I thought Shovel Knight was a very pleasant jumpman with great music. I played through it start to finish at a game night with friends, and while there was a bit of You Just Don’t Get It, Man in the audience with regards to the musical styling, it was a swell time. :>
I got my settlement in Banished up to about 375 people and it taxed my resources almost to the breaking point. Then there was a bit of a die off and the community seems to have stabilized at ~350. I’ve run out of space though so I think that’s about it as far as growing the population. At this point I’m just watching it run on cruise control rather than play it so I think I can put it away for now.
If there’s one thing I learned from this game it’s that humans are not sustainable 
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beat Steamworld Dig (3DS). a nice 5 hours mindlessly spent.
now playing Steamworld Heist and it seems like a 2D Codename Steam.
Also played a TON of "Puzzle Quest’ on 3DS and PSP - who knew that adding a meta around match-3 could be so addictive? Why isn’t this on the app stores? Anyway, I am not playing this game any more, I refuse to dedicate more time to match 3.
Started up Radiant Historia, too much text but battle system seems snappy.
I wonder if the divisiveness around Shovel Knight depends on whether or not you played and beat Duck Tales and Mega Man 2 as a kid?
I did not do this, and so Shovel Knight felt like a tightly designed platformer with original takes on old concepts. Maybe it was just a bunch of overt references to games I never played?
I dunno though, this feels like a case of “the game was designed TOO WELL” which has never made sense to me. It’s a charming game through and through.
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It is, in various licensed forms. Marvel PQ is a thing, as is Magic The Gathering PQ, and a newer WWE version called Champions. I think PQ2 is as well?
Not A Hero is what you’d expect when OlliOlli folks take on Elevator Action
It seems nice except the frame of ‘hired killer executing criminals to support a monster’s political campaign’ isn’t something I can stomach after 2016. The humor hinges on banal bureaucratic powerpoints about kills = votes and that’s just not angled enough satire that I can then pick up the gun myself
So why is this stomach-churning when Robocop feels plenty appropriate anno 2017? I need to think about tone and inflection on satire to dig this out.
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I have been playing this, excellent time waster. The PvP seems kind of dumb to me though, it would be better if you could battle actual humans.
I got a 5 star Takumi and didn’t realize how lucky I was till I started poking around online and realized how much everyone hates him. Also I play with the volume off so I thought Takumi was a lady? I should have known from the lack of cleavage.
5 star takumi was like, the third character I got. I’ve had ridiculous luck in this game.
I’m Takumi-less but I’ve been enjoying myself plenty with Setsuna, who I’m fairly sure is constantly stoned off her ass.
This has been a consistent strain of thought reaching back to IC. I understand some of the thinking behind it, maybe. It’s just interesting that it’s persisted for so long. In another medium I’d assume the criticism would fall in line with that terrible earnest-seeking binary of “Slick Production = Corporate = Dishonest = Bad || Clipping e-guitar + lo-fi = Anti-Corporate = Honest = Good” but I think the criticism from game to game on these boards has referred to visual “polish” and how willing the game is to make a mess/let you get frustrated. Flow? Or something? Idk
I get this feeling about Naughty Dog, particularly in Last of Us, which follows “how to screenwrite” so well in addition to “how to game design” that I am never surprised or invested; my only pleasure is from a clinical evaluation of how well they’re pulling off the beats that, yes, yes, should be right in this exact spot.
Latter-day Nintendo has a similar issue particularly in Mario with a cadence of ‘delightful surprise’ that I find exhausting and ultimately shallow though it’s not terribly; I’m not a big fan of Tokyo’s Mario output but I keep appreciating the craft.
In the interest of being genuine I’m assuming the logic is that Shovel Knight seems “machine produced” in how it calls back to old nostalgia and successful design. If that were the case, if it were lifted directly from old game titles and didn’t experiment or take risks, I could see the point of argument. But that’s not actually what’s happening in the game, so I’m confused each time the case is made.
SK doesn’t feel “by the book” so much as it feels like genuinely clever expansions on old ideas that became obsolete in the progress of technology.
it me, shovel knight hater
i don’t want to take credit for anything, honestly, but this talk probably dates back to my aggressive shitting on SK several months ago
for me personally, SK is too boring of a game to actually play enough of it to argue about it, but it’s definitely, definitely, definitely not a case of [quote]
“the game was designed TOO WELL”
[/quote]
it’s fun to press the buttons and stuff! but the entire experience fills me with existential terror. truly.
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it’s a fun game, I beat it without hating myself, but the designed too well definitely applies because it doesn’t convey anything other than Level Design From That Iwata Asks thing. I can see that this is a weird complaint, but when it is so by the books, when in every room you know that the next one will be the same challenge but with holes of death instead of safe floors, when the influences are so traceable, the game seems like an amalgamation of gamasutra’s first page
that’s why my favourite parts were the ones where it bends the rules, like that kickstarter mansion thing and the final boss. the game shows heart in these parts, but the rest is a laboratory.
tbh “designed too well” is a nonsense phrase. it cannot possibly be a coherent criticism based on my understanding of those three words in succession
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it depends if you think of “well designed” as a sucession of interesting ways to interact with the game (with contrast or wabi-sabi, for example) or if you think about it as a sucession of efficient (not necessarily interesting) ways to convey what they want
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my point is if you are finding flaws in it, those are in fact lapses in design, regardless of whether that design hits all the relevant checkboxes. if it hits them and is still flawed, well… take your pick. something doesn’t add up
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I played like 20 minutes of Night in the Woods and feel a little ambivalent about it. It’s obviously a striking game with a confident art style but I can tell where it’s heading and I’m fairly certain the themes its tackling are well-worn at this point. I will admit that maybe I’m no longer on the same wave length as the ideal demographic for this game, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of imagination I’m seeing in the writing.
I for one am absolutely sick of stories about millennial ennui and the hopelessness of middle-american culture. There are scarier things in life than coming home from college and seeing your friends slip into obscurity or losing touch with your parents. However, “indie” games sure seem preoccupied with concerns like these when the real pressing issues are never really addressed in these toothless pieces of shit.
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I think our language isn’t communicating properly. Design implies both a process, repeatable, efficient, communicative, and the intent of making games, a form of pop art, requiring creativity, wit, and insight.
I get paid for 80% the former and 20% the latter. I get bored by games made following entirely the former; best practices as known at the time. I revel in heaps of ideas, roll around in them (by the way everyone needs to grab Oikopolis Oikospiel right now), but I can also say they’re not well designed, or done carelessly or amateurishly – it wouldn’t meet standards of work I produce, but it interests me more.
It’s funny both how breathlessly we uncovered these emotional spaces untouched by games and fell out of love with them before the Kickstarter was released. Nearby someone gripes about Hyper Light Drifter feeling derivative…of an aesthetic it shocked into creation with its Kickstarter!
Culture is burning too fast, or, everything just barely pre-2017 feels hopelessly out of date. Actually I think this is true and as brought up in the decades thread we just hit a hard cleave.