i never got very far in starseed pilgrim either. i found it very annoying and only spent like 40 minutes in it before swearing it off forever.
of droqen’s stuff, i remember playing a lot more probability 0.
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I remember really liking Starseed Pilgrim when I played it about ten years ago. I think I just fit the mold of the ideal player, someone who wants to be confused and is content with not finishing things. I think I actually accomplished a lot in the game though I can’t remember exactly what, just different outfits, different rules, etc.
It was a very meditative experience for me, the opposite of frustrating.
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thinking of games that are full of friction without difficulty and the first thought I had was Deadly Premonition (on easy). Every “challenge” is essentially neutralized on that difficulty and so just becomes a matter of busy-work. Meanwhile, the game is full of annoying mechanics, long drives, totally insensible dialogue, and a story that is both simplistic and hard-to-follow.
And yet! I found it deeply compelling at the time. The friction was the memorable part of the game, and it essentially was about as “difficult” as a point and click adventure with extremely easy puzzles.
anyway just thinking about deadly premonition again
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MGS2 and MGS3 have deliberately slippery control schemes that require hair’s-breadth finesse in velocity and pressure on the PS2’s analog buttons, along with wild acceleration curves on the first person camera controls and contextual cover/position systems for movement
I manage when I’m successfully avoiding an alert phase but it’s really hard to feather the square button under duress
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Like, analog controls on a face button for whether you raise/fire a gun or grab/slit a throat
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this is why i’ve never tried to play that game, none of my ps2 controllers had analog buttons (or they just didn’t work)
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fwiw the HD port on PS3 works with the DualShock 3’s analog inputs and the HD port on Xbox makes it a chording input
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i love this
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i just did todays sonic heardle and i feel like a fake sonic fan because it took two seconds to get instead of one because i was so sure i picked the right name but didnt notice it was the wrong game
ive been playing pikmin 2 and its stressful because your pikmin have very simple thinking and if you leave them idle they will go do something if it’s close to them, like trying to break a electric gate that will vaporize them instantly, which is how you can lose 25 pikmin at once
im playing the gamecube version which has really not precise aiming which makes me resing to the fact that i will lose pikmin to certain enemies but will still be frustrating like the most op thing you can do is throw purple pikmin, which are heavy, above enemies, who will slam down on them, dealing a lot of damage and stun them for a second, so you just throw a bunch in a row and you can kill most things pretty quickly
unless they end up grabbing the enemy instead because you cant change the height of your aim so throwing purple pikmin at a bulborbs back for example will make the ground pounds happen because its curved down but if you throw them at a bulborbs face its tall enough they will just hang on instead until vored
also how far you throw a pikmin depends on your movement which means you can accidentally thow a bunch of pikmin past a enemy and into the pit of certain caves (known in the game’s code as " h e l l")
caves are the main focus of the game which makes it doubly stressful because theyre semi randomly generated dungeon floors with no time limit but you can only bring up to 100 pikmin (though there are ways to regain lost ones or change the colors of some). theyre full of enemies and certain floors have enemies or bombs drop from the sky on top of you at certain sort of predictable spots. also youre picking up treasures the whole time and bringing them back to your spawn point of the floor. almost each cave has different themes, the most stressful being the submerged castle, which you can only bring blue pikmin in cuz they can breath underwater, but it has traps that they arent immune to like the mentioned electric gates. also you can only be on each floor for a few minutes before the boss of the cave shows up which is basically a giant steamroller that goes around the entire floor that you cant harm until the final floor (did i mention that each cave has a boss you fight at the end that can wipe out your pikmin pretty easily like a giant mechanical spider with a gatling gun???). the surprising thing is that it never got to kill any of my pikmin (luckily when you exit a floor you dont need all of your pikmin next to you, so you can just have one of your leaders stand next to the exit until it shows up and leave) but i lost 70 pikmin when i re entered the place to pick up treasures i missed and wasnt paying attention so i got cornered by a bunch of bomb rocks that fell from the sky that wiped them out completely…
i like it because of the stress though. the pikmin being imperfect followers makes them more enduring even when i get mad about it. also, literally, they cant follow me well. most of them lag behind enough that you will be stressed out when youre guiding them around enemies every time. really the most annoying parts are ones that could use quality of life stuff, like having a hard time picking just one color group of pikmin out of your whole group you have with you which is how i often will end up wasting time guiding one white pikmin back to shore because it snuck in with my blue pikmin, or how often the game will interrupt you to show your ship picking up a treasure (which luckily pauses the game) or show your leader snorting up certain berry powerups (which unluckily does not the pause the game), so one time i lost a bunch of pikmin because i had just broke open a egg that dropped a berry powerup right next to my captain who HAD to snort it up at the exact time that a enemy decided to attack.
