There’s some stuff in the third set of levels, where you race the car a few times, that made me appreciate the little stuff they slip into the level design.
Hell, I got an upgrade for an ability I haven’t even come across yet thanks to seeing an item way off to the side and making my way to it.
But yeah, the toughest challenges I’ve come across so far have been those challenge levels (I’m giving up on meeting the target times - unless there’s some reward for getting them all, it seems like you just get a few extra coins). That, and any “beat the boss without getting hit” challenges.
I think even if there’s a reward for hitting all the target times this might be where I draw the line on completionism, it seems like a real pain in the ass on some levels.
I’m usually coming up like a second or two short on them when I do. It’s a lot of effort for very minimal reward. Heck, they don’t even show the check mark unless you click on the level. Nobody has to know! Passing grade is passing, etc.
I’ll save sweating record times for stuff that shows up in the levels proper.
This is reminding me of Forza Horizon 5 how every time challenge has like 00:30 for 3 stars, 00:32 for 2 starts and 17:38 for 1 star. Because I know game designers (and hence know that they lack even a shred of human sense or dignity), I’m sure these times are based on percentiles from the playtest pool (and the gap on the high end just closes very quickly), but from the perspective of someone playing it all the timings just seem geared to be frustrating and weird
I always start with, silver is around my skill level, an expert but not all that skilled, gold is what QA thinks is appropriate, a pool of terrifying murderers.
Of course, the key is deciding what your challenge tiers are for. If you gate progress on gold, well, it’s really your silver tier and if you want an actual test you need to make it secret-diamond-SS+ and not really lock anything behind it.
Yeah you need numbers for stuff that feel normal to the people playing, I think, rather than basing it on hidden information aggregated from a ton of people, that feels weird and wrong, but having worked with Microsoft on a product before nothing about that surprised me
From what I’ve heard, Turn 10 has maybe 2 full-time designers. They consider their games an engineering problem more than a design problem…and their game design reflects that.
I’m not sure how Playground Games is built but from the Horizon series (and the positions they’ve held open for years for their Fable game) I’d guess they have world designers and not much else.
Playing Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright and the shift to having the people found guilty because of you proving the person you’re defending not guilty immediately executed by being burnt alive makes everything feel so much darker that I expect it to be revealed to not in fact be happening as… I mean it’s a Nintendo game after all.
i think doolittle is right. it’s a curiosity more than anything. i don’t think the combat ever comes together & they work around this by just keeping the difficulty really low. i don’t remember the story at all, but i recall thinking some of the character drama was ok?
that sounds like a downer but to be honest i think its neat and recommend giving it a go if you’re interested. especially if you’re emulating.
i have played waaaayyy too many friggin hours of Vampire Survivors recently for a game i’m pretty sure is empty garbage. it’s like, an idle game without the benefit of idling where success or failure is mostly taken out of your hands by RNG but it’s been really easy for my very stressed and drained brain to get sucked in by the catharsis loop it creates in packaging the musou sensation of blowing up a ton of guys with copiously implemented Number Go Up elements. one more game-ing it constantly to try and diceroll a run where i can actually get a build off the ground makes me feel like my soul is getting sucked out the same way like, grinding out a battle pass does lol.
speaking of games with wildly vacillating RNG i finally committed to beating act 1 of Inscryption. i still don’t get it at all. i really feel like either you don’t get anything you need and tread water till you die or you get deck search squirrels and two dual strike deathcards the squirrels let you play first turn guaranteed and you nuke the entire game and beat the final boss so fast it doesn’t even process all your attack animations and skips right to the cutscene (this actually happened to me lol) and it literally might as well have been on autopilot because it wasn’t even possible for the game to fight back. juego estúpido.
i need to play some good video games!!! before i took a trip with some friends last week i was playing Don’t Open The Doors and i wanna get back to it, it was absurdly cute and had fun little rpg ideas. i’m really into the specific paired down vision of action rpgs only really shared by stuff like, idk ultima 8 and entomorph and like, this where it’s mostly a point and click game where you beat guys up with a stick.
I think of Inscryption as secretly a puzzle game. Each different card game it has you play is a new puzzle that you solve by finding a way to completely break the card game over your knee with one weird trick. I thought it was pretty cool the first time through, but I’d imagine it doesn’t replay very well. For that reason, I’m very curious about that new “Kaycee’s mod” feature they recently released, which turns the first card game (in the cabin) into a self-contained roguelite. I wonder whether they rebalanced the game for that, because if they left in some of the most intentionally broken combos then I can’t imagine it working as something you’re supposed to replay indefinitely.
