I think I objectively had more fun with Skull Island Rise of Kong, the game where my controls irreversibly broke and I had to restart the game twice.
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Seeing the talk of Bioshock Infinite and I have to note that I had the good fortune to start my playthrough of that game on Election Day 2016 which… probably didn’t help.
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Battle Axe: Henk Nieborg is a very good pixel artist and his pixel art in this game is very good
from how the game plays, I’m going to argue that he’s not as good a designer as he is a pixel artist by a fair margin
I appreciate that the game is literally 4 levels and 20-some minutes long while also realizing if I had paid the full price of 30 dollars, I’d be very cross
I guess the meat of the game is supposed to be the infinite mode, which plays like a simpler version of Zombies Ate My Neighbors with randomly generated levels (except without the threatening aura said concept would have) but that has two tilesets, one piece of music and the difficulty plateaued early enough that I mercy killed my first run after 90 minutes with no deaths
anyway, I owned a Genesis in the 90s so I actually like Amiga games and ultimately I think it’s Okay, but it seems like a weird buy at full price when Chaos Engine is ten dollars and is probably the game you want because you’re looking for a maze pervert game about finding knicknacks because you have bad Amiga brain
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okay but what’s your opinion on xeno crisis?
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Owns.
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Even after beating it I played more Death Stranding tonight. Just delivering as Sam Porter Bridges The Man Who Delivers.
The deliverying was good. Then I did the Director’s Cut missions finally in my 45 hour of a replay.
It is very slight and not worth anything, however it points the story to be more blatantly about (not a spoiler for anyone that has played DS any amount of time) The Government is using Aborted Babies For Science!!! Don’t know how I feel about that. I mean that was an undercurrent for the whole game, but making your bonus missions about eh.
Guess time to finally delete this game and free up that harddrive space.
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I’d like to amend two things I said about Indika above.
- On reflection, the game’s philosophical ideas are embedded in events just as much as SOMA’s, on top of the conversations between characters. One thing I’d kind of overlooked in the spectacle of it all is the way the game ties two of its themes together, the value of gaining points and levels in a video game and the benefits of religious ritual. This is really driven home by the final scene in the game.
- Indika is more than a walking simulator, even if you set aside the action scenes that I mentioned can be a little frustrating. There are also environmental puzzles and some of those are clever.
It crossed my mind yesterday that 2024 seems to have already had more video game releases that really stand out than all of 2023. At least for me.
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I screamed in disgust when this happened. I maybe didn’t put together that, now that we have had shocking violence to represent the loss of life, it is time to do that constantly for a dozen hours.
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but i thought 2023 was supposed to be the BEST YEAR EVER for videogames?? geoff keighley and my favorite videogame content creators online all said that so it must be true!!
I have no opinion yet as I have not yet played/bothered to steal it but I’m going to argue it’s better because it’s, from what I’ve seen, a much more focused piece of design
forcing you to 1CC the game is a sick joke though, because you won’t know unless someone told you or you play through the game
it being an actual twin-stick game is, I reckon, also a plus in its favor (Battle Axe has three characters and two have “hold shoot to strafe while firing” while the third has “hold for a fixed eight-way shot” and you’ll never guess which character feels bad to play)
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I have never understood videogame’s absolute pornographic depiction of gruesome deaths up close that are performed by the player. This is one reason I am loathe to play The Last Of Us because it would appear, in every piece of gameplay video I watch of the series, that the entire game is a pretense to make the most gristly and violent kill animations possible.
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what was it, Mortal Kombat? where animators got actual PTSD from studying and rendering human bodies being destroyed in countless ways like fuckin why lol. the older games just had like Mileena peel back her mask and go AWWMP and the other guy disappears cuz she ate them and then she spits up their bones hahaha FATALITY. ive watched comps of the newer ones and a lot of them arent like fun to watch! theyre just gross! i wanna punch some ninja guy so hard his torso explodes not hit a button combo to get a Saw cutscene
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Yeah I think it was MKX in particular, since that one had a lot of really nasty, detailed vivisection fatalities.
It’s a chain of thought of “damn Jax just knocked the top half of that guy’s head off and put out his cigar on the tongue and throat hole” to “wait how did they render that” to “ah…shit.”
I think Netherrealm is also one of the few big game companies in Chicago besides like, Iron Galaxy (RIP Volition), so a lotta young hopeful game artists are probably signing on and being fed to, uh, a feed of a meat grinder.
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yeccch
the last one i played it seemed like every other move you could punch your opponent in the gut so hard they puke, i cant decide if i also think thats too nasty or is just really funny
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That happens in SFII = o
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I was never certain if those were barf or jets of nose blood
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KID ICARUS
weird game! i didn’t really love playing it, but the more i think about it after the more fondly i feel about it. If i had this on NES as a kid, or even on GBA in high school as when i played Metroid, it might have become one of my beloved favorites.
