Nice, I’ll give this a try! Thanks for the tip. I could use something as cute and cozy as this game right now.
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Well I tried to give Jedi Outcast another chance, for over an hour, but I can’t get past how awful the shooting feels. I thought something must be wrong with my game/computer but the internet has reassured me otherwise. It’s just mind-shaggingly shoddy shit, some kind of terrible combination of the projectiles being too slow, their hitboxes being too small or nonexistent (like just a single point of contact), the hitboxes of enemies being too small (seems about 1-to-1 with the character geometry, headshots do more damage but you end up mostly hitting the torso/upper limbs and the damage done to these parts varies in a way that makes it a total toss up as to how many shots any given enemy will take before dying (if you can hit them at all that is! no auto-aim and I swear I’ve stood dead still in front of a guy and watched my lasers spread past/go through them (this is the Quake engine for christ’s sake!)).
Also enemy AI is some of the most hyper skittery stuff I’ve seen in a while, often totally unpredictable about where they’ll run to and no animation indication (ditto for hitting them, no recovery window or else it’s nigh imperceptible (contrasted with the hilariously over the top death flips and corkscrew spins but all the preceding jank renders these random and unenjoyable). I was unable to get any sense of feel or control over these guns.
A real bummer now that I’ve seen some of the more promising level designs ahead but I gotta call it quits on this one. Sometimes a game makes such a bad first impression there’s no recovering from it or getting through it and life’s too short.
If it’s all some plan to highlight the eventual force powers, Seinfeld must be invoked again, Jerry-voiced:
“But I don’t wanna be a Jedi!”
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obvs the game isn’t for you but for anyone else who is thinking of facing to bloodshed
the starting briar pistol has an extremely useful charge shot for an alt fire that makes it a practical main weapon until you get the disruptor rifle/bowcaster
the stormtrooper rifle I tended to just spam the alt fire to get through those early levels or just stuck with the briar pistol. It’s probably just an odd game design joke to make the stormtrooper rifle as useless as it appears to be in the movies.
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Cheat and level skip to jedi times. No one can stop you.
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After I posted, that dawned on me, possible third chance coming lol
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I spent a few weeks just settting a wall of Dark Jedi and a wall of Jedi and seeing them go at it in 2001.
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Yeah, I also think it’s good but share your criticism over accessibility. The original game was two buttons: 1 dash/throw/block, 1 lob.
The new game has 1 dash/throw/block, 1 lob/drop, 1 jump, 1 slap shot, 1 super.
These new controls put a large burden on a new player, but once you internalize the controls it doesn’t feel like you have that many more options than before. On a tactical level, it feels maybe 1.5x as complex, but on an input level it’s 2.5x as complex. I’d bet some folks bounce off of it pretty fast feeling like they don’t “get it”, simply because they can’t remember all the controls and don’t really have an idea when to use what option.
I think there needed to be another design iteration where they reduced the moveset down to a point where only one additional button was needed. In the original game the first button is very overloaded and contextual, and I don’t see why that couldn’t have been the case for the additional moves (granted they’d have to do some work to make all the functions of the new button seem conceptually related in some way).
I’m having a lot of fun playing it now, but I think I’m still putting the original on when I have guests over because it’s way way easier to pick up and play.
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Just finished a…12CC of Grand Cross Renovation, which I had never heard of but then @wourme bought it for me. Thanks!!!
Also: Holy shit!!! !!! !!!
What an incredible sensory overload kinda game, absolutely thrilling, just a total nightmare in the best possible way. I love it and I’m excited to go back and figure out what the fuck I was even looking at.
The risk/reward of having a generous life bar that’s also the energy bar for your (only reasonably damaging) weapon is really cool, and it definitely rewards riding that line scorewise. The fact that it eats bullets means this game is more about managing the meters, some situational awareness, and good timing than it is about dodging bullets…although there’s that too!
Absolutely fantastic, cannot recommend it enough. I bought a copy of it for @Godamn_Milkman immediately after finishing the prologue. It’s that good.
Real shmup-heads may disagree but I found it a thrilling 45 minutes.
Basically what I wanted out of Rym 9000 but it doesn’t crash and looks and plays better.
Maybe I will try to 1CC it? I feel like it would be in my skillset despite how poorly I did on the last few levels.
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I realize that one of this game’s biggest flaws is the lack of a time limit
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Ooh I know what you mean, but the delicious thing about BoI is how willing it is to let you break and exploit it at all moments. It would feel different with an imposed timer. But I think it would be cool if some things were related to time, like after the 12 min mark you won’t ever see certain rare rooms necessary for progression or not… could be cool, may already even be like that too. BoI is mysterious and expansive.
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yeah it’s nice that i can save and quit whenever and come back to my game, but i also think time based objectives would necessitate different game balance that might be more fun to me, but that’s all in theory. maybe the answer is to just make the roguelite that i want to play
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Thanks for this description! I was pretty certain the visual overload was something I couldn’t handle and Feel like you confirmed that.
It’s a FUCKING LOT.
Thanks @VastleCania for the game. I got to level 6 on two credits first go. There’s some cool ideas and execution in here. Some foibles, but one hell of a game and more excitement through small things in a SHUMP than I’ve seen in a number of other games with bigger budgets and so on. It’s super creative and fun.
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I love how if you reach one of the last levels with the right combo of items, you can effectively generate an infinite number of items, which causes the game to crash if you shoot at all.
Now that’s my kind of gaming! Part of why I love Binding of Isaac over other action-roguelikes of its ilk is because it lets you abuse stuff like that.
(I usually try to beat Mom within 20m though so I can get the Boss Rush items)
20m for the Boss Rush, which gives you two items (more if you cheese it) and makes you fight every boss in waves. It’s a good bump in power, especially if you haven’t been working the system for Devil/Angel rooms and have mostly relied on regular drops.
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it also doesn’t help that the the tutorial is a somewhat-poorly-written virtual instruction manual that doesn’t really explain what each thing does or why you would use it
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i love binding of isaac, great game. the newgroundsy nature of it never really bothered me because it feels kinda earnest and messy and is trying to Do Things. i don’t necessarily care that much about the Things it does, but i respect it for trying. some of the music is incredible
it might have been my top action-roguelike before i got obsessed with noita. noita forever
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Bowser’s Fury feels really out of steam conceptually. Shadow Luigi? Big Cat Mario?
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I think they hit a weird saturation point when they rereleased that after Odyssey, because 3D World was originally, like, the best linear co-op level design they’d ever done by a mile but pretty boring for a solo player until the very late game if they hadn’t been away from Mario for years, and Odyssey was their BOTW-style Endless Appetizers release that you’re already nauseous after
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When Mario 3D World tried to do something clever it was a little bit delightful, like say that level with platforms shaped like NES Mario sprites that you fall on from a great height, and reveal themselves to be little landscapes from closer up.
Whereas Bowser’s Fury’s big new idea is “repeatedly interrupt what I’m doing to have another boring Bowser fight”. Or the reverse of that “wait next to a Bowser block until he finally arrives”
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I was having a lot of trouble in the post credits Mario 3d worlds but then I remembered there are other playable characters and that makes it a lot easier
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