is it an actual nes game, can we expect bootleg cartridges in the future?
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Yeah, Limited Run is doing preorders for NES carts right now, so I gotta imagine I’ll be able to boot this thing up on my Mister before too long.
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such a good idea that would break balatro open from a “numbers go up” game to an actual game game that is satisfying beyond the beginner novelty level. most runs have no identity at the mid/higher stakes, where optimal play resorts to fishing for certain winning builds to survive past the early antes.
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The suit identity thing sounds great. I think there should also be some kind of super suit, like a star suit that you can turn cards into to do crazy things.
I got the game yesterday and the most surprising thing so far is that there’s no way I’ve seen yet to manipulate the number on a card? Maybe I haven’t gotten those abilities yet, but something like: subtract 1 from a card and add it to another. That way you could have a hand like 44688 and turn it into a run by making the 8 into a 7 and the 4 into a 5. Things like that.
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there are a few ways to manipulate numbers with tarot and celestial cards but they don’t feel very deep tactically. the best use of them is in a hand but you’re often opening them from packs which makes you use them immediately for a strategic advantage but no short term tactical advantage.
the common tarot ones let you add 1 to a couple cards or copy a card exactly onto another. celestial tend to be random destruction or replacement of cards.
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speaking of solitaire this just came out
but since it’s from the baba creator (and having directly experienced some of his more recent experimental output) i’m 95% sure at least some of these variants will be brain burny to the point of unplayability to me.
i’ll still probably drop $3 on it though just to see what fucked up shit this man has come up with. guy’s super creative and prolific and even though a lot of it isn’t personally for me i respect it.
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tarot cards/arcana packs are often the most tactical part of the game that you can actually control (jokers are too random). they are all about culling your deck. with 52 initial cards, there’s a fair chance you won’t get the cards you actually want. arcana packs usually have at least one tarot card that lets you remove a card, turn a card into another card, or turn a card into a “blank” (stone card). once youve determined your run strategy, you can use tarots to remove less useful cards and have a smaller, more focused deck in order to get the cards you actually want. for example, if you’re doing a 2 pair run with jokers that incentive playing face cards, you use tarots to get rid of non-face cards or duplicate face cards in order to guarantee the 2 pairs you want.
spectral packs (what you’re calling celestial packs) are about gambling, they are high risk/high reward (more like medium reward imo) moves (duplicate random joker, destroy other jokers; turn all cards into a single random suit; remove 3 random cards and “enhance” 3 other cards).
both of these aren’t useful in the early game, they are tempting in early game as you may not see any good jokers, but never really work well and are a waste of $. they are really only useful mid/late game once you are surviving with jokers, have already started shaping your deck, and have excess cash.
celestial packs (upgrading hands) are probably better early game, especially in an early ante shop where you have limited cash and no good jokers available. upgrading flush, straight, full house, or 2 pair can get your through the first ante or so without any jokers.
but again, the game isn’t super tactical. it sort of plays itself once you get the gist.
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still waiting for him to finish environmental station alpha 2…
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Okay, I went back and played that Rugrats demo entirely in the 8-bit mode, and it rules. There’s a completely out of place (inside a sandbox that I guess Tommy imagines is Egypt, but with fighter planes?) boss fight with the fake baby brother Angelica has a nightmare about, set to an extremely ominous 8-bit version of the main Rugrats theme.
Half the fight is basically the Bowser fight from SMB3, the other half involves throwing stunned enemies at the baby’s colossal head.
Both the sprite for the giant baby and the even larger giant baby head are incredibly grotesque, and even moreso by being just like, pink and baby blue.
I get why they had to make an HD version of this, but even though it’s well drawn and everything, it feels like an afterthought. All of the weird title card stuff, the squiggles and shapes and whatnot, only show up in the 8-bit version? Maybe the HD title cards are placeholders or something for now, but I’m tellin’ ya…NES version is where it’s at.
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Played through Alwa’s Awakening this week, a sort of NES-inspired Metrovania with more of a focus on platforming than combat (it actually has a version rejiggered to work on the NES so while it cheats a bit it is close enough to 8-bit faithful). It is focused much more on exploring the world than fighting through it as while you only ever have 3 HP max very few enemies can put you in peril, while there are enough instant death spikes (an oddly some spikes that just do the normal 1HP of damage) to keep you on your toes. The bosses can be a bit tricky but mostly come down to slower paced pattern recognition.
Utterly inessential but I found it enjoyable to work my way through for the 6 or so hours it took. It shifted around the traditional lock & keys by never giving you a double jump, instead mostly tying progression to a spell that can produce blocks you can stand and push on (and eventually can float on water) and another that produces a bubble that slowly floats up for a bit and acts as a platform before popping. I give it a rating of neat.
