mega man zero is really, really, really good. i love the ever-looming threat of perma-failing missions and how good it feels to dash up and slash enemies in half. the action is fast and meaty, the soundtrack rips, what a fantastic game!
i owned it as a kid but that desert level made me ragequit the game completely. beating it the other day was a very happy moment!
Sunset Overdrive is the best open world game I’ve played in years. It reminds me more of Sonic Adventure than GTA or even Saint’s Row. It has big Punk Poser Energy, lots of grinding (on rails), goofy characters, a totally inappropriate attitude towards an apocalyptic scenario in a city, big colors, and a clear joy and passion behind it. Even the Snarky Main Character trope works here. I love it.
And the respawns are fun too.
I tried Nex Machina again, this time trying to finish each stage on its own without continuing, and it went a good bit better but I still don’t love it. It legitimately has some readability issues when it comes to stage design as on the rare occasion they include something you can get caught up on more often than not it is too hard to tell this from the regular non-interfering stage dressing.
Playing each stage on its own reveals that its biggest issue is that the difference between starting out and powered up is just too much. The beginning rooms of each stage are generally among the hardest playing this way as you are so weak, and only the hardest rooms match it when powered up. This also makes dying problematic as if you die “well” (not in a troublesome location in the room and not automatically losing one of the useful powerups) it isn’t the end of the world, but if you don’t then they can quickly stack up with you losing most of your lives and leaving more or less crippled.
My solution would have been to make your starting shot a bit stronger (at least cover the whole screen) and make the triple dash the default, and balance the rest around that. The power-ups beyond those can be powerful and important, especially when it comes to the bosses, but not to the degree that being without them is crushing.
i was mad at the internet today, so i decided to shelter myself and played a bunch of fighting games with my friend, who used to be the #1 dan hibiki player in canada. and for someone who has only really started trying to get into fighters in earnest a year ago, i managed to do pretty well for myself! specifically, we played garou, darkstalkers 3, samsho v, and marvel vs capcom 1.
Hour 2 of Hollow Knight (roughly between the first and second boss) is the worst part of the game FYI. Assuming you might never have played a Search Action, the game takes it too slow in opening up the world or making the level design interesting or challenging, so it’s a tedious, generic mush for a while. I almost quit the game then and there, but it quickly got better after that.
One of my favorite things early on in Bloodstained is using the triple mid air kick the kung fu shoes or whatever you get almost immediately have to get to nooks and crannies it would take you much longer to otherwise.
I was thinking of bloodstained when I said that since I played through it in the last month
Though I just lured monsters under ledges and jumped off their heads. Very effective w flying monsters because they follow you after you do that so you can keep kicking off their heads for all the height you need
TABS just got added to XBGP for PC
i liked Hollow Knight right away simply because i love the setting and aesthetic, and it’s probably my favorite Search Action Game, but i wouldn’t argue with anyone who gets a little bored before picking up the Mothwing Cloak. After that the pacing picks up quite a bit and powers aren’t dripfed as much
I truly think it avoids the “oh a dead end… guess I’ll come back with the double jump or whatever” most of the time, you open up so much unexplored ground whenever you get a new power and there are multiple “front” entrances to most areas, it doesn’t feel like you’re being progressively hemmed in until you reach the “correct” path. At least, that’s how it felt to me. I don’t mind seeing the hand of the developer in general, but i also really didn’t get that artificial vibe from the game at all
Blood Bowl 2 – Look, I love Blood Bowl. I love it far more than it deserves just because it’s an extremely silly fake sport with silly Games Workshop fantasy races and the associated over-the-top anachronisms and bloodshed. This edition of BB can’t side-step the big honking issue that all editions, including the tabletop, have, which is that you could make every decision correctly in the game and still lose, because it’s always going to come down to dice rolls and likely, a fairly small # of really critical rolls in which it seems things always go catastrophically, horribly wrong. It is a testament to the aesthetics and general joie de vivre of Warhammer Fantasy that I still come back to the game after I get an Ork Thrower jogging up and rolling some 10% or so chance to take down my Ogre, who then of course dies as a result. (Why is this game great? Your only chance to win, really, with the Halfling team is to somehow get ahold of the ball with a Halfling, then have a Treant throw the ballcarrier as far downfield as possible.)
Civilization VI – Apparently this one is not very Civilization? Or at least that’s what I heard on the internet! It wasn’t really explained further than that and frankly I’m not sure what they could be referring to because it sure as heck feels like Civ to me, in that I stayed up too late last night one-more-turning so that I could get more cavalry archers built so that I could take out some barbarian troops that were threatening to kill my settlers that I was frog-marching across a continent so that I could cut off England from expanding near me. Anyway, it’s okay so far? I hear they only added diplomatic victory via a DLC, so maybe that’s what people are upset about.
