Had the day off, so I played like 5 hours of Neon White today. I really like it!
I am impressed at how solidly it solves the speedrun game approachability problem. This team figured out how to primarily center/reward planning and routing as the core challenge, rather than execution and twitch reflexes. I think the last game in this genre I really dug into was Lovely Planet and I simply didn’t have the twitch response ability to feel good at that game. But Neon White’s card attack/traversal system turns each level into a very small routing puzzle, and the completion medals are balanced so that if you do a clean execution of a shortcut route, you always get the highest possible reward for the level.
Execution is probably where the top of the leaderboards are battling it out, but nothing about the UI makes you even look at the global leaderboard. You can just be satisfied with figuring out the routing puzzle, and move on. Great stuff. Wonderful at making you feel very very smart, and at focusing your attention and time on the more approachable challenge.
Noct is a now-abandoned early access game that had a Kickstarter years ago. It’s a top-down, multiplayer survival horror thing. The game is presented as though you are watching your “Survivor” through a drone cam with some information overlays. I’m not sure if the gameplay would have ultimately jived with me but I really like the visual presentation.
The servers are depopulated now, obviously, and the game has been delisted on Steam. But I decided to wander around. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to find any supplies. Maybe they don’t spawn if you’re not on an active server? I wandered around swatting monsters (mainly spider-looking things and worm-looking things). I’m satisfied to have experienced this as a little moodpiece I guess.
I actually went looking for it last month, assuming it had been finished by now but having forgotten its name. Well. I’ll still hold tight to Teleglitch.
Battletoads 2020 has literal blasphemy and the first boss is a gay-coded union-head gangmember that promises paternity leave. the toad’s reply with “no way butthead.”
Then it turns out all the enemies are gay-coded so the toads can be smart-ass.
I’ve been playing the Dark Souls remaster, enjoying it, but it was heartbreaking to look up comparisons online and see that the original looks better in every instance. It’s subtle but enemies set against levels sometimes look like two images photoshopped together, like they don’t fit into the atmosphere. Really interesting splashes of colors are desaturated, depth in the world is flattened out.
I thought it would be fine since the graphical changes between the remaster and original seemed so minor. I would never try the remake of Demon’s after playing this.
The fog gate lasts too long too when you walk into a boss room, blinding you as the fight starts, and it was so weird that I knew it had to be because of some bizarre graphical change they made.
I am usually quite picky on these things and beat DkS1 like 6 times, and when I played the remaster on Switch, the vibe felt the same as I remembered and I don’t recall being struck by a visual difference as compared to my memory of the game.
The small/low-res Switch screen probably had something to do with that, but with respect to DkS1 I would fall on the side of “go ahead and play the remaster if it’s significantly more convenient”. As opposed to Demon’s where I would say “remake? what remake? the only way to play this is with a PS3 emulator”
Yeah, I wanna say Digital Foundry looked at DS1 Switch and concluded that it’s pretty much identical to the 360/PS3 versions, it just runs better than those did.
The Demons Souls thing is a bummer, and a problem with a lot of remakes/remasters. When WB inexplicably decided that Arkham Asylum and Arkham City needed brand new ports to Unreal Engine 4, they had Virtuos redo all of the assets. A lot of them are “eh, close enough,” but then you have Commissioner Gordon, who’s gone from a rumpled elderly Gears of War beef slab in a sweater vest to a very ironed out, uh…“yassified” version of the character. It’s jarring and it sucks!
But the graphics are shinier, as is the lighting (two things I’d argue also go against the art style of the originals), so most of the public nods and says “mm, looks better”.
To be fair, the originals also looked shiny, because that’s just Unreal Engine 3 for ya.
Bluepoint’s Shadow of the Colossus felt the same. Like, yeah, it’s technically beautiful, but is it Shadow of the Colossus PS2 beautiful? Well, no. That game was made within a certain scope and limitations, and it made the best style it could within that. Cranking up the photogrammetry doesn’t make that better, it just, I dunno!
Feel like rumors have swirled for a while that their next project is Metal Gear Solid, so I guess brace yourselves for that.
As a FF XIII update of my own I’ve gotten to the point where there are levels and magic and paradigms and just recently techniques (well, technique) I can mess around with. Whoever it was who said something along the lines that the game explains the hell out of everything yet somehow doesn’t explain enough was on to something as I feel everything it tutorializes leaves me with a follow-up question that I have to remember to check up on online afterwards. Knowing that libra reveals an enemy’s weaknesses and that my AI companions will adjust their attacks based on that is good, not knowing if they remember that for future encounters or if I have to re-Libra to retrigger that is less good.
Anyways I am using the paradigm system and feel I use it in the proper manner (switch to a defensive one when health gets low on the final hit of a filled ATB attack, switch back to an offensive one when no longer in danger), except when I use it I tend to get lower star ratings so it is possible I’m very bad at it. I haven’t customized any of my own and am just using the default ones so maybe that is why.
An important thing with the ATB system is there are actually two bars - one’s the visible one, and another ‘reserve’ that you swap to when you paradigm shift. The reserve one fills up every 12 seconds, so I’ve found that shifting every 2 rounds gives you a free round. I wish that reserve bar was visualized in the UI because it is a really fun plate to spin and it’d be cool to get a lil scifi swoosh or flash for doing it right.
i think its a big deal because i keep getting private messages from people saying GRATS sdkjdfjg so cool! this game isnt a cult at all! shh! shhhhh shhhhhh
Alundra is so full of sicky shit! The most perverted You Want A Top Down Dungeon Puzzle? HERE!
Eventually they’d just make Steel Princess which was just one room puzzles and no plot or graphics.
A faq said I should have the warp gates unlocked and then I had to look up how to do that and my jaw just dropped as I read that. Then realized I was in an unescapable dungeon.
The story is neat. You aren’t saving this village, you just trying to slow down the hemorrhaging. And through no fault you fail. And people blame you for it. And you got friends and a fortune teller and mysterious other visitors.
There are so many parts that if I was playing the Working Designs version I would have quit. The combat is not good! Vic loves to shove a joke in whether it is appropriate or not.
And it is perfect to play in silence enjoying my ipod/spotify.
having played back to back turds recently (stranger of paradise, triangle strategy) i decided to retreat into the comfort blanket of super metroid, love it
Did you figure out what to do with the gilded falcons? Access to the NPC vendor for them is completely missable since you need to go down a chimney in town to get a key item and that chimney is only ‘open’ a limited amount of time throughout the story. I think I only have one more opportunity to get it before I’m permanently locked out of that entire part of the game.
I have played a couple of adventure games, lately: Unavowed and Lamplight City. They have been in my backlog for years!
I had very high expectations for both, considering I had liked Blackwell a lot 5-6 years ago, and considering how highly Hardcoregaming101 speaks of them.
Honestly, they are good but not as great as they were made out to be. I am not sure which I like more of the two: Unavowed is, sometimes, a bit more memorable, but also uneven and slightly less mature in writing. Lamplight City has a more coherent and better graphical style, and better writing, athough perhaps it zooms less in the characters. Both are good/very good although not must plays.
Now I have started Firewatch, I am at the beginning of Day 3 and I am liking it a lot. It’s very emotional.
thinking about playing no man’s sky just for the vibes but i only have an hour and last time i launched it it took 11 minutes to get past the loading screen