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Honestly, probably a reason for the game’s success. ‘Games discourse’, as a series of noticeably disparate cross-platform conversations by ppl interested in the same subject in potentially very different ways, has its most noticeable peaks in volume & attention when everyones talking about the same thing. As a kind of market boosterism for indie pop-works that take established ideas, remakes them as novel and smooth, and include some sort of hook that embraces conversation, it works great.
Balatro seems 2 slot right in that because it isnt particularly challenging in a genuinely different sense. Also, probably easier to make, market, and sell a game as “innovative” if you don’t need to spend any time second-guessing yourself or researching reasons that wouldn’t be true.
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both of these aren’t useful in the early game
My friend if you get Ouija (“all cards in hand become 1 random rank, -1 hand size”) you can just fish for 5-of-a-kind for the rest of the game, AND have it mostly work out despite the hand size.
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I think i’m done with pacific drive, I spent a half hour doing a run so I could get the resources to unlock fixing lightbulbs because both of my lights were out on the car, and you can’t just craft a lightbulb to fix it, you have to craft a lightbulb fixing kit, which required unlocking it in the tech tree first, which required going on a run just to get the energy points needed to do so. the game has a day night cycle and I had to do this in the dark, without headlights. when i finally had it crafted it fell on the floor because my inventory was full and I couldn’t reach it because it was under the car. so I got in the car and started just ramming it against the garage wall, which causes damage. I took the car outside and started hitting it with random objects to cause even more damage.
i fucking hate crafting. i fucking hate tech trees. i fucking hate gathering resources. i fucking hate gating gameplay behind all this bullshit progression. i fucking hate how the game just stretches this out to be overly fucking long. i have been playing the game for over 8 hours and haven’t unlocked the next area of the game because my car is too fragile. everything is a fucking nesting doll of crafting recepites and tech tree unlocks. fuck offffffff
When I played Jalopy it had a similar problem, but you could cheese it by restarting at the first area and then selling off stuff you had over and over until you had enough cash to keep yourself going. I remember one point finding a case of wine on the side of the road, which was enough scratch to get me on the path to finishing the game. In Pacific Drive you use too many resources crafting shit because everything has durability and eventually just fucking breaks so you end up with a lack of one or two resources to do basic stuff like repair or replenish things that do break. and things break A LOT.
this is why I stopped playing No Man’s Sky. They changed all the crafting formulas so that everything takes 3-4 things instead of 1 or 2, and it made doing basic shit in the game so much more harder. I hated it so much. it put too much friction on things.
I mean you know me, I ride 70’s mopeds, they break down all the time, you have to maintain and repair them, sometimes on the side of the road. this stuff is my jam. I play games with this stuff in them all the time. This game should be catnip to me, and instead it’s just turning the game design meta screws in making me hate myself for wasting my very tiny amount of free time I have in an evening.
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Forgive me for saying the obvious but fixing and maintaining stuff rocks irl because it is physical and you’re interfacing with a complex machine where everything is interconnected whereas something like pacific drive is just giving you chores at calculated intervals. You don’t really need to internalize the complexities of the machine you’re working on. You don’t have to diagnose problems, you can’t actually jury-rig solutions. The game just tells you whats broken and which resources you need to make the part the game asks of you. It’s busy work that misses the appeal of the actions it emulates.
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youre absolutely right, these games give players so much homework to do before you get to the good stuff
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like this is the second playsession i had that ended like this. a full on hour of misery
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as someone who played a lot of s:tw i think this is the best possible outcome!
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yeah it’s make-work for children, fetch quests “just like a real job”
tho I was thinking of Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 and its almost complete lack of tech tree. need a replacement sway bar? you could grind to save enough for an improved benchtop repair kit… or order it from the shop with immediate delivery & completely bypass the friction
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souping up a brick in forizon is cool, i loved it
i’ll do more if they actually make another one
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i didn’t get a chance to say it before there were like 50 posts about it but i stopped playing balatro for a lot of the same reasons stated in the thread earlier - it didn’t really feel like there were many paths that a deck could take to get all the way to the end, every winning run i had was me doubling down on a single hand type (usually flushes) regardless of what kind of deck or tarot path or joker path i chose
my conception of this is probably not actually the case! but i can’t really see what this game looks like even if it isn’t outside of the flow where if i haven’t started down a deck path that i feel like will get me to the end it’s not worth playing out the run
it’s made me appreciate slay the spire more where even though the dynamic of determining whether or not your deck will be good enough to see the whole thing through earlier in the run is present, there’s more variation in what constitutes a good deck even within one of the classes and the acts are structured in a way that you still feel like you get to make a lot of decisions in the second and third acts whereas balatro seems to just play itself out after the first few rounds like @jdoe says
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