I have found the bicycle and 5 other effects. A few of the dream worlds have me kinda stumped. (The one with all the numbers scrawled on the floor, the one where @Mokushka is hanging out with a bunch of technicolor weirdos).
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had a nice time cheesing out wins against @slime in blazblue this evening
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been having a fairly good time with Empire of Sin, which I tried out with game pass streaming. I regret that Microsoft and Paradox apparently donāt care enough to make cloud sync work cross platform, so I canāt continue my current playthrough anywhere but an Xbox or cloud streaming now, but itās a fun little xcom-lite thing thatās pushing the right buttons for some fun
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I finished Katana Zero. I enjoyed it.
It was a fun game with an engaging story and good bosses.
The last boss fight was especially enjoyable.
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Iāve been playing super Mario world two yoshis island. I think it might be kind of underrated, or at least under discussed. Harder than I remember too. But maybe I just am no good at games any more. Sadly the game doesnāt really look as good when itās not on a CRT
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Itās pretty uneven for a big Nintendo game, isnāt it? Every time I get a hankering for it I tend to check out at one of the vehicle sections, which canāt resolve the ticking timer with the stated goal of exploring everything, leading to a lot of soft failure that can just be restarted. But thatās the whole gameās approach to conflict; to try to move past typical failure that it doesnāt see as necessary but it hasnāt found purchase on something new.
Though I think the baby Mario health system is probably a reinterpretation of Sonicās rings, it also makes me think of what the Game Boy team would do with Wario Land 2. The Wario team couldnāt resolve everything, either, but I think they had a better handle on how to mix exploration with platforming challenges. I think their secret puzzles embedded in the hidden level exits were a lot better than the ossifying secret exits in the mainline Mario game.
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I love Yoshiās Island.
The Japanese cart looks great.
Such good vibes.
Itās the most Kirby-like Mario game.
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Put around 7-ish hours into Rogue Legacy 2. So far, I like the expanded trait system. The game plays well and it looks good. The writing is a bit grating (unfortunate mix of SERIOUS STORY and non-stop zany jokesāsorry but it is almost impossible to make this actually work) but itās not totally without charm.
The thing thatās kind of got me on the fence is likeāok, so this is the series that basically pioneered taking an existing genre game (i.e., platformer) and padding it out by making it unplayably hard before adding in meta-scaling so as you improve the difficulty also decreases to meet you half way. And the question I think is āis this actually a good formula?ā Like at the end of the day I canāt help but feel like despite all the new classes (which play super differently and are mostly very good) and the randomly generated abilities and the run-based power ups and the weight system and all this stuffāall of which is, you know, very goodāthat this would just be better as a tight 6-8 hour platform game with lots of replayability options.
This is kind of how I felt about the first one. Itās not that the meta is boring or that the game isnāt fun enough to play for a long time; itās just that it honestly feels like it should be a shorter game made longer through concealing what is effectively a difficulty slider under 17 other menus and 20 hours of gameplay.
Interestingly enough this game also has accessibility options including āhouse rulesā for difficulty scaling, and when you scale enemy damage down a bit and player damage up a bit it immediately becomes less of an outrageous grind. This effectively fast tracks you through a bunch of upgrades and the end result does a fair amount to mitigate my issues with the game generally.
And the problem there, again, is the question it raises that just using a menu is better than spending hours on doing runs to gain upgrades. The game itself gets by on being well constructed and well tuned and although the meta-scaling concept has been copied endlessly Iām not really sure itās helping.
Iām often suspicious when a game succeeds off a bunch of different things that everyone copies whether these things are ALL good or if itās just that the package works well enough regardless, and Iām starting to feel that the ārogueliteā idea is the latterāthe game works, but maybe the idea isnāt as worth copying as people seem to believe. For a fun game it spends a lot of time making you do the same fun over and over until the shine kind of wears off it quite a bit
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Started playing SaGa Scarlet Grace: Ambitions. I love it.
Just the sheer confidence of it is exhilarating. I love how far up its own ass it is. It knows that I know that itās a SaGa game. I didnāt even realize this was initially a Vita game but that explains so much about why the character models and UI look like that.
