Games You Played Today ##RELOAD

and we shall be judged for it yet

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Over here remembering posting on the SB usenet group in 1995.

The Saturn is gonna be great!

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My two cents on Bastion…

I played it for about 30 minutes and said to myself, “I am never going to beat this game.”

Did not grab me.

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Bastion has the best combinations of garageband loops resembling pieces of music.

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if your first and only playthrough of shovel knight isn’t with the butt cheat enabled then you haven’t played shovel knight and are not qualified to judge it #gatekeeping #buttkeeping

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As much as we’re all sick of pixel art and chiptune indie games, I think Bastion is proof of why that (or, another lo-fi style like polygons or simple curves) is the wise option for most small developers. The problems with Bastion are mostly due to its overreaching into a high-fidelity style without the person-hours or skills to back it up. The lack of “crunch” mentioned above is mostly due to the art not having much animation, so it ends up looking good in stills but like a paper cutout play in movement. The music problem is somewhat analogous.

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And they got much better on the second go. I think Transistor has a great soundtrack that fits its world and art much better than Bastion’s, in addition to much better mechanics.

Bastion’s an alright rough draft for what indie games were in 2011. I’ll give an ex-Gamespot guy trying to break in the same slack people give to a Starmen.net poster.

Pyre looks better, too, like Capy’s Might and Magic puzzle game.

It’s still not on the herculean animation level of Indivisible, though.

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I agree in general but disagree in this case; I think Bastion’s art is feasible and plays to their strengths. Their main artist is a fantastic painter and concepter but she’s not an animator. The backgrounds and illustrations still played to her strengths and built a ‘look’ that stood out and sold the game. We all know what Bastion looks like, its color palette and its texture.

Transistor shows them learning, they had some part-time animation work additionally but they also moved their design away from something requiring more animation.

17-BIT has a) a guy really good at color and decent at environments and b) a really good animator and FX artist and sometimes they play to their strengths (spaceships, bright flashes of deep colors, lots of rocks / japanese landscape art) and sometimes they step in it (character animation expressing stories the art style/budget can’t hold).

Tons of indies look worse on their second-run ‘now with higher fidelity’ but studios greater than 4 people usually have a professional artist who can avoid that trap. The trick there is figuring out what holes remain in their skill set and avoiding those designs.

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It is dangerous to speak ill of Starseed Pilgrim here but I put about 9-12 hours into it trying to find what was enjoyable about it and I never did. I’ll see just about every puzzle-type game I come across to the end on the off chance it keeps some truly great puzzle designs until its final run (too many puzzle games do this) but man, I don’t think I ever actually successfully completed a single puzzle in all my time with it.

I assume there is some game rule that I never cracked that would have made a difference but if after that much of a time investment I never figured it out… well either I’m an idiot or the game does a bad job teaching you things. I think obscuring the rules of your game is fine up until a point, and then after said point it is just a terrible flaw; SB for the most part disagrees with me on that point.

This is a long way of saying feel free to try Starseed Pilgrim again, but by god feel free to walk away if it doesn’t register with you.

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Now that I’ve cultivated a habit over several years of collecting games out of fascination, I’m already faced with the knowledge that mental illness alone will keep me from playing everything I have in my lifetime. Add to that the sinking feeling I’ll always struggle to find employment. :frowning: Despite that, I’m still psyched about new games. I’m trying to develop a new habit of only buying a game if I know I want to play it Right Then.

iirc there’s some game mechanic that only functions in the inverted level that is never explained and without it the game is borderline impossible. getting a bubble that enables you to float which makes the architecture of the inverted space effortless to navigate

I mean, I managed to beat the first couple iterations without that but only through tedious hairpulling, it did put me off the game.

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think of it as your ‘antilibrary’ imo

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i have no idea why this build worked, but i cleared with it.

defense: basically everything

offense: badass boarding crew and, uh, a combat drone i guess?

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I admire how frustrating that would be for another player to encounter

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you don’t need to shoot ships down if you punch them apart from the inside out

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I can’t tell but mega-congrats if that’s against the post-patch boss that’s designed to shut down boarding-party builds.

So I’m playing Blaster Master Zero and it’s definitely a remake but good lord does it improve on the original to such a degree that the original is obsolete.

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I’m pretty sure the one you’re talking about has the weapons all connected to the main layout, so you can’t just take out the missile launcher by itself so easily, and that only shows up on hard mode or in the rebel stronghold event.

Only playing on normal difficulty here, while I unlock stuff.

did i complain about lego marvel super heroes in here? i could swear i did.

anyways game is worse than other lego games, the camera angles suck and there’s not enough invisible walls to make sure you don’t fall off shit

e: original post

i played lego marvel super heroes for 3 hrs

why are ppl in love with this game? it’s like any other lego game but worse, more padded, less intuitive, and has all the things about recent marvel i dont like