Games You Played Today: Actress Again: Current Code (Part 1)

I played this last month! In that context, it was a game chosen by a member in my friend’s game playing club. He really loved it and wanted to see what we thought. Ultimately, I found it to be just okay.

I enjoyed every time something secret and rare happened but most of the time, it became this tedious loop. I wound up beating the game in co-op when me and my buddy found a truly game breaking gun. I think my ability to enjoy Rogue-influenced action games is pretty limited. Downwell might be the only one I truly adore.

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I’ve been playing No Straight Roads after being sold by the announcement trailer. This is a real mixed bag.

The premise is neat but a little snobby? You’re an underground rock band trying to overthrow the system but for some reason the system is explicitly characterised by the genre of EDM. So it’s rock versus EDM. It doesn’t even really follow since most of the NMH-style antagonists don’t even fall within EDM musically. It occasionally veers into musical snobbery (rock is authentic, EDM is soulless) and I’m not sure how much of it is genuine or setting up for a ‘all styles are equal’ kinda payoff.

The art direction (and generally the music) is outstanding. It’s clearly got influences from Psychonauts and other properties where the characters are partially abstract technicolour caricatures. However, the directorial focus on art reminds me a lot of El Shaddai (beautiful and out there but dull to play). The core creative directors are a concept artist for SF5 this makes sense, and the lead designer of FFXV.

The boss designs are conceptually interesting - classical music prodigy with overbearing mother (who is the real boss), virtual idol (whose mocap and art team create new phases on the fly) - but goddamn this combat is awful. It’s a very basic whack-em-up but enemies attacks are partially tied to the rhythm of the stage’s music. This sounds neat in theory but it’s just frustrating having to navigate two modes that don’t really gel: tightly-paced reactive spatially oriented combat and call-and-response rhythm game. Some bosses will just hitstun you to death and the game seems to acknowledge that you can’t get through a bossfight without taking copious damage (health boxes constantly drop in) from a inconsistent mixture of audio and visual cues from attacks. Then it dares the player to stand still to open said health boxes or transform objects in the environment to progress. I don’t like to go on about game feel very much but the game feels extremely light and empty and there’s no snap or heft to any of the rhythm inputs. It feels very ‘default’ and prototypey, most notably when you are asked to platform without any indication where your character might land in 3D space.

I don’t wanna drag it down too much because there’s a lot of cool creative concepts and it’s a rare case of a game subtly demonstrating national pride (characters have authentic Malaysian accents and even speak in some of the regional dialects). I’m enjoying it aesthetically but the game loop is a slog.

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I purchased crusader kings 3 and I am attempting to make the Irish fuck the Welsh

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Screen Shot 2020-09-02 at 12.02.53

felix comics episode 1

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thanks for reminding me that i google “the irish are immune to psychoanalysis” frequently enough for it to autocomplete when i type “the irish” into the browser

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this is why it lost me too, sometimes i want that item synergy early on to SEE the game, to witness what like, im going to be able to do once im better, but its never that, bosses never get ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED. binding of isaac is fucking hideous but he really understood designing powerups in a way thats kinda turned me off to any other indie darling roguelike after

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its true tho

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designers need to be more willing to give players the tools to break their game, and roguelikes are beautiful because everything given can be taken away

it’s the ultimate excuse to fulfill every player fantasy without constraining their future behavior from the biological drive towards boring grinding optimization

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yeah breaking the game is a good thing! enter the gungeon does not believe this at all. it sucks fucking as
also i never knew why the dodge roll rubbed me the wrong way but cania is right thats exactly why GOD i hate that game, also the name of the company that made it makes me not wanna trust the game. like yacht club games or something. gtfo

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that’s the shovel knight people lol

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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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