I like the gun power level thing though in that particular case I absolutely understand why something so punitive wasn’t widely embraced. And I probably don’t actually want to see it in other games. In fact I definitely don’t! I distinctly remember not enjoying whatsoever the way a similar system was implemented in blaster master.
What you said about steam reviews makes total sense. Maybe it’s telling that both cave story and spelunky started out as non commercial projects.
Reading through this one that came to mind when I played it recently and I didn’t see here is Arkham Asylum. I don’t know if other people feel that way about it but I got series “MV” vibes when I played it. Three main hub sections and then areas that grow increasingly explore-able as items are collected…lots of nooks and crannies in between. One of my favorite game worlds in recent memory and definitely it’s best feature imo.
Oh, it’s absolutely a metroidvania and I thought it was very weird that it wasn’t described as such by press people when it came out. (I also think it completely sucks real bad, sorry.)
No apologies needed, I think there are a lot of criticism’s of it that are warranted. I would be curious to hear yours, as long or as short as you’re willing.
I praise the game world, it’s flow, kind of labyrinthine feel and the general mood and lighting. I don’t think it’s a great game but I thought it was designed very well and had fun ‘Batman’-like mechanics to tool around in that world.
Many criticisms, but as to its search action structure specifically: it’s built entirely around the most boring part of these games, where you see a block with an icon and you say “I don’t have this icon yet” and you’re rewarded for remembering where you left this block behind after you move forward and finally get the right key that fits that icon’s lock. Tedious, mindless.
I got you. Maybe if the game had been longer it would have felt more that way to me but I think I beat it over a week so I was thinking less critically about that and more breezing thru the environments with interest in the aesthetics. Not a game I’ll likely ever return to in any event.
The characters are all disgusting slabs of meat, but I agree that the environments are pretty cool looking. If only all their detail wasn’t rendered irrelevant by the game heavily incentivizing you to look at it in Neon Orange Vision all the time
start to xray scope is like the metroidvania equivalent of start to crate
start to double jump ledge
start to skill tree
Start to “you got captured and temporarily lost all your powerups”
SB 1955 would be a bunch of people complaining about how “rock’n’roll” is too jargon-y and off putting of a name and it should instead be called “70bpm blues scales” or something.
we’d definitely have strong words about malt shop culture and its state
old discussion but i agree with this. the whole promise of being an indie developer to me in those early post-Cave Story days (esp embodied by people like increpare) is that you could make whatever you want unconstrained by the demands of publishers or marketing or whatever. yet the imagination of a lot of especially all the most visible people seemed to be very limited in a lot of ways. esp when it comes to interfacing with the past, the usual nostalgia mining over the same handful of games and ideas over and over again really have become dominant, especially as like the whole Game Award nexus of AAA releases mixed with higher budget indies has solidified. even something like Fez which i thought was kind of a conservative gamery game at the time feels kind of weird and experimental compared to most of what comes out now.
you can say that game designers are increasingly becoming constrained by market forces and trying to sell their thing in the same way as something else that was successful so they can have a shot at any visibility at all, therefore they’re shaping their creative decisions on that. and that might be true for some people? but to me it’s not really that. i think there was always just a lack of basic curiosity and literacy, and a need to endlessly regurgitate even before the gold rush was over i don’t think most devs were interested in exploring beyond the most obvious points. either you were someone who wanted to performatively scrap the entirety of game history and put forth your own similarly constrained/compromised ideas or you were just making your thing to uncritically nostalgia mine. neither party ever seemed that curious or open to me though… and that’s why Cave Story still feels weird and different and like it’s trying things people won’t try now in spite of being maybe the most influential and copied “indie” game there is.
Gamer culture in 1955 would have called rock’n’roll “Diddleberry,” “Maybellene-likes” or some shit.
‘Triple Elvis’
Beatlemanias
Blues as a Service
this is why i’m glad that return of samus and the prime sequels were smart enough to grant you a few basic abilities intrinsically, since they’d more or less become the primary verbs of the series (prime 2 still pulls that sequence but iirc lets you keep morph ball and charge beam)
Namco video game investigation