it’s giving youth pastor
it’s giving surburbia, mm and lack of experience! delicious
I should be nicer but I really hate this song
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i like the idea that this person only got the shallowest possible impression of max payne based on the fact that the encounter design is nothing like max payne and your character grimly intones “Pills.” when he picks up painkillers. its like getting attacked by a bunch of melee enemies from someones quake mod in most levels. you literally dont have to dive at all. have you ever tried to play max payne without using shootdodging or bullet time?
the quit messages are nearly lifted from max payne 3 lol
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at least it’s sort of comforting to see that nerdcore is still alive and well, lol. this is really bringing me back to my old oc remix days.
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Funny you mention this because I also dislike ULTRAKILL for many of the same reasons I dislike El Paso Elsewhere; namely, boring combat design that is mostly lifted from inspiration without consideration. Same hat, different game.
I am also one of these people and it didn’t work on me. I am deeply interested in all the decisions that go into making a game and why those decisions were made. I am a gamedev professional and enjoy talking things over with other pros in a pragmatic way. I see the game itself as the text for dissection in that regard, a little black box for me to turn over in my mind until the inner workings come into focus. The reality of production is often arduous!
But at the same time, I want the games I play to be clever, to push me, to challenge me in ways I find novel. So far, El Paso, Elsewhere has done none of that. Maybe that’s on me for expecting something the game was never planning to do.
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on top of everything else I feel like it’s just such a poor allocation of labor and creativity to try to slavishly reproduce these old classics with much smaller teams that can’t be expected to build out the same kinds of emergent worlds or edge cases with anything close to the same thoroughness
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this is the problem with a huge amount of modern indie games that really faithfully try to recreate some aspects of retro games but are kind of half-baked in other ways. several things i’ve played have fallen into this for me. it’s a shame.
it’s not like there aren’t games like Fatum Betula that both feel like they could be old PS1 games and also take advantage of being a smaller scale contemporary game to make something unique. more people should aspire to that.
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this game doesnt even have the enemies watching lords and ladies on tv and allowing you to overhear how bizarrely invested in it they are!
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“Max Payne but all the enemies are melee” is such a fundamentally baffling decision that it calls the creators’ abilities into general question
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It does have a number of gags like this, like “Pill Cop”. The one that bothered me most was an interview with a guy getting anally probed 30+ times, which made me a little uncomfortable given stuff like Communion where there are strong parallels to repressed memories of sexual assault.
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i guess i can add “never put a joke conversation about getting anal probed 30+ times in a game” to sam lake’s resume
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I’m also a developer who enjoys getting into the nitty-gritty of it all, but I do feel the current typical mode of engaging in these discussions is counter-productive - feels like we’ve crossed the line between understanding the necessity for being a professional as means to an end and fetishization of a certain idea of professionalism as a goal in itself. What I mostly meant is that El Paso is very showy about adhering to that idea - it’s certainly “savvy” and “smart” in ways I don’t really care for.
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i don’t know about any of the specific games you’re all talking about, but i do want to say that i’m increasingly wary of any new cosmic horror stuff using the word “eldritch”
makes it seem like they’re just going to be using the shallowest of trappings with no understanding or real interest in them, as a rowling to fantasy
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Finally beat La Mulana 2, but not the DLC challenge yet. Felt more like a sequel to the remake than a sequel to the original La Mulana. It did the self aware thing pretty well by not going out of the way to draw attention to it all the time, but the ending where there’s actual photos of real world ruins with the kind of chunky sprites of the game’s characters felt like deliberately calling out the game and maybe the people who play these sorts of games as the real relics.
Perhaps the ruins from the original La Mulana being presented in the start of the game as a mostly harmless tourist attraction are a commentary on what that game became in a world where there’s a wiki for every game ever.
Last dungeom was filled with all of the minibosses from the game proper, but now they were headless zombie versions of those bosses shuffling around without a locked arena to keep you from just walking past them. Final boss cycled through attack patterns based on the previous main bosses as a sort of miniature boss parade similar to how the remake did, not as a set of all new puzzles like the original La Mulana.
