This feels like a Yuji Horii specialty to me. Dragon Quest is stuffed with tragic scenarios played light to disguise their nature, clever inversions of fable tropes or just fables played straight. They always, always cut before they get windy or representational in a way they can’t pull off – and I think Chrono Trigger succeeds for me more than much of Dragon Quest because the music and character designs are just that much hookier and call me to think on them later, that much more.
8 Likes
Hot take: The Marauder (and, by extension, the Gladiator boss) are the only good fights in Doom Eternal because they are the only fights that require you to slightly change the strategy of “freeze bomb, hotswap delete” that permeates the rest of the game. You have to actively pay attention to the space you are in and use it to your advantage. It’s practically the only time Doom Eternal asks you to be spatially aware and manipulate enemy behavior, which is the hallmark of good shooter design. The rest of the game is “generic arena fight, then mario platforming.”
There’s also a Marauder fight later in the game where you can lure him into a crusher and that’s quite literally my favorite part of the game.
Eternal is just a truly loathsome game, one of the worst shooters I’ve ever played. On hardest difficulty, the difficulty spikes are extreme for no reason and the combat is tedious; on easier difficulties, you may as well be invulnerable. The infighting is purely cosmetic and serves no mechanical purpose. Enemies just bumrush you the whole time and every arena has infinite-spawning fodder, so there’s tons of unavoidable damage flung your way at all times. There’s no real sense of space, either; every arena feels the same, plays the same.
God what a fucking terrible videogame. Boggles my mind that people are willing to heap praise on it. 2016 wasn’t that good in retrospect, but it at least had some texture, did stuff like “give the player more than 12 shells”. Doom Eternal feels like a game made of amateur snapmap levels.
7 Likes
Reductive counter-argument:
Power fantasies are cool and some people just wanna rip and tear.
4 Likes
I don’t like Eternal and in a way this video is an exhausting slog but it is also a virtuoso performance that I think is very fun to watch
I really had a good time with 75% of it, kinesthetically it’s fine and that goes a long way, but by the end of it the lousy design decisions were on my mind nonstop
For a power fantasy it sure has a lot of abilities with cooldowns. More like balanced fantasy
11 Likes
It’s the apex of watchmaking as action game design, wound ever tighter and tighter and the player must fit exactly to the designer’s intent or the entire machine falls out of sync.
I hate being told exactly! what! to do! even if high-level play in a lot of games falls into this; Doom Eternal takes it as its core principle and reshapes guns into keys.
I think it’s a valid set of choices to the extent that it lets them craft much-tighter weapon/enemy loops than they could otherwise, but it suffers the same fate of Pac-Man: CE DX and other overdesigned action games. In forcing specific play, the reduce player growth to much tighter lanes of better reflexes, better aim and cut out much of the mechanics exploration the player should be doing.
7 Likes
I definitely think about all this as I keep playing on. But I can’t deny how fun/satisfying/cool it is to play Doom Eternal within that extremely narrow space, if I can keep up, if I still find things novel.
And I’ve been thinking that this kind of tight tight watchmaker design would work really well if ported into a game like Devil Daggers, where there is no 10 hour+ campaign and no upgrade layers to support with level exploration - just narrow time constrained arena gameplay.
3 Likes
I could never quite articulate why I also thought Pacman CE was overrated but that’s a nice way of putting it
I love Pac- Man: CE DX (which is also very different from Pac-Man: CE), but I think the shallowness fits much better in a game with a set 3 or 5-minute time schedule. The directed nature of the sequel lets them aim directly for high-intensity flow and hit it, but you top out in skill quickly.
I don’t love DX either, I played both of them when they came out and remember thinking it was only slightly less meh. The wholehearted enthusiasm in the reviews at the time was weird. First they called CE a perfect game and then they called DX an even more perfect game.
This makes me think of Bit Generations Digidrive again. Although in advanced play it does fall into this exact trap, before you get there the game mechanics exploration phase is almost a cosmic mystery where you tear down veils to reach enlightenment. You do “normal science” for a while then discover a paradigm-shift that 10x’s your previous best high score, and there are like 3 such shifts to make before reaching the true intended strategy. The baffling abstraction of it seems to drive most people away but personally I’m a huge fan.
