good on you though, stick it to ‘em
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shovel knight rubs me the wrong way too
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they’re called dodge roll lol
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Have you tried Crypt of the Necrodancer? It’s the best one, in part because it hews very closely to the original Rogue formula for an action game.
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I tried a tiny bit in less than ideal circumstances. A friend was introducing it to me through co-op so I just felt very out of sync with the whole experience. I love rhythm games and rogue-likes so theoretically it should be right for me.
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that explains why i never managed to go though Gungeon, i really like everthing about it, except playing it seems.
Crypt of Necrodancer i liked a lot same as Patapon that is to say, my rhytic sense doesn’t go very far and i never finished a run or even those continuining from area to area.
i actually managed to finish Binding of Issac once though.
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Shiren The Wanderer does the “many game-breaking builds” thing too. It’s a joyful thing and I got a lot out of it for a few hundred hours, but ultimately I started getting a little bored with the dynamic. I fell off Shiren 5 and Binding of Isaac quickly after a few hours of play because I don’t like that design philosophy that much anymore I think.
It turns the entire game into first a metagame of learning what are the broken tricks, and secondly a slot machine of actually getting them. Whereas ultimately what I like the most about roguelikes is moment to moment tactics, threat level assessment and improvising solutions with the mismatched crap I happen to have in hand.
With the super broken builds games, the late game challenges have to be really strong to at least put some backpressure on the moderately broken builds. If you come into the deeper floors with a low-power build, then heroic improvisatory tactics eventually hit their limit and you die anyway. So what was even the point of surviving that long?
My favorite roguelike is ultimately Brogue, and favorite roguelite is Necrodancer. They give you really strong items but there aren’t actual game-breaking synergies, rather your strength in one place usually comes with an Achilles’s heel forcing you to maintain tactical awareness. And your heel is often the very thing you steamrolled the last run: the emphasis is on variety in the challenges rather than variety in your player abilities
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I actually think Gungeon’s difficulty is fine – I think it’s balanced around the dodge roll; the patterns a lot of bosses make are explicitly designed with holes to roll between.
What’s not fine is how long and slow it is to play. If I want to play a difficult dual stick shooter, I get more out of 2 minutes of Robotron than I do out of 40 minutes of Gungeon. The pace just sucks all the fun out of it. It’s even glacial in co-op. What a terrible sin for an action game!
Necrodancer is also probably my favorite “roguelite”. It doesn’t waste your time, it’s brutally difficult, and it’s very tightly designed.
Spelunky is a close second. Hope Spelunky 2 is up there when it comes out. It’s actually kind of mind boggling how good Spelunky is vs. nearly every game inspired by it.
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It definitely has an uneasy relationship with difficulty. You want the player to be challenged and fail, but you don’t want them to believe that they can only succeed with broken items. Instead, you want them to view brokenly powerful runs as ‘sneak peeks’ of gameplay they should be chasing under normal runs by improving their skill.
I find this easier to maintain in action-based games. Straight turn-based affairs like Shiren I find harder to convince myself that I have a lot of road left in optimizing grid-based tactics.
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Spelunky is mind-bogglingly good and it gets away from so much of the loot game. It tracks with how I understand action templates to hold more visible and attainable player skill progression, because Spelunky is the least-loot-based of all its successors. Loot is almost always interesting and cool but it doesn’t track to a run’s power level in anything like the same way.
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Yeah, I think I’ve heard the Necrodancer designer and the Brogue designer talk about this too. They explicitly try to tie items to unique effects rather than having numbers slowly go up. What’s the most exciting thing a piece of loot can do? Give you a completely unique ability.
And when there are numbers, just crank them waayyy up. Like in Necrodancer, if you have a gold weapon, then the turn after you pick up gold you do infinite damage. You can one shot anything. Super impactful and fun!
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Probably some of the people in this discussion know about this too, but I heard from the Brogue designer myself on the Eggplant podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/eggplant-the-secret-lives-of-games/id1435365252 . A podcast mostly dedicated to roguelike game design
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i tried playing terraria today and just wasnt feeling it lol
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hey what’s up. I’m not much of a pokemon fan or really an online games fan, but I’ve been playing a lot of the Pokemon Trading Gard Game Online that you can get for free on the pokemon website, over the last couple days. I had a bunch of pokemon cards as a kid back in the 90’s/00’s but of course nobody knew how to play the game, they would just try to get rare “holographic” cards or if we did try to play, the whole energy card thing went out the window and the snot nosed kids from the neighborhood would just spam you with their most powerful attack, willfully ignoring any explanation about how the game is actually fun for all of us if you don’t do that. (has the whole world gone crazy?! am i the only one who gives a shit about the rules?! anyway…)
But there’s a relatively obscure gameboy color game that’s just called Pokemon Trading Card Game which kicked ass, by far the best pokemon game IMO (but i only played a couple of em), I used that to learn how the card game actually works. I loved playing it because the matches would be close, and its soundtrack had no business being as good as it was. But it’s prolly been 15 years or so since I actually played that game for real and I always just looked back on it fondly and praised it to friends like I am doing right now. 
But a thought crossed my mind this week as I was like lying in my bed bleary eyed or something, wondering “there should probably be a Pokemon trading card game that you can just play online,” so I got up and looked online and yeah there was. So I got it, it puts you through these tutorials that were pretty annoying if you know how to play, no option to skip, whatever. The interface is pretty overwhelming with deck creation, all this “reward” stuff that I dunno the purpose of, seemingly thousands of new Pokemon to learn having not played since generation 1, and so on. But anyway they start you off with a deck and you get to playing pretty quick.
