Since covid happened, food service people aren’t really allowed to interact with customers as much. So, my only other co-worker and I have to use an elevator to do a curbside drop-off system thing. This requires us to use the elevator often, and usually at staggered times. This is especially annoying because the elevator is slooooow and I usually have a timer on eggs or something. Anyway- if I have to go up before her, I always press the 1st floor button as I’m exiting so it’s waiting for her when she’s ready to head on up. I know to do this because I died a whole bunch in New Londo and would start all the way the heck up at firelink shrine. She doesn’t do this and I always feel like I’m left hanging. Even though the odds that someone who doesn’t play vidya games would think to do that are, like, zilch.
All of this to say- maybe more people should play games, because it’s all about shaving those seconds bay-bee.
The surprise transition to a narrator (?) commenting on the tragedy that just occurred is the best part
phantasy star ii is very very good. it still has the feel of an 8-bit game in a lot of ways, but it’s pushing against some interesting ideas. it’s sloppy and haphazard in a forgivable, lovable way, though my god is it grindy!
i especially love the frequently bizarre, interesting music. there are weird rhythms and chord changes all over
I didn’t know this game looked like Myspace Dollz
imho the best part is that this Teim character is not a playable party member, but rather is handled as just another inventory item
gamedev is high art
PSꟼ
I sometimes think about how I had a prediction for the market demand level for every major new Nintendo system this century before it came out and how they panned out
Virtual Boy - Flop
GBA - Success
DS - Flop (who wants 2 screens? Seems like a clunky and inexplicable monster)
Wii - Huge success (I even looked into how to buy Nintendo stock before release but couldn’t figure out how from Canada)
3DS - Success (the 3d gimmick also seemed really dumb and with little appeal but I had learned my lesson from my failed DS prediction)
Wii U - Success, I loved the idea of sometimes playing on my TV and sometimes in my bedroom
Switch - Flop (because this is too similar to the Wii U which nobody wanted, plus it’s clunky and has weak graphics)
to be fair i think this was consensus for the first 18 months or more, with things really picking up the pace when the ds lite came out
the original ds pal release was late because nintendo, so i imported a japanese ds at the same time a friend imported a psp and i felt like i’d bought in to the wrong one for quite some time, he had sick homebrew while i was struggling to play mario 64 with a thumb strap
(i found the receipt recently in my gmail and wow, £140 for a new device + two games…)
I was also on the “PSP is gonna be the way to go” train before I bought either. I was like “The DS, what a washed up idea! That’s some game and watch shit”
I think the game that sold me was uh LostMagic?? I read about it and was like “this is the best idea ever”
i was a big backer of the original ds, i even traded in my gp32 to get one, almost entirely on the strength of it having a new sonic and a new castlevania.
unfortunately, because the ds was a system with both massive success and a massive, awesome library, i assumed the 3ds would be the same. i had my doubts when the region lock was revealed, but it was still my first choice against the vita.
now obviously, neither console was particularly huge, but the 3ds did have a bigger audience than the vita. however, i eventually came to learn that the vita was the better console, with a significantly better library.
I imported a DS after the US launch. This is the only console I have ever imported and/or gotten at launch.
It wasn’t until Catch! Touch! Yoshi! that I understood why the DS was a good idea.
Edited for my feelings, but stylus gaming seems to have died with the Wii U?
one time i had a dream about a basketball game that must have been in some way inspired by the NES game Bad News Baseball because it was called “NBA Bad Time, Worse Time”
Started playing through the DLC in Nioh 2, really appreciate how the evenly spaced player graves here perfectly traced the part of the shoreline where the water becomes deep enough to drown in. Bloodstains/graves/etc are obviously always caution signs, but in this particular case the metaphor felt very close to real-world implementation.
Thinking lately there is a major game design trend primarily in 16-bit games in the early 90s that has not been named. This category includes ~all rotoscoped platformers, brawlers and fighting games, as well as isolated games from other genres such as Secret of Mana. These are games based around the fact that ROM capacity had radically expanded into the megabytes, and artists used it for fluid, expressive character animations. This reduced the abstraction level of the graphics and created a new problem about how to trade off control responsiveness with animation fluidity (for example, waiting for a foot to hit the ground before starting a turn-around animation).
And in turn an explosion of nuanced game mechanics emerged from these subtleties, which have gained names primarily from the fighting game community (combos and iframes are some of the most basic examples).
In the original Prince of Persia even walking was uninterruptible, so you had to be constantly nervous about slipping into pits and traps, making relatively simple level designs feel like terrifying dungeons of death. In Secret of Mana most enemies had huge iframe windows while they were attacking or stunned, leading experienced players to an observant, run-in-and-poke combat style. Both of these games baffle and frustrate beginners but the precise reason their style has been abandoned is why I’m increasingly curious to reevaluate them.
Nowadays (outside of fighting games which remain far more self-conscious and nuanced about this) the conventional wisdom is generally to prioritize input responsiveness at the expense of animation fluidity, and additionally after Dark Souls some moves are specially designated as “committal” and cannot be interrupted. However, this is a stilted way of conceiving of the tradeoffs here and it has started to lead to a certain tedious uniformity in gamefeel.
I can’t think yet how to name this pseudo-genre in a catchy way, ideas welcome.
Alwyas thought this song from Genghis Khan was the right balance between classy/melancholy. Fascinated me as a kid
Peggle… TWO!