like, this complaint takes the game from a 10 to a 9.5, for me. it’s still a goddamn miracle
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Puggsy (Sega CD) - what the fuck, i didn’t know this was released on Sega CD. highly similar to the cartridge version - the in-game music is still FM, though you do get one (1) Redbook world map theme. it’s puggsy, now with load times. game is a charming little puzzle platformer. noting that the CD version doesn’t have the (infamous?) copy protection that is still causing issues in 2023. had to manually patch a version to get it fully working on my everdrive a few years ago
Despite the fact that Tt only intended this copy-protection to deter cartridge copiers that were around in the early to mid nineties, this method has proven itself to be future-proof as all flash cartridges and console emulators will blindly make SRAM data from any game that requests for it to be made. Even modern Sega emulators that aim to be hardware accurate like Kega Fusion, Genesis Plus GX, Exodus and BlastEm! are not safe since it cannot account for a piece of software requesting the usage of hardware it shouldn’t have access to under normal circumstances.
edit: oh, right. forgot that the Sega CD version does have these dinky little FMV sequences. they are… not worth the load times, lol
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puggsy first appeared in an amiga demo, i saw it in a store as a kid and thought it was a game and it blew my mind because it looked AMAZING, then i played the actual game and it was nothing like the demo
i can appreciate it for what it is now that im older though
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what the fuck this is the origin of Tim 3 from Lemmings!!!
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i really liked puggsy when i was a kid. it’s one of those icebergvania games that seems like it has an infinite amount of secrets and weird stuff hidden in it.
i think some emulators have the option to turn off sram saving specifically to stop that protection from trigger
doesn’t the cd version have more stages, too?
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CD version does not have new stages exactly, but it does include 3 new bosses, increasing the number from 6 in the Amiga/Genesis versions to 9 in the CD edition
they aren’t too notable, though. the bosses are the least interesting part of the game
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Intentionally losing doesn’t seem interesting at first, but you get worse cars for poor performance. That made it much more challenging to try to get everything.
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it’s not the worst way they could have done it
i just feel like most racing games avoid you ever needing to sandbag, like, categorically (outside of stuff like Mario Kart). it’s a bit strange to encounter
idk i had an experience last night where i was like PRC and Lizard or something and i blasted thru and won every race. so now i need to do the exact same team/mfr again but ensure i do not win. in order to not waste time i need to save scum if i mess up the placement.
just… kinda weird. kinda offputting.
it doesn’t really hurt the game too much, though
also, if you like… don’t win right away, it ends up working a lot better. you do your best, get a mid car, then you learn the tracks better, come back, get a better qualifying, get a better car - this is the way the flow is intended to work. but given how you need to hit every possible placement, there’s really no way to avoid retreading a lot of ground
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started limbus company cause i’ve been curious about lobotomy corp and library of ruina and this is the free gatcha alternative i can use to maybe kinda gauge how interested i would be in the “real” things, and i guess that’s affirmative cause i’m into it despite the bloated structure of a gacha.
love my squad of sinners. favs so far are don quixote and gregor. ryoshu too although she doesn’t have much characterization yet
also been playing the gba version of riviera and enjoying how deliberate it expects you to be with fighting, growth and exploration. i dunno if it’s all good, but i have a good first impression, and it’s all a pretty strong loop. fight well, to explore more, to get more items/stats, to fight better, to explore more…
i think it’s nice that you can miss a lot of “content”, and you can fail sequences and get nothing but a permanent nerf for your attempts. at first i figured i should try to do it as well as i can, but have adopted an attitude against save scumming instead cause it’s more fun to just take the loss and move on with it.
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16 hours into Brave Fencer Musashi I have all the powers, a very empty technique list and only 3 remaining lost citizens and its still like a 7/10. Im propelled by curiosity, love of the visual style and save states. Its very easy to make a tedious mistake and this game offers no transportation short cuts. Had a few old game moments recently in terms of how to progress. I don’t know that its a game I’d recommend exactly but Im having fun and making steady progress. This game feels through-out like something big got cut. I got an absorption ability to do a flying kick and the game was temporarily 20% more fun. Few games make me want to make my own like Brave Fencer Musashi. Its a few tweaks away from being an absolute blast.
Tried some Elephantasy: Flip Side and i like it but im cheating to always have the high jump. The platforming it too brutal to be fun without it. Its very fun to discover. Reminds me of chewing into cavestory but the control just isnt there imo.
