I can't believe today was a good play (Games you played today)

[loki]

sonic adventure is still great, even the ugly ps3 version. i’m so glad i got to play this and sa2 both when they were new (well, sa1 was like a year and a half old when i got my dreamcast, but close enough) and just as i was entering my chuuni phase and seriously getting into anime. they’re such perfect games for that.

space invaders infinity gene is really cool, and it’s a shame it got completely eclipsed by space invaders extreme. (extreme is great too, of course).

moon diver is a fun game, too, though it’s an action game with levelling, so it has a negative difficulty curve. i remember making a hype thread when it was first announced as “necromachina”, and no-one really cared. it’s like a poor man’s strider, with up to 4 player co-op? i don’t have anyone to play with, but i bet 4 player is super chaotic.

also i read that bible adventures book a few years ago, and can add my recommendation to the others. it’s very good and interesting.

[Gate88]

I love Super Metroid almost entirely for its sound design. God that game sounds good. It builds its whole atmosphere off the strength of the sound effects and music.

[Sykel]

I hate the lock and key design of Super Metroid, but yeah, the sound design and atmosphere is top notch.

A while ago I realised I don’t like Metroidvanias, because my favourite games are Metroid 2 and Metroid Fusion, which splits the world up into self-contained sections you progress through that connect to each other via a hub-like central area, rather than lots of back tracking which I’m not a fan of. I don’t want to go back to the other side of the map to get a missile pack I couldn’t get before!

[toups]

I feel weird about the link’s awakening remake. in many ways it is utterly charming and delightful, but the quality of life improvements and aesthetic changes remove a lot of the magic of the original. I don’t know if it would be possible to preserve the specific things that made it such a singular experience in a modern HD wrapper anyway, so it’s probably for the best. like, the original often has this barely there, just slipping out of the grasp of your perception quality. the movement and physics are loose and airy. nothing seems quite fully solid. the remake on the other hand is extremely solid, and while that’s nice, a lot of the navigation and the dungeons are breezier than they were in the original, and it is sometimes lacking in atmosphere as a result. but idk I’m glad it exists, and I appreciate the care to which they made it faithful (like they even implemented weird things like when you dash directly into the center point between two bushes, you will bonk instead of cutting through them, which was a movement oddity from the original that you know they had to deliberately add back in and you have to respect that kind of attention to detail).

[villain]

I am also not a fan of Super Metroid, or any Metroid outside of the one with the Samus clone who follows you around (Fusion?).

[Mr_Mechanical]

Yeah it’s Fusion with the SA-X. I think Super Metroid and Metroid: Fusion are probably two of the best video games ever made? Definitely the Very Best in the Metroid Series. I love playing Super Metroid on the Switch. It’s really good on a small screen. They should put Metroid: Fusion on the Switch.

[Alyx]

My favorite of the series is Metroid.

[username]

A few more brief thoughts on The Suffering now that I’m a bit more than halfway through:

• There are a couple different opening “made by Midway” FMVs that seems to change each time you start the game up. Such an odd, utterly pointless touch.

• I was standing above some repeatedly spawning enemies and since I had time to aim a tried to take one out with a single head shot. It blew its head off, causing it to freak out and attack whatever was nearest to it, which happened to be another enemy. This is always a great touch.

• The game occasionally needs you to do something specific in order to advance, and I am always lost when this happens. One time you have to stop infinitely spawning enemies by shining spotlights where they happen to appear, where I thought they were just background touches and didn’t know anything could be done with them. Most recently I was wandering around a closed down mental asylum that happened to be next door to the prison and I had to destroy a bunch of projectors in order to advance and I literally wandered around the entire place trying to figure out what to do and nearly running out of batteries for my flashlight (without which I’d be wandering in pitch darkness) before i decided to just look it up.

Also in these games I always feel like you play as a “felon convicted of killing his wife and kid but really didn’t” and in this case I am not entirely sure that I didn’t really kill my entire family which… would be a thing.

[villain]

just realized your avatar is animated

[Gate88]

Played through Manifold Garden over a few days this week. It’s extremely gorgeous and sort of touches on the same transcendent mathematical experience that Mirror Drop or HyperRogue gave me the first time I played them.

Its main gimmick is seamless looping 3D spaces. It’s hard to capture the scale of these in static screenshots, but it’ll at least give you a taste:

The music in the game is typically sparse, but will build up in suitably awe-inspiring locations. The sound effects are very crisp and help ground the player and objects in the world. Everything has a slight echo to try to approximate the soundscape of the infinite room you’re in. Your footsteps and all the thumps and clanks and tinks of collisions are very satisfying.

