Quick Questions XIV: A Question Reasked (Part 1)

The anthology has a little bit of input lag but is fine and will be on sale again soon so you can just try it for 7 bucks of whatever and see how much it annoys you.

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this sounds like the plan then. thanks, Rudie!!! Maybe Iā€™ll get X separately at some point if I really want a more pristine way to play my favourite in the series

The guy who did the voice of Mr. Bones commented on one of these videos years ago and I still havenā€™t topped that personal achievement

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Thanks for all the answers regarding Saturn!
Btw, I had also a note regarding this game:
Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari

Has anybody (with Japanese knowledge) played it?

What are peopleā€™s feelings about the glass tunnel in Super Metroid? Do you like it? Was it a cool moment or one that frustrated you?

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I donā€™t remember too much about Super Metroid but I do remember this spot is why I stopped playing this game for a long time. I just didnā€™t knwo what to do until I found out that thereā€™s a bespoke rule for this setpiece. If there were other weird shit moments itā€™d be fine, but I canā€™t remember any of those. It reminds me of burning down the windmill in Dark Souls 2 (another thing I hated in games).

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I canā€™t remember if I figured it out or read a guide first but either way, I think itā€™s really cool.

And after finding power bombs I was using them in every weird room anyway in hopes of finding secrets, so it doesnā€™t seem a huge leap to me to use it on one of the weirdest rooms.

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I distinctly remember trying to break that tunnel with regular bombs for a long time so power bombs were not a huge leap

This reminds me of accessing the Dark World version of the Lost Woods Dungeon in A Link to the Past. Requires a use of a mostly-optional item in an unprecedented way. I stumbled upon the answer by accident, after having put the game down for years.

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thread reminding me of this thing:

r444

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I donā€™t know about the glass tube, per se, but just this past week I played a Super (Duper) Metroid hack that locked a (useful, non-required) key item behind a clever puzzle that required you to make a leap of logic asked nowhere else in the game.

Some people tried doing a difficult trick (much later in the game) to get into the backdoor, while other players swore up and down that the game was broken. It took me a little while to suss out the solution, but I thought it was really great once I did.

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This was a full stop for me, had to find a guide. If you were going to make the game today there should have been a non-aggressive obstacle that required the power bomb to access shortly after finding the power bomb in a room full of cosmetic monitors, and the power bomb would have blown out all the monitors.

But thatā€™s a design thatā€™s probably only possible to arrive at with modern hindsight, even if it would have been possible with the technology.

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imo the fundamental design issue with the glass tube is that by the time you need to break it, the game has conditioned you to scan the environment (with bombs or xray) for tiles with item icons on them. Since the tube doesnā€™t produce those icons when examined, itā€™s easy to overlook. (In other words, the game forces you to examine the world in a way contrary to how it has been training you (tbqh I think this is good))

Later 2D games (such as Fusion and Dread (but not ZM!?)) would solve this issue by marking their equivalent tubes with the normal destructible block icons. (My preferred (and substantially more difficult to design around) solution would be to get rid of those icons entirely.)

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yeah, i always thought maybe have these different materials make distinct sounds when theyā€™re shot could be a more subtle way to differentiate them than turning them into literal icons indicating which thing breaks them

but maybe too subtle? idk

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By 1994 games aspired to a smooth never-get-stuck experience but it seems clear from things like Super Metroidā€™s glass tube and Sonic 3ā€™s barrel that they werenā€™t yet backing up that design goal with sufficient playtesting to really deliver it.

It leaves many 16-bit games in an uncanny valley of design: itā€™s also hard to savor the obscurity/frustration like we now do for NES games, as the rest of the experience is somewhat handholdy

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i saw usenet posts about it from 1994 this morning and iā€™m still not totally convinced the whole ā€œgetting stuck on the barrelā€ isnā€™t some kind of mass internet gaslighting operation. i literally never once heard of anyone getting stuck there before coming online, and it never stood out as a place where anyone might get stuck

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I personally got stuck on Sonic 3ā€™s barrel for at least an hour. Itā€™s similar to what RT-55J said about the glass tube, it comes after the game trained you differently. There are something like 5 prior barrels you can get through by jumping momentum before it presents you with one that requires up/down dpad presses. And it keeps seeming like if you jumped slightly more efficiently you could get through

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same

i got stuck on it as a lad until i read cvg the next month

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Same2