I played about 30 matches to various Internet opponents, they (intentionally i think, because kids play this game) don’t offer much in terms of avatar creation, and your in-game chat is restricted to a couple pre-selected compliments and emoticons. so it was fun to try and interact with those, occasionally a fellow weirdo would come in spouting “Hello!” “Hello!” “Hello!” Hello indeed. there are different “modes” you can play, called: Theme, Standard, Expanded, and Legacy. I of course have no idea what these mean, but I think “Theme” means you use decks that the game developers designed, so it kinda prevents things from getting unbalanced. Of course there were some cheap losses and I steamrolled some people, but there were a couple close games in there which were nice. It took about three days before I started to want a little bit more beyond my one deck so I started to see what else the game had to offer
My foray into deck creation was brief. There are all these booster packs and treasure chests and stuff you unlock which I didn’t understand, and you can buy more I think, but it was taking too much energy to figure out. I had problems making my deck, I wanted to do it in “Legacy” mode because that seemed like it would be more similar to the earlier style Pokemon cards without all these crazy ones called like “Anolian Gensector V-EX” that do 270 damage and block every attack, which feel like they would be kind of not fun. The deck creator looks like it should be simple enough, because it asks you what kind of deck you’re trying to make and what filters you want to adhere to, but then it just… doesn’t adhere to them. I set it to show only the cards I “owned” and then when I was finished with my deck, I couldn’t use it because it “included cards I don’t own.” Once I solved that problem, it said my deck wasn’t a “Legacy” deck even though I set it to be. So this got on my nerves but I had spent some time making the deck and I wanted to at least try it out, but I could only do so in “Expanded” mode, which I assume just allows any Pokemon card on the face of the earth to be played, and this is probly where the pros hang out.
The two matches I played involved my first opponent having to re-shuffle his deck nine (9) times before getting a Pokemon he could use, which allowed me to draw 9 cards, but as soon as I did so the game ended and I won a crapload of EXP, I don’t know if he conceded or the game glitched or what. I’m thinking this happens in 99% of his matches and he built his deck with exactly 1 super strong pokemon and just hopes he gets it on the first draw. The second match was more what I expected, I sent out some jobber water type with 50 HP and attacks that do 10 and 20 damage, and their pokemon was one of these megazord mumbo jumbo 5 billion HP shiny holographic things that just completely wiped my whole team out in three turns.
So I didn’t have fun with that and I really don’t think I’m interested in investing the time and energy it would take to understand the game at that level and also build a competitive deck, I just wanted to play in kind of the old style, but I also felt like nobody else wants to do that, so I was haplessly googling stuff like “pokemon trading card game without the EX shit” and “it doesn’t say what legacy deck means” just hoping someone on some forum somewhere has said that exact phrase lol. There was one guy who was also annoyed about the overpowered EX stuff, but none of the replies made sense. w/e
I doubt I’m gonna play much more, it was cool while it lasted, I would even put the soundtrack from the GBC game on in the background during the duels, that was tight. And that’s all I got to say about that
so yeah. anyway i saw someone posting about dragon quest pep, i’m also playing that game here and there. never played a dragon quest but <3 turn based RPGs, but having to kinda will myself to play it, hopefully it starts to stick
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Ah, that’s great, I didn’t even know about this and independently implemented it in a pirate-themed gear set once. Gold rewards thematically go well with random, casino mechanics
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I finally bought Terraria a month ago to play with a friend, started it up, looked at the fonts and background on the title screen, and was like “no, after all, I really cannot with this art style” and we ended up playing Starbound instead
I can consider the art in Stardew Valley “charmingly outsider art” but Terraria is too much
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One of my favorite things about the original Rogue is rarely replicated in its roguelite descendants: the opening mystery of each piece of equipment, wand, and potion. It adds a layer of science on top of tactics as you try to ascertain what the effects are while minimizing potential risk. It’s such a cool thing to puzzle through.
Cinco Paus is one of my favorite modern takes because it takes this idea and reduces it it to a mobile package.
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Oooh which one are youi playing? 11? I think that’s a good game, but I would almost recommend playing DQ1 on the GBC first since it’s like Dragon Quest the EP. Nice and short, but gets all the major ideas across, and playing other ones afterwards is much more interesting IMO.
Or Dragon Quest Monsters, a dope Pokemon + Dragon Quest game
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I generally dislike the action roguelites (really all roguelites and likes) as I hate investing a good amount of time and effort to start back at zero, but fortunately yesterday I stumbled upon a game named Gutwhale that solves that problem by making the whole game about a dozen or so rooms long spread across three areas. The last time I completed a run it took I believe 56 seconds, who cares if you ultimately lose a minute of progress?
It’s actually pretty cool as the gimmick is that you only have one bullet so after firing it you have to go retrieve it to fire again (if you catch it before it hits the ground you get a multiplier). Depending on your hat/difficulty level you get a different number of lives, each time you die you leave your bullet behind so when you can end up with multiple bullets in play. Granted I only really got an hour of entertainment out of it but it was a pretty good hour, I’ll take that over a dozen where I’m frequently annoyed at starting over because I bumped into something I had no way to know how to deal with.
Downwell is probably the best of these I’ve come across FWIW.
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Been slowly progressing through FFIX. This OST is a big contender for best in the series.
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