Yeah, double ichimonji is really a core skill in Sekiro but IIRC it comes near the end of the Ashina skill tree. It’s hard to sustain posture pressure without it, so it’s another reason the intended systems don’t really come together until the midgame.
2 Likes
the most silly but absolutely essential skills to unlock imo are midair combat arts and midair prosthetics u can shut down a lot of guys by jumping toward them & flinging fireworks in their face
3 Likes
looking forward to seeing how they manage to animate a mid-air ichimonji
1 Like
Arkham Origins didn’t give me the achievement for beating Mr. Freeze at the end of the DLC. Batman betrayal. Deleting it! Onto other things.
2 Likes
I played the first ‘world’ of Astro Bot. It’s very well-made and there’s lots of polish but there is a sense of apprehension playing it.
A way in there’s a level that works as a tribute to Ape Escape. You use a net to catch monkeys and even some gadgets from Ape Escape are there. I like it but I also wouldn’t mind a new Ape Escape? Or for this studio to do something other than Astro Bot/homage since they’re clearly very talented.
Each new level introduces new mechanics which feels like the standard for platformers recently with Mario Wonder, Pizza Tower etc. Again, it’s good and I haven’t seen a platforming mechanic I dislike. They manage to keep very simple controls throughout. The music phases in nicely as you progress and it’s all very smooth. I think it suffers from the same problem Wonder does where the abundance of new things every level is a double-edged sword. You regularly see new things but the pace of it becomes rote and it feels you’re rarely going to be surprised on a meta-level though I hear some of the cameos are deepcuts. What I really mean is the game seems unlikely to structurally surprise me and it doesn’t need to. It’s nice to see more 3D platformers, but it’s a safe joyousness. A joyous* game.
Motion controls are frustrating me, but you can turn them off and use the left stick instead. The game is generally playable with the Playstation Accessibility Controller. It’d be going the extra mile, but I think it’d be cool to replace the PS5 controller with the PAC as a cosmetic option. I don’t get the HD vibration with the PAC so the game ends up feeling a bit ‘lighter’ and toylike than I think it’s meant to. I will play more.
10 Likes
Yeah, this is what I was expecting to happen, as it was a similar case with Astro’s Playroom. The game design keeps moving laterally to adjacent concepts via the power ups, but it won’t give the attention to explore any one gameplay concept on deeper levels, with the level designs to suit. I’ve only played three or four stages so far, and it’s light and fluffy and fine enough, but after three previous games I really wish I could get some meat.
The Astro Bot games have had a weird cadence where every game has felt like a re-introduction. There was the initial The Playroom VR for PSVR1, which was a mini-game collection by Double Fine. Then Sony made Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, the first full actual game. Okay, this is pretty much a brand new franchise now and a lot of its design is hinging on creating cool VR experiences within a classic platformer. It’s relatively lightweight for a platformer but it’s trying something new, and a lot of VR games are lightweight because they’re trying to keep the barrier of entry low.
But that’s a PSVR game, that audience there is really small, right? So then came Astro’s Playroom, the free game included with PS5s. This is going out to a much bigger audience for the first time and it’s scope is small since it’s a free bonus, so I understand the game once again being relatively lightweight. This is essentially going to be the first Astro game for most people and it’s just like a cool little bonus thing you can play on your PS5 while you wait for new games to come out.
But now, we have the first full blown retail game. This is like the re-re-re-introduction of this franchise as a Real Game. So I feel like, again, it’s going through the motions of treating itself as a “first” game, for the third time. It reuses a lot of the same world aesthetics, level concepts, enemies, and even the same music.
People seem to really like Astro Bot (2024) though, so I’m hoping things pick up in some way.
6 Likes
I think that was my main issue with Astro’s Playroom. Rescue Mission felt like a showcase title for PSVR in much the same way that Ape Escape was for the initial Dual Shock. It didn’t really give off tech demo vibes, it was just a solid game making good use of the technology it was designed around.
Astro’s Playroom did not cross the tech demo threshold for me. It felt like a game that was purpose built to show off tech first and be a good platformer second. I can’t really remember anything gameplay wise that felt improved over Rescue Mission and I felt like I was just playing through a worse version of Rescue Mission with controller haptics and lots of Sony fan service reminding me of an era when Sony used to take the craziest risks instead of whatever the fuck they do now
I honestly hope fleshing it out into a full game gets them over that hump and makes Astro Bot feel whole again, but I’m not in a hurry to buy it or anything.
5 Likes
I will say- people have been saying this game has some deep cuts. But wow, this game has some deep cuts.
What’s the deal with Alucard talking to a chicken?