i hear the wii version has qol improvements but im close to 100% it at this point. theres also a hack that adds stuff that was in pikmin 3 into the game (like being able to to tell your other captain to go to certain places on the map) but idk where to find it. im curious about pikmin 3 because despite how much more engaging the caves are then the overworld i wish it had more giant levels you run around in just for change of scenery/cuz i wanna feel like a little guy. but also im pretty sure pikmin 3 isnt as hard as 2 from what ive gathered and the caves idea is neat because it forces me to think more about preserving my pikmin since i cant regrow them(tho the lack of time limit can lead to being able to cheese some of it, like having olimar run around by himself and punch everything he can to death). i guess ill play that next if i can get the wii u vers going on my computer. or pikmin 1 since i skipped over that
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also not a game but ive spent the past couple weeks watching a 8 hours 45 minutes bomberman retrospective video and im 6 hours in and my thoughts are full of bomberman now. i wanna make a bomberman OC
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friendship ended with five nights at freddy’s lore now bomberman lore is my best friend
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funnily enough everything you described about Pikmin 2 is why I like the first one better. I dislike how the fuzzy controls interact with the high precision needed in the semi-random caves, and it’s really important to me to Feel Like A Little Guy. I might want to go back to it though as a proper adult though because I’m a lot more immune to frustration than I was even a few years ago, and I really do love Pikmin deeply.
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ive been watching on the side a streamer play with the wii version and you can be way more precise, like you can aim your pikmin really far without needing any movement. but also he has weak catboy arms and his streams are 5 hours long so most of his complaints is about needing to hold up the wiimote for so long and also how frustrating the already complicated controls are to use with the wiimote’s layout (which is something i forgot to mention earlier but the A button being used for a lot of things can lead to a lot of unfortunate mistakes, and also im playing using my half broken sn30 pro controller (well only the bluetooth is broken i think? but sometimes i think it disconnects for a second?) with its generic super nintendo button layout instead of the gamecube’s fun sillytimes different shaped buttons which means i still sometimes forget which button does what even 22 hours in).
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Pikmin 3 is easier than 2, I think. It’s a little annoying having to use the Wii U controller for the map (especially if you wear glasses for either reading or distance) but otherwise it’s an excellent game. I’m still determined to play through all of the extra multiplayer maps one day (which are quite difficult, especially if you go for the highest rank).
The first Pikmin game is still my favorite of the series conceptually, because of the real sense of isolation and danger. And the way they subtly reveal that you’re on Earth after humans have gone extinct.
Also, it’s a game you can actually lose. I respect that they allow for the possibility. And they don’t hold back. You see Olimar’s corpse and the final image is basically body horror.
