The word has definitely lost potency through over-application.
So I ended up going back at it on hard and then expert, unlocking every racer and even the last two races before petering out at about 212 stars. I think that’ll do, I don’t have the heart to press on with especially hard traffic or tank battles.
I started up The Fall and had to restart a couple of times due to the game always crashing at a certain point (error has been in there ages, devs never bothered to fix it but at least their quick fix suggestion still works). It is an interesting little thing but I have the same worries I do with any adventure-type game that decides to include iffy gunplay.
the worst thing you can say about people aping super metroid is ‘man this isn’t as good as super metroid which the creator clearly loves’
that’s… okay tho
it is the nature of great art to inspire a bunch of not-as-great art and that’s how creators learn their craft
my high school lit teacher used to advocate writing out famous passages to get the feel of the words. he’s a published (nyt best-selling?) author and poet now so maybe he was on to something
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I knew you would. The game is just that good. I stopped around 212 too.
Well that escalated quickly…
I wouldn’t either, for I was using it as a comparative analogy and keeping consistency (as @sleepysmiles used the term) with a streaming dialogue about the indie scene’s creative integrity. I mean, use whatever analogy you like if it helps you sleep at night.
It has? I’m new here, so I wasn’t aware that it has been discussed in every conceivable context.
You’re being facetious, right? You know no one thinks like that, yea? It’s just a personified caricature of your frustrations with others not being confluent with your worldview, true?
Aping is not the problem regarding the indie scene as a whole. It’s not about being as good as Super Metroid either. Why try to match it? It’s something more deeper than that, a lack of vision and having a powerful message. Or as @jodeaux put it, soulless.
I used Super because I recently played it and it was fresh in my mind. I could have used an indie game as an example too, for I’m not against those games or the community itself, it was just that Super came to mind. That’s it, that’s all.
It has a distinctly pre-Trumpian connotation now imo
[quote=“DOS, post:4629, topic:68, full:true”]Aping is not the problem regarding the indie scene as a whole. It’s not about being as good as Super Metroid either. Why try to match it? It’s something more deeper than that, a lack of vision and having a powerful message. Or as @jodeaux put it, soulless.
[/quote]
sure but this goes back to this
all art and all artists (except the truly exception, cf. prince) start out derivative of their forebears and grow into themselves by practice, refinement, and in some sense life experience.
b) there’s a lot of ‘soulless’* art out there but those creators generally still wouldn’t have anything interesting to say if their art took any other form than the one it did. sturgeon’s law applies here: 90% of everything is crap, and to me it’s a bit trite to complain about it.
*(if you want to use soulless as a definitive, i personally try and avoid it bc the term assumes the speaker has a sort of objective viewpoint that isn’t actually possible.)
anyways this is a long-winded way of saying i’m not super fussed that bad indie games exist, there’s more than enough good ones to justify it. not having a go at you! just thinking out loud
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are y’all out here saying bad games are bad
get that shit outta here
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Yea, I see what you’re saying. Where does that mantra come from? The old Califronia Poet’s Society? I remember Samuel R. Delany mentioning it in his book About Writing. Good stuff for sure.
sorry man, i realize that post came off as pretty aggressive
my frustration is with the cynicism that always surrounds movements of independent work once any kind of content pattern emerges, like as soon as things start to resemble each other folks act as if the work is bankrupt by virtue of being just a tiny bit samey
obviously this work is being done and consumed in volume because it’s relevant to people in some way, because there’s an audience that actually likes it and draws from it. it’s one thing to dislike an artistic zeitgeist on the basis of the actual content but it’s another to dismiss genres of work entirely bc hipsters
of course super metroid is like the perfect videogame, it doesn’t mean that everything that draws inspiration from it falls short as a whole work because it falls short of being super metroid
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Yea that’s cool, dude. We all have our moments. I’ve been there myself. Don’t sweat it 
I get you, but my point was not about games being made that resemble each other, but actually relying on such things mechanically and aesthetically and ending it there. Why are these mechanics here? What does the aesthetics mean in the greater scheme of things presented in the game? While the inspirations are apparent (and very much appreciated) the finer details are just barren; it lacks a “voice” in the mire.
But I also forget, as @stylo pointed out, that some of these devs are making their first or second game and that experience is required to hone the craft and skills of making a potentially excellent game.
After all, Super Metroid would not have existed without the experiments of Metroid I & II.
I’ll just leave it at that and be done with it.
It’s a pretty common thought pattern.
See: every boring thinkpiece on [[[Millennials]]] that targets a vaguely defined group’s mere existence.
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Belmont’s Revenge’s Hard Mode is interesting. There’s not much about it that’s different, except that and makes more enemies’ hits–specifically, monsters in the precise middle of the annoyance scale–take away whip upgrades. Also, since it’s password-activated, it forces you to finish the game in one go.
Other observations: Is the Soleiyu fight the first instance of a battle against an enemy who could be a player character (see: Maxim, Julius, Albus)? If so, it’s a not-entirely successful first attempt–I’m not sure this concept works with Classicvania mobility. On a similar note, the game’s Dracula fight is terrible, starting off being far too hard–really, game, if you’re going to keep Dracula only vulnerable to headshots, making the stage have platforms is just sadistic–until it swings around to become entirely rote-based. Finally, I am charmed by the mechanic of only making bosses appear after the player collects an otherwise useless (gameplay-wise) item.
So is it worth playing, then, if I’ve played the sequel? Oh, good! I should get it, then.
That’d be CV3
EDIT: just to be clear, in case it seemed like I was referring to Grant/Alucard/Sypha
I thought the Fall was great. Don’t worry about the gunplay, it’s more another puzzle element than a real action/twitch mechanic. Made me think about Flashback of all the things.
first: i apologize for shitting on tomb raider (psx) way back
second: can we talk about prince of persia/another world/flashback/heart of darkness and how they connect to tomb raider, and further if there are other 3D games that more appropriately capture the stilted jank of Another World (there’s a flashback sequel in 3d i haven’t tried yet, i assume that’s the spot to start)
i guess dragon’s lair is sort of in the same vein. hm. i could make a thread for this.
This sounds interesting, I can see clear control/character animation influences but the game around them feels real different
i’m really interested in “things like [x]” threads, usually with the word “like” as rigorously defined as possible. in this case it would basically be about tracing a line from dragon’s lair/prince of persia through eric chahi’s work and then seeing what recent stuff sort of fits as well
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I mean, I can see the relation with Dragon’s Lair (high graphical fidelity at the expense of limited control), but I think QTE games are essentially different from the cinematic platformers.
I honestly don’t know any other 3D games that are such blatant 3-dimensional transformations of cinematic platformers as Tomb Raider. Weirdly I don’t think there were hardly any Tomb Raider-likes, despite its huge popularity. But I could easily be wrong or just forgetting shit.
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I have this personal theory that if I could remove one game from existence it would be Super Mario 64, just because it “solved” so many moving in 3d issues so early on that most games just fell in line behind it. Tomb Raider I believe was in development around the same time so it had to figure things out on its own, and you have other early 3d platformers such as Jumping Flash, but they more or less became endangered much earlier than one would historically assume because of Mario 64 kicking things a few years ahead of schedule. It was a good game but… I’d have liked to have seen a few more years of experimentation before things became so codified.
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