Grotesque videogames

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loving the warlock’love here. The whole game is essentially the intro, on repeat, never ending ~~~~ WARLOCK ~~~~

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This is incredible.

It’s based on one of the very few original Australian comic book characters. The game was made by an Aussie company, and they marketed the hell out of it in local magazines. It got bad reviews when it came out because you just died if you choose the wrong option (lots of trial and error), but it must have done well enough for the company to survive because they also did Xena and Popeye games.

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oh duh why havent we posted anything by this guy

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narco police for the music alone really although the bio-organic swat tenement thing also does it.
i feel like the amiga sort of hits the miraculous mid point in general between weird zx homebrew stuff and the grungy quality of early hires games which just used the same visual layouts /art styles but with gradients/phototextures put on everything and more sound samples.

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pixelartists for the amiga used dithering in a way that is truly outrageous

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Dithering was one of the few effective ways to use the extra colors in the Amiga’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify mode. I think HAM was too restrictive to be used in most Amiga games but the habit might still’ve carried over.

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HAM Graphics

smells like a pork industry kickback to me

Calling Castlevania 64 “grotesque” is giving it a bit too much credit for visual interest but it does have moments where the ugliness is blasting into your eyeballs at full force. Having more garish and brighter colors for environments’ palettes and a smattering of sourceless luminosities would do a lot for this game.

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Really? I get a strong emotional vibe from gray-green, gray-brown; that N64-ish gray stone made of pink and green.

Shadowgate 64 pulls this off even harder and I love it more. All that’s missing are chunky menu SFX, a la King’s Field. King’s Field is undeniably better but the world is so unremittingly hostile it loses the casual entropy of this vibe.

(feed me more if you got’em)

I do enjoy cloudy days and live in Seattle, yes

For me, the N64 Castlevanias are all the more disappointing for their release-based adjacency to SotN. SotN was like, “Look how incredible we can make a 2D game look and sound with talented, imaginative artists on a CD-based platform.” CV64 was just like… “Well, we tried. Castlevania games are gloomy, right?” And I say this knowing that nothing on the N64 could’ve matched the sumptuousness of SotN. But, at the same time, removing SotN from the picture – yeah, I really do think that CV64/LoD are pretty uninterestingly glum games with only occasional highlights.

And I also like cloudy days.

Certainly, nearly everything in those games sighs with exhaustion. The level concepts are strong enough that I remember them vividly but pacing to combat to art to sound has the feel of a dozen revisions, the last only shipping because they gave up.

Other MK64 stages look better but the DK stage is an utter nightmare

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Is this whole game just walking down tunnels and pressing the Automatic Murder Button the instant you see other humans

Perhaps the same c-

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I don’t remember writing this at all. I think I must have been drunk

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How could I’ve forgotten

EDIT: OH YEAH and

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Vangers looks vaguely like an entire game made out of moon sand

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