I put 2048 on my phone and now I’m acting like a junkie. I got in my car outside a store last night, decided to play a couple moves, and was still sitting there an hour after they closed.
jesus wiped the floor with me 
it probably didn’t help that I tried to make my self-insert true to life by giving it terrible lungs and a bad back
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I have a designer obligation to recommend Threes; 2048 is a clone of Zach Gage’s game (Spelltower, Sage Solitaire, Really Bad Chess, tons of cool stuff) and fixes a corner design bug the clones never noticed
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I have this reaction to the iOS puzzle roguelike Imbroglio. I’ve been playing it while listening to podcasts on the subway every single day since it came out and I still haven’t tired of it.
I cracked open Mega Maker to try and do something with it, and, well…
There’s about a eighth of the enemies from the first six games each, with about two to zero assets available from each Robot Master’s stage. The implemented choices also lack inspiring dynamism- almost nothing here is reactive (e.g. floor-roving Gabyoalls / Metal Man’s presses and can towers / Napalm Man’s tigers / Centaur Man’s leapers / Knight Man’s scholars) or climatically and imposing (not a single miniboss besides Big Eyes) or generating (nothing short of Tellys). Almost everything here stands still firing shots or flies at the player through blocks or flies forward. I know it’s a miracle for any given game to exist, and a giant wealth of usable assets is hardly necessary to make good levels, but what’s available just feels like rather weak material. Not enough provided potential and novelty for a creative community to have much of a lifespan, or for players to keep playing. I’m sure that continuing updates to the engine can drastically help here, but as an initial release all I feel is the desire to wait for such updates.
Aside from enemies that hardly use terrain, terrain itself is its own struggles. I don’t mind the twelfth of level feature assets from each of the first six games ( + Galaxy Man teleporters? ), but blocks are only placed in severely awkward ways- contextual sprites formed by grid placement rather than deliberate and controlled tileset placement feels severely annoying to work around. There’s also no subgrid alignment set-ups, and backgrounds are fixed per screen. Gleh.
Also, this is super petty and personal, but one needs an account to do anything, and because of how humanizing robot masters through making them nearly all male worked out, the only non-Male account icon out of Rock’s family + Cossack + Wily + MM1-6 Robot Masters is Roll. Where are the robot animal friends, where are the generic enemies, where is Kalinka, where is Quake Woman. Gotta wait for when they get to MM9, I guess.
Mechanically, the upgraded weapons and strong controls over those weapons, the scroll controls, the overall feel is all pretty great (as long as one is in a good level, and doesn’t try to make bosses interact with non-block level features). The online features are also pretty fun, having learn much from Mario Maker. I’ll try to pare down these thoughts here into something useful for the devs, but the forums are also already full of rather… hostile and aimless feedback. I kind of suspect they released something early on hoping for player interest to push them forward- the whole pre-launch trailer kind of pointed at that. Poor devs.
Anyway,
A clip of the level I made with what little I could pull together: We Strike At Sunset, ID 61920. One of the very few levels in this engine that practices introduction / iteration / subversion principles with a few clever tricks, I think- most of what’s popular in it has little understanding of level design. I’m not going to bother with making much else myself for a few months, I think.
(Quick Man’s Force Beams have multiple settings here: the one as seen in this preview is “quarter of life” rather than “instant-kills”.)
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been playing a lot of descent lately.
started with the DOS version, which, while it controls very well with keyboard-only, doesn’t run quite as well as i’d like on the raspberry pi (via dosbox). i can reduce the settings and shrink the viewport on the fly, ~/~
- ASIDE - why don’t more games let you make the viewport smaller in real time. i can seriously use the plus and minus keys to mitigate framerate issues when i get to crowded rooms in descent. pay attention, slacker devs*. this is also a joke don’t take this paragraph seriously ok bye
~/~ but it is still just a wee bit too pokey for me to totally enjoy it, especially since the reactor assault rooms are the busiest (thus, the worst-performing), compounding their inherent relative difficulty.
enter the playstation port - and what a fine port it is! the music is miles better than the dos version. the controls are fully customizable (lacking only dualshock analog support, which this port predated), even including the ability to use the select-button as a modifier key for any other key on the pad save start. the framerate is much more manageable. there are dynamic lighting effects now (side effect - you can just shoot the laser in dark rooms for a bit of illumination without having to throw out a flare. second side effect - the dark areas seem to have been made a bit darker in the psx port). it’s also otherwise running the game with maxxed out texture draw distance (Options > Detail > Highest) from the dos version, so it’s flat-out superior aesthetically to the original software renderer. there are fmv sequences as well, presumably to give this port another bullet point and fill up space on the disc. they are serviceable - most notably, the introductory scene adds voice and cg animated characters to what was just a big text dump over background stills in the DOS version.
interestingly, there was a psx-exclusive descent game: descent maximum. this seems to be mostly a mix of the descent ii engine and featureset with new levels created for this port (at sony’s behest; they were not approving pc ports at the time). contemporary reviews were less than stellar. i’ll report back once i’ve had a chance to play more of it.
i also tried the forsaken port for psx while i was at it. wow. forsaken is a terrible game with terrible controls. it does seem to run at 60 FPS, which is kind of neat. it controls like it’s running at 15, though.
*
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yeah, playstation descent is fantastic, probably one of the best examples of how important the PS1 pre-FF7 was in making DOS games more accessible & improving on them in some cases
there haven’t really been any worthy descent successors imo, in large part because the game was more of a first-actually-good high-mobility corridor FPS than a space sim or mech game or any of the other genres it appears to resemble – I think quake is as much a descent successor as anything else.
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apparently one of the more infamous reviews of the original descent was literally just
Better. Than. Doom.
, and it definitely takes the left/right strafe-dodging fireball gameplay into another axis. quake really doesn’t scratch the same itch. it’s also wildly different aesthetically. after that, no succeeding game that doesn’t let me pitch/roll/yaw can be compared to descent imo
basically i’m saying it’s a fucking travesty that there aren’t more games like this.
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sublevel zero was mostly just, like, teleglitch with worse pacing/crafting/writing/maps (the developers even acknowledged it as a major influence), but there are at least two other attempted descent successors in the pipeline right now (a unity game that’s more singleplayer focused and a UE4 game that’s more multi focused) afaik
as far as I know both are hoping that VR market penetration increases a bit because it’s such a theoretically good fit
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I guess what I am saying is everyone get Fire Pro and make yourselves so you can beat me up.
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The last time I played FPW was Fire Pro 2 on the GBA
I’m curious as to what’s new about the PC version–it’s been on my wishlist for a while but I’m not in the financial situation to drop $20 on a video game
This is basically what a bunch of console games do now, with that adaptive resolution or w/e it’s called.
currently unsure about pyre
the art direction is pretty much impeccable and it’s eminently well-conceived as a package
but the early game is really really easy and the writing is so far more elaborate than good, compared to transistor
consistent with my first half hour (except them referring to transistor as a “bastion reskin” in the closing remarks seriously jeopardizes their credibility)
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On the final level of Clustertruck I decided the jank was too powerful to overcome and uninstalled. Overall a pretty fun time, though!
i tried gigantic today. it sure was average
odds are good if I accepted Motiga’s offer to be in the group of people who helped shape game balance during the early stages of the closed beta, everyone would love it and it would be huge and everyone would be calling for Knossos to be nerfed into the ground
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The Hey! Pikmin demo leaves me unsold. I think it might be too watered down. It’s a shame because I think that done right Pikmin could make a really good 2d game
Game is real good.
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