yep! most of my characters in games get named after kismet—otherwise it’s zeno or lumi.
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having seen these in person, real talk, these look fucking awful and the only redeeming qualities is that they do different skins and don’t cost 80-100 bucks a pop, unlike the OW figmas that have been made
meanwhile, they just solicited this pretty boy and it’s dumb and I love it
i was just posting them because i know everybody here are big overwatch fans
jokes on you
I’m the one dumb enough to be that fan
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Continuing to learn Hammer (is it called Hammer 2, now that it’s in Source 2?) but I am feeling a little obstructed by the fact that there are only three Source 2 games, and only one of them is at all interesting to design maps around. My headset is having some problems right now, so I can’t actually play HL Alyx and test the stuff I’m making. I just wish there was a Garry’s Mod 2 already, or a port of Half-Life 2.
But besides all that, I’ve been playing Thumper. This game is crunchy feeling. I think it’s pretty bold that this rhythm game involves the player as an instrument that makes sounds that are pretty non-musical, at least in a conventional sense for rhythm games. You don’t have the pretentious layer of performativity that comes with rock music (hello clevland) or electronic music (got to charge my macbook) and you are just a silver bug slamming down a track inside innerspace on a mission to kill a freaked out skull. The mechanics, music and story are so paired down and immediate that I feel like I control it just with my neurons, like it’s just a dance happening on my gray matter. At least that’s what it feels like to me when I’m in da zone
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Yeah Thumper is all zone-out flow state. It’s wonderful!
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a senran kagura estival versus cutscene involved two characters’ dead sister floating up to them and saying “looks like your dead sister is alive again!” and like anime sitcom music started playing while it focused on their horrified faces. sometimes trash anime games are good
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Hop on Polybius if you haven’t yet, it’s absurd in VR
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what is the sb hivemind consensus on axiom verge? I remember playing the first hour or so of it back in like 2016 at my brother’s house and just thinking “oh this is just a rote super metroid worshiping game that has a seemingly asinine “glitch” aesthetic” and dismissing it but
for no reason aside from quarantine-induced boredom and maybe also getting burnt out on new horizons, I decided to give it another shot on switch and while there are a lot of things that annoy me about it (most of all the incredibly poor, unsatisfying grappling hook mechanics) it is actually turning out to be a lot more interesting than I had originally given it credit for. I reckon I’m somewhere close to halfway through the game now and I mostly admire its restraint in seemingly not having a double jump at all. for every predictable metroidvania move it makes it also has interesting hidden mechanics that are rarely required and are generally easy enough to stumble upon accidentally and I really appreciate that.
I don’t think I was on SB much when this game came out so I missed any discussion that might have happened but I’m interested in what people here think about it.
I mentioned this in the ff7r thread I think but for times that I want to turn my brain off and manipulate glowing television objects I’ve been playing parasite eve and I’m so surprised at how well put together it is.
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idk what the hivemind take is, but from what i remember of my impressions of it when it initially released, i kind of thought it was like if Irem had made a Metrovania. not necessarily Irem, maybe Natsume, but like one of those companies.
i liked it, but never felt compelled to finish it. maybe i should give it another go.
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I remember thinking it was alright.
I mostly remember that damn giant hornet, and the main character looking like every webcomic protagonist from the early 00s.
But I’d be lying if I said I don’t think about going back to it, or checking out the eventual sequel.
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Pretty cool aesthetic and some clever ideas, but dragged down by bad pacing/bland level design in the midgame and awful boss design all around. I’m looking forward to the sequel as these are fixable problems though.
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yeah it certainly isn’t like amazing but I’m finding a lot of value in certain things that it’s doing. compelling enough for me to have gotten this far.
and yeah the boss battles are just like… really flat and predictable. the level design has grown on me though. it’s less boring than it initially came off. I appreciate that it’s trying to be more like NES metroid than super metroid, and there are times where it mildly succeeds at capturing that same sort of sparse mysterious atmosphere.
if anyone is interested in trying to make a metroidvania it’s definitely worth studying because it has lots of examples of good and bad approaches to the format.
I feel like metroidvanias are so exhaustively played out at this point even though in my opinion hollow knight is the only truly excellent, worthwhile one to come out of the recent batch. I mean I guess bloodstained counts too, but I can’t separate my experience with it from sotn nostalgia.
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Rain World is the good one, and it pushes on the hostile, mysterious world by interrogating the player character and their role in the ecosystem.
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I liked it a lot until I didn’t like it at all, and unlike Hollow Knight where it felt like I could comfortably exit with my warm fuzzy memories when I was finished with it, I immediately started disliking it after I stopped playing.
It is also the game that made me ask the question: Why do all these metroid clones star dudes instead of cool beefy ladies like metroid? At least Hollow knight is a nonbinary undead bug thing, so that was at least a little relatable.
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man I tried to start rain world and just could not get into it. the controls are weird and honestly I think just kind of bad, and I feel like the aesthetic is more lazy than stylish?
granted I didn’t get further than like 20 minutes in but I found the entire experience just so off-putting. what am I missing?
Environmental Station Alpha is really solid too. It’s basically the opposite strengths and weaknesses as Axiom Verge: bland aesthetic, but fantastic boss design (with none of the usual metrovania boss jank), the best grappling hook feel, and great pacing
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The real question is why was Samus a woman in the generally reactionary 1980s, and I’m pretty sure it’s mainly that Alien was still a major pop culture reference point when the first Metroid was made (and also the reveal was played as a titillating reward for skilled play at first).
Nintendo created an empowering icon mostly by accident as far as I can tell
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Think you can find my thoughts on this itteration if you look it up. My substained memories are:
Fucking webcomics ass protag
The weapons not actually being interactive tools but just keys
Which either through marketing or word of mouth or my own fancies I had thought the game was trying to capture the feel of glitching through floors in NES games. Of going where you can’t. Then it is just Search Action Game.
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