you have to use the up and down buttons which is never ever signalled
2 Likes
Constantly shocked how I figured this out at 10 years old and it has baffled literally everyone else.
5 Likes
Colt Canyon
This seems like one of the more accessible rogue-lites Iâve come across, yet of my first four runs, three ended with me running out of ammo and then dying. Only one of the four runs had me dying with ammo. This game seems like it would be a lot more fun if there was an easy mode with unlimited ammo.
1 Like
Yesterday I played Journey for the first time! Kind of playing an interactive Fantasia. Poetic, relaxing, right pacing, right length. I loved it.
I have been also playing 13 Sentinels for a few hours. I love the tone and how the story is being told. I also really like the battles. Story-wise, itâs just a bit too slow, so often I need to stop and do something else.
Also, I played ZeroRanger. The unofficial conversion plays perfectly on the Switch. Itâs fantastic, probably the best shooter I have played. But I cannot proceed after one point, things get a bit too difficult in stage 4 after what seems a wall of intestines and I keep getting killed.
9 Likes
Iâve also been playing 13 Sentinels. Being able to pull off as many twists and turns as it does while letting the player handle most of the order the story is told in mustâve taken a ton of planning. Iâm constantly impressed it works as well as it does.
The battles are really fun, too. Trying to S rank everything on hard mode gives just enough pressure to play smart and fast. I kind of wish there was a post-stage live replay since most maps take <60 seconds without pausing to issue commands.
8 Likes
This was the coolest shit when I was a teenager.
1 Like
Replaying Symphony of the Night and Iâm using the wolf familiar to go through Clocktower early. Iâm trying to make it as difficult as possible but despite that and making my stats as low as possible, these harpies are still dying in two hits. This game has a mind of its own. Doppelganger was hard I guess.
3 Likes
you need to have played the game during a very precise between learning how to use a swing and being too big to use a swing
a question for the 13 Sentinels guys: does it play ok on Switch? probably will grab it one day but like, does it make a difference whether itâs that or PS4?
4 Likes
I havenât played it on Switch, but in one video review I watched they claimed it actually runs better than PS4 somehow?
EDIT: looking it up, it seems thereâs a few graphical downgrades to the battles to reduce the framerate issues, like removing some of the CRT effects etc, but apparently itâs minor enough that itâs not too noticeable.
3 Likes
Iâve gotten minor FPS hits in big crowd scenes in handheld mode. I think the combat has only dipped once and Iâm about 70% in.
2 Likes
bless youse
1 Like
iâm just watching a playthru of it but as someone who couldnât make it through any of the previous dark pictures games (man of medan, etc) even in video form, i gotta say that the choice to have the new one set during the iraq war really elevates it way beyond what you would think. itâs exactly the same as every previous game - inexplicable drifts into melodrama and strangely timed qte sequences, all of the characters are pricks to each other for no real reason, everybody talks exclusively in screenwriterese, canned sequences linked together with little choice bits in a way that makes it impossible to keep any kind of consistent tone - but having them all also be marines or cia guys in aviator sunglasses talking earnestly about the need to find saddamâs chemical weapons and yelling OOHRAH while moving each otherâs respect and romance gauges up and down really sends it over the edge in a delightful way. i just got to a part where a soldier finds a house full of like those minimalist handcrafted occult sigils that horror movies like so much and a dialogue choice popped up where the two options were, verbatim, to go âWhat theâ?!?â or to yell âFuck your voodoo shit!â, which also causes your guy to go into an inexplicable rage and start knocking everything off the shelf. very appropriately 2004 delirious, good shit
18 Likes
beat paper mario this morning! what a great time. i think itâs hilarious that they kept giving me badges, i was pretty well-set pretty quick. i did make a few adjustments as i went and got something more exciting but, basically i just had everything that made my attack power go up, the one that let me switch partners and still act, and then the repeated jumps on one guy and on all the guys (and the shields for fire + spikes when i needed those to jump on an enemy. if a boss didnât need that iâd take the move that let me buff my next jump for +3). this also in the end had me taking extra damage from all enemies because i equipped literally every badge that made my power go up and some had drawbacks.
