Yeah, it’s early access on Steam and GOG.
GOG seems pickier about what they allow to sell early access.
Campaigns are there and complete, multiplayer is there.
The devs want another year of tweaking before calling the game finished.
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imo the easiest version of Double Dragon 1 is the arcade version. the AI doesn’t know how to counter the elbow attack and you can just do that to get yourself out of pretty much any bind. if you had the patience, you could just do nothing but elbows and probably almost never get hit. easiest to 1CC, by far. i think the Genesis version might also allow for this, but it’s not really the greatest port. it was kind of neat to have something closer to the arcade version at the time, but it doesn’t really have any charm that brings me back to it (whereas like, Street Fighter II: Special Championship Edition does have charm and i still play it in spite of having access to arcade-perfect ports of SFII).
i grew up with the Master System version and i think it’s probably the best home conversion since it actually had some balancing and had a 2-player simultaneous mode, which the NES version completely lacks, unless you count the sort-of under baked Versus mode (which, to be fair, was kind of neat as a bonus). the NES version also has a leveling system and gets super hard towards the end of the game.
i do think NES DD2 is probably the peak of the series in some regards, followed by Super/Return of. DD2 has a LOT of different versions, compared to the rest of the series. the PC-E port is…interesting?
all versions of DD3 are kind of bad, but the NES version is probably the least bad. i remember it used to make me feel anxious as a kid; something about it felt…off?
Double Dragon 3 Arcade has the dubious honor of being one of the first games to ever have microtranscations. want to buy nunchucks from the item shop? insert credits
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NES Double Dragon 3 is pretty good. Bimmy and Jimmy forever!
NES Double Dragon II is my favorite Double Dragon.
NES Double Dragon III is probably my second favorite, but it’s close.
Double Dragon Advance and Return of Double Dragon are both good as well.
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Strangers of Paradise is not what I expected and I kind of hate it. The hype immediately died down at release for a reason
It’s like, all the level design from Souls has been removed (it’s all corridors now) which sucks, yes, but on the other hand you get all these attacks and combos to use! Which also sucks. Honestly when I’m given two kinds of attacks in Souls (light or heavy attack) I can’t even manage to use both? Here there are a zillion fighting game combos to keep track of in your Soulslike and I just always feel like I’m playing SoP sloppily since I can’t stop thinking about all this crap I’m not using. I also hate the agressively balanced low MP reserves, the cinematic kill animations, and much more!
The graphics are aggressively bad to the point of being almost unreadable at times and always an eyestrain. Without a doubt the worst looking game I’ve played on the PS4
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i played SoP on a Series X and it looked pretty O.K. but not amazing. Rudie definitely alerted me to how bad it looked on PS4, though.
i think the main issue is they didn’t really communicate what the game was properly. it’s really a beat’em up with Souls-like elements. use enemy weaknesses to break their guard as quickly as possible, then crush them. the game’s difficulty is all over the place and kind of nonsensical - i haven’t beaten it, yet, but pretty much with a strong melee class and the Sage magic class, you can essentially wreck any enemy in a matter of seconds.
i stopped playing cuz it got kind of boring, but i should just beat it soon since i’m close to the end. if you’re a stoner, i recommend playing it that way, because it can be a little mesmerizing to just get yourself into routines and patterns through the levels. it took me until about 65% of the way through the game to use all of the systems, but doing so makes the game too easy. i guess in some ways that makes it a little bit of a throwback to the NES days
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They’ve talked about not intending the games to be difficult per se, and I believe it. I think difficulty is the same thing as creating friction and forcing tool usage, and when they want to make the player think about using weapons in tight spaces or deliver the experience of something too scary for conquest difficulty is the tool of communication they have.
There’s surprisingly little experimentation on game friction outside of difficulty. Moreso than other media, I think it’s difficult to confuse and surprise the audience with mechanics because games demand participation and mastery. Grasshopper likes to throw variety and completely different mechanics in, to make a statement about what the different game systems can achieve and what stories they can tell, but as time has gone on I think they’ve found that they mainly speak to highly game-literate audiences and limit the breadth of discussion. No More Heroes is in some way a natural endpoint of that type of expression.
Starseed Pilgrim is one of the most aesthetically focused experiments on challenging rules and it’s really interesting to watch people approach it. Even an atmosphere of sparseness and an invitation to grow gets read as hostile and judgmental. Where linear media will flow despite the audience’s comprehension, it’s very hard for a mysterious game to proceed without the player’s involvement.
