Yeah, Galak-Z was pretty good about having things on the board that interacted in many emergent ways. Then enemies started getting to chunky and they didn’t feel as strong as a tactic.
I kept telling Jake that buffing HP on higher tier enemies was wrong! And I was supposed to own those numbers!
ooh I’m so mad about that!
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Big HP was manageable. It was big shields that killed the pacing. Because of the inertia based movement fights were often messy affairs and more often than not I’d end up getting my shield popped just as I popped theirs. Player HP is a precious resource so you are very strongly urged to catch your breath but then the enemy just catches thiers creating a vicious cycle unless you can get a perfect run in that encounter.
You’re absolutely right, and at proper balance the shield requirements are there to force you to pick a target and stick to it. That’s why the Imperial faction (the ones with shields) are the first enemy type – it’s an important lesson. Later the Pirates come in with no shield but plenty of explosives and the intent is to push the player to dive into enemy groups to take advantage of friendly fire.
But enemy shields is another way of saying enemy regenerating health and it’s real dangerous past a certain point.
On the other side, I think one of our biggest breakthroughs was regenerating shields on the player. Giving the player the confidence to run into a fight while preserving a roguelike’s long-term survival pressure was super-important, and even though we blatantly lifted it from Halo I think it does even more work here and I’m surprised it hasn’t spread more amongst action roguelikes.
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for a game with so many good design decisions I sure don’t understand why there are boss rushes gating a lot of the postgame, the bosses aren’t very interesting at all
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I went back to this after over a year, and cleaned up the postgame moons in Bowser’s samurai castle. I had a pretty good time! When I first played the game, I felt that the postgame moons were a bit much, but now I realize their true utility is to give you more to do when you revisit the game in the future.
Still shoulda gotten some DLC worlds though.
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the only moons i have left are the face tracing ones.
i will never get them
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this post is from awhile ago but i wanna agree that there’s something very mysterious, free and open about Mario 64 and i think that’s why it continues to be so popular with people. it is my favorite Mario game of all-time (more than SMB3 even) because it evokes a very unique/uncanny feeling that’s hard to put into words. and i definitely don’t think that’s just nostalgia talking or whatever.
i was hoping to relive that feeling somewhat with Odyssey when i played it since i missed many many years of Nintendo stuff (i never owned a gamecube or wii) but it felt kind of randomly strung together. when there were mystery side worlds and other things behind the scenes it did call back to Mario 64 but those were few and far between. there are definitely good moments to Odyssey but overall it felt incoherent. i would’ve liked a more contiguous, smaller space that you could explore more deeply and extensively.
like honestly it would’ve been more interesting if Odyssey centered New Donk City as its central setting and like really went as far as it could into the weird jank of that. i was really disappointed to just find that it was a random level midway through the game given how hard they pushed that space in ads/trailers.
but yeah i found Odyssey disappointing overall.
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Have you played Super Mario Sunshine? It has a similar kind of underlying weirdness to Mario 64. It’s not as polished either which imho enhances that. The hub world is like a weirdly abandoned tropical resort city? It’s like an entire game built off of the “summer vacation episode” anime trope
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This is the first of these upscaled marios that actually looks really good! Like someone bridged the gap between what was in my head when I was ten and what the graphics actually looked like.
I don’t want an unreal engine mario, but I might like a mario 64 remaster that looks like it’s a gamecube game.
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I hated this game and that joseph anderson or whatever’s video on it i think hits at some of my big issues with it. there is nothing engaging to be doing in this game unless you’re trying to use mario’s movement tech to try to “break” the game but even then it’s either trivial or are speedrunning tricks so outlandish that it’s incredibly annoying to do and not worth the effort.
all the moons are either incredibly boring dull tasks that just feel like an enormous waste of time or tutorials for a main game that doesn’t exist. the game never challenges you on mario’s platforming abilities because it is so concerned to try to force you into boring captures instead that have no skill curve to them and have very limited utility. you spend a whole world using a boring capture only to go to the next world and use that next world’s boring capture instead of actually playing as Mario, the character who, yknow, actually feels good and interesting to control.
i get that we won’t get that experience of playing super mario 64 for the first time again. of understanding 3D spaces like it’s our first time playing a 3D videogame, while learning with baby steps all the nuances and complexities of mario’s controls, coupling these two intertwined learnings into moving smoothly through environments you have now acquainted yourself with, yet still manage to find new discoveries about them. we can’t have that again because we sort of know how mario should control in 3D, we’re too literate in how games operate and how to operate in these virtual spaces. so now mario 64 feels less like a limitless world to keep digging into and more like an overhyped toy that feels annoying as hell to do any sort of platforming with because he’ll bonk into walls or spin in a wide radius like a car if you try nudging him slightly to adjust his positioning.
but like, man, I feel like I would’ve just preferred to play Mario 64 with Odyssey’s much more refined camera and controls than this. And I’m saying that from a position of liking only a handful of Mario 64’s levels and thinking the rest is total dogshit. The only fun I’ve had with Odyssey was in two spots: First is New Donk City, because it is the only world that actually feels like a playground for Mario, and second was a very specific challenge room that you have to jump as the frog from platform to platform avoiding waves of poisonous water, and even -then- I only had fun because I refused to play it as the frog capture and did it with regular Mario instead, which de-trivialized the challenge.
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i think this game’s charm is entirely dependent on how much you find the novelty to be novel. i found the novelty to be quite novel, but i also am a sucker for Be The Monster shit. notably, i have not gone back and played this at all since getting as many of the moons as i wanted to and quitting, and have no real desire to. it’s interesting in that way - i think it lights up all the correct neurons in my brain to be enjoyable, but very little of it had enough friction to actually stick in a meaningful way. very strange game
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i think this was the last game i really tried to obsessively power through, always just working towards getting more outfits and an impressive moon count. it wasn’t that fun towards the end of my time with it but i really just loved to move in that game
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Sonic Forces has better outfits
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I’m three months late but:
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You wonder if they could fudge a high resolution texture pack to, uh, bring the textures back up to the original clarity from the original. Some places there look pretty rough
I think it’s poor art direction more than the technical constraints they’ve chosen; they need more interesting color palettes and low-res texture drawing techniques. These textures are all in a similar color range which makes more sense if there are strong lights on them. Without the lighting of a modern game like Odyssey, that color palette needs to get baked into the textures.
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New Super Mario Flashback demo.
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