There’s some bot porno in the game too.
6 Likes
I beat that Star Wars Outlaws. idk… I thought it was pretty good!! I think maybe because I haven’t played a Ubisoft game in forever (there’s a whole lotta open world shit in this game I ignored!!!) and also I haven’t watched any of the dozens of Star Wars tv shows Disney has put out. It’s actually got some pretty decent stealthy bits which apparently a lot of people did not like. It’s fun to do the classic trick of whistling guards around corners and zapping them with your magic wand. Nix, your pet alien lizard, who I kept calling Gex, is like DD from MGS5, so you can get him to distract guards, activate switches or fetch items. Actually this game seems to take a lot of inspo from MGS5, especially with all the “you thought I was working for you, but I was really working for ME!” plot twists. So yeah this is a pretty good open-world stealth-em-up in that sorta style? Except with even more of the base infiltration stuff that was sorely missing from that game.
It’s crazy how good this game looks!! It’s been ages since I’ve played a game where I felt compelled to take screenshots of everything. And it’s actually surprising how little this feels like a Star Wars game at times. Like you’ve got all the muppets, droids and the storm troopers of course but at other times you’re just exploring some weird ruins or a Tatsuyuki Tanaka-lookin alleyway. It feels like they decided that they were going to put the fan-mandated amount of Star Wars on Tatooine and then try and do something different for the rest of the game. I mean it would have been so easy for them to play some John Williams orchestral sting when you pick up an item but there’s nothing. The whole story is just a sci-fi heist film. I can almost pretend I’m playing Beyond Good and Evil 2.
16 Likes
Wow. That’s Graphics.
5 Likes
I’ve just been informed there are references to specific Net Yaroze games which increased my desire to play this game by 300%
11 Likes
Is it Devil Dice? That’s one I was kind of expecting a reference for for some reason, but it’s the only Net Yaroze game that I think had any cache in the west. If it’s a different one, that’s wild.
I’ve only played a few levels but the one that caught me off guard was crash bandicoot. It just looked like regular crash bandicoot and not a crash bandicoot themed robot, which looked really weird. I was going to complain about it here until I realized it’s a bot wearing a crash bandicoot mascot costume and it suddenly hit me it’s a reference to the US tv ad campaign about a guy in a crash bandicoot mascot suit.
6 Likes
I wonder if it’s to do with licensing and people not wanting their IP to be ‘botified’. Spyro is just regular-ass Spyro.
1 Like
I don’t understand why when you pirate a game with multiplayer they haven’t come up with something by now like some universal fake pirate storefront you sign into with a pirate friends list or something to be able to play it. I was playing pandora tomorrow versus on fake xbox live in 2004, we used to build things in this country dammit. the impulse to come up with a free work around to anything that cost has been robbed from inside of people (wanting to play space marine 2 co-op without paying for it)
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It was the Intelligent Qube robot that got me
It’s not deep or challenging but it is an absolute delight to play
9 Likes
They didn’t have to fully animate that robot the way they did. And there are other instances of that sort of care everywhere.
Edit: Speaking of, I just found the Rez robot and its animation is just as painstaking.
2 Likes
Took an extra 30 mins for my lunch break today while playing Shadow of the Ninja Reborn, as I managed for the first time to get through the first stage without dying, and then got all the way to the 4th stage boss and then stupidly died trying to switch to the fish to heal.
Now I’m 55th on the Prep Money rankings, which I assume is more due to lack of players than my own skill
2 Likes
today i played rez hd on xbox 360. you can put different types of reverb over the music in the game in the settings menu. it sounds insane. there’s still never been a more techno game. even Techno Drive isn’t as techno as rez
if there were ever a rez 2 i would be ok with them putting low iq techno like Boris brechja in as long as they let you put big reverb on everything.
15 Likes
Yeah, after seeing Astro Bot has some challenge levels that are quite different in design compared to the regular levels (definitely more in line with Mario style platforming challenges), I’m realizing that the low difficulty is a very deliberate design choice on the dev’s part. It just wants to be a game easily accessible to young audiences. Most of the player involvement is more about trying to find all the collectibles in the level rather than the platforming, so it’s really more of a collectathon ala Rare games in spirit than a platforming game. The platforming and action are more like a roller coaster ride. It’s got tons of ideas though, so there’s so much design space it could play with if it really wanted to. Maybe next time.
It’s also not quite the nostalgia fest people seem to make it out to be? The themed robots are definitely a big flavor, but they’re only a fraction of the robots you rescue. Most of them are generic. And the actual levels have nothing to do with cameos, other than what appears to be a small handful.
It’s got some good body horror like all children’s media.
11 Likes