im.tginking about breadbugs
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evolution
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mmm, claymation Pikmin would be really good
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alice: an interactive museum is great, lotsa fun clicking around, i always heard it was the slightest and most tech-demo-y of the haruhiko shono games but the scrappiness and humour made it a real pleasure. minimal game shit, itās just a mystery box where you root around and poke at things and then that either plays some goofy animation or folds up your sense of the gameās space in some way. or else it shows you a painting, the game has many paintings which mostly belong to the how you say paul delvaux school of porno surrealism, like expressionless naked people but with floating pears or whatever in the background to class it up. i tease but enjoyed that about it, it means the whole thing feels a bit more tonally ambiguous than itād be as just a pile of cute animations to encounter, and frankly these days i just respect when art games commit to showing you some genitals (which to my knowledge is frowned upon if not illegal in the Apple Arcade). thereās also a good section where you poke around in a studio and can sift through compressed scans of what are to my knowledge real book and magazine covers, japanese āreal lifeā supermarket serials and trashy usa glossies, just scanned and dropped around in here to add to the texture. why not. the real shit.
contained one of the more inscrutable point and click interactions iāve seen in my life, where clicking a box in a painting makes a 3d magician fly out and spin around before disappearing after a fraction of a second, no sound. animation below (nsfw?)
magician functionality
i also played a bit of āthe dark eyeā but hit a bug. iād like to get back to it. on the one hand the comparatively more dutiful approach it takes to clicking around the various backdrops is kind of a drag in comparison to the more freeform style (having to click multiple times to rotate to face something and then select the door handle to open the door and etc). on the other hand, a thing i did appreciate about it from the little i played, how often it does the myst thing of just confronting you with this visual plane you have no way to āinteractā with, just so you can look at it and bump your head against it and i guess be confronted by the mystery of the visual. look at that skybox!
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Just want to reiterate that @Broco is correct in that Brogue is the Best Actual Roguelike (Shiren too so long as you handwave the being able to send items to your future runs). It also has the structure that got mentioned upthread re: Shiren and thatās in Noita as well, in that thereās a relatively short and less-difficult āmain questā and then post-game content for the True Rogue Murderheads.
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My current favorite roguelikes are Angband and Hengband. : )
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Shiren I think is in the best traditional roguelike in Spelunky school of aesthetic goals. Itās about omnipresent danger in a cute but deceptively cruel world, and about having a sense of humor with deliberately ridiculous mechanics. The most memorable story both Shiren and Spelunky like to tell is the extremely long cautious grind where the player collects a vast amount of protective resources, and is suddenly killed off anyway by a hyper-unlikely confluence of interactions.
Brogue is going for more of a slow unfolding of satisfaction and tension as consistently interesting choices build up to both greater success and greater danger. A key meta-decision in Brogue is how deep to go. So if you accumulate ātoo many resourcesā, Brogue doesnāt feel the need to introduce unlikely ways to insta-kill you to keep the experience meaningful ā instead, itās the playerās call to become hubristic and dive down 10 extra floors, and a fair comeuppance if that results in death. IMO, thatās a masterful transcendence of a false tradeoff that most other roguelikes solve by picking one side or the other: Brogue proved that fairness and excitement arenāt necessarily contradictory design goals.
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this is violence to taxonomy
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Angband and Moria are the only old-school roguelikes (others: Rogue, Nethack, ADoM) that Iāve successfully completed. As much affection as I have for Angband, itās a game that really requires an ultra-cautious approach to be ultimately successful and thereās a reason why it was pretty easy for the maintainer at the time, Ben Harrison, to code an AI that could reliably clear the game.
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I try not to be a classification nerd but this is literally just a ton of games off Steam with no real organization at all. Sekiro is in the roguelike festival, so is that star wars game and Carrion.