Finished Harmony of Dissonance with all but one piece of furniture.
I read some interviews from the developers and two things really stood out that explain the released product: firstly, their desire to create a Symphony of the Night adjacent experience on the gba and secondly, their desire to draw from and build upon the combat of the nes castlevanias. So much of the game’s design stems from that attempted synthesis between the old and the new: the whip wielding Belmont protagonist who also has the flair and agility of Alucard, the lush baroque interiors matched with the vivid hues of the nes trilogy and using Symphony’s structure as a vehicle for cryptic clues and relic hunts instead of finding loot and new traversal abilities. Its kind of unfortunate that the gameplay side of things is really bad for that reason. Like the whole conceit behind the shoulder dashes was to build upon the positioning based whip gameplay of the originals but it precisely worked in those games because of the absence of such a mechanic. As it stands, the average combat experience revolves around passively hitting things from a safe distance with your whip and mashing the dash button when an enemy slowly raises their heavily telegraphed attack (sometimes I vary things up by accidentally dashing into them). Its so boring and easy and the only evolution of combat comes when you start dashing through enemies full of hallways instead of engaging with them. They are beautiful hallways though. I wonder if Harmony of Dissonance’s underperformance is why its probably the last 2d castlevania to go all out on its production values. The sprites are alright but I love how many animated and scrolling backgrounds there are. I played this after playing all the other igavanias so I was genuinely surprised at the sheer amount of unique backgrounds, a weird part of me thinks that its almost wasteful from a production point of view coming from later igavanias. Its visual language is undoubtedly its greatest achievement. The way all these gorgeous handdrawn backgrounds distort, disconnect and disorientated me reminds me of the similar feelings of alienation and distrust I felt playing Simons Curse. In that game the villagers lied to you, but in Harmony of Dissonance its the castle. I don’t know if its better than Circle of the Moon but I’m really glad I experienced it nonetheless.
Some more minor notes:
-The plot is dull canon-filling trite and Juste’s visual design is kind of hilarious in how its literally a collection of other characters traits but I genuinely enjoyed how the central conceit of Castle A and B was paced, revealed and tied to the friendship of Juste and Maxim. I think it works for me because I like their characterisation, they’re just friends who want to help each other without any ‘I must be stronger than you/ You wouldn’t understand’ angst.
-Furniture collecting is something I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did.
-I don’t know why they designed dashes and also have your momentum completely break as soon as you jump.
-Having played all the gba vanias I can now say that its tied with 16 bit vania for what I consider the most interesting set of castlevania games. I like how each game is a different teams answer on how to succeed Symphony and I can appreciate them on their own quirky terms for that reason.
i’m pretty cool on all the igavanias these days, sotn included if i’m really being honest with myself— i find them all sort of boring to play— but harmony’s searing, bizarre aesthetic tone does make it my maybe-favorite
The Death Stranding enhanced edition thingy is now out on PC. Easily the best walking simulator. Kind of weird about women in a very Kojima way but not aggressively so. You get to drink energy drinks and look after a baby. 7/10 (aka the highest possible score)
thank you for the whirligig tip for bloodborne @Broco , it’s worked out well so far. I seem to have the least trouble in souls games the less of an expectation of using shields or spells it has. I am currently in the “nightmare frontier” which has demolished my internal sense of direction
I’ve been sitting with having played Stranger Of Paradise and I think this Final Fantasy is giving me depression. For all of it’s blistering weirdness, the game kind of sucks. You select the next level from a menu. In a different menu you hit touch pad to optimize your gear because who gives a shit. You can also customize your combos through another sub-menu but back out to the Job Tree. And all of this is slightly too small to read from a couch.
The actual battle system is not FF7R. It’s a clunky action game with 4 gimmicks bolted on to it, use as you would. It all looks like a ps2 game. The soundtracj despite the frank and nu-metal is orchestra Final Fantasy.
I’ve got so much loot. I don’t know what to do with it. The battle system setup menus I do not know what to do. I got like 7 different classes with piles of sub-abilities I don’t have time to consider the pros and cons of. Playing this down to Story Mode (easy) would only further sadden me.
Using optimize equipment always gives your characters Ninja Masks so you cannt see their lips flap in cutscenes. I am too tired to think of the consequences of that. Think I am going to get it up for sell and if it sells before I beat it I win.