Basically agree. The chunky acid look works best for the medieval fantasy > The Thing antarctic chthonic horror science base opening. I appreciate in theory the drive to mix things up by having totally new art for each episode but the industrial/urban look is especially boring in this context (although I often enjoy it in others).
Just wait til you get to that tank boss though
your description of this makes me go āoh my god, i absolutely cannot play another game right now, donāt do this to me, ah geeze iām going to have to play this at some point but itās going to be a year from now and everyone will have moved on, but luckily i guess nobody is playing it anyway so itās fineā
just fyi this looks dope
started getting into kaizo mario hacks despite only ever playing about 20 levels of the original super mario world. i always thought the physics felt weird and janky compared to mario 3. i still think that, but they are weird and janky in pretty interesting ways.
SMW controls are very complicated ā there are two jump buttons with different properties and heights, and holding jump in the air significantly increases your hang-time. a pretty basic move that is necessary is a lot of kaizo levels is called the āregrabā, which involves tapping the jump button to do a short hop, but then immediately holding the button again to increase your hangtime and thus how far you can go horizontally with that short jump.
also interesting: seemingly i have to switch hand positions depending on what jump button iām using. e.g. if iām jumping with B i use Y to run, but if iām jumping with A i have to use X to run. this was not at all intuitive for me and not something iām used to doing in a video game.
the scene is pretty big now (i think partially due to mario maker & mario twitch streamers getting more popular). itās also something nice to do when i have lucid time while sick, because it takes a lot of concentration and distracts me from my headache/sore throat.
there are actually a decent number of āteachingā or ābeginnerā hacks to slowly ease yourself into the kaizo scene. i mean, i think the skill floor for those easy hacks is still pretty high, but it doesnāt immediately throw you into the deepest end.
i started with Learn 2 Kaizo, which is a series of single-room levels that have message boxes to teach you very specific tricks. at the end of each set of levels, thereās a practice section that strings those tricks together to see if you learned the lessons.
i just beat Quickie World 2 today which is a hack designed for beginners (although itās definitely not trivial). hereās a video of me doing the last level in that hack (after having practiced it for a bit)
iām currently working my way through Mario and Luigi Go to White Castle, which is quite a bit harder. itās sort of a beautiful hack though, and not nearly as meme-y as the name suggests.
a videogame thing i think about often is how in the SMW hacking community, kaizo hacks tend to be some of the most polished, high-effort stuff they produce, whereas in the Super Metroid community kaizo hacks have a reputation for being some of the most amateurish, low-effort stuff that gets made. itās interesting how the design ethoses of the two communities have diverged like that.
I havenāt looked at Super Metroid Kazio games but SMW feels much more suited to Kazio than Super Metroid, and I expect the most talented Metroid romhackers realized that?
I donāt see Samus gracefully navigating a hellish Rube Goldberg contraption-like level like Mario in Gateās video aboveā¦ Mario is small, agile and fragile while Samus is big, meant to take hits, and has more rigid movement. A lot of her options would not be very fun to abuse in a Kaizo hack, like hyperspeed, wall jumping, morph ball bomb chain-jumping (so slow). Over-reliance on hidden walls would not be great either!
Super Metroid also has less visibility (especially vertically) and visibility is crucial to make a Kaizo hack enjoyable
Plus dying and restarting obviously take forever in Super Metroid compared to SMW
I was gonna post about how I am finally learning to play (and enjoy!) Picross after disabling all assists (previously I just used the one that would scold you for making an error, and didnāt learn shit other than memorizing my mistakes), but then I hit puzzle 60 in the first Picross S game on Switch and itās fucking me over. Ah well!
Anyway hereās that thing:
Wordle 200 4/6
Some of those problems have solutions that have been around for a while IIRC (HUD removal, instant respawn at the door), but just havenāt been put in an finished production.
Though yeah, you have some good points there. Kaizo hacks (when looked at as viewer experiences, at least) thrive on physical comedy, but Super Metroid doesnāt have quite the same variety of interlocking moving obstacles to make jokes with, and Samusās movement mechanics are ill-suited to instant death as a punchline.
Another thing that comes to mind is that any normal SM hack can be designed so it becomes a kaizo hack under low% conditions. Take, for instance, this 4% playthrough of the recent Super Duper Metroid, where a top low% runner of SM and several hacks spends 6 and a half hours fighting Draygon (for reference, thatās an hour longer than my entire first playthrough). These kinds of challenge runs probably soak up most of the demand that there otherwise would be for Kaizo hacks.
i just got to the tank boss and got through it on a few tries. obviously the build you recommended helped a lot (iām not really sure how much the shield actually helped me but i canāt imagine doing this without the Ghost perk given how much the tank would phase through me with it on). it just feels pretty stupid that the game totally shifted to these wide open spaces with a lot of fast shooting enemies that are impossible to melee when it wasnāt that before the city stages. it basically necessitates using the rockets and minigun and just wildly firing at everything as fast as possible.
i was initially happy about the novelty of the city stages after hacking and slashing way too much in the Egypt stages but they really got old to me. the grey theme doesnāt help very much. and the Hell stages seem to be basically more of the same re: the city stages. i guess iāll try to play to the end but the charm of the game has definitely worn off quite a bit by now. the game definitely peaked at those Antarctica stages for me.
