Finally looped around and finished Actraiser on the ol’ crimeboy. It’s a lot rougher than I remember from my childhood! The building sequences are weirdly busy and shallow while the platforming is at best ok (a lot of odd quirks, and what’s with the hugely variable room time limits?). But the important part is you can already see Quintet trying to do their own thing even in such an early title. It feels like a game whose reach really exceeds its grasp but in hindsight those are usually the most interesting
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After a slow start, Tunic just really clicked with me. It starts as a paint-by-numbers Zelda clone, but it slowly ramps up its mysteries until you’re in much more interesting territory. The things it does with its in-game manual are so cool, I love it as a hook. The secrets in this game are delicious, and unlike something like Fez, so far they’re tuned so a reasonable single human being could feasibly solve them. It’s also just fun to play a zeld-ish game with roguelike-style item discovery. Yeah I guess I’ll throw this unlabeled flask… oh no I just froze myself and everyone around me in ice!
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In Max Payne, high level play is using the dodge roll all the time, ultra level play is fitting in as many shootdodges as possible without dying
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Max Payne 2 is one of those “video games can have physics now” games that came out when I was in high school so all I remember of it is using a console command to make bullet-time fully stop time and then fucking around shooting guys with 50000 shotgun pellets in one second and watching their ragdolls distend and warp from the impact
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Me, yesterday, tired of video games: I am tired of video games
Me, 30 minutes later after having played 30 minutes of Kirby Super Star: Video games rule so much
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Kirby Super Star is usually what I throw on the Retropie + CRT when friends’ kids are over, it’s a crowd pleaser
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Damn I wonder if we all remember our first one of these. For me it was Deus Ex 2: Invisible War on the OG Xbox. That was the first game I ever played that used Havok Physics.
HL2 for me, I’m the normie gotta love me
I mean, it wasn’t havok was it? but same diff
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Actually it’s possible that the first game I played that had Havok Physics was second life??
Anyway the final evolution of this: New World Notes: Watch: A Second Life Clock That Runs Entirely On Virtual World Physics
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i have 100% nu-kirby. it was a good time. i have like 2 dozen photos and videos of kirby sleeping in funny places i need to get off of my swich. i am definitely making more of these. also i realized that when you get into bed, and out of bed, with Deep Sleep, you have a tiny hitbox that deals SUPER miniscule damage, and i now have a mission to play around with the math on a boss like Gorimondo to see what combo of inhaling multiple stars at once + strength buff at the right time i need to get his health low enough to kill him with the bed because that is the funniest thing imaginable to me. i don’t know if it’ll actually be possible tho - taking him down as low as i could with normal star damage then buffing and sleeping didn’t do enough to finish the job, and i don’t know if the math on multi-star shots or attack buff would let me get him lower without a kill. but dammit im gonna grind it out because it would be so good if i could pull it off
also uhhhh the final boss of the post-post game was amazing, aboslutely incredible stuff. the most Kirby Boss the game gets, and it really becomes an action game. i will say i’m surprised (and maybe disappointed) that getting 100% doesn’t require getting within the target time on every treasure road, but … well i only had missed the time on two anyway so i went and did them for my own sake xP
i am a sicko, and i readily accept this
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I think the first time I noticed PHYSICS!!! in games was hitmans tie?
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Same! I swore I was just going to do all the levels, get all the waddle-dees and then that’s enough, gacha figures be damned. Yet I ended up grinding out the money (Ultimate Arena as fast as possible) to buy them all anyway. Full screen 100% congraulations image very appreciated. Great game! And yeah the final final boss was the only time in the game that made me think “shit i might die”. That’s fine!
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I’m replaying Link to the Past on the ol’ crimeboy. Folks, it’s good
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Halo 1 was my first physics I think? And boy they were some fun ones.
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My first physics game was the incredible machine 
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I mean, if that counts, yeah, haha.
I don’t remember which game it was, but I distinctly remember how the first time I saw ragdoll physics in a FPS game I hated it, because it didn’t look as good as Perfect Dark’s canned animations.
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I played Riven a lot as a kid but never touched Myst. Was tempted by the original but the newest Unreal remake seemed a bit more modular
Myst is some good shit and they preserve the feeling of the environment pretty well despite you having free movement. Had to turn on the old FMV stuff cos I couldn’t stand the 3D models of remake’s book footage.
It’s funny because I have to bear in mind that the environment will not break out of the constraints of level design that must function as still images in its original version. In some cases this ruins the challenge of navigating a puzzle. Channelwood is made trivially easy by being able to look at your destination as you move. But somehow it really works as a 3D environment that you can look around, emptiness retained and these dead worlds feel so.
Forgot how potent the idea of creating worlds within books and having realities nested within one another is. Not only that, but the ethics of the premise were completely lost on me as a kid. The true ending turned out to be one of the more disturbing things I’ve come across in recent games. Essentially you are accomplice to capital punishment meted out by the only other person (as far as you know) still around in the world. The fact that your world could be burned to dust entirely at the whim of a creator or their idiot son made the nested hierarchy of books within books take on a pretty horrible significance. The power to create these worlds is kind of terrifying and it’s unsurprising that tyrrany reigns. Atrus gotta find dat wife tho.
I would like to play more of this genre. I was very young when I played Riven but that definitely felt like more of a world-puzzle than Myst’s very mechanism-focused stuff (it’s still great). Myst puzzles sometimes feels bogged down in Earth-bound trivia like how calendars, compasses, and clocks function despite the premise of these being new worlds. Riven chooses the more ‘alien’ route. Just being able to fall back on a hauntingly beautiful environment when stuck on a puzzle is something I think The Witness tried to do but ended up being almost too pleasant and full of needlessly hammy audio logs (not all, but enough).
I think the eerie atmosphere has to do with being alone in a deliberate space which makes even a benign environment seem like it might become suddenly hostile. And then, of course, it’s the wake of hostility that the isolation is really about. In the moment to moment play, it’s the unsettling ‘kchkk’ of every button press which often results in nothing happening. Makes you feel like you shouldn’t be messing around, unlike other game environments which beg the player to touch everything; its theirs after all. The music lifts great weights when it comes to that eeriness. Definitely benefits from its creator’s outsider energy when it comes to the game not really feeling like any other and there being very few imitators decades later.
They really hit it out of the park back in 1993.
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Kirby and the Forgotten Land is annoying me just slightly with some of the extra objectives in later levels, because some of them have become “execute the maneuver or you have to replay the level to try again”. This was already annoying enough sometimes with the “take no damage” challenges on boss fights but at least you get back to those real quick.
All I’m saying is, put those kinds of challenges at the start of the level so you waste less of my time.
Also a third Gacha machine? Jesus wept.
Overall though I can’t think of a game I’ve played in a long while that already has me hoping for a sequel.
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As the OST quickly becomes my most-listened to album of the year, I continue to have a complicated relationship with this game. It has flattened down to “cool factory bits in a nice landscape” in my memory and I’m honestly quite happy with that? I need to remember that there’s a big WARNING sign on this, since it’s a danger game for me, but having memories of conveyor belts and machines and the hum of electricity and trucks driving by and a complicated network of transport tubes in the middle of an otherwise natural landscape is quite pleasant. Honestly it’s a cornerstone of my aesthetic.
So yeah, I wish this was a better game but it’s kind of turned into a much nicer memory.
Still wish that there was a version of this that essentially sat on top of Minecraft. I tried to install a modpack like this, actually, but the thing froze every time I launched it so I’m calling that a wash. I want a bespoke game for this anyway, since Minecraft is 100% not optimized enough to make this work at the scale I want.
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