Where Starseed Pilgrim strips out everything but the obscured rulesets, Myst might be a reasonable predecessor. It’s still about the process of learning and understanding tools but the narrative and exploration provide something to work on while frustrated and, in the best circumstances, provide context and clarity to the machines.
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Biggest problem with DD2 NES is the controls, but there’s a romhack for that now:
The other big problem is the platforming sections. It’s possible to see them as a charming kind of jank, but they go down easier if you are able to practice them with savestates. As a kid they were agonizing because half an hour in, all my lives would suddenly disappear, and this happened so fast I didn’t even necessarily have time to learn anything about how to DD2 platforming for the next attempt
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hard disagree on the controls - i really like the left attack/right attack thing that it does. i’ll concede that it’s more interesting in theory than in practice, though. i kind of wish they’d worked on making that more interesting over the years, as it adds a dimension to the fighting that isn’t really touched on by other belt scrollers (though Streets of Rage does have a back attack). in my mind, i imagine a player being able to fend off multiple attackers at once and really feeling ownership over the fight. as it is, the back attack is mostly there to create distance against large bosses. but again, in theory, i really enjoy games that consider the actual positions of buttons in relation to the positioning of a character on screen. it’s unusual, at the very least
the most important part of mastering DD2 on NES is learning the timing of the knee attack. it’s good for some platforming sections as well as obliterating every enemy in no time. the platforming in every early DD game kind of sucks, though. how many people lost all their lives trying to get over that bridge in the Mission 3 of DD1?
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DD2 PCE rules
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hard agree!
Good, good evening.
Double Dragon II with CD audio and fully voiced dialogue was crazy!
It’s not my preferred version, but it sure is interesting!
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the arranged soundtrack for DD2 is definitely worth a listen.
vocal version of the title music rules. also, i pointed this out elsewhere on SB, but the arranged soundtrack makes it incredibly obvious that Mission 2’s music is literally just the same song as classic 80s hit “Easy Lover” by Philip Bailey and Phil Collins.
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the ps4 kunio/dd collection has a single button mapped to jump in double dragon 2
(also it’s totally worth it, it has all the nes kunio and dd games, including translations for the games that never got translated before, and proper translations for games that got stupid “japan doesn’t exist” localisations in the past)
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Not sure if the US version had this pre-order bonus, but the pre-order of the Japanese version of the Kunio-kun collection on PS4 got you an additional, stand-alone, apparently new remix game: “Hanazono High School Dodgeball Club,” in which you play dodge ball not as usual main character Kunio and his Nekketsu High School team, but rather as their main rival, Riki and his Hanazono High School team (known as the “Pro All-Stars” in the NES version, apparently):
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According to Steam I put a bit over 10 hours into Starseed Pilgrim and never figured out one (or perhaps more) of the rules/mechanics that actually makes the goals conceivable to accomplish. Remember when looking for some sort of guidance I saw someone saying that they could “beat” a stage about half the time and I grew so cross with the game that I don’t think I ever played it again. My official opinion on the game is either I am an idiot (which is at minimum 30% likely) or the game is actively bad at teaching its mechanics even accepting the context that it is trying to make them initially obscure and make the player figure much of it out on their own.
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this post is helping me clarify one reason i’ve always enjoyed jump-the-gaps / platforming sections in otherwise non-platforming games, e.g. Half-Life 2’s bridge section. gives the player a type of friction they are not used to that does not neatly correspond to “difficulty”
switching between horizontality and verticality in an FPS, similarly
speaking of friction vs. difficulty, basically the entirety of Baba is You
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Oh I love underbridge levels; my favorite in any level design is the sense that I’m going where I’m not supposed to. The thrill of sneaking through empty church rooms, testing locked doors in a school building in summer, going behind the coolers in the grocery store…
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Randomly played through the whole Titanfall 2 campaign today. It owns bones and is making me heavily reconsider playing Jedi Fallen Order. Crazy that it’s a Source engine game, I didn’t notice in it a single idiosyncrasy common to other Source games.
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it’s a game designer’s game. it’s awful to play. the equivalent of spending your Friday night updating your resume
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The beef behind looks like…
Make me think a lot
The biggest problem is that the game doesn’t teach you that you can fly in the inverted world, so you can be the sort of idiot I am and spend too much time crafting platformable worlds and getting tired of the game by the time you realize that you can fly.
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