It’s ostensibly a puzzle game. The puzzles do ramp up a bit over the course of the game, but I never found them to be all that tricky. However, they are a wonderful excuse for the player to interact with infinity.

You largely navigate through the world by manipulating gravity. If you approach a surface, you can press a button to orient gravity towards that surface. Since most rooms repeat infinitely in at least one direction, the fastest way to move somewhere is normally to fall to the copy below you. This falling is breathtaking, and never got old. The audio design here really shines; the sound of the air swells around you as you pick up speed, and you get an extremely satisfying WHOOSH when you nearly miss a platform.

It’s a little short; I think I beat it within 4 hours. There are secrets, but they’re unfinished and a little buggy. Figuring out and navigating the secret path is quite a bit harder than anything the game has you do on the main path, and navigating some of them takes excruciating amounts of time. This all adds to an effect that makes it feel like you’re breaking the game, but I’m not sure if the tedium is worth it. I hope he fixes some of the bugs and fleshes out the secrets more in a future patch.

Despite being short, the game certainly worked its way into my psyche. I sleepwalk occasionally, and my most recent episode I imagined I dropped something behind my bed (which is sort of a recurring anxious sleepwalking theme for me). This time, instead of frantically grasping behind my bed, I looked up, fully expecting the object to loop around and fall out of my ceiling.

[Rudie]

Kindaichi 3 PS1 ends with an explosion and rolls credits and fuck you for a bullshit detective story ending with your horrible FP-walking around. Bad detective story endings are the worst.

This Skeleton Is Rude! (TokyoRude)

[Tony]

Glad to see that I am not the only one who does NOT love Super Metroid. If I play it with some “suspension of disbelief”, thinking it’s mid-90s, it’s a great achievement.
Otherwise, it’s slow, linear, and not nearly as interesting as it’s been made out to be (even for today’s standards) by some sites. I replayed it one year ago, thinking I could have been wrong when I first played it 15 years ago, but I still felt the same.

[Tuxedo]

I like that « making a short hop » here means jumping three times your height without any momentum like a god, and everybody gets it

Videogames

[Mikey]

The fact that Cuba isn’t in here posting a defense of/ode to Super Metroid just makes me think the combined force of all this unveiled dislike of the game has killed him outright like a Vampire dragged into the sunlight

[Rudie]

You aren’t wrong his computer broke.

[AutomaticTiger]

I want to defend it but like…my defense is literally just the entire game works to create a great atmosphere and narrative. Some folks on here don’t like it, what argument can I make to refute that idea? I like it, apparently others don’t.

The best I can address is well…yeah it’s linear, and linearity isn’t bad. Especially because being in a contiguous space you have to puzzle through yourself is still important to the game, even if your route is mostly linear. The presentation adds to the game, and being linear is only a problem if you think it needs to be a clone of the first game.

Which of course, it does not need to be.

(And as with all supposedly overly linear Nintendo games before the GameCube, there’s actually a ton of weird stuff you can do in the game without actually advancing which adds to the feeling of the game being a world, even if the main progression is mostly linear. And Nintendo gets shittier later because of reasons other linearity but since the games get even more on rails linearity becomes the scapegoat when there’s way more factors at work that make Twilight Princess a much worse game than OOT).

[AutomaticTiger]

If my posts are incoherent I’m sorry, I really should be asleep right now.

[Grandpa]

If I’m gonna do one Halloween gaming event, I guess it’s this Hitman 2 escalation. Three bad missions to unlock the wetsuit (cool!) and some bat shuriken (OK I guess).

No Ring Fit yesterday. Too tired.

Oh also uhhhhhh I forgot how people write Instant Pot recipes to include the time it takes the thing to heat and pressurize, so my broccoli was steamed under high pressure for ten minutes and came out as baby food.

(Uhhh imagine I’m talking about Cooking Mama or something there. But really, don’t steam broccoli for ten minutes at high pressure.)

[Rudie]

Because of you chuckleheads I played the first 30 minutes of Super Metroid.

Yeah guess this game is pretty good even if I don’t like playing it that much. After that info dump it does a lot with wordless storytelling.

Playing any SNES/NES game that makes extensive use of the selectbutton on joycons is fucking awful. Like wanted to figure out how to order that bluetooth snes pad awful.

[VastleCania]

Oh yeah switching weapons on the switch is a fucking misery