i think i played like 5 hours into it? i know some people who really really like the game, and i wouldn’t even feel comfortable calling it a Metroidvania because the sensibility is a bit different and it’s more plot-centric in a way you’d expect a JRPG to be. i like some of the characters in it - all the character-based stuff in the game and like the animations and their individual personalities are cool and probably my favorite aspect of the game. i think the art is way overbaked/over-detailed unnecessarily in some areas and you can tell that this was a 8-year project that kind of lost its focus. the gameplay is a bit unique in some ways but not unique enough to really stand-out outside the sort of genre-framing it’s put in… it feels underbaked and i wasn’t fully satisfied with it esp compared to something like Environmental Station Alpha which works a lot better on that front. i’m not inclined to call The Iconoclasts a masterpiece (though i know one person who does), because it just made me think of stuff like Cave Story or whatever in terms of sensibility. and it bears its mark as a game that was started in 2010 and probably should have been released in like 2012 or 2013.
but at the same time i think it’s also pretty interesting and unique in its own ways, and it’s definitely going for exploring a lot more themes plot and narrative-wise than similar games of the type are at all. like i said, i think it’s closer to like a byte-sized Final Fantasy game in terms of plot, and the story/characters are the best aspect of the game. for better or for worse, it’s something that i think bears the mark of its creator a lot more than a lot of other hyped indie games do these days (i.e. more akin to Fez than Axiom Verge or whatever). so overall: i dunno where i fall with it!
i played like 15 minutes of SHELLSHOCK: NAM '67 because i thought it sounded stupid and it turns out the horizon zero dawn people made a game in 2004 where you spend 90% of gameplay dismembering vietnamese women while a bunch of americans run around hooting and yelling racial slurs. war is hell i guess. imagine a world where this was their popular game instead of killzone lol
i think you’re better off talking to someone who really likes the game (which maybe there’s someone here cuz i know at least one or two people who do) since it’s been a bit since i played it and i already said as much as i want to say about the game.
I liked but didn’t love Iconoclasts. It has definite issues that I could see bothering people a great deal, it spends way too much time talking and it feels like maybe english isn’t the writer’s primary language. What it is is overly ambitious, and at a point it became interesting to me to see what else they’d try to shoehorn in there. Like it is basically trying to be a Treasure-esque run & gunner as more of an adventure game, and right in the middle of it there is a 2d take on The End battle from MGS 3.
It doesn’t really all fit together in a way one would hope but I found it an easy game to root for while playing it? If you put some time into it and aren’t getting anything out of it I think you can safely disengage, but I wouldn’t say it is without charm.
Also I don’t know if I was supposed to find the end game revelation funny, but I did.
Yeah Fall Guys is pretty fucking stingy for a game that costs £16 on steam. I wonder what their plan is for it, i’m not sure there is enough there to hold people’s interest for the long term? I guess it will become cheaper and then go free to play.
I am curious about the team size, budget and development time tho. It feels like it could have been a lot quicker and cheaper to make than some other free-to-play type games. Perhaps it’s sustainable like that.
The game itself is … idk, not really good but simple to play and i often felt like i could do better next time. I think simplicity is really under-valued, but then people start questioning if there is enough to hold your interest and that’s probably hard to resist if you are spending a year and a lot of money making something.
Due to weird circumstance, I actually visited the developer of Fall guys a few years back. I believe they primarily started out as a social media/mobile game dev. Their policy at the time was to rotate teams of 40-50 on projects but their studio size has likely grown since then. This seems like their big breakout project so it could be a bigger team.
i played this as a teenager - might be confusing with a different ps2 vietnam shooter but i believe the main back of the box features were “can listen to Purple Haze on the in-game radio” and “taking LSD gives you predator heat vision”
I think a lot of the problem with Fall Guys in the current marketplace is that they’ve made a very casual game that’s meant for very small or spaced-out sessions and released it to a buying base that will very much sit there for hours on end playing the same game or declaring it their “main” game for a time
this is not a sustainable model and a lot of it isn’t even their fault but they encouraged it with their guerrilla Twitch marketing campaign
I’m fairly convinced the game is going to fall off in popularity hard instead of expanding out to a more casual audience but that’s less the game’s fault and more gamers being gorging binge monsters of gluttony (which, funnily, is a thing this year’s Devolver Direct joked about)
i like it kind of a lot, but, yes, it’s so explicitly eclipsed by cave story that’s hard to consider it essential. maybe that’s unfair; cave story eclipses an awful lot of stuff, and iconoclasts is probably more interesting than most of it
its big strength i think is a whole bunch of really bombastically ambitious story/character/plot stuff. it really goes for it, and it gets real dark/violent/sad, and it’s all done really sincerely and unsentimentally, and if there are rough spots they’re still charming enough
as far as game-game stuff i like it too, though it’s more just straightforwardly likeable than, like, amazing. it occupies kind of an interesting space where you can feel out all kinds of other (older) games in bits of movement or weapons or level design chunks or boss fights, like in all kinds of these prestige indie platformer things, but instead of feeling like it wants to reference all these other games it feels like it wants to more seriously take inspiration from them, which i think is a step lots of stuff like this never reaches (it’s not as cloying and boring as shovel knight is what i’m saying, lol). and there are genuinely abrasive segments, which i think is important and usually overlooked
i also find it extremely visually impressive, and only increasingly so over the course of the game and through its later big setpieces, but ymmv
For maybe 3 weeks now I’ve been playing 2019 Bioware disaster game Anthem, which is really uncomfortable. I finished the main story, but I’m not really sure what that is, because I started skipping all the dialogue after a few hours. Look maybe I’m a freak but I get incredibly unnerved when someone’s face is too big or too present or something. I can’t watch most youtube videos for this reason, the faces are all way too big and up close. Every Anthem cutscene is like this, except the characters are just telling you about adventures they’ve had in the anthem world that are way cooler than anything you ever get to do, despite not being that cool.
