I always imagined this developing to entertain QA, who usually start racing completion times against each other as they play it over and over every day for months.
6 Likes
Judging by the comically short credits scroll (even solo indie games nowadays list more people as ābeta testersā at a minimum), QA and programmers were probably the same people so it makes sense QA desires would feed back into the game design
2 Likes
Yeah, I donāt know enough to know if they had specific QA at that time who went uncredited or if they were responsible for it themselves. Nowdays games are so big the developers only see a portion of it, but a 4-hour platformer probably several people know it backwards and forwards.
2 Likes
I think honestly Iām reassessing how much I like its entire ethos, which is still carrying over to a lot of todayās bigger indie action games. The problem of being very difficult but in a heavily constrained way is thereās not much way to ramp up except to become more difficult. The movement, overall, I like (could be less animation lag, obviously), and the earlier bosses are I think really good.
My major problem is the game is very boss-driven, and lifting from the Fromsoftverse they just really want you to learn the patterns and nail the timing, and that leads to a situation that later Fromsoft games tend to fall into, which is nothing in the game is really allowed to break that and thatās at odds with the any other priorities. So in HK, charms, which are pretty much the only thing of interest to pick up, canāt be very good because then you wouldnāt need to do the bosses in the right way.
So as the game goes on this fight just gets worseācharms donāt get any better, so thereās little reason to explore or fight optional bosses, and boss fights get harder (i.e., more constrained) so thereās less and less to do but memorize the pattern. At some point the game kind of falls off and by the time youāre fighting Nightmare King Grimm itās likeā¦ well why bother even doing the rest of the game. The fact that they just put him in the hub area is almost a clear nod to this ongoing development towards likeā¦ man, why even make this entire game, much less play it
15 Likes
Yeah. My experience with the endgame of Hollow Knight is getting the normal ending, futzing around for a bit, looking up the requirements for the good ending, and then quitting once I realized that Iād just be fighting a bunch of bosses I didnāt like for the sake of fighting even more bosses I know I wouldnāt like.
idk, overall I liked the game well enough, but I feel like itās got a lot of people obsessing over stuff that I am well over with by this point.
3 Likes
There are these incidental Hollow Knight characters I apparently never met because theyāre semi randomized. And I think thatās neat
I aināt played shit for a few days.
7 Likes
The Switch version of Dying Light is shockingly good. Itās been a long time since Iāve messed with the PS4 version, but it feels pretty damn close to what I recall of that one.
Only bad (?) thing is that it includes the years of DLC that came out for the older versions, so when it comes time to craft some basic gear or weapons, youāve got a huge fucking list of DLC weapon schematics you gotta scroll through before you can find what you want.
Still, pretty neat!
2 Likes
This looks really fun and completely contrary to how I perceived kaizo Mario.
2 Likes
This is making me reconsider an earlier conversation about how the late-game in Mario 3D World never gets that hard. The optional late-game content in Mario Odyssey turns out to be way harder, even though difficulty is not what Odyssey is necessarily āaboutā.
With Odysseyās wacky overcomplicated movement options they could have nightmare Kaizo areas and still always feel varied and human. Whereas with 3D Worldās strict 8-way movement and simplified acceleration system, if it had had a truly hard level, it wouldāve risked that Nightmare King Grimm āI have accidentally turned myself into a joyless robot efficiently following a scriptā experience
5 Likes
no way. the 2nd half of last of us 2 is not replaying the first half with an enemy commentary track just to get them to stop hitting the stop button during the ending cutscene so soon this time. last of us is much better than nier
3 Likes
It just occurred to me that all difficult video games basically trend towards quick time event sequences that just take a really long time to learn
5 Likes
yeah itās interesting ā i think the scene is pretty big now largely due to mario maker. namely, mario maker:
- got people excited about mario level design
- introduced more people to difficult mario levels
- frustrated level designers with its many weird and esoteric limitations
- popularized mario streamers on twitch that were already in the kaizo scene
since the community is large, there are now a wide variety of hacks available ā hacks for beginners, hacks that emphasize trolls more, hacks that emphasize precision, hacks that emphasize flow (which is how iād describe white castle).
this community also wouldnāt be possible without lunar magic, which is a impressive piece of software that lets users create entire smw hacks (think smw level editor + overworld editor + a bunch of other stuff) without having to program anything. and the community even distributes āasmā patches that can be applied to your hack that can add new elements or mechanics, fix bugs, add quick restart, etc.
some of the most complicated hacks have new mechanics for basically every level (e.g. sonic saves the world, a hack by celeste dev maddy thorson)
itās a pretty fun scene but even the ābeginnerā hacks are pretty damn hard so it takes some dedication/stubbornness/zen to get into it.