My protagonist was chosen by questionnaire. Sheās an ex-witch who is now a ceramicist. Okay, thatās tight as hell. Iām dropped into a world map. My character thinks the nearby phoenix is causing her potteryās warping, so she just decides to try to kill it. I meet a mercenary dude, and suddenly I have a full party of a bunch of randos all on a mission to track down an ancient bird. Nice. Thereās like no bullshitāI have my party and Iām doing battle. This feels like SaGa.
Fights are all sets of fixed events on the world map. There are no dungeons to exploreāthis game is only about fighting. So itās a lot like Crimson Shroud in that regard. Kind of a bummer but not every RPG has to be a dungeon crawler.
Combat feels freeform but thoughtful. The United Attack is like a more predictable and strategic counterpart to Frontierās combo systemāif you kill an enemy that was splitting your partyās turn order, the party members whose turns are adjoined will do an all-out attack on a new target. The party has a shared pool of action points and anybody who doesnāt act is automatically defending. Glimmering weapon skills, battle formation, HP/LP, itās mostly standard Romancing stuff. You can choose party actions irrespective of turn order which is a nice quality of life feature. Everything about how it plays feels like it was designed to strike a balance between briskness and intelligibility, and it makes a lot of sense now that I know itās a Vita game. This is something younger me would have loved to have on that system.
I love the voice acting. Itās so excessive. At the start of the game it made me pick my protagonistās voice acting style. The Normal voice sample has her saying āWhy is my pottery warped so? I must discover the reason.ā With the Expressive voice option she goes āWhy is my pottery warped so? I must discover the reason.ā So obviously I pick the Expressive voice. My guy named House glimmered a skill called Chop, saying āHere comes my new product!ā and the animation is him just doing a punch. Amazing. Some of my favorite HP up voice lines are āIām gettinā nice and juicy!ā and āHumanās gotta get big. They gotta.ā Thereās a lady with a knife who occasionally goes āIām gonna fish you up real good!ā Like what does that even mean? Is she going to gut the enemy like a fish? Is she calling them easy prey? I donāt get it, but I like it.
This game is good lol. Iād recommend it on the same principles as Romancing 3 or Frontier which is that if you donāt care as much about a sweeping narrative and are on board with tight combat focus at a sprinting pace, then this game is for you. Itās like $9 on PSN right now which is why I randomly bought it.
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Yeah this is how iāve largely felt about the genre for years now. imo, the games rarely really do anything that make them better by adding in the randomization element, or the persistent unlocks that are so common amongst the 'lites.
what it DOES benefit though is, well, how well they sell. a lot of folks wanna spend some money on a game and put 100 hours or whatever into it to get the most ~play time value~ out of it, and they get that pretty easily out of a game that tells them āhey thereās essentially infinite technically unique instances of playing this game, and also weāre gonna drip feed you tasty new content to keep you coming backā.
imo the fact that playtime is often finite and reasonably predictable plays a part there too. thatās also the case for something like competitive multiplayer games like a shooter or a moba or a forted nite, but those require matchmaking, they require other people, theyāre kind of intense by virtue of involving others. so i think roguelites have persisted as an inescapable menace because they basically serve as the inoffensive light snack of video games. itās just a shame that they tend to have corn syrup as their primary ingredient.
enjoyed reading this last year and feeling like it verbalized a lot of things iād been thinking, re: how roguelites (purposefully or no) get people to keep playing Treatmills, or, Hades, Roguelites, and Gacha Games
iām very cynical about the genre though so iunno. maybe take what i say with a grain of salt (always take what i say with a grain of salt i exaggerate every statement i ever make)
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Non-cynical praise: a random, repeating structure is well-suited to exploring action mechanics, presenting unique encounters and ability modifications across the full spectrum of character capabilities. Itās much closer to the purity of arcade game sessions than the forced highway of a linear story game that are always tough to fit into action and increasing player mastery.
Linear story games are just really hard to square with skill challenges and mastery, because the impetus of the narrative to progress steamrolls over the different rates of player learning.
