a -christian- missionary.
Everyone is helping in the fields and getting frustrated. And the one toddler? Character bumps into the overtly polite quiet girl andā¦she slaps him? As part of a chain of everyone getting frustrated. It is played as a moment of drama.
And then the big dumb guy (plenty of jokes about the big guy eating to much hahaha 
) begins to recite a rice planting song.
And the there is this beautiful sequence of everyone singing a complete song as they plant and entire field and you get to watch it in real time.
Thereās also a lot of talk of both gods and humans (and the existence of GOD in the West) being the same but also everyone has their station in life and should recognize it while simultaneously being about an outcast god and humans marked for death being thrown together and make a commune of everyone doing their share to establish a new way of life.
Like the main character Sakuna is a bratty asshole and is constantly pointed out to be so but also her familar regularly states gods are better than humans even if they have a symboitic relationship.
Strange game.
5 Likes
For some reason these moral complications make me want to play it even more.
I noticed other games this year where young people are dramatically and viscerally slapped without warning and everyoneās just chill about it like Sakura Wars and one other I canāt recall (I feel like this might have happened in Deadly Premonition 2?).
2 Likes
To put another thought train that is running this yard:
During the rice planting song I took note of how they were planting the rice and went āi am going to do that next yearā. So in like two game hours I am going to use this background detail from a cutscene in my rice planting. Like 4 hours into the game it is finally giving me actual tutorials on how to plant my rice it just gave me vague advice from
an NPC I had to talk to for the first go around.
On top of all of this is beautiful real time lighting and seasons changing and weather effects and environmental sound.
And then also this game is a doujin 2D action platformer with as much polish as you can put on top of that while still being a doujin game. Kind of samey levels that are short enough that you donāt mind.
I mean also this game is very easy to read as colonalism. But so are like most games.
9 Likes
i heard people were consulting real life rice growing tutorials to get better at this game
9 Likes
tactical nexus, i beat that cursed extra zone of tower p. not on my immediate try after, no, i screwed that up spectacularly and ended up entering the extra zone way too weak to live. so a third try, changing the start parameters again, modifying my strategy a bit again. i was rewarded a platinum. with my score close to the diamond i want.
i need that diamond. iām gonna have it. but now iām spent.
itās hard to explain how i feel about this game cause it is compelling but also, i hate the compulsion and it gives me a headache. itās definitely great and well-designed, but also it pisses me off and makes me feel like i wasted 5 hours on a bad run.
i hate it and will play it for probably at least another 100 hours.
8 Likes
Sega Rally Championship (GBA) may just be the best racing game on the GBA. itās probably not, since itās up against heavy hitters like the GT Advance games, Mario Kart: Super Circuit, 3 good-to-great F-Zero games, Konami Krazy Racers, and other gems.
it has fully 3D tracks and a reasonable framerate (to me), and is shockingly playable. it features tracks and music from the arcade games in surprisingly recognizable fashion. the track displays at half-resolution (giant chunky pixels) and I think this killed all possible appeal for a lot of people, going by reviews at the time.
love it, though. played it recently just to see what it was, and got sucked into hours and hours of racing.
i do have to recommend you play in first-person view, though. the game seems somewhat unplayable otherwise since the half-resolution is markedly worse with less screen real estate dedicated to actually showing the relevant part of the track
donāt talk to me about V-Rally 3.
8 Likes
tactical nexus sits in the same space as factorio for me, where it would consume all my time and thoughts if i let it.
had the most fun when my sister was watching me play. iād talk through my reasoning and she would sometimes remind me of things i said before or ask questions about why iām sequencing the way i was which helped a lot. sort of like pair programming!
i did achieve flow state a few times in that game, which is absolutely wild for a resource management puzzle. iām still trying to extract design lessons from this game. itās intensely interesting to me. iāve been very attracted lately to video games that i would never attempt to design, and tactical nexus is absolutely one of those games. it seems like a total nightmare to make and balance.
this is the exact feeling i get when when debugging a hard programming problem or working on a complicated mario maker puzzle all day and i absolutely feel it with this game, too. the sense of relief i get when i figure it out is wonderful, though.
4 Likes
red dead online update: people keep hopping on the back of my horse and calling me dad
15 Likes
The experience was very similar to late-stage Kingās Bounty or Heroes of Might & Magic, where Iām re-traversing the map over and over again to find the marginally most advantageous fight and waiting for resource collection spots to open up.
Iāve played those games more than enough so I ducked out after ten hours.
1 Like
yeah, i think the trick with tactical nexus is that it does play like that until you have some epiphany and then you start considering every dungeon you played before that with that new idea in mind. itās a game about finding the actual huge advantages in a sea of comparatively meaningless advantages. if you pick āthe least worstā thing every time you end up in a local maximum without much to show for it. sometimes you have to make large sacrifices to get the thing thatās actually worth it much later.
1 Like
That shows up after the first five levels or so, with the interconnected diamond-tier rewards and the like?
Because that is not a bridge Iām willing to go down, Iām far too much the dilettante
1 Like
it shows up when you start trying to optimize the different levels, i think, but itās been months since iāve played so itās hard for me to remember. the diamond-tier rewards certainly blow that aspect way out, but iām pretty sure it exists when considering the levels in isolation too. the very sinister thing about the game is that each level does SOMETHING different than every other level, and that something pretty severely impacts how you have to think about optimizing that level. and especially in the early towers, that change can be pretty subtle, like the XP curve of the monsters they give you access to.
itās a very odd sensation to be very successful on a level by prioritizing a certain thing, but then that same optimization fails hard in a level that you thought was essentially the same. youāre having to design the game in reverse, almost, where you have to figure out what details are important and WHY your strategy doesnāt work in this new level that looks superficially similar.
the game also consistently makes me feel pretty stupid, so maybe some hypothetical genius wouldnāt experience the game the same way that i do. playing the game for me is like slowly gaining an intuitive sense of some complex mathematical model that I could never fully consciously understand. that part is comparable to like how hyper rogue gives you an intuitive sense of hyperbolic geometry. itās like a subconscious connection to something abstract, like a spiritual experience with math, lol.
anyway iām pretty sure this is the result of some alignment of very niche interests because even my friends who like hearing me talk about the game and like are interested in it conceptually canāt stomach actually playing it. itās very hard for me to describe without getting a little spiritual, and then i start to worry that iām bullshitting or that iāve drank the kool-aid.
7 Likes