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oh, yeah, they make that first spoiler very obvious within the first few minutes of pikmin 2 because the treasures you pick up are actual product placements hahahaha??? its really weird??? and feels like a social comment that wasnt intentional, like, hey, the only things left of us are our uncompostable garbage like DURACELL BATTERIES and SNAPPLE CAPS. its the least subtle thing i can think of without the game just flatout telling you.
i do respect pikmin 1 for its time limit though i never found it to be too much pressure (back then pretty much everyone i knew and the internet were convinced that the time limit was too limiting or scary but i remember getting 100% with plenty of days left?). tbh im not gonna be surprised if pikmin 1 ends up being more of my favorite then pikmin 2 because i remember it being short and sweet. while i like pikmin 2’s weird difficulty and its caves it still feels like a endurance test sometimes because the caves have no time limit so they arent as easy to pick up and play as just putting in a day or two. though, also, i tend to do caves in one go, which very much adds to feeling exhausted (you do not have to do this, it autosaves at the beginning of each floor and you can even redo a floor by resetting the game, you dont lose your autosave or anything like that).
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yeah i assigned it for one of my classes and it got a very hostile/negative response from one or two people (whereas basically nothing else i assigned did), which surprised me. i guess people feel like they need to “solve” a game or know what’s going on, but for me i always just treat it as a thing to play with for awhile. maybe some of the discourse around Starseed Pilgrim was pretty overbearing, and i didn’t really try and go super duper deep into it after a certain point. but i enjoyed it for what it was i guess? i don’t really experience the same feelings of frustration around this stuff that a lot of people seem to, which is why it’s hard for me to connect with that attitude sometimes. especially from people who seem to assume that their experience is universal.
i think it’s difficult to do anything different/unusual with game design, because there’s basically no room for failure for a lot of people. some players really expect, if you’re doing something significantly different from the norm, for you to cover all bases and be perfect in every way or your game is seen as a complete failure, and an attack on them personally or their expectations. and over the last 10+ years i’ve def seen people who points this out continually get hostility directed their way. i don’t think that’s fair at all, because not everything has to be this perfect object that is perfect coherent and comprehensible and you can 100% or whatever.
the idea that the weirder indie games with novel mechanics were ever going to replace industry norms at large was a complete fantasy anyway - it’s not like this stuff will ever be the dominant thing. yet the reactionary fear that games will be taken over by some artsy/confusing stuff that people don’t understand which will Ruin Games Forever exists in a lot of people’s minds. i think the game industry has trained consumers and players to think a certain way which helps continue to direct hostility at especially smaller designers who are trying something different. like while maybe some accepted industry norms can be attributed to “best practices” or whatever, a lot of it is just the arbitrary movements of the market. and i think most people know that, deep down, but a lot of games people have their identity and expectations invested too much into a particular idea of what the space is and should forever be.
i get that the Jon Blows of the world are very condescending about their attitude towards which games are artistically worthwhile or not, but the idea that games which are way more cryptic and mess with player expectation a lot either a) are just there to troll and look down on players who don’t ‘get it’ or b) don’t deserve to exist at all is one that is unfortunately pretty common. the way that the industry has developed has very much codified certain expectations and approaches that are really hard to get people out of. the market and consumer base being so set and locked in in a particular way has been an impediment to a lot of things being able to grow IMO. and i’m really really tired of having this debate with people.
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That’s why they recommend not going under a five pound trigger pull in a duty/defense use firearm, though snakes custom 1911 in 3 does have a three and a half pound trigger.
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what happens
after 23 years i beat lennys walkabout
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Yeah, this was what did me in. I remember looking it up after the fact and going “I tried that and it didn’t work as I didn’t do so in the way the dev expected me to” and just being done with it.
Re: what @ellaguro said, I would say I’m pretty open to meeting various small experimental games on their own terms and am more than okay with puzzle games yet Starseed is probably one of my least favorite games of its era so I feel it is fair to say that there is something specific to how it is crafted that can truly bother folks beyond people just rejecting what isn’t “normal”. I don’t think it should be barred from existence or that people who enjoy the game are in any way wrong to do so (the person who recommended it me is an individual whose opinion I hold highly), but I think putting the blame for the entirety of its negative reception from some on forces outside the game is misguided.
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