i wasn’t attributing that to you, just a sentiment i’ve seen overwhelmingly in a lot of different places as someone who has been in that space, and is a fight i’ve had with many people over and over. i do feel very much like designers who are experimenting with some new spaces and ideas are kind of put in a shitty situation because so many audiences expecting every element to be perfect and cohere and something to be like the best example of itself if they’re going to invest themselves in it. and most stuff i see isn’t that, but it’s interesting anyway.
i guess i personally just disagree about the game itself anyway, because i think it is pretty compelling in its own way. but also i’m also someone who appreciates novelty even when it doesn’t always fully form or cohere in a way i love. but Droqen has other stuff that compels me just as much and i do think Starseed Pilgrim got a weird focus around it a lot of other stuff didn’t… and i’m more inclined to think about that other stuff these days.
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is charming as hell! I wanted to play a Wario Land game then figured why not start here (Super Mario Land was the first Mario I owned, never followed up with the rest of the handheld series).
Really dig the lean into more atmospheric environments and some moody lighting
and appreciate a Mario game that gives me pause and makes me wonder, ok, who’s body is buried beneath that tombstone?
Delightful Fleischerisms, bite-sized briskly paced gimmick gauntlets, all in under two hours, just what I needed to transition out of a post-Elden Ring malaise (last week I melted my way through to the Grand Lift of Dectus in NG+ in like 3 hours which was a nice victory lap but it’s time to move on).
Wario Land 3 seems like the most interesting one from what I’ve read but I might just burn through all of 'em since they’re so short, bless you Game Boy games.
there is an “open world” driving game based around The Italian Job, a 1960’s british caper comedy film starring Micheal Cain, of which I found an abandonware download for the PC version, which runs at 60fps. This game is notable for recreating the entire movie’s iconic climactic chase scene in one big level. Kind of like Stuntman, I guess, except much more forgiving.
the one downside is it’s Very British, I played it a long time ago on the PSX but don’t know if I can stand it now. anyway.
turns out you can play any mission in the game because there’s no save function? Or something. This is nice because I got to play the mission I really wanted to play immediately without having to play through dozens of missions to get to it. The controls are…awful. They’re pretty bad. My car goes flying off ramps uncontrollably and has a really terrible turning radius. I had to retry the mission because I ran out of time. But I did finish the mission and play exactly about as much of this as I wanted to before realizing it wasn’t as good as I remember it being.
yeah as i recall when Droqen posted here they were mostly looking for beta testers for prob.0 (i was one!) and the bundle was called “Probability 0 and Friends”, i think Starseed was always a little more of an afterthought that just just happened to have the most thought-provoking mechanics and compelling ludonarrative synergy
Thanks @username! Played through 2000 to 1 A Space Felony finally with folks and we had a great time. I said a lot of mean things about Stanley Parable (they are rich and successful they can take it.)
I recommend the 90 minutes it takes to 2000 to 1.
Also got stuck and had to look up that I didn’t take the exactly right photo.
Then I tried some RPGMaker game and had to be reminded video games can’t have writing.
Yeah, I was watching a streamer I follow play some new, pretty templatey Steam indie game and boy howdy should most games just have less writing than they do.
I don’t understand how so many indie games aiming at mass market success will have 300,000 frames of character animation and perfectly tuned camera tweens for every event and swappable outfits AND YET force the player through unending belaboured dialogue where in-game characters directly discuss game mechanics written by someone who has clearly never read a book.
I like writing and I like writing in games but like everything else it has to be, you know, good writing or it just shouldn’t be there.
Honestly, when I see most game tutorials I regret ever making fun of all the indie games in 2014 which had PRESS A TO JUMP graffiti’d on a wall near the start. That was good. I’m sorry. Please bring that back; I promise I won’t make fun of it ever again
Really resonating. Me and a few other people I know from my department are starting a dev team to make a game and I feel like I’m out here fighting for my life to make sure we don’t become an interactive fiction game or an adventure game with writing that only people who care about BAFTA winners will bother reading.
Yeah, when replaying Disco Elysium I was struck by how that game has absolutely no filler. Everyone you can talk to is amusing. Everything has some kind of actual point.
I’ve been watching Nextlander stream Mass Effect Andromeda and my god that game has so, so, so much text: everyone you meet will tell you their life story and/or lore dump contextlessly at the drop of a hat. It’s a universe of people who love to just constantly tell every stranger they meet their most intimate secrets. It’s so phony and tedious and there’s just so much of it. None of it is interesting because it’s all just star wars nonsense. “I moved out of my small home when the space war happened and my whole family was killed by space lasers and now I sell supplies to other fleeing refugees. Are you feeling feelings yet? Does this sufficiently CREATE EMOTIONS? Anyway press X to automatically sell all your vendor trash. A seemingly limitless need for useless cadmium ore is just another one of my personality traits I guess. For 25,000 credits I can upgrade your gun”
I think the two things people constantly misestimate are how much reading text interferes with anything else you’re trying to do and how engaging text actually needs to be to compete with everything else that’s going on.
Like Disco Elysium is a game about doing dialogue with people so I think they understood that that dialogue all needed to be as good as, you know, pogo-ing off spikes or shooting mans, or the game was just going to be bad. But if you can’t hit that bar? I don’t know—maybe play to your strengths. People’s capacity for reading is not endless and all dialogue and descriptions are not created equal.
I think the only thing else you can do is just to go so far through it that it becomes authentically charming, like a Kojima game. Sam, you can press X to talk to anyone at any time—a dialogue is an exchange of words between two people with the goal of gaining information or simply strengthening a social bond. In the past people used to engage in dialogue routinely, but it’s become less common with the world being all jacked up and shit. Some dialogues are good, while other dialogues are bad. I guess in that way it has a lot in common with all human experience.
that’s it!, that’s the feel of this game and its spooky whale and murder-crypts and tinkle-tunes and the exact way it sits off-brand to what we remember of the period
Devil Daggers: I have bested some of your times . Having tired of Vampire Survivors I think this will be my quick-session game for the next little while.
Reventure: I hate how it looks too much to play it lol
Abyss Odyssey: The opposite – I love how it looks (and the setting) but this thing feels like a chore to play. Don’t think I can be arsed.
The 39 Steps: It makes you do Karate Kid Wax On/Wax Off motions to advance the text (or go back). First of all fuck you I don’t need an RSI. Second of all somehow this lead to me repeatedly clicking outside of the game (in Fullscreen mode, I guess I was clicking on to my second, turned off monitor) somehow and exiting the game, which would restart the scene. Get the hell out of here.
. Having tired of Vampire Survivors I think this will be my quick-session game for the next little while.