12 Likes
oh neat this hack iām playing ā take it easy world ā is teaching me new things. itās def harder than most of the hacks iāve played previously.
in smw you fall more slowly when you hold jump. this creates the concept of a āregrabā where sometimes you want to do a small bounce on an enemy (donāt hold jump) but still get more air time after the small jump. usually hacks force you to do this by putting a low spike ceiling over the enemy youāre bouncing on.
to execute a regrab, you fall on the enemy while not holding jump, and then hold jump immediately after you land on the enemy. so the timeline is something like:
donāt hold B ā small bounce enemy ā B asap
in take it easy, i just had to do what iād describe as an early regrab, i guess? i had to fall quickly to get to an enemy in time so i couldnāt hold jump, but i wanted to do a big bounce off of that enemy. so my timeline looked something like this:
donāt hold B ā hold B RIGHT before hitting enemy ā big bounce enemy
and of course the hack puts a normal regrab right after so you have to internalize both timings and not get them confused.
smw physics feel so so good when you get used to all the control nuances. i tried to play mario maker after playing a bunch of smw hacks and it just felt like ass to control. jesus christ mario is slippery as fuck in that game.
10 Likes
TLOU2 is pure hubris that anyone got time for that (again) in 2020.
At least the Nier series is a self-contained narrative even if you stop at whatever Ending A is in a given Nier game. TLOU2 stops Route A midway to make you play Route B before resuming Route A whilst also making the player endure the messy order of flashbacks (A through J).
2 Likes
I think this 2nd case in sherlock chapter one has been the best example so far of these games at their most irritating. the cases can be overly vague and everyone equally potentially guilty. there is no such thing as conclusive evidence in the world of these games, everything is circumstantial and everyone has the same amount of circumstantial evidence pointing to them. except I donāt think itās ever been this bad before
you canāt be bothered to check up on anyoneās alibi, I guess Iām supposed to just pick who I think is a liar and who is honest. every suspect convincingly sounds surprised to hear the victim is dead or convincingly denies being accused of anything. everyone happens to have a bruise on their elbow. everyone has a recently used dart gun. you can work your brain into knots weaving whatever story fits around whatever suspect you want. whatās the point of a detective game where investigating anything yields nothing but āmaybe?? whatever you think is best :)ā every single time. maybe itās an attempt to broaden the series appeal to zoomers, a detective who investigates entirely by āvibesā
10 Likes
Dale Cooper
10 Likes
the last of us is stinky poopoo
2 Likes
i played this game Sagebrush last night on my stream -
if you own the itch dot io racial justice bundle you own it
itās like a walking sim/light puzzle game about a cult compound that is apparently informed by lots of real life research on cults (this particular one is a fictional small Christian cult in New Mexico). i didnāt know anything about it going in other than the style looked intriguing and it had some positive itch comments.
unlike a lot of lo-res games, this isnāt really a horror game and itās not very over the top vs. a lot of games that look like this. it actually strikes a pretty serious tone about its subject and itās not something that departs reality that dramatically (well, other than the a few bits esp towards the end). the game is like a 2-3 hour experience that felt pretty complete, in line of bigger production commercial narrative walking sim games. but obvs the production values are more humble here and the voice acting is pretty amateurish (main characterās VO works pretty well though). there are some bugs and one or two confusing bits where you can tell that this is a game by basically one person. but honestly itās not too bad.
but yeah - overall i enjoyed this more than iāve enjoyed plenty of walking sim games that look like they cost way way more to make than this. iāve also seen several games that made a much bigger stink about being informed by real life research be way more over the top and unrealistic about their subject than this one was. the writing was very solid throughout though and kept me interested all the way to the end.
thereās not anything that like surprised me per se in this game, kinda just felt like the greatest hits of cult stories you probably know if you know of the big ones. itās a little bit of a 7/10-ish experience for me because of that. that said, a game that manages to be about cults in a way that feels reasonably realistic and not too over the top and makes you feel empathy for the protagonist still feels like a pretty nice achievement.
19 Likes
The neolib nonsense in Ys IX does not stop
You attend this party with Fantasy Jeff Bezos (the father or the party member who opened a flower shop in the fucking slums, if you remember my previous post), someone tries to slip a liquid in Bezosā drink, you chase after him and catch him turns out the liquid was only a laxative, the culprit wanted to ruin Bezosā day because Bezos suddendly stopped all business relations with him earlier, dooming his company, and started working with Italians instead (Italians being foreign invaders (the game takes place in Fantasy Gaul occupied by Rome circa ~100))
Bezos then comes in and schools Laxative Guy about how he just hasnāt innovated enough, the market is constantly changing, get with the times or die in a ditch, etc. Bezos is the clear winner of that argument, Laxative guy is arrested and disappears from the game, thank you Mr Bezos for this lesson in economics
Oh and later I went to see the people in the slums that are explicitely exploited and polluted by Bezosā company and they told me Bezos went through some efforts to reduce pollution and improve their lives despite his company suffering from no pushback whatsoever. The invisible hand works!!
Does all of this seem out of place in a cheesy JRPG about becoming Monstrums to fight monsters? Yes and itās even weirder in game to the point that Iām looking forward to it
18 Likes
bloody hell