yeah, it’s kind of a hard problem technically – a lot of games are very sensitive to time, so if the time suddenly changes (or if they never check if the time changed) it can get stuck in bad states. my theory for what’s happening in these games is when they send requests, they have bad timestamps and so the server is like “nah, that’s too out of date” and doesn’t let you in.
you could try to force games through an API that correctly accounts for this, but then porting to your console becomes harder (and there are probably still ways around that API).
the only real way to guarantee it would be to fail certs for it, but i don’t think either company wants to take a hard-line stance on that because, well, they’d rather have the games on their console than fail it for a feature that isn’t terribly important in the grand scheme of things.
yes. it’s very funny and surprising. the combat is fun because every party member (and there are like 40) have different gimmicks that may even change the inputs you do to fight. I think it’s probably the best melancholy commercial gamemaker game that gets compared with earthbound, because it avoided a lot of the tropes we kind of chafe with in those games now that it’s an established trend. it’s also a bit early to be considered apart of that, it came out in 2014 pre-Undertale
Finished Viewfinder and have come away feeling kinda empty and grumpy. Recent puzzle game talk makes me wonder what I really value about these kinds of games. The mechanics are very solid and what they made is impressive, but I think I need a more holistic package to chew. The game never really gets that hard outside of optional challenges and its extremely short (around 3 hours). These aren’t really bad things since the same can be said of Portal. But I think the difference is two major things. Viewfinder’s mechanic of creating or finding photos and then placing them in the environment just takes a lot longer than shooting a portal gun. Take a picture, wait for it to develop, aim it, often needing some additional rotation or tweaking, place it, just never feels snappy enough. The rewind is great though. The pacing is a lot slower and messier since a lot of solutions just end up wrecking geometry which is cool, but I found the game lagged behind my ability to figure stuff out. Most puzzles are solved conceptually much quicker than their mechanical implementation takes. There’s not a lot of figuring things out on-the-fly or as much experimentation required.
The other point of difference is that Portal’s premise was more inherently interesting, released in a time when this trope of exploring mysteriously empty science labs wasn’t made mandatory by Quantum Conundrum or Superliminal, losing their teeth in the process of emulation. The characters and plot of Viewfinder are powerfully anodyne. Apart from one dramatic turn there is no real sense of threat, suspense, or intrigue. Photography-based puzzle simulations were apparently a way to solve climate change by creating a ‘bad weather’-destroying machine that turns out not to work anyway. Like, it’s nice that the game acknowledges that climate change is a complex problem that a single machine couldn’t solve but then undercuts this with its own ending as it turns out the simulation you were roaming around in can just manufacture plants from scratch.
The trophies seem more interesting challenges than the base puzzles but I’ve kinda lost interest since I feel like I’ve seen enough. There’s a nagging sense that the developers felt like they might not have had ‘enough game’ by putting so many minuscule post-it notes and collectables in the environment.
I really like the way they tried to tell the story in that engine, I always like when indies actually commit to narrative diorama scripting to that degree, it reminds me of what I liked from early Matsuno work and you have to really want it. I remember being ambivalent about the rest of it, though not as negative as Tulpa – the tone is weird, but it’s an interesting reach, I wasn’t that turned off by it.
hmmm … could imagine that some functions are using delta interval increments for tracking some stuff that is not built to withstand major jumps in time, because when the dev team started out developing their engine, probably didn’t target quick resume platforms or it was an oversight/forgotten until someone noticed in testing, and fixing it was expensive enough (more in terms of timeline than $$$) that it didn’t get implemented.
Server-Client code … from limited implementation experience, that is always more prone to unexpected stuff happening, be it that servers are dynamically spun up/allocated/load balanced across large server farms, sth which is transparent when you start out developing, and then add the boring infra stuff like certificates timing out, cached information being flushed etc. … i’d be quite surprised if there is a game that survives quick resuming at all, tbh, but maybe i am being pessimistic because of aforementioned limited experience (stemming from crufty OT/industrial experiences, modern gaming infra might be better/more robust, or so i want to believe )
yeah on the server side I’m not expecting it to “survive” quick resume, but when it kicks me back to the title screen I would expect to be able to log into the game again. a surprising number of games completely fail to login to the server after a quick resume. I often have to completely restart the game to fix it, or it takes like 3+ tries before it will actually connect.
restarting the game completely makes it connect on the first try.
like, both Diablo 4 and Halo Infinite fail this test.