The combat is fundamentally broken in ways that aren’t that interesting to talk about. what bugs me is that you do a lot of flying in this game and the world manages to make that boring. and it makes the world boring. I’ve spent a lot of the time playing this feeling bad for the environment artists who built an insanely detailed jungle land that you end up just zipping through because the pace at which you engage with shit is totally at odds with the amount of shit there is to be engaged with.
I think flying has a way of reducing everything to terrain and obstacles, and it turns out that’s not very interesting because those things are actually scaled (annoyingly perfectly) to your ability to fly. You know how like, when you were a kid you thought it’d be cool to fly because you could go up on the roofs of buildings or whatever, and how else are you supposed to get up there? this has none of that world-breaking feeling.
I paid $11 for this which feels about right.
Anyway I got into this because I was playing dragon age inquisition and wanted a breather. kinda got sad because it made me feel those mad lads at bioware learned nothing about structuring an open world in the interim. well I guess that’s generally true, open worlds are a disaster. I imagine it’s hard to make a world that has any kind of place-ness but I really feel like these guys are barking up the wrong tree. that shit doesn’t come from aesthetic coherence (though it might help). it comes from the way varying density of shit in an environment translates to varying pace of experience as you move through it. small things surround big things and little fast experiences surround big slow ones. wish I could give a gdc talk about the relationship between scaling laws and event perception but really who cares.
this is how i feel about all multiplayer games, really. PUBG is a great hangout game, except everyone but me and my friends got really, really good at it so now it’s fuck-ing-mis-er-a-ble
Meanwhile I appreciate that CoD remains comited to Split Screen Multiplayer. That’s great. Sure it is in adult games for “adults”. But that you and your little sibling can play the game where Ving Rhames and David Tenant say fuck as they pull a Nazi Zombie’s skull out of it’s body with a standard Army-issue shovel.
In my first match of the multiplayer the grim reaper did the Arrested Development Chicken Dance. While looking at kill cams I went “this is still fucking Modern Warfare.” I can curse just like Ving Rhames.
This was Call of Duty World War 2. Which if you’ve been paying attention would be relevant to my interests. Upon starting the single player my face was in my hands going “who the fuck is this dialog for?” And then I appreciated the absolute fetichism of the period accurate equipment and uniforms. Look at those textures. Listen how no one talks like they are from 1944.
Then I went “were there zepellins at D-Day?” But also wow 3D Graphics let us show the fucking staggering scale of D-Day. And hey this is just like The Longest Day. A movie I was ambivalent about but could appreciate the fetishism there as well.
And the last mission is literally Bridge Over Remagen. Then there is a dream sequence where our hero goes hunting wolves in the snowy mountains of LONGVIEW, TEXAS. Wow i didn’t think this game would let me be a Texas pedant.
Turns out America used zepplins at D-Day and woah what a wild way to use Balloons I love it.
this is one of the reasons I stick around in Destiny so long, because it is entirely hangoutable and you can just ignore most other people and still do most of the game with your friends.
I had the same reaction; the actors are all playing to the mocap camera like they’re a Far Cry villain and it’s just way too close for comfort
What I see is that western developers are extremely sensitive to the perception of empty space. We’re currently looking at world traversal and watching the demoer walk for a minute and a half…and everyone is reacting like it’s an uncomfortable pause in a conversation. Can we have traversal activities?How about random encounters?Maybe someone should be talking to youOr collectables!
The world is a flat-shaded graybox, there’s no vegetation and barely any rocks, and, as developers, we already know the mysteries of this world and where we’re going. People are hesitant to trust the process of thought and discovery that is ocurring in a player’s head and feel the need to fill it with stuff.
It takes a confident hand to set out an aesthetic of open spaces and I don’t think the collaborative nature of western design studios is well set up to understand it.