My guess is they added up how many actually popular roguelike and roguelite games there have been and it was way fewer than everyone believes, so they had to chunk it up with just a ton of other stuff popular with the same crowd
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i might be doing YN a disservice but imo thatās the best way to play it, just wandering around for a while and dipping out when you feel your own attention flag. i think the most noteworthy thing about yume nikki is that dense as it is, it still feels like something thatās trying to structure itself along rhythms of human attention - attention from the production side, the aimless pleasure and doodling (scooting around in the chair!) but also the boredom, repetition, dread of having your inner back and forth manifesting as a set of interminable tile mazes. drawings on a scaled-out map editor become a giant void with heiroglyph figures dimly glimpsed in sections, pages and pages of dense events and weird little one-off conditions happen as a kind of termitelike background life you move across without being directly able to see. the uncertainty with which these two sides regard each other - the experiential side of playing vs the production side, that is āunconsciousā or at least differently conscious in the sense of being refracted thru a game editor - i donāt mean to make it sound like a tedium-is-the-point artgame thing but i think some sense of an unreachable distance is just part of what it is
so itās weird to me that thereās evolved a sort of accepted āhow to play YNā method in the culture around it which focuses on getting rid of this distance, almost trying to put the player in the same place as the developer - aware of all the little background things that are going on, the position of all the goofy effects, the psychological readings, etc. i think if the game has any value itās in not being whatever kind of skewed adventure game these sorts of guides tend to assume it is
i guess the comparison iād make is, most games are basically designed like mechanisms, they have in points and out points and different forms of mechanical inertia that take you from one to the other. yume nikki is more like a broken machine - when the machine breaks it stops being a machine, a process, it becomes a heap of material parts, in this case the parts and materials of fantasy construction. some of them are still connected up enough to feel like functioning mechanical circuits, and that can make it feel like thereās secretly a working mechanism beneath the whole thing to uncover, but for me whatās interesting about it is just that it breaks down those habitual mechanisms into a set of disconnected parts to sift through. anyway this is my longwinded justification for never having played that game the right way or reentering the same room 200 times in order to meet uboa or etc
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The lid on the Inscriber was lifting up slowly. Then it fell completely open. The teeth of a cog wheel were exposed and lifted up. Soon the entire wheel appeared. It was as if some huge force was compressing the Inscriber, so that there was no longer sufficient room for this wheel. The wheel rolled all the way to the edge of the Inscriber, fell down, rolled upright a bit in the sand, and then fell over and lay still. But already up on the Inscriber another gear wheel was moving upwards. Several others followedālarge ones, small ones, ones hard to distinguish. With each of them the same thing happened. One kept thinking that now the Inscriber must surely be empty, but then a new cluster with lots of parts would move up, fall down, roll in the sand, and lie still. With all this going on, the Condemned Man totally forgot the Travellerās order. The gear wheels completely delighted him.
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Yeah. I donāt like playing all that cautiously, so Iāll probably never beat it. Thatās okay though, I want games I like to last forever.
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(For a snazzy free version of Rogue for Windows, try ClassicRogue SDL : ) : Donnie Russell II's Home Page - Rogue )
(( Here is me playing it, I am very bad: 677: ClassicRogue SDL \\ How many snakes & trap doors could there be?!? = oo - YouTube ))
I seem to have failed the reply thing again, ugh EDIT: Oh no I didnāt, I can see the reply indicator in the editing UI, but it still isnāt showing this post as a reply to nastypaulās reply for some reason in the post itself, hm
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For some reason the forum software omits the reply-link in the corner if a post is immediately after the post itās replying to. Technically not a bug, but bewildering nonetheless.
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im making a rogue lite with pretty bad progression curves, bad level generation, and an obtuse story told through daily conversations you have with other npcs and poorly cut together cutscenes. i made it because i hated everything about version 1 of Binding Of Isaac. maybe someday it will be finished
regardless, i played 2 hours of Dillons Dead Heat Breakers, a fuckingā¦amazing game. i lost a race minigame which meant my bank account was short for the next mission, so i had to take out a loan to make up for the shorfall (because each npc you hire to fight in battles costs money, money you earn from missions but also minigames like working at a store or playing pachinko). if your team is weaker then more bases get lost in battle, which meansā¦LESS MONEY. so there is another npc you borrow money from, but he takes it back at the end of a mission (interest free, so basically a buffer? probably because the in game economy is really harsh for a kids game)
but yeah the ongoing stress of being in the red while running a mercenary protection squad, led by a silent armadillo who sleeps on the couch in the hotel room you live in, working a second job at the market to make ends meet. criminally fucking underrated
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A little Steam Library Roulette this morning:
Assault Suit Leynos: Controls seem a little jank? I dunno, level 1 felt like a chore and I canāt imagine changing my mind after a poor first impression. Could just be me.
Valfaris has managed to suck me in though. Itās a pretty linear sidescrolling shooter with a heavy metal album cover/grimdark 40k kind of pastiche going on. The graphics have a chunky, heavily pixelated style (Iām not sure if itās āreal pixel artā or just 3D models that have had a texture applied to them, but I dig the look either way. Itās muddy-yet-readable). Your AI partner/Cortana lady has her tits out, I guess because thatās more metal.
It is otherwise a pretty regular shootman, you run and jump, you can aim in 8 directions, etc. You can catch projectiles with your shield and shoot them back, with occasionally very devastating results against bosses. You have a sword, a sidearm, and a heavy weapon. Your shield and heavy weapon share a pool of energy that depletes pretty quickly but replenishment pickups are abundant. Health pickups are actual beating hearts, again, because thatās pretty metal. The whole thing is tongue-in-cheek but definitely comes from a place of affection.
The checkpointing system is interesting because you have to find pickups in order to activate them. Thereās a maximum number you can carry (this can be upgraded). Excess ones you gather turn into health on the spot. But there are also opportunities to trade in the checkpoint pickups (āResurrection Idolsā) at different places to earn āBlood Metalā which is the weapon upgrade currency. So you can potentially supercharge your weapons early in exchange for having fewer checkpoints. Itās a real tradeoff, this game will kill you pretty often and the checkpoints offered are quite generous. So far I have activated every one.
I did turn down the screenshake to āhalfā in the options menu I felt like it was a bit much but I also generally find screenshake a little annoying so ymmv.
The OST is all fuzzy metal
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