more time loop games should allow you to plan and execute elaborate hijinks and japes
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Yes, a Wile E. Coyote game where you play as the Road Runner.
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999 fits into this timeloop genre too, in fact (spoilers for the ending) it seems like the entire story ends up being about how players can retry sections of games over and over and then in the context of the gameâs story it would appear like the protagonist has miraculous knowledge they shouldnât possess. Characters in the game can pass knowledge backwards to their former selves. The whole game is set up so you have to replay it lots of times to get all the endings
I also feel like time loops or day-to-day timers as a game mechanic just solve a lot of practical design problems. Like in Majoraâs Mask you get to see the positive and negative consequences of your actions without getting locked into the current gamestate.
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Thereâs a lot of tension in this definition when broadened to include games with little to no simulation like a VN. I donât think 999 or other VNs are really âclockworkâ because that implies reactivity rather than branches in scripting.
âTime loopâ describes the narrative structure of those but not the design which already varies wildly in @drastic_bbâs examples of Majoraâs Mask, Dead Rising, and Outer Wilds. Simulation complexity increases in roughly that order, where in Majora youâre flipping switches that change the state of the world or setting off scripted chains of causality, in Dead Rising there are disjunctive paths within the time constraints, and in Outer Wilds the entire 22 minute loop is simulated down to grains of sand.
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Case Zero, the XBLA exclusive Dead Rising 2 prequel, was much better than any of the sequels and itâs a shame itâs not available on any other platforms.
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starting to think of japanese stunt actor-led mocap animation as one of the defining characteristics of console videogame development in the 00s, with shenmue (obvs built on a foundation laid by am2âs previous work w/ mocap actors in virtua fighter) anticipating the kind of fully real-time 3d immensely audiovisually lush games that japanese publishersâ internal dev studios would come to semi-reboot a couple of their most popular franchises into, thinking mostly of ffxii and resident evil 4 here, but also mgs2; all as some kind of response consciously or not to shenmue (along those lines we might see vagrant story / dmc1 / mgs1 as especially prototypical to those titles as virtua fighters 1-3 were in some sense for shenmue?). mgs4 and re6 were kind of absurd singular disasterpieces along this trajectory that seemingly collapsed an entire style of game for those developers⌠idk. dead rising is probs in this mix too as a post-re4 pre-re6 capcom game right
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How there still hasnât been a more surprising moment in video games than:
âWait, as in the guy from MadTV?â
Possibly only matched something like five years later when he was revealed to also the voice of Ramza in the PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics.
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Samurai Jack!
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i got a toaster today and was like âYEAHHH I BEAT A WAVE OF DUDES IN SMASH TV WOOOOOOâ
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Yeah, Phil La Marr made the wise move of utilizing his years of experience in sketch comedy playing characters to transition into voice acting and is probably living a lot more comfortably than a lot of the MadTV cast are today because of that move, vs holding out for other live action TV and movie appearances. He has an absolute shitload of animation and video game credits to his name.
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The âwalled gardenâ lyric in this is very 
This was my understanding; apparently Alyx had a really troubled development and Campo Santo was brought on to âright the shipâ so to speak. Just what I heard through the grapevine though so take it with a grain of salt.
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One of those things twitter shows you for a second then you lose forever:
âI didnât say Fire Shark was good. I said I liked it.â
Which, what a statement for criticism on this webforum.
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The Frank West version of DR2 is superficially better Because Frank but DR3 was a damned chore and forgetabout whatever the Hell they did with DR4
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videogame thing i did not think about all until now because i didnt know it existed: dead rising 4
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I JUST got mad about this too!!!
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I replayed dead rising last year. itâs aged like wine for the most part. still a terrific experience⌠and still looks really good too! as far as I know the steam port doesnât really have much in the way of visual enhancements⌠itâs honestly a miracle how good dead rising was for the time it came out. wasnât it basically a 360 launch title? it doesnât have that unreal engine 3 muddiness/overly