I actually played it specifically because it was an American Mcgee game. I’ve played Doom and Quake but nothing else he’s touched (I think?) and wanted to see what the level designs would be like. I haven’t noticed much I could specifically attribute to him. It feels like a lot of the games that came out last last decade.
Game is British as hell though. I guess the books are too, but it hasn’t done the game many favors, I feel.
It’s easy to pick at what doesn’t translate from the new Mario Kart 8 Deleuze courses like some of the graphical fidelity that I don’t give a shit about and some baffling changes to the few new retro courses people actually remember (was it that hard to make the cars move again at the end of coconut mall? At least keep the boost pad!), not to mention the BUTCHERY of Sky Garden from one of the series’ best tracks into a family friendly romp.
Yet while all that’s expected the biggest surprise was how aesthetics aside, the tour courses are easily the standouts? Each lap morphs the course into a new form which I don’t think the series has done before effectively turning the one lap conceit of the MK7+ entries into a new way that still feels fresh bashing out the five different speed options capped off with the ninja dojo which is as close to a tiered playground that’s makes races FEEL different each round that on a design level is up there with the purity of Baby Park.
I mean I think technically for games the problem is the pipeline at this point. I know I’ve said that before but it’s no surprise games run just as well on a new $4500 computer as they do on a mid-priced console from a generation ago because everything has been using the same fundamental pipeline since Shrek for the Xbox (I’m honestly not kidding—it’s the first “modern” game) and that kind of hit its hardware saturation point already. Deferred rendering has issues with throughput because of marshalling at each stage, so if you wanted to hit very high framerates consistently you’d either need a much more sophisticated forward renderer or a high performance, ultra high core CPU renderer that basically used the GPU only for the last stages. Throw in a lot of streaming content for large assets and you have additional variables for hard drive read speeds and consistency. The rest is VRAM for huge assets (hasn’t substantially increased because ram is still expensive and only a handful of newer machines have faster GPU bus speeds) and it turns out we’re just buried in constraints. It’ll be a while (if capitalism holds together) before anything really technically changes that much, I think
I think his personality as a Quake map maker is apparent when you play the original Alice game rather than the sequel, which feels kind of generic in my opinion.
Deleuze & Mariokarttari
Severed Steel
First impression is that this is a FPS that took all the right lessons from all the right games.
You can pick up and discard weapons quickly like you can in SUPERHOT.
It’s improved upon the parkour of Mirror’s Edge.
It’s got destructible/deformable environments.
The music, the look, the way the game plays are all a bit much, but it’s the first game in a while in which I enjoy it but am also thinking ‘I bet this is even more fun if you get good at it’.
If you are playing it correctly it looks good, and if you play it incorrectly it looks kind of goofy and that’s probably a good thing. It has an informal visual reward/punishment instead of just having a ‘you died’ reward/punishment.
It’s like how 2D Sonic games would punish you without punishing you.
You want to move quick and smoothly because doing so is fun and looks right.
I’d say it’s more lazy production relying on the “tea and crumpets” aesthetic + the exoticism of an estuary accent & the source material rather than being too British. But that’s exactly the same habits that a lot of terrible British media have! The new Moomin adaptation is awful & I’ll never understand why Hilda doesn’t have a Yorkshire accept.
If there was a game I’d complain about being too British it would probably be something like a Llamasoft game that has to be played on an Amiga to properly appreciate it. Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk
Horace is too gamer and british.
I take umbrage to this one statement because in the video you posted the player manages to fall toward a wall and then completely reverse their course for a wall run and I at least want my video game parkour to respect momentum. The sequence of moves leading up to it (jumping through a window on a walkway, sliding across its floor past a baddie, crashing through the window on the opposite side, twisting in mid air to shoot the baddie) was pretty sick but I guess I can only allow things to go so far over the top lol.
Sequence in question is around 0:24 in the video if you want to rebuff my nitpicking. Game does look pretty sweet though!
No rebuking, that’s totally fair.
I was not being careful with my language use when I said,
It’s “improved” upon the “parkour” of Mirror’s Edge.
The movement in the game isn’t remotely realistic, nor does it try to be.
You can explicitly double jump.
You can use dive to change direction mid-air.
You can swing your aim around to do totally sick mid-air flips 100% regardless of what speed you were going.
On the ground you can do ridiculously protracted slides which look goofy as heck if you do them without having been moving fast first.
It’s taken what Mirror’s Edge did for movement as one of its inspirations but then built up something unique and very intentionally unrealistic from that, sort of giving you the modern FPS version of Mario redirecting his movement after becoming airborne.
You can kick off an enemy’s riot-shield do a sick flip over him and shoot him on your way down. It’s great.
Mario jumping on Koopa Troopa vibes.
Since my previous post I watched a developer interview and found out this game was mostly made by one guy.
He calls the movement the ‘stunt system’.
I tried Atelier Ayesha for a little bit. I think the landscapes are gorgeous, the music… not much… and the character design doesn’t do much for me. But the places are really gorgeous.
I uninstalled it pretty quickly because I felt I did not want to play standard rpg dynamics and because the main quest seemed a bit by the numbers and boring. And the voice of the protagonist was a bit unnerving. Also, I would not want to tinker with the alchemy mechanics.
This was just an initial impression, so I don’t want to discredit the game for anybody who’d like to play it…
Severed Steel intimidated me way more than any Souls game ever has. It felt pretty darn well-made but I had to dive into a deep, deep well of movement shooter skills that I would have had to spend years developing to get ready.
Ghostrunner is a lot more straightforward and flow-focused, very fast and with much better combat integration than Mirror’s Edge, and a paean to the continued relevance of kitbashing. Kind of disposable but also quite well-made.
The alchemy systems and character designs are basically the main attractions in Atelier games (the battle systems not so much, as they tend to be pretty generic), so if those don’t appeal to you, then dropping it immediately is the right call
I accidentally played four Atelier games and completed three of them before realizing I don’t like the series that much. Don’t make the same mistake I did
Spent four hours unlocking all the vehicles in Cruis’n Blast with an old friend tonight and that game just hits the perfect nostalgia of e"early 00s arcade in a movie theater where I gotta kill 15 minutes because I read the listing wrong". We laughed a lot when we attached rockets to a shark and our school bus got a spoiler. 10/10, would be early to the movie again.
Also got to show that same friend Zombie Nation for the first time and we abused the rewind function in the Switch port to beat it. Happy to spread the shit gaming around.
I love Cruis’N Blast so much. The way it reuses levels and assets in absurd ways (here’s the track you did before, but now there’s a shitload of helicopters, or dinosaurs), the way the whole thing is absolutely clockwork in how it functions so that if you’re going like 10 mph to collect keys you see course events play out in borderline slow motion. Or, like you said, adding neon lighting to a unicorn or tank or whatever you’re racing. Backflips with a helicopter.
Just a weird, beautiful artifact from another era.
I have started Darkwood. It gives me the right vibes. Has anyone tried it?
It’s been sitting in my library for ages, so I look forward to more of your thoughts!