Ooof, that sounds harsh, yeah … it would be nice to have a debugger clamped onto the source code to be able to determine what kind of error handling takes place:
a clean-up-properly-and-exit kind, or the crashing-directly-to-startscreen kind (where you expect to land when booting from the OS with a blank slate in terms of memory management).
It sounds like the latter, and from my own dev experience, am pretty sure that most of the software i’ve written wouldn’t handle quick resume as well (because i didn’t design it that way, confession time! )
Totally a fair reaction, but it is definitely more of an attempt to depict the latent misogyny in culturally prescribed notions of masculinity, i.e. toxic masculinity. So regardless if it is a success or not, it isn’t the usual fair for misogyny in videogames, which is I think worth clarifying. And tbh I think even where it arguably errs that some folks here usually sensitive to that could find it tolerable, and worthwhile because of the other ways it is creative and surprising and well made.
the problem with most of these types of games (which i call “One Clever Mechanic” or 1CM games now) is that one you get past that neat mechanic or gimmick that serves as the selling point and main focus of the game… you often don’t have much else. the creators of the game that spend all their time honing down to that one hooky mechanic but usually don’t think about “what do i have to say with my work?” beyond that. or maybe they do - but any kind of messy personal expression that could be there is encouraged to be pared down by the Jon Blows of the world… who have been so incredibly influential on this type of game.
not to mention that those games often take themselves really seriously, even when they are trying to attempt Portal-style humor. they certainly don’t do what Nintendo does with Tears of the Kingdom and wrap it around a much larger, more multi-faceted experience (or like whatever the smaller indie version of that is - maybe like Noita or something). so you’re left feeling like you played a fancy prototype. it’s polished, it’s a neat idea that initially stands out, but it never really goes anywhere after that. i think that’s why these games have somewhat fallen out of favor now.
i think the reason a game like Stephen’s Sausage Roll succeeds in spite of being this sort of 1CM game is it just assumes you’re interested in the puzzles and doesn’t even try to put it into a snappy package. that’s sorta why i think that and The Witness (in spite of its many problems) were the peak moment of that genre. either you like that sort of game and get into it and you really want that taken to the fullest extent, or you don’t.
anyway this is an issue i’ve thought a lot about lately partly because i’m now involved with the Experimental Game (formerly Gameplay) Workshop which was hugely responsible for propagating these kinds of games for a long time and Blow was prominently involved with. it’s also why i’m like, explicitly been trying to push it to move it into a broader direction now. tho i think these sorta 1CM games get enough notice when they do come up (like this one has) that they’ll probably to continue to exist.
in my experience, this is almost literally true. it takes a ton of effort to make a game with excessively concise rules because it’s about discovery – you basically have to discover the implications of the mechanics like a player would, but without the benefit of someone guiding you through that discovery with like level design or whatever.
for my latest puzzle game i spent at least 90% of my time on puzzle design; either trying to come up with new concepts or iterating on old ones. there’s this ebb and flow where you get super stuck for a while, find some facet that you can milk, quickly make some puzzles that exploit it, and then you’re stuck again.
in the periods of being stuck, i can totally see going “fuck it, we need to ship”. the only reason my game came together was because it was a solo hobby project and i worked on it sporadically. if i had a team that needed certain aspects finalized so they could finish art, story, whatever, it would be missing the last 30 levels.
turns out i wanted more wolf 3d sooner than later so i played through this
it’s only 21 levels (including secret levels, of which i found one), but they’re split up into little mini-episodes with a boss every 5 or so floors. each episode has its own aesthetic and thing going on which stops it from being too repetitive
it’s also quite harder than the original game, i think, but in ways that are fair so i didn’t get frustrated. a lot of the difficulty came from the zombies which come back around halfway through, and kept catching me by surprise.