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overall impression of The Witness is it’s a Myst 3-like (isolated puzzle sections that exist for the purpose of being solved) with rare fleeting glimpses of what could be a Riven. then again, instead of elaborate roller coaster rides at the end of a puzzle it just has ordinary gates and elevators and instead of Brad Dourif chewing the scenery it has dry prerecorded TedX talks and it has no soundtrack whatsoever so maybe even that comparison is being generous. but i did at some points experience the sensation of interacting with something truly cryptic and alien and being surprised when it responded.
ok, i found the dick in the sky lol. that was cool for a moment when i wasn’t sure if i were about to cause armageddon, but once it became clear it’s just another checklist of things to find i was out.
the second layer of the mountain was pretty cool, i enjoyed teasing that out. initially realising what i had to do was kind of like “well of course it wouldn’t be any simpler” but the exact execution was a more subtle “ohhh”.
given that the last room in the game is cylindrical puzzles i’m a little disappointed they didn’t progress to toroidal
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both of Jon Blow’s games are actually fairly mechanically interesting and iterate on themselves in novel ways, the problem is that they both came out in an era where indie devs had to push for some very literalized meaning beyond that, and every time the guy opens his mouth or commits to any prose or suggests he has something important to say, everyone is worse off for it, so it’s actually uniquely difficult to separate the art from the artist, you have to separate the mechanism from the text as well, which is very ~video games~ in a way that no one will ever agree on.
the saving grace is that the text is totally superfluous to the rest of the work in a way that would usually count as a failure but here it’s kind of a blessing. the indie equivalent of skipping the cutscenes.
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It does have one. I still get PTSD whenever I hear that music start in real life.
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i mostly agree with this (as someone who got into indie games because of Braid), though you can see his values reflected in the works as well. i think he’s a pretty reactionary guy in general especially when it comes to gender, but you could argue that Braid is at least self-reflective and self-aware to a degree. but then of course he aggressively fought against any attempts by people to analyze or interpret that element of it. but i think The Witness in particular breaks down from further scrutiny. it tries harder to be enigmatic but not in a way that helps it. in hindsight it’s hard for me not to see Stephen’s Sausage Roll as basically just doing a better version of the same thing.
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That part is the Malenia of puzzle games
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i see the value in the ability to thoroughly excavate every ramification of a central mechanic but it’s not exactly what i’m looking for; i would prefer to see the most clever or sensational moments pulled together in a more tightly organised experience. that’s more or less how i feel about everything though.
i felt a little insulted when the challenge was “solve this puzzle type you’ve seen before but on a glitched out display”
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yeah there’s a lot to say about the way this whole sensibility of puzzle design has become so prominent starting around the time of Braid. some of the people who preach that stuff have been extremely influential. playing both Chip’s Challenge and Myst again in more recent years made me aware of how different it can be, and appreciate more what those games are doing.
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yeah the idea of things being harder because you have a slower car is really neat but you have to intentionally sandbag and unlocking specific cars requires a precise win/loss record. add to the fact you have to do this with every combo of team and car company. i gave up and used unlock cheats. i think theres an interesting game here someone could remake.
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The Witness I think explores mechanics well but at the same time feels like a game design textbook in that it is like ‘let’s draw a line! Can you think how we could add an additional wrinkle to this? List all the ways drawing a line could be changed to provide a new challenge.’
I think this kind of design is good to practice (as in practice to become a designer) but doesn’t necessarily lead to good pacing. It’s the same logic that underpins flow theory constantly being cited but without much critical thinking, balancing skill and challenge can be interesting but prescribing one size fits all ways to do it, less so.
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Master Detective Archives: Rain Code’s premise gets even stranger.
So, the mystery labyrinths that you solve are kind of trial and error. They have forks in the road which represent two possible options e.g. murderer played dead or committed suicide. They’re presented as a multiple-choice question about the murder. One answer is objectively correct but the other is not. Going the incorrect way simply leads to a dead end so you can just go back the other way with no penalty. So fictionally these are just trial and error trees, and you must exhaust all branches. There’s no in-universe time limit given and not much in the way of threat to your actual life so, again, it lacks a lot of the threat that DGR had.
In one case an incorrect choice was that the murderer played dead, however later it is found out that they actually had played dead all along and that you just didn’t have enough evidence to suggest this definitely was the case. So, the labyrinth isn’t really based on what’s objectively true, only what is subjectively true based on my character’s knowledge so far? It leads to some epistemologically questionable world logic that would make for an interesting satirical game about how evidence and testimony functions in a legal context, but the mascot tells you to just look at her boobs for 8 seconds in case these kinds of questions bother you.
They also introduce the troubling premise that once you solve a mystery labyrinth and find out the truth, not only do you know what happened, but the entire process mysteriously kills the culprit. Your character does this unknowingly at first, but this is presumably going to be a plot point later. It feels morally weird to try to solve murders knowing that whoever is responsible will just die and there’s nothing you can do about it. Capital punishment ho!
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