Rogue Legacy was always the quickest, shortest jump to the cynical shortcut of progression systems, though, and it deserves to be scorned. I think itās fundamentally a naive design that doesnāt understand the full effects of the progression systems itās adding. A game like Dead Cells, which is much smarter about deploying progression as a slow complexity increase and as a tight reward and has an incredibly insidious death->restart cycle, is at least good enough to support a critical discussion.
(did we talk about that article here? Boy, I remember getting REALLY STEAMED about it, I think it really rushes to the moral judgment before examining the system outcomes)
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I take back my previous comments about Overwatch 2
Overwatch 2 is good, actually
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i definitely think thereās something to be said for defined sessions of exercising a skill! and admittedly i mostly just prefer arcade style gameplay over the randomization of roguelites because i just like having discrete fully designed levels
anyway i think its fine to like these games! and i think its fine to make things that people are probably more likely to buy, everyone deserves money to live (also i mean, a lot of folks who make games with random levels and persistent progression do so for what i must assume are non-cynical reasons)
also admittedly when i think of ārogueliteā my brain is filled with just all of the worst garbage to come out of the early-mid 2010s (god there were so many knockoffs of specifically the binding of isaac), and iām fully willing to believe that there are in fact games making the model work
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Iām trying to figure out what generates a lot of the audience fatigueā¦ I think a lot of these games are poorly paced, and donāt introduce new mechanics and enemies quickly enough. Just look at Super Mario Bros. and in 4 levels they introduce 4 very different environment sets, tons of different enemies. What they donāt do is ask players to play 4 levels built off 1-1 before unlocking the underground zone. I think a lot of developers naively pace their content by linearly stretching it across the whole experience, rather than paying attention to the early experience and then understanding the slowing rate of mastery and new expression later on.
Even funnier, you see this pacing mistake in all the mediocre platformers of the '80s and '90s.
I also think a lot of roguelikes mistakenly tie story progression to game progression, when the game structure is designed to effectively be endless. Shiren understood this pretty well, with short early campaign ends and higher-tier dungeons unlocked afterwards. Binding of Isaac works like that, and it paces it pretty well. And Hades will be remembered, I think, for developing a much better narrative structure ā small, character-based interaction rewards between every run so narrative is slowly pieced out, rather than an (often unreachable) goal.
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This is a video of Overwatch 1, you canāt fool me. I even remember the gdc presentation from 2017 where they showed off the first person rig for the zen kick.
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So ultimately I resolved to quit Yume Nikki at whatever point Iād reached before I decided to go to bed. I looked at a wiki quickly and realized I just donāt think I have the patience to ferret out all of its secrets. What I have found is pretty cool though. I think I wound up with about 11 effects total, including the real game changer, the knife. That one certainly made things a little more interesting right away. Dare I say it was the first one I found where I could immediately think of a use for it. But then it leads to something which seems like a dead end? That felt fitting.
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all this talk of roguelites and negative difficulty curves also applies to most modern action games with levelling up/stat-boosting equipment
(it makes stuff like river city girls super frustrating, as iām sure itāll be another scott pilgrim situation where i love a gameās aesthetic, but wctually playing it is a chore)
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look out for the character Chiago, all of his lines are brilliant and you can tell the va was having a great time
game rules so much
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- New UI
- New sound design (seemingly final)
- New lighting engine (subtle on the training map, more dramatic on others; note how dull the golden weapon is, they havenāt been tweaked/arenāt final with the new lighting)
- Zen has 225 health
- ZEN HAS A FUCKIN BOOP (the last two changes went live within the past 24 hours)
Zen play has gone from ālook at me, I am the DPS nowā to looking for corners to come out from to punt people off the map
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I probably wouldnāt mind it so much if they hadnāt coincided with the advent of early access. Either facet alone is okay but an unfinished progression structure or an overtuned progression structure turn me off like nothing else.
I have a particular bone to pick with Supergiant making a perfect singular sophomore game and then heading off into the woods but thatās strictly from an audience perspective
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