Been playinā through Resident Evil: HĢ¶oĢ¶wĢ¶ Ģ¶RĢ¶aĢ¶cĢ¶iĢ¶sĢ¶tĢ¶ Ģ¶CĢ¶aĢ¶nĢ¶ Ģ¶YĢ¶oĢ¶uĢ¶ Ģ¶GĢ¶oĢ¶?Ģ¶ 5 with my significant other as it was on sale for around $5. Itās been pretty up-and-down, even moreso than I remember it being way back when my brother and I rented and played through it on PS3 way back. Weāve started the last round of bossfight stuff and honestly, I dunno if weāll finish it. Right before heading down to start the last round of fights with Wesker, we came across a document mentioning the destruction of Racoon City in RE2 and stating āThe American people wonāt soon forgive its government for killing 100k of it citizens,ā which is just wild to read here when the government has let around 1.2 million die of Covid.
Also did some Star Citizen stuff, have stories to share, but thatāll have to wait as Iām pretty sure thinking about RE5 has pretty much killed off what little energy I have for typing.
okay, yeah. finished Project Warlock. last episode tries to mix the themes together but also adds insta-death lava pits:
also the last boss is a ridiculous damage sponge that basically takes all the ammo you could possibly ever use. i did a lot of super monotonous circle strafing. also experienced a bug where i fell through the level and another where it played two different music tracks throughout the entire credits.
so, uh yeah that was pretty anti-climatic. certainly a big step down from DUSK and AMID EVIL as far as modern retro FPS games go. anyway shout out to the art designer of this game for keeping me interested all the way through but everything else i felt pretty meh about.
Oh yeah mine had this wonderful audio bug where any time I used the minigun it would constantly play a short snippet of its sfx about once a second forever, even back to the main menu
sounds like someone doesnāt like to clean up sfx instances on loads huh
my friend in this call was playing house in fata morgana and through a really funny series of events she like, locked herself into a bad ending without saving for six hours, got locked into it again while fast forwarding because she wasnt looking at the screen, then she just saved over her save instead of loading. im going to remember this vividly when i see people imply thereās something uniquely barrier erecting/user hostile about most games that text-based games somehow avoid from now on lol. maybe a software based medium just inherently requires learning through attrition to engage, idk
I played Papers Please for the first time the other night, and I guess it left me feeling a little āmehā because I forgot to write about it until now. Oh well. If nothing else this is maybe (part of) a lesson for me to stop buying games just because they were critical darlings, like, I need to be more honest with myself about what I enjoy.
I finished all the available puzzles in Sticky Terms ā really had fun with this as a little time-waster.
After about 5 minutes of Barony I decided it looks/feels too much like Minecraft for me to play more than that.
Video Games!
HELL YEAH. No Twin Stick Shooters, No SRPGs. Those games might as well be Big Buck Hunting for me at this point.
with indie games especially iāve come to not trust critical consensus at all. there have been many times where iāve played a bunch in a row and what i like does not line up with whatās been well-received at all. this is less so with AAA where a lot of games are going for similar things and thereās just a limited number of them. but with smaller games, what is well received by the press feels really random especially given how many games are out there (and how many games donāt get a lot of reviews from publications at all).
remember: there is only one reviews source to trust
The Triennale Collection is a bundle of 5 artsy-fartsy experimental games. I enjoyed them the way I would an experimental art exhibit: held my attention for a few moments, and I thought āhey this is coolā then I was ready to move on, and I probably wonāt remember them particularly well in a week.
I thought I was going to like Blue Fire a lot more than I did. Itās a bit Prince of Persia (the latter day kind), a bit Zelda and Iām sure it flatters itself that itās a bit Dark Souls. Itās not as good as any of those three games but I thought the synthesis of all three would be cool. It kinda is, but also there just feels like thereās some bullshit. Too unenthused to give it more time. Bland audio/visual presentation, and the plot seems pretty whatever, too, which doesnāt give much reason to keep pushing.
Metamorphosis might have some potential, though. Itās superficially adapted from the Kafka story, probably mostly for name recognition, but it very quickly branches into its own thing. It mostly tasks you with navigational puzzles/platforming, including some brief sections where you walk on walls (but not on ceilings, and only if youāve walked through something sticky first whichā¦ I get why they did it from a design perspective but it still kinda irks me). Got a pretty good sense of style. Iāll keep playing it for a bit, see if I get sick of it or if it keeps pulling me along.
I enjoy BBH games. Itās usually the locations that have them that I donāt really enjoy.
yeah as i have coincidentally recently discussed out loud with some sbuds (shouts out) i played a lot of big buck in one period of my life lmao