3 Likes
hmm, that’s a good comparison
I don’t think my ‘overtightened watch’ metaphor linking Doom Eternal to Pac-Man: CE DX is the same as Felix comparing it to XCOM 2, though that also feels true.
Maybe that’s just true on a broader sense; XCOM 2 is a tight resource dance and the player is managing strategic and tactical risks to find the right balance of aggression; too much custom content, too many behavior types, and the game shifts from ‘learnable’ to ‘chaotic, random’ and satisfaction in execution turns to frustration. In that sense, it’s the opposite of overdesigned watch games - it’s too loose in its scenario construction, with mechanics that are too tight.
2 Likes
almost like a hyper-fast ‘arcade complexity’ game
I’m positive it would appeal to some but you gotta get the hook just right, it directly asks for more effort from the player for little reward. I often enjoy that but I’m a designer and can’t be trusted
2 Likes
Yeah, [voidpost], I was thinking about MOBAs and their evolution into hero shooters when I wrote that, but I think their starting point is much looser, and the tight keying comes into play only gradually as people get into elder skill, after dozens or hundreds of hours. And they tend to build out their content so the player has rarer matchups against other characters they might not have internalized, or other heroes to play as, rather than the much more limited Doom Slayer vs. 1 Dozen Enemy Types, in Varying Configurations Doom Eternal gets to play with.
1 Like
Many hours into Prey now, and yeah, I think it’s the best Shock game by far. The early-midgame had a really excellent frisson of freedom crossed against difficulty, with you always negotiating with yourself over what resources it was worth to spend, whether an enemy could be bypassed in some creative way, or whether it was best to flee and come back later. I’m way too powerful now and it’s more like I’m taking a tour of this derelict station. I don’t know whose fault that is. On the one hand I do exhaustively explore and hoard, but on the other hand the game very explicitly encourages you to do this. It’s about that, really.
Probably the most convincing derelict-station environment ever built for a videogame, and that is an appellation whose importance to me personally cannot be understated. Found myself marveling about how I learned how the cargo system works. Only a very good game can make you care about an industrial cargo system.
There are things I don’t like about it, it’s not perfect or anything. It’s not weird enough. But definitely a big step up from Dishonored.
11 Likes
Be really careful you don’t do a sidequest wrapup at the endgame – this can easily chew up a third of your runtime and will really damage the experience. They have a (-Shock classic) endgame intensifier that ought to mitigate this but it can be worked around.
2 Likes
I beat Paradise Killer and it was fine.
I don’t think the game ever made me laugh. I wasn’t fond of any of the characters. The overall mystery isn’t all that interesting. The trial was pretty flat. Maybe they coulda used some screenshake and orchestra hits and sweat drops and some new, more dramatic music. Maybe shelve the smooth jams for a bit there. Phoenix Wright and Danganronpas are all bloated and treat me like a dummy but at least they deliver some thrills during their trials. Yet I did finish this game without shouting “Just shut the fuck up and end already” so that’s good, that’s not something I can say about most adventure games. The island was well designed and traversing it never felt like a chore. That’s very good, that is huge, makes it easy to forgive the visual style being simply ~vaporwave~ without any twist.
I got to have sex at one point, which meant the screen briefly faded to black and the characters were like “Wow, let’s not do that again though okay.” You’d think they’d at least play a sax wail or something. I think the sax is the official instrument of sex. But maybe that’s how sex is supposed to work? Brief, silent, and in the dark? Maybe that’s ideal.
At the end I killed the horny dude just cuz I could. I don’t think he did anything wrong but he sucked so unceremoniously executing him was funny, to me. Also nearly everyone dying was good, cuz none of those folks were cool enough to live.
Anyway good game I guess good game.
7 Likes
Blob Opera — Google Arts & Culture.
Had some fun playing around with this tool. Can actually get some things sounding pretty good
2 Likes
i got that new mat dickie wrestling game on nintendo switch and it fuckin owns.
if you’ve ever seen an mdickie game, this one isn’t too much different, but it is far more optimized and playable than the rest of his work. there are too few games like this in the world.
9 Likes
Can’t believe there was such a riot over the Marauder being difficult or cheap or out of place in Doom Eternal. Fighting it doesn’t seem all that overwhelming, at least on Ultra Violence. Really expected something more. Not to make this seem like a humble brag but if it ever kills me it’s always really obvious what I did wrong.
2 Likes