having said that, it’s pretty mid! none of the levels felt like duds, and there were some i liked with cool ideas (i believe romero designed all of them) but there definitely wasn’t anything really new here, and the levels are TOO DANG BIG so ideas get run into the ground and design starts feeling samey. so if you want more wolf 3d, it isn’t a bad option, but it never reaches the highs of the best levels of the original game. it’s also much less aesthetically pleasing than most original episodes… just lots of empty rooms and corridors, but the design is solid.
on the other hand, the rug pull at the end really got me. very very cool and unexpected finale
afaik that’s not true, i think it was a collaboration between him and Hall like the first game. unfortunately finding the individual level credits these days to confirm is harder than it used to be and bc there’s nothing as good as the Doomwiki (i.e. the community-run, non Fandom version) for Wolfenstein 3D.
edit: i realize i might have misread and said the levels you liked the most were all Romero levels. ah well - still wish i could find those level credits. and i do wanna stick up for Tom Hall for designing basically all of my favorite Wolf3D levels, outside of one or two.
and yeah i’ve never been a huge Spear fan outside certain levels. too samey.
This prolonged my attempted grind to get ahead of the power curve through sheer HP numbers! And man is that Sleep Powder annoying. ; )
By the end of this session I felt like I was close to getting on top of things again…but will the enemies respond with a fresh round of upgrades?? Will I have to bite the bullet and venture into the depths of the dungeon without a clear power advantage? ; D
Hopefully the enemy scaling isn’t limitless, that would just kind of suck, what would be the point of leveling anyway. : P Maybe it isn’t, though; they’ve already raised their group sizes AND their skills, and I’m still maybe close to pulling clearly ahead–and I think there’s gonna be a limit on their group size? Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
Number of possible enemy waves per encounter has increased also, got up to a third wave of attackers. Not a big fan of the waves mechanic; it’s just trying to force you to have to flee the combat and get no XP, barf. And no healing so eventually you end up having backtrack to some safe haven. But…I guess it keeps you on your toes. (But I just want to crush things as reward for a little grinding! ^ D^)
Overall though I’m enjoying the combat system, I guess I like just a straight simple fantasy combat simulator of endless random encounters and watching numbers go up–with some nice atmosphere and the occasional amusing occurrence. ; D
I do kind of want to explore the dungeon a little though and do some mapping in Photoshop so uh well we’ll see how the next power peak push goes.
This is probably unnecessarily reductive, but I feel like many of these “clever” first person puzzlers with a Portal-esque gimmick are made by people who rather than being puzzle game fans just thought Portal was neat. I think this generally leads to the puzzle design on average not being quite as well developed or dug deep into, so you get some cool moments and possibly a chill trip through the game for a few hours but rarely anything more than that.
Like say what you will about Blow but he plays and thinks a lot about puzzle games and their design.
I would describe Stephen’s Sausage Roll as at least a few clever mechanics BTW, both the rotational and vertical sokoban elements at least weren’t widely examined beforehand. I keep trying random steam puzzle game demos (played an interesting chinese one earlier today I may write about elsewhere here in the near future) and let me just say that many smallish devs were inspired by SSR.
I don’t know what version of Returnal I was playing but weapon proficiency was 100% not permanent, I started with a fresh slate after each death.
FWIW I put about two hours into it and aside from unlocking the melee blade and I guess the key to the boss room I did not get a single permanent upgrade, I think some ether carried over but I generally never had that much of it (I love opening cursed stuff).
Also like 90% of the enemies I faced were those blue things that stayed far away and fired a slow wide spread of easily avoidable bullets that never hit me, with the occasional bigger angry thing that’d dash at me. Maybe later in the game things get more interesting but unless there were two big enemies in the room at the same time (or they spawn right on top of me >_>) combat wasn’t much. I just played the first chapter of Guardians of the Galaxy tonight and I’d describe their third person shooting as comparable so far. I would assume Returnal’s late game would probably develop more than GotG’s though.
So yeah, I’m not sure if you mean that after the opening hours things get like that, or your runs need to be X long to get benefits out of it, but you are not describing the game I played yesterday at all. Maybe we just have different definitions of extensive or generous, but I got basically zilch.
feel physically exhausted by the system shock remake. i had a very busy week, but just generally I regret playing this on harder difficulties. It’s so long and the goals are so involved. i am holding onto the memory i had of it hours ago, but it’s horrible to play atm. i need rest
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