Like I said before, I really appreciated that there was one major health power up in each area so that there was no need for a victory lap through the whole map once all the movement upgrades were available to be sure to grab every last little upgrade.
Also, I probably wouldn’t have stuck with it if the traps weren’t genuinely funny a lot of the time. Tough but fair is a lot less appealing to me than unfair but hilarious, which I probably why I could never get into kaizo/masocore games.
It’s the sort of game that makes me want to make a game, but it’s probably for the best that I don’t. Anyway, a great game. I put in 78 hours, which is almost four times what i put into Metroid Dread but the time flew by in a wy that it didn’t with Dread.
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Also Doom II was made as an afterthought between Doom and Quake. It’s not nearly as good and even most of the better levels are memorable gimmicks more than actually good design. It wears you down because…it’s just being phoned in half the time.
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Doom 2 is highly regarded because a) it was the first Doom a lot of people actually played (Doom 1 didn’t have a boxed commercial version until The Ultimate Doom) and b) it’s the basis for most Doom wads now because of the new weapon/more enemies.
but i agree… it’s a huge mixed bag. over time i’ve come to appreciate individual levels more in their own context. but it really doesn’t match up with Doom 1… a lot of half-baked gimmicks and really missing the atmosphere of the first game. it’s a similar sort of problem with Spear of Destiny vs. the original Wolfenstein 3D (which is definitely better) honestly.
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I played through two more classic NES games thanks to rewind that i never got anywhere in as a kid
METROID: I like how much looser this is than super metroid. the items used to unlock doors and areas feel much more natural than super metroid with its billion very artificial feeling locks and doors. also much less locked down in general which i appreciate, though it’s easy to get lost because so many areas look the same and there is no map. overall still feels very mysterious.
it’s also very frustrating in some ways… mainly in having to farm for energy constantly. energy doesnt get refilled when you respawn, so when you have a bunch of energy tanks it just means you gotta do a bunch more grinding to fill em up. i like how hostile the world is BUT the grinding got old fast. also like how you can’t duck, so you need to use bombs to attack things on the ground at first, and then later with the wave beam which has a wider attack range. actually i found not being able to duck to be annoying, i think im spoiled by modern games.
so yeah, pretty dated in some ways but also still cool in others. i remember liking zero mission a lot because it made the original game a lot more modern, but i wonder if i replay it now i’d be more critical about some of the changes which would have made the world less mysterious and threatening.
my smart and handsome friend @Infernarl said the missiles are like xp points since they’re all over the place, and i think that’s an interesting point. it rewards exploring rather than straight combat. though there are also lots of empty areas with nothing to find.
ZELDA 2: much less mysterious and cryptic than zelda 1. so many secret areas are obvious and feel unrewarding as a result. is MUCH more linear, in fact you basically have to do everything in an exact order to progress. puzzles are mostly replaced with fetch quests and some stupid old adventure game stuff like talking to someone multiple times until they give you a different response. actually this feels like an adventure game in a lot of ways. also don’t like the experience system.
i went in open minded about the combat, but it got increasingly more painful as the game went on. it constantly felt like my hits SHOULD be hitting but weren’t. also the enemy placement and AI got increasingly cruel (sometimes you got attacked the second you went to a new screen). I also hate how you have limited lives, and when you game over you have to go ALLLLL the way back to where you were, often losing a bunch of resources on the way.
i enjoyed the first half of this game, but the second half was a painful slog.
oh, i did like talking to NPCs in towns because that’s my fav bit of adventure games, but…
feels the same.
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http://web.archive.org/web/20070304082411/http://www.gamedesign.jp/index_jp.html
some of my favorite little gem games which I finally found and play again
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This water-based shooting system was really cool. There was a powerup making it temporarily fire 3 streams of water too.
But it was hard to find much joy in it because the hit-testing was miscalibrated and the game’s premise was confusing. Why does the water freeze enemies when it’s not ice-cold? Why are there pirate zombies?
I just realized that instead of “Ice Man” they should’ve gone with “Pee Man”
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