i think i have a similar mind virus, except with the knowledge that toby fox and i were both on acmlmboard (defunct romhacking community) during the mid-aughts at the exact same age
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damn
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When I started my PhD, a friend of mine also started on the PhD program at the same time and we kinda began it together. He’d eventually leave the program to go work at Rocksteady and I focused on games academia instead. It turned out much later that their first project was the Suicide Squad game. I’m not really in touch with them anymore but it’s another divergent life path thing I think about a lot.
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he was a fan of my livejournal which always weirds me out he was too young!!
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indeed…I sat in the back row with the artists who went on to Nerbacular Drop. I was so close, coulda been me etc. but I was so indignant that the art program had no say in game design I chose to make a silly animated short final project instead, oh well!
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this was how it was for our team except because I was the only person who could draw I did the art for our final project…in a game design program…where I was studying game design.
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a few years back while searching for info on hydlide II i came across a screenshot of this scene, in a reply with zero interaction- much information on the hydlide series is contained in years-old twitter replies from inactive accounts with <100 followers. in the secret basement of the final dungeon, there are these statues which drain your health and magic when touched. i had originally beat the entire game twice without using the underutilized “talk” mode at all but after seeing the screenshot i tried going back to my old save to talk with the statues. all the other statues still just drain your resources when touched, except this one, which (in a translation by @spinnylights) says:
“I’m an original…PC-88!”
i have tried finding any fan shrines or old pc-88 magazines or other sources that might mention this, but the only place i’ve seen it mentioned is in that twitter reply. i figure it’s likely just an easter egg or inside joke, but it’s so cryptic it feels easy to imagine any number of other places it could lead… in hydlide 3 there is a chance when making your character to have a secret class, “Monster”, appear on the class selection list, and the few sources that mention it cite different chances, from 1/100 to 1/1024. at first i doubted it existed based on the one english-language gamefaqs thread that mentioned it, which sounded more like an urban legend than other well-documented secrets in the game- but even the more well-documented secrets feel like they could be urban legends, and it becomes hard to differentiate where the boundaries of this stuff lay.
for all the efforts to make games legible, to delineate edges in a concise and recognizable way, the one thing that actually excites me is seeing all the formulaic grindy crap pull away for a moment to reveal something truly inexplicable. from the mush of “gameplay” an alien presence reaches out and makes contact. if you beat the elite four 40 times prof oak will call you a bitch.
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I wonder how this is translated in the English version of Hydlide 2. I really gotta get around to figuring that game out.
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Damn, this all rules
One thing I regret is that only popular or infamous games will ever get mined for neat finds like this. Who knows how many wild secrets game devs have left in obscure, ignored licensed titles
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yeah!! im always down to talk shop when it comes to hydlide… if you ever have any questions well… let’s just say they call me the “Hydlide Freak”…
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I mean, I did lose my shit about Hydlide 3 last year on this very board, so yeah, haha.
Super Hydlide is undoubtedly my fav Genesis game at this point.
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What about the Genesis version captured your attention? I only have a passing knowledge of Hydlide and mainly of the Saturn version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_O8CNa03Yg all video games should be made like this. It’s a shame that i don’t really care for the type of game it is because aesthetically this is kinda my dream game. all of the towns are photographed physical diorama’s it’s awesome.
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The soundtrack for one is amazing. Best overworld music ever. The Genesis version streamlines some of the grinding to make it a lot smoother. And the overall presentation is just perfectly Genesis
Hydlide 3 in general is so full of weird dream logic. The original title of the game is The Space Memories, which relates to the giant hole in the middle of said overworld that eventually you just get a spacesuit and jump into. There’s so many weird hidden secrets that are only vaguely mentioned by NPCs that finding things felt so good. It’s just so much playground game.nonsense in a great way.
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tuxedo posted a couple cool ones that I think about a lot now
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Gotta say: For as many things as I feel conflicted about with Tunic, the lack of a goddamn parry system to my knowledge at this point endears me to it more than it should.
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feels like when old game titles give to the indie game developers, many of them just change the color wheel of art assets.
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I regret to inform you that there is a parry mechanic and it’s explained and implemented in a hard-to-use way
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