It was very fun walking around at 5 health whenever possible. with the right buffs and at low health i could easily deal like, 50-70 damage to a single target in one turn. and basically no enemy troop ever made it past one round as early as the second dungeon. it was honestly extremely fun i loved it
the game is basically immaculately paced, there was not a single point where i thought âoh this is starting to dragâ, and i still love the peach segment â downtime (remembering things you can now do) â next dungeon
also i think its extremely hilarious that beating the whole dojo gets you nothing, so far as i could tell. i beat the final master fight after the ⌠fourth? dungeon and was like âoh i wonder if this degree ever does anythingâ and the only thing that ever happened was dudes in some towns goin âwow you must be like the strongest guy everâ and i just thought that was real good. never got XP, gold, badges, etc for beating him and i think that owns. just a little treat for the sickos who wanna do it
probably gonna replay TTYD sometime soon with fresh eyes as a point of comparison. also because i just wanna look at the characters in that game i like them a lot
also the definitive list of partners based on their vibes is
Spike > Sushie = Bow = Bombette = Watt = Parakarry >>>>>>>>>>> Kooper > Goombario
and i wonât apologize for speaking the truth
9 Likes
youâre not wrong
2 Likes
Also something Iâm watching rather than playingâNextlanderâs LP of Mass Effect: Andromeda is a pretty good time with some funny boys and a bad game. Learned the tragic story behind ME:A (it was originally going to be a No Manâs Sky ripoff but with a budgetâwait wasnât I just talking about how this is the most frequent bad idea from big studios?âbut they ran out of money and had to build what assets they had into a linear âopen world-liteâ game in 18 months)
The whole thing got me thinking about how like⌠the now-ubiquitous combo of quest log, quest markers, non-stop NPC dialogue and an action button has rendered almost all design know-how for games redundant so long as you are ok with boiling absolutely every problem down to going to a marked location and pressing a button, which big studios mostly are. In the before-times when games were not yet solved as a science if you wanted someone to figure out something was broken and turn on a generator you had to deal with players making leaps of logic, probably getting stuck and needing things like puzzle design, level design and interaction design to make problems understandable and solvable.
Not so when you can slap a big red sticker on everything and have an NPC say âit looks like we need to go to the Big Red Sticker and press the Action Button to proceed to the next step of the Quest.â Now all levels can just be a ton of garbage props scattered around in big empty spaces with no logic, nobody needs to ever remember anything, and you can play games with solely the mini-map. Thank godâthereâs nothing I hate more than having to actually play a video game I spent $80 on
13 Likes
the only time this was good was Mario Kart DS where getting inked meant I just looked at the bottom screen to drive for 15 seconds - the most exciting use of a minimap in history.
8 Likes
I think of this as the trap of âQuality of Lifeâ. When a feature is annoying or distracting, the trend has been to smooth it away, to make the system solve itself so the player can focus on the core experience. And thatâs driven by playtest feedback and consultant and reviewer feedback and the common ways projects fail through overscoping. I think that in a lot of ways, focusing on the core experience of these games has made those parts better â combat systems in most of these got much better in the last decade. In other ways, the way theyâve improved has been parasitic, to fill the hole left by quality of life: progression systems design, which has gotten significantly better, is often detrimental or arbitrary to the core experience.
Itâs never more clear than in the Xbox 360/PS3 Prince of Persia, where they Quality-of-Lifeâd away basic jumping in a platformer and tried to figure out what was left.
I think whatâs needed is a clearer understanding of what players do in games and whether thatâs interesting. A lot of older games seem to be better at this maybe due to luck â that by importing real-life analogs in a low-tech way, they created play that was later smoothed out. For example, map-reading and navigation used to be a big part of older big map games, but as more energy and human effort was put into them they started working on their own, doing the mapping job for the player. Honestly I think itâs more likely the mapping tools were crude because the tool was crude than out of a considered choice. It just made sense and it seemed to work. And maze design fell out of favor as the influence of '80s Dungeons & Dragons receded.
I keep being shocked at how well these Japanese studiosâ first open-world games blow past conventions: Breath of the Wild, Metal Gear Solid V, Elden Ring. Because they werenât five games deep into an open-world series, I think they were able to examine each element and decide on the gameâs aesthetics: is this about exploration? Is exploration a game-like experience? What tools and what challenges should the player have? Theyâve also started to standardize some new tools that help fix the frustrations of older systems while preserving the play â the user-created map-markers, instead of a compass arrow, are a player-enabling tool that allow players with poor spatial navigation to adjust the difficulty themselves.
22 Likes
I thought that was Knackâs schtick.
2 Likes
So I think the other thing is the rapid scaling up of these projects, esp. their huge outsourcing components has also required a standardized series of assumptions about how games are going to work so that designers are able to start filling out the truly staggering amounts of content without having to wait on programmers to build and iterate systems.
I think itâs interesting you point out BotW and MGSV (also Elden Ring works here, which broke all the open world rules and ate everyoneâs lunch while doing it), because I think the way their systems were built with intent is a strong contrast to, in my experience, the way so many AAA games in the English-speaking studio world wind up shaped more by the decisions that are being made by nobody, out of default as part of the process, than intentionally by people
6 Likes
Oh, totally â Ubisoftâs worldwide studio system is kind of a miracle of production but I think itâs guaranteed they will never ever make anything better than âokâ. Every - single - component - piece is mediocre and theyâve correctly bet on scale as their differentiator. I just hope people are getting tired of it.
Boy it sure was terrifying to watch Odyssey ship and then within a year ship three huge expansions and new world maps and character designs.
6 Likes