It’s a quirky failed experiment im predisposed to like, a 3rd branch off the Nintendo action/adventure/RPG tree that didn’t grow anywhere. Its hard to argue that Legend of Zelda and Metroid of Samus don’t cover Kickarus’s genre appeal between the two of them, and like Zelda 2 comes along in a few years and eats what’s left of its ARPG-platformer lunch, and it makes KI a unique dead end answer.
Kid stands out from its sister games by being way more arcadey. You’re on a short, linear, and grueling journey, with only time to pit stop in bonus rooms, and a score tally at the end of each stage. There’s an incentive & expectation that you replay the game for mastery and beat your high score. Other than the unlimited password continues, it seems more like a game you retry from the bottom over many sittings until you can clear it in one, instead of slowly chipping it away in one character lifetime like you would a Zelda
So where that intersects the adventure RPG mystery is necessarily really different from Zelda and Metroid hiding secrets in screens you’re repeatedly wandering through. Instead, part of your process of mastering Kid Icarus is learning its arcane mechanics so you can eventually make a perfect run. Learning where the strength raising chambers are and that you have to kill a lot of enemies without getting hit too much in order to make Zeus appear in them, or that the treasure pot rooms are a press your luck game, is gaining that classic Playground Knowledge in the same way as like, walk up 5 times on Death Mountain or bomb underneath the chozo statue. Its just you’re expected to learn it after falling down bottomless pits and getting screamed at by the grim reaper and seeing IM FINISHED! a lot
There are dungeons in this! and they’re… ok! this is where i admit though that save states really kept this game palatable. The regular stages eventually arent so bad once you have some upgrades, and its easy and painless to grind in a few places (even if you’re anti grinding the time:reward is ridiculously in your favor, i spent about 10 total minutes grinding periodically in world 1 and gained +2 strength/+3 HP upgrades). And they’re pretty fun when you get the hang of Pit’s unusual platforming physics and can shoot across more than 1/3 the screen
The dungeons (fortresses) were ok with save states, just kind of unexciting. Theres only 3 in this 13 level game and no real space to develop variety of rooms or challenges compared to like Zelda 1, so you end up going through lots of simple copy paste challenges. Like all old NES games have repurposed assets i get it, but theyre painfully apparent here. Still, relatively painless and a neat-for-its-time, unique change of pace. With save states.
Without save states the fortresses would have sucked shit/could have kissed my ass and sucked my nuts lol all thanks to notorious piece of shit game enemies the eggplant wizards 
Nastily prefiguring the worst parts of the Wario Land games, the wizards force a hard to avoid status effect on you that you can only cure by backtracking. You can see for yourself on my maps how far the eggplants are from the crosses (clinics)! Imagine having to repeat that walk every time through respawning enemies! Gahhh!! Like the rest of the game its a level of player unfriendly design i kind of admire, but imo it goes too far into time wasting meanness. Oh yeah and theyre egregiously blackfacey
Less racist but still worthy of a dishonorable mention: the plutons, who can steal your magic subweapons – which you only have limited opportunities to gather in the first place, and which dont work in fortresses theres another demerit – and cant be killed! Mean!!
ive been fascinated by Kid Icarus for years, it felt like a lacuna in my games knowledge just by being the Metroids forgotten dark mirror twin and one of the weirdo NES games that gets homage in Smash Bros and Animal Crossing and whatnot (someone at Nintendo really doesn’t want us to forget Clu Clu Land). The impenetrable mechanics and difficulty usually shut down my attempts to emulate it, and im glad i stuck it out for once. Probably just once. Might try the sequels though i hear they don’t build on this at all
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It’s somewhere between shocking and adult and badass. People watch slasher movies for the kills. Lots of folks wanna watch live-feed and faces of death.
I cannot remember my original context for this thought but like bearing witness to something that graphic is meant to imprint on our animal brain so that it doesn’t happen to us. Oh yeah it was when reddit wouldn’t stop showing me snuff videos and car crashes. So exactly what I am trying to dance around.
Like people make/made jokes (me included) about “watching the life drain out of him” or “killed a man in Reno” etc. But I am older and it is really gross and disgusting to actually stab a man in the neck and watch his soul leave his body in a video game. Like I did that! or i am supposed to watch my character scream in pain in their final moments. What the fuck?
I know lots of people, the gamers, think that is bad ass. Watching it over and over is definitely bad in a desensitivizing way and it is not worth the hundreds of human hours and PTSD.
Not sure I am going any where with this that hasn’t been said in less. The only one who should see that much viscera is a butcher. And if you can deal with that sort of thing might I recommend becoming a butcher!
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filth and violence are vital creative components. actively studying actual gore/death footage and traumatizing a lot of involuntary workers not so much, yeah, but i don’t like this “moral” approach to the concept of viscera
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