mooncrash is good, the problem is that the progression is poorly signalled (you need to recuse survivors in order to be able to play them in subsequent runs, which is how you advance the “story” of it) and the runs are quite long so if you wind up not fulfilling the conditions to move on to the next one you just play the same 40-minute sequence over and over with a slightly different seed
a lot of roguelikes released around that time were implementing similar secrets to add variation but most of those were optional hidden “postgame” content, whereas mooncrash really needs you to find them to not outstay its welcome
I really liked the Ursa Major and Taurus challenges, and noticed it shows what your katamari is comprised of when you pause, so I tried to make a snack only katamari for star 1
What could they have done to telegraph it better? Genuinely curious.
For me, I thought it was kinda railroaded. The game tells you explicitly that you need to find the characters and complete their specific quests to finish, and ties it into the narrative as well. It’s also part of several popular roguelites to have this sort of “complete the game multiple times with different fulfillment conditions to unlock everything and finish” progression structure - for example, Dead Cells and Binding of Isaac and Risk of Rain. So it felt mostly in line with my expectations.
Yeah the level design is all static, it just alters bits of the level to open or close paths, give different items and enemies, that sort of thing. Learning the level is the main thing that kept it interesting to me, and figuring out how to plot routes through what’s randomized and what’s static to complete the quests.
The narrative structure is nicely wound around this too. You are in a simulator living through reconstructed events for a corporation, and your goal is to figure out what happened on the moon base by fulfilling the various linked win conditions. Each character gets a particular escape that is their Canon Escape, and navigating them through these escapes fleshes out precisely what happened.
Each character is a particular “build”, restricted to specific skills (retained between runs), so learning how to play through the particular scenarios with those builds is pretty fun. I played Prey only using human skills so playing a character who only had access to mimic skills was refreshing. Equipment is not retained, when you get a blueprint it unlocks it for purchase between runs. Some characters don’t really need it, but others are very dependent.
Genuinely one of my favorite games, turns 0451 into a roguelite formula pretty naturally. If you like Shock games for pretty much any reason, you’ll almost definitely enjoy it.
the problem was, contra most roguelikes, they managed to make a “typical” win condition feel abnormally unexciting – rather than something you work towards on successively better and more interesting quick runs, it’s something that sneaks up on you before you realize you failed to pursue the tertiary lead that would let you actually make progress in the game. A lot of roguelikes fuck up their meta, but this was a new one.
I did still think it made for a very nice demonstration of build variety as a followup to a big game that isn’t afraid to only show you a fraction of its content during a long playthrough that most people wouldn’t be super keen to repeat, and it completes the package well (which is more than you can say for most DLC, and is consistent with their generally strong theming), but the second time I failed to advance from character 3 of 5 (I think) on an otherwise “successful” run put me off of it.
it’s a weird artifact of Arkane’s approach to development – the storyboard guys knowing exactly what they want, or something like that – that their most successful releases (dishonoured, prey) usually wind up feeling a bit pat and their less successful ones (later dishonoured titles, dark messiah) are usually more impressive
I got to the ending credits in Glittermitten Grove/Frog Fractions 2 (3?) and it did end up turning the corner a bit. I have to admit that hyping the game up for years, running a kickstarter and a large scale ARG for what was essentially “just” a ZZT map is a pretty impressive troll job. I’d argue that almost every single minigame was bad Carmen Sandiego meets Dante’s Inferno being the exception but the base adventure game part had some solid ideas and neat little “breaking the mold” moments.
I think if I take one thing away from it, it is that the lack of a consistent playable character compared to its predecessor makes everything feel very disconnected and resistant to any kind of narrative, either in-game or player-based. The prior game felt like a journey through madness while this felt like a bunch of random unconnected references to other game and I think that likely played a large part of it.
I think that’s working around the inability to change level geometry. Because it’s too expensive and too baked for optimization, it has less interesting variables when you replay, so they need to be more careful in how often you repeat it.
So, they bias you towards winning and trickling out the build variety. It’s not a structurally sound answer to the problems they created, but I think it’s an interesting answer that has the modesty to be a soft failure.
Finished Doom Eternal and had a lot of fun even though, yeah, you do start to notice that it’s complicated and shallow in the same way that patting your head and rubbing your belly is. I really wish I had just stuck with Nightmare and learned to play on that difficulty, because honestly things got so rote like 3/4 through the campaign. Sure, there were moments where I had to smile about something cool I did but a lot of the time I was just like ripping and tearing on automatic. Busy and proficient.
Can’t say anything bad about the presentation, though. Loved the variety of levels and the art style, the weapon variety, the skyboxes, the sounds and all the colors. It was a pretty fun campaign.
The Last of Us: Part 2 should be called “The Last of Them” due to the uncanny ability the protagonists have to be able to detect the absence of enemies in an area immediately after the final one is killed, where they always have to say some variation of “I think that was the last of 'em”
the hell I have inflicted on myself: playing Scott Pilgrim made me want to play River City Girls because the latter is sane, civilized game not designed by madmen who think enemies who can suddenly move 5 times faster, bosses who can just leave hitstun and not having guard crush are good ideas. in fact, RCG feels more than ever like “hey we’re making SP but also it’s going to be good this time”
well at least it looks good and the music is good (the rest of the sound design is still bad and has not aged well at all, a fact highlighted when the brand new port bugged out and the music stopped playing for a level)
also the netcode is slightly better than it was in that DLC for the original, mostly because you can actually find people playing the game instead of the DLC coming out a year or so afterwards and it being a big ol’ shrug
I’m sure it’ll get better because I think they need to take another crack at the game as a whole
Looks like a tile data file misaligned by 1 pixel. Probably a sign they rolled their own slightly error-prone 2d game engine and pixel art editing tools since there weren’t so many off-the-shelf ones in those days.
actually it aligns depending on camera position, so if you moved up a smidge, it looks in place
other levels do the same thing and I actually had a one pixel tall line going across the screen in the stage pictured if I moved to the right Y coordinate. I also had a weapon sprite misalign, which is some Final Fight CD nonsense
that sucks