Yea that Bloodstained: CoTM game is a pretty cool little thing to play during the Halloween season. It’s got a neat little “choose your own adventure” structure to its level design and it’s only 2 hours, so I plan on possibly 100%-ing it.
it’s probably my favourite thing Iga has been responsible for, however indirectly, in 20 years
one of very few 8-bit throwbacks that’s zippy and novel and conscious of its intended limitations and uses them to solid effect
it’s… not afraid to be a little uneven? in character selection and boss design and deathtraps and so on. and the result is really engaging. it’s not my favourite game of the year or anything but it is totally worth playing.
1 Like
it also does a great job of being difficult while still feeling like there were five or ten other ways you could’ve finagled a part you struggled with
seriously the idea of a racing game with proper physics and beautiful real-world terrain and shortcuts is just, bless your hearts
it is much less overbearing than 3 too
1 Like
Yes, it does feel very accommodating and flexible while still maintaing the requisite “hardcore” feel of 8-bit classics. I’m genuinely surprised that a seemingly tossed-off product was able to strike that balance and hopeful the bigger game learns some lessons from CoTM.
Maybe…Inti Creates and Wayforward are good now and we can say that without any caveats?
when were inti creates not good, especially when it comes to platformers?
also, did wayforward release something recently? i don’t remember that D:
1 Like
Mighty No. 9? (Inti Creates)
Inti Creates have always been pretty mushy in my mind, like Dimps, they seem to do a consistently OK-ish job with a lot of franchises that are long past their glory days and for which the fanbase doesn’t exactly have high expectations
this could’ve easily gone that way and didn’t
That Mummy licensed game Wayforward developed is actually pretty weird and good, I would check that out. Think of it as the spiritual sequel to Aliens Infestation.
3 Likes
playing nwn2 and realizing i dont think ive ever played a non diablo like roleplaying game on pc before so this is actually all new to me is kind of bizarre
Is Neverwinter Nights just blizzards all day and palm tree sunsets after hours?
1 Like
Ironic: Neverwinter Nights was a pretty bad game until the first expansion added a winter tileset.
3 Likes
Is it Inti that swore they’d never release a game without DRM? If so they’re still bad.
After watching some webtiles Dungeon Crawl .22, I started a game for the first time since, like, .9 and I think I get why the development direction has been making me cranky.
First, the game’s super fun to play! Level generation has gotten way better and more interesting, as have randarts. The constant easy availability of information on ever single thing (adding, among other things, automatic notation of dangerous creatures on a floor, the spell list of both regular and unique wizards, every spell you’ve in one page since I last played) continues to be brilliant. Some of the changes I don’t like on paper, like removing encumbrance and different types of food, indeed make things quicker and more intuitive and seems to totally eliminate stash-building.
Those changes also make it remarkably fun to watch because they cut out the downtime of, e.g., paging through spell books and carting stuff to and from the Lair. Changes to piety, timed portals, and monster generation help, too. The importance of diligent packing is reduced in favor of in-the-moment choices, which is a much more compelling show.
And I think that’s what gets me. I can see all the ways the changes are objectively good, but I can’t get past my gut reaction that everything is governed by esports values, that a good experience is by definition one that streams well.
But it does stream well and it is fun to play. I’m just being grognardly and self indulgent in resenting how it got that way. The futzy simulator-RPG mechanics I’m so sure I want aren’t any better, and they certainly don’t balance out all the unquestionable improvements that have accumulated over the last…jesus, like 10 years.
throwing a beemer around a mountain pass in a night race in the snow is just the absolute most I can ask of a big-budget videogame
something they’ve done this time around has clicked like playing the original gran turismo for the first time
it refuses to save my unlocked framerate settings between runs which is pretty funny but I’m getting ~100 FPS on 1440p with most settings around high-ultra which is just beautiful (I should probably tweak it more to get a locked 120 for frametiming but it’s really hard to notice when it’s that high)
the LOD is weirdly aggressive no matter what I do but it doesn’t matter too much during races
1 Like
we made it to neverwinter safe and sound and boy they werent kidding when they said of all the games in obsidians ouvre this is the single most traditional narrative
They’ve also been taking out smaller choices on the regular. The biggest one that ended up with the Something Awful community mostly breaking up with the main branch and forking their own was taking out the ability to eat mutative chunks (get a random mutation per chunk).
This is still in effect. Mace of Variability, a fixedart that you rarely stumble on, is no longer a variable weapon but arcs out chaos occasionally.
It’s a question of where to put the burden of proof. Does a feature need to be “good enough to keep” or “bad enough to remove”? The (cranky traditionalist part of the) player base is uniformly for the latter and developers for the former, which is kinda worrying.
What I really want is for the management to realize that they’re releasing a series of new games and not feature upgrades and give me an SFIV-style edition select with every .x0 release.
I like most of the changes in DCSS over the past decade; it’s made it much less tedious to play, and I’m playing more b/c of it. I’m not sure I agree that the changes were made for some “esports ideal”. I do admit there is some tension between the maximalist parts of the design and the desire to streamline and balance.
I think some portion of the community for an actively updated game will always be unhappy. But unlike live online games, you can still download old versions of Crawl and play them. I think most of the servers support playing on pretty old versions too. Supporting multiple sets of features simultaneously sounds like a maintenance nightmare.
1 Like
Speaking of DCSS, I have 5 wins now! I would describe myself as “decent” at this game, but I still have some bad habits I need to break (I get very stubborn about percent chances sometimes). My brain is really bad at mitigating risk, and I only started to get over that by sheer repetition.
Look at that beautiful 0.64% win rate!
EDIT:
Gate88: !lg x=sum(dur)
beem: 782 games for Gate88: sum(dur)=17d+1:58:37
Oh good only took 410 hours to suck as much as I do (please ignore the untracked time I spent playing offline).
2 Likes
I want to be clear that I am really, really enjoying playing Crawl right now. I took a MiMo and started clocking guys and it’s super fun. I especially like the increased density of cool stuff – my randarts have been uniformly interesting, Okawaru hasn’t given me a -1 animal skin yet, and fun vaults are everywhere.
Thinking about it some more, maybe the distinction I want is the old game-ist/simulation-ist. I always liked the feeling that my Crawl games were expeditions, where half the work is managing inventory space and hedging against item destruction, which is just a different thing than is valued in development right now. (I’m trying to talk this out in order to stop being a grognard and just enjoy the very good thing that exists; that is not my natural inclination, as evidenced by my being here in the first place.)
2 Likes