Civ VI isn’t bad (certainly not compared to V), it’s just firaxis’ design goals are increasingly far away from anything I want to play – they have a bunch of board game designers trying to hyper-maximize the tradeoffs from every micro-level action at the same time as they’re trying to make videogames that you can play endlessly, and it winds up being an exhausting combination of very deliberate and very repetitive
the pro strats is to assume this will always happen and aggressively play safe moves before attempting anything remotely risky
that’s not for me, I love to Blitz and Go For It with a crappy catcher and lean hard on team rerolls before even standing up my decent blockers
I am very bad at this game
no, I think that’s really the only way to play a Games Workshop, to fail catastrophically and laugh about it
That’s why it’s so hard to do a straight mobile game, their tabletop rules are in no way meant to create interesting balanced matches
I tried Anodyne today as it was 99 cents a few months back (and probably now as well) and it is the most “partial controller support” game I’ve stumbled across in quite a while, so it has that going for it. It simply would not let me use the d-pad on my controller even with joy2key and insisted on forcing either keyboard or analog, but fortunately it is a fairly widespread issue and after a half hour or so of fiddling one of the various suggestions worked.
Anyways the game itself seems fine. The thing is… one of you poisoned my mind. There is a room in a dungeon flooded with a ton of mindlessly wandering people with a differently colored central “nook”. This sparked a memory from years ago, probably the only one I have of the game where I thought someone was talking about how were they supposed to figure out that they were supposed to herd all the people into that central nook. I spent a good fifteen or so minutes doing it, nothing happened and it struck me that the years ago post was probably about the person doing that and complaining that it did nothing.
So yeah, don’t do that.
there was a free month trial thing going on for origin so i got 3 codes using a VPN and some old emails for 3 free months. promptly installed anthem because i have a sick mind
a lot of things feel very almost. the guns feel OK, but the enemies are beyond mindless, and there basically can’t be particularly meaningful level/encounter design due to how potent flying is. once, i double-jumped toward a ledge and my lady actually mantled up it, which i had no idea could happen and seems totally unnecessary but is somehow perfectly emblematic of this game.
it’s very pretty and flying is quite enjoyable
idk, it’s a weird fucking game! i’m glad i’ve gotten to experience it, i might play a bit more
i’m conflicted about this. i don’t particularly value immersion, but i also dislike the signposted “guided game-teaching” school of design that characterizes contemporary “good practice.” there’s a great glenn gould interview near the end of his life where he criticizes his first recordings for being too “pianistic” in a pejorative sense; “there’s a lot piano playing going on.” i feel that way about a lot of game design too, whatever the equivalent would be. my favorite instances of game design tend to have a sense of rigorous literalism or honesty rather than condescending skinner box didacticism, even if they also involve a meticulous structural balancing act in order to cohere at all. this can also apply to game mechanics of a very high degree of abstraction. in other words, i like when game design is quite honest about “the matrix,” and the matrix itself is what you’re expected to play, rather than a guided subgame where you’re the rat in the maze and the designers are the researchers guiding you from above.
Hollow Knight update.
I am 10 hours into it. I read the thread and particularly took note about Vania’s comment about how empowering the upgrades are.
I also haven’t gotten another useful upgrade since hour 3 and felt like I have made every wrong turn possible for 7. And then when I go through an area for the third time I go “oh yeah I did somehow make every wrong turn possible” as I stumble into badges and minor upgrades and minibosses I missed before. I don’t know what to take from that.
The Messenger is all about abusing the move set until your hand falls off and the few moments I am encouraged to do that that is pretty fun.
I’ve unlocked like 3 of the 4 DLC but am no closer to the main game.
On the other hand that the game let me do all this is like cool. That it is completely not…directly signposted throws back to that old 8bit era.
But I’m also like the exact person who shouldn’t play these games because I keep ending up at “Fun Coming Soon.” I am like a cool bug drawn to the light of things I can’t do yet. I must have a list of 25 things I can’t do. Someone familiar with the game would be driven crazy by how many wrong turns I make.
It is comfortable I am glad I paid only a dollar for it. It would probably be pretty cool on the switch. Xbox Game Pass gave me an excellent oppurtunity I would have hated this had I spent money for it and putting it next to UNNAMED INDIE SEARCH ACTION GAMES THAT SOLD HORRIBLY it wipes the floor with them.
All the bugs are good and cute. Every other review/critic is right it starts with the heavy Dark Souls influence and moves into something more positive.
yeah I’m still basically looking forward to the sequel despite being as cold on it
