I don’t see why you should give it another try. I only really resent games that I kept giving a chance long after it was pretty clear that would be fruitless
I played two of the Max Paynes a couple of years after they came out, and I didn’t dislike them given the expectations of the time, but today all I dimly remember of them is boxy rooms, slack shooting gameplay and heavyhanded narrative. The idea of replaying one in 2019 would never have crossed my mind
Gish is a real time capsule between its Newgrounds aesthetic, wonky physics platforming, and the disjointed soundtrack which kicks off with an instrumental ska track.
sounds like you guys are treating Max Payne like the dearest of all your friends
I kept staring at the faces of Max and JC in the early aughts, sticking out from pc gaming shelves so I could ponder whether to lean cyber slick or crime-noir grit. Granted I’d purchase a decent pc soon (I didn’t).
Denton eventually won, I kept meaning to and never played the MPs. The first probably doesn’t handle like Syphon Filter at all but for some reason that was my quickest association way back.
to be fair Alex Austin would never animate something by hand when a crudely accurate physical simulation would do
just to be clear, I love Gish and especially its soundtrack
tiny rails got rid of the ability to sell trains and also merge them, so your inventory fills up with tons of train cars you dont need (since you get them randomly from a gumball machine) and theres no sorting option and i have NO IDEA why theyd add these two things in an update
like i have no idea how im going to manage my train cars late game and i just dont want to play anymore
sigh
Sad to hear about skatebird. Was a cute idea I guess.
what did you hear about skatebird
Skatebird got their head stuck in a toilet and drowned to death. RIP Skatebird 1991-2019 gone too soon
I never pay any attention to Sonic the Hedgehog games, having had precisely the experience you describe playing the first one a few times, but your post has convinced me to try this one.
I’ll never get over the death screams of Naughty Boy, a game about throwing rocks at the Looney Tunes big red monster and watermelons
this is a really interesting game design piece that I’d like to play and analyze
i’m really enamored with the idea of a small arcade game with a single button action, but that action has its own little unique rule like “you can only hit targets at a specified distance”
yeah, I think it’s pretty neat
It’s obviously Pac-Man derived, with monsters chasing the player through a maze, but it’s almost all flipped. The player has a weapon right from the get-go and that feels immediately empowering; there’s a nice texture when you realize that one shot only stuns monsters, and you have to spend time to get the second shot to kill (it reminds me of the Gear of War loop when forced takedowns are enabled). What looks like a ghost house in the center is actually a safe house! and a timer that counts down as you sit inside. The power pellet analogue flips all the enemies but doesn’t change your offense, just makes you invincible. You can’t pick up food or other powerups by walking on them, you have to bomb them. And the terrain is destructible! I’ve been trying to get something half as powerful in a $150m game for a year!
I’ve got two main issues: one, the monster move in what appear to be mostly-random patterns. Giving them readable AI personalities and preventing them from flipping directions at weird cadences would do wonders when the player is making a decision whether to go for the second hit or run away. Two, the movement feels pretty rough around corners; I’d like it to slide me if I push into a turn just a bit too early, rather than stopping dead.
oh yeah, and that walking animation is great, it was itching my memory but I couldn’t remember why until I thought about your game and those great footsteps!
if there was tiktok in 1982 that scream noise would absolutely be a meme
also god my recommendations are so fucked. oh, you watched videogames well how about some SCRATCHERS
shadow tower \m/
I played Nex Machina today.
I really did not enjoy it.
I think a solid portion of this is just down to personal preference, but it has a pretty nasty case of Contra/Gradius syndrome so I’ll stick with Resogun/SSHD as the good Housemarque games.
I felt the exact opposite, didn’t much like anything they did before nex machina. curious for you to elaborate!
EU4, instead of leaving the Europeans alone until the end, this time I deliberately gutted the problem countries before they took off. That meant insinuating myself as France’s friend because they were having problems with England and the HRE and sure I’ll secure the Iberian peninsula, don’t worry my blue brother the Sunni Ottomans don’t have designs on you eventually. Oh sorry, got to contain Great Britain before I make them give back all the land they took from you! All those Italy traders were sure taking bites out of your own profits, good thing I made them stop forever. What’s that? It looks like I’m keeping Portugal on a leash to colonize the New World? And what are all these prophets all of a sudden? Oh no no, that’s a translation error, we’re bringing PROFITS!
It’s the start of the Revolutionary Age. Castile is gone entirely, eaten up by me and Morocco. Aragon remains guaranteed by Morocco much to my dismay. Portugal was integrated so I could control their colonies directly. Great Britain is a one province minor in Iberia but with a sizeable colonial nation in Canada. France finally figured out what I was doing but did not secure any strong allies by the time the truce was up and has been ravaged ever since. The HRE won the religious war for the Catholics but the heartland was all Reformed/Protestant which weakened it entirely, allowing Austria to big fish it up in the interior. We had a beatdown fight recently (their troops were better than mine!) but I managed to eventually defang them.
Now the rest of Europe is absolutely pissed off at me to the point where every single country not under a truce is in a coalition against me. It hasn’t been triggered because at this point I’m still 3 or 4 times larger than their combined total. What’s hilarious is that the coalition has problems with staying united: every so often one or more countries decides something closer to home is absolutely more important than the looming giant in the background and start squabbling with each other. Once that happens the countries at war fall out of the coalition, leaving a much smaller contingent looking worriedly at each other.
I mean, I credit fed through the game to see what it was like and it is pretty poor to play that way (I take some blame, but the game shares in it as it gave me 99 credits). Resogun and SSHD don’t let you do that, which is better as a way to gradually get used to a game, which is why they are better for me. I think the issues I have with Nex Machina wouldn’t bother someone more experienced with the game, but they kinda feed into each other and make it a worse and worse experience for someone new to it as they get further and further in to the degree that by the 4th or so world I was fully in “let me just grind through this so I can say it is finished and never play it again”.
If I had to name my top issues, your shot doesn’t even cover the whole screen until you power it up and if you reach a hard part where you die a few times it means it is now much harder to get through, particularly if it is a boss. Another power up makes it so that your dash doesn’t have to recharge as much or you can do 3 in a row without having to, which often resulted in me thinking I could dash and instead walking right into a laser. This makes some boss battles awful.
-Dashed into geometry that initially looked like I could walk across but could not.
-Certain enemy attacks visually blend in together (those circular spreading lasers are the worst with this) and I’d sometimes die to them a few times before even knowing what was up.
So yeah, think the game is balanced to the player experienced with the game to the detriment of one new to it, to the degree I don’t want no more. I platinumed resogun and SSHD.
