One of the reasons roguelites don’t sit well with me is that I find it hard to make myself enjoy losing in those contexts. It takes a special alchemy to make losing fun (or funny) enough that I’m willing to try again.
I find losing much preferable to a game that forever pulls its punches because the narrative demands forward motion. Getting the player to any sort of lose state is necessary for any game to really flex its mechanics. Strategy games have to deal with save scumming and campaign time investment problems, so it’s a tradeoff if the lack of long term investment saps the experience in a repeated runs structure.
I think by and large it’s also very evident when a roguelike is overreliant on its death loop, too
(into the breach isn’t, but it is kind of thin)
Losing should not be an all or nothing proposition and I think punch pulling would be the wrong term for my ideal (Crusader Kings 2/KoDP/small-IF style fail forward)
basically, hard end-states turn me off of a game more than small setbacks.
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I think fail-forward works very well, though it’s tough to set up the conditions. For instance, Paradox strategy games require a frame-shift towards stasis and stability as a win condition, or rather, interesting outcomes.
It’s been gratifying to see an audience trained on those games and others learn to play in these more sophisticated and collaborative ways with the games; it opens up more possibilities for things it’s believed players won’t take.
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Agreed on it being difficult. I am fascinated by games that let dozens of failures accumulate and discourage savescumming by making the failures as interesting as the successes. My real ideal is for at least some video games to completely deviate away from a failure-success binary
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Hollow Knight is 100% my shit. (Well, 98%. I hate the “go find your corpse after you’ve died” mechanic rather a lot and I resent Dark Souls for making that the death mechanic du jour for like a decade).
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it’s by far my favorite metroidvania and that mechanic is the only thing i don’t like about it (i don’t love every boss, but there are far more good ones than bad) It isn’t even a big deal once you have bought most of the things you can, it’s just a weird chore you have to do while trying to beat a boss
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I appreciate that in the early-to-middle going money is scarce enough and items expensive enough that you really have to choose what you’re going to buy. But the one time I lost all my loot because of a fuck up reallllly made me frown. I hope I’m not going to have to resort to farming money.
I tried picking pathologic 2 back up and I think it runs even worse than it did at launch so it’s kiwami 2 time I think
and I like how they’ve carried forward the beautifully rendered faces and really sparse geometry from the PS3 era engine but improved both without really changing that ratio.
More like a few days last week. Allowed myself a small risk allowance, recovered from great loss to only a small one. Went through another torrid affair with Baccarat…learning to count better for next time’s edge.
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playing yakuza has been a lot of character development for me because ive gotten legitimately better at arcade games and UFO catchers. but im mad right now because i got over 8 million in space harrier which is the furthest ive ever gotten and it didnt count because i was competing against the sega hi tech land girl. FUCK
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I miss the purpose I had in my life when I was playing yakuza
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I played through a Super Meat Boy knock-off called Heads Run over the past few days. I thought it was something that got added to my wishlist a while back due to my whole random game names thing but apparently it was never mentioned in that topic so… I have no idea where I heard about it from.
Anyways it is pretty snazzy!
Its got a gameboy color scheme on CRT aesthetic going for it, but that sells it a bit short as rather than limit itself to just what a gameboy would be capable of it tosses some odd effects out there or randomly has a giant monster or bug appear and chase you through a stage. It looks a bit better in motion than in screenshots, so I should probably drop the trailer in here as well.
Fortunately it also plays pretty well. Now I haven’t played a game of this type in a number of years so I can’t say how it compares to say a Celeste (I assume Celeste is better), but in my experience these games live or die based on how they control and for the most part Heads Run controls very well (wall jumps were apparently changed after release and on occasion act odd). This is doubly good as your little guy moves pretty darn fast, so being able to reliably steer him as he dashes and ping pongs through a given stage is a life saver.
It’s a pretty short game, 50 stages long which should took me a bit under two hours to get through. I’d say my platforming skillz are about a medium, so perhaps a bit longer or shorter for others. There is also an extra mode that adds additional obstacles to each of the existing stages and often seem to demand tearing through them at ludicrous speeds, and S rank times to chase on all the original stages. These times are often in the neighborhood of eight to twelve seconds, just to give an idea as to the general size of an average stage.
Said stages are fairly well designed. I remember being wowed when playing Super Meat Boy as when going back for better completion times one could tell how there were these little shortcuts or how the obstacles would often line up in a certain way if you got to them as quickly as possible; Heads Run has none of that. It isn’t a master course in stage design, but I’d say that they are above average and make good obstacle courses to speed through at top speeds.
My total completion time for beating all the regular and extra stages, plus getting all S ranks was just under four hours. There was also an unlockable turbo mode (everything is sped up to 1.2x speed) and “world record” ghosts to chase in each stage that I did not spend any time with. I know SB doesn’t really care for the whole “game must bring me X hours of enjoyment per dollar or else” perspective, but I think that return on a $3 ($1.49 during the steam sale) investment is fair.
So hey, good game not a lot of people heard about, I think it is swell to look at and plays pretty well, good times.
EDIT: Oh yeah, forgot about my one big complaint. The only movement options you usually have are a single jump and a dash, but a few stages let you touch an item that gives you a double jump for the rest of the stage. This was tricky for me to wrap my head around as 80% of the time you have a single jump and the double jump stages aren’t like all in a row, so going back and forth was… mechanically confusing in the moment at times. A couple stages put the double jump item halfway through, which combined with the Super Meat Boy-esque instant restarts upon death meant the amount of jumps you could perform sometimes changed every five or so seconds.
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I could not get anything out of Hitman (Sorry Grandpa.) but I am getting miles out of Murdered:Soul Suspect.
Actual NEers: How White Is Salem? There is…one black NPC with no speaking lines.
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I had a great time with that game until it crashed and corrupted my save data. Still want to grab it on PS4 and give it another go.
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I think the main character’s fashion sense is horrendous but you can be a cat sometimes so this problem is mitigated. Also dedicated meow button GOTY whenever it was released
i’m no Salem expert, but my remembrance of it is that it is more diversee than that
So far this game is a delightful level of bad and weird. It is also very easy so far I like that bit.
This guy was just a random npc with nothing to say!
The demon design is really great and terrifying. I hate looking at them tenouttaten demon design.
The spunky teen sidekick girl is great and every other female character is only defined by the man in their lives or how she’s dead and he’s less dead but still dead.
God yeah this game!
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