oh, i did, and then restarted the game on Okay, lol.
missed this, but yes, also this but for everyone. it feels like every character has kind of a long wind up for their initial attack. it isn’t stopping me from being able to kill most things, but it’s noticeable?
Don is especially bad because is basic jab is the slowest thing in the game even though it benefits him on bosses since he can just outpoke them to death
meanwhile Raph and April can just run (or, hell, walk) up to enemies and press buttons for free
yeah, i started playing the game with Leo and was having a little bit of a tough time with his movement - switching to Mike and then April it’s like, night and day
heat signature, a game i remember complaining about being unfairly difficult at some point, is almost too easy now. even without unlocking things or using cheap tricks, i can ace most difficult missions if I’m paying attention. i’ve played this game too much, probably
played crystar, which sucked, and mahou arms which had hard to figure out moves and bullshit hitboxes
i had the same experience, and i think it’s that the game has a relatively high skill floor and a relatively low skill ceiling. if you use the items effectively there’s not much the game can throw at you to stop you.
the design reminds me a bit of the design of into the breach and exhibits some of the same problems – the player’s potential for success is very binary. either the game generates levels that have solutions given the player’s current tools or it generates effectively “impossible” levels where the player is forced to fail in some aspect.
heat signature errs of the side of caution and tends to generate very beatable levels, which means that once you internalize all the mechanics there’s not much that can actually go wrong. a skilled player can reliably make a plan and then carry out all the steps in sequence. everything is extremely predictable and the slowdown during the action means that it doesn’t require much dexterity/reaction skill to execute.
i found the structure to be fairly entertaining while i was learning the game, but once all the pieces were in place in my mind it got boring very quickly. the “chaos” of the game is basically all controllable by the player, and for this type of game to stay interesting for skilled players, it needs to present them with situations that they don’t expect or don’t know how to solve, or have more depth and nuance to the execution side of things.
This is key – action games are simple puzzles presented under tight time constraints. Tom’s games increase the possibility space and puzzle complexity but are loose (nicer: generous) with the time constraint than they could be to be truly tight.
The gentleness encourages experimentation, which is more what the game is about, but it would be nice if the games tightened the screws at a certain point.
I started playing FFXIII based on recent posts
I’ve had control of my character for about 8 seconds now and I just want to appreciate how if you jiggle the analog stick to make lightnings walk cycle go crazy, she freezes and gives you a disgusted expression like on some Sonic the hedgehog shit
I’ve been sceptical of immaculately scoped switch games up to now because I feel like they usually come out too tidy and easy to praise but I gotta say neon white is an unqualified success
I’ve been debating Neon White but right now I’m mainly torn on Switch vs Steam; I guess the Switch version is pretty good, then?
I bought it on steam because I generally buy everything on Steam, but anecdotally the Switch version is fine and it definitely feels like A Switch Game the way eg Hades or Goose Game did (both of which I somewhat disliked for it)
Every time I read “Neon White” I want to say it like Bob Ross: “Just gonna dip my fan brush into some Neon Hhwhite”
Played about 10 minutes of GunValkyrie and I couldn’t get past this one jump. IDK. I’ll try again tomorrow.
Movement system is neat, making camera controls inverted is an inspired choice. Lock on is probably what I’ll use for the rest of the game because aiming precisely is always a huge pain.
Completed Neon White. What a game!!! I was utterly delighted by it. Know some of the folks who worked on it… I gotta write em a letter or something, haha.
About the ending and unlocks: I may max out my neon rank before uninstalling this game but I am not gonna find all the gifts. The game has two endings and one of them is locked behind getting all gifts. I don’t have time for that!! So I watched the “good ending” on YouTube and it’s quite short. I feel satisfied with this, haha. If I tried to get all gifts myself I think I’d sprain my wrist!!
I think the dungeons in Alundra are eatting at my sanity it rules.
This is such a small game and yet… 30 hours long probably to fight rentals and buy/sell.
But you start looking at PS1 games and you will only see the calculations to make it longer.
I’ve pretty much ONLY been playing Final Fantasy XIV the past month. I even fell off Elden Ring for it! It’s the first time I’ve ever really played an MMORPG. It helps a lot that it’s a single player first experience, where you largely don’t have to plan around multiplayer. It’s nice, you don’t really have to commit to much.
The base game is fairly slow and the story is merely serviceable. But since I’m working on a Preserving Worlds episode that includes this game, the desire to film expansion locations for b-roll pulled me through. That was the key, really. All the horror stories you hear about MMORPG addiction had put me off of actually engaging with the genre, but as soon as I had a real productive/artistic reason to justify it, I was off to the races. No regrets! I’m not much of an addictive personality anyway, but this game also (crucially) is not trying to get me addicted. It respects my time, if you can believe that. The experience is really not much different from playing through an especially long singleplayer FF game.
Anyway, it’s true what they say about the expansions. They really do have excellent writing! I just finished Heavensward. Massive political maneuvering among different factions of big mad dragons, with some surprisingly nuanced thoughts about nativism, war, and isolationism. It’s neat! I hear the writing still gets better as it goes too.
for me:
@HOBO found that the Story Mode-having 2009 PC version of Namco’s Project Driller Mr. Driller spin-off single-button action puzzle 2002 arcade game Star Trigon is somehow available as an under-$10 download from Amazon (thread Game Vids You Watched Today - #51 by HOBO ) so I played it.
Playing using my bluetooth keyboard was dropping them single inputs pretty badly, got better once I switched to my laptop’s hardwired keyboard midway through. : P I’m still real bad at pushing the button at the right time! ; D Story Mode gets pretty crazy and I’m only halfway through that.
Been playing a shit ton of Ring of Pain. Pretty interesting low-key strategy roguelike about navigating right and left along a ring of randomly interspersed monsters and rewards. It does a good job of pursuing its themes (tough tradeoffs, negative outcomes, sacrifices, etc) while also never actually getting super hard.
It’s the kind of game that makes you take a minor stat hit every time you want to get a major stats boost. It puts debuffs on most of the good items, haha. However, it also gives you pretty easy access to fairly OP-feeling item synergies. Easy learning curve, but it’s also very easy to die a minute in if you aren’t paying attention.
I have been quite sick a few nights this week and I’ve stayed up twice playing this game all night while my stomach hurt too much to sleep. It’s good! I also feel like shit now, lmao. Still haven’t beaten it yet but I’ve come might close 3 or 4 times.
Watching the footage of the turtles game made me feel like playing a new old looking video game but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend money on tmnt media in this day and age. It’s fine for other people to like it but if I’m going to indulge in star wars and marvel crap I need to save room for some stuff in my life that I didn’t already like when I was ten years old. So I got iconoclasts and I’m enjoying it so far. Weirdly the only other game I’ve played a lot of recently is Yoshis Island, so I don’t know if it is actually reminiscent of that or if it’s just me, but it feels more like that and less like mega man than I was expecting
We also got In Other Waters because it was on sale for very cheap. Not my cup of tea but it is exactly the sort of game my wife loves. It’s fun to hear in the background and then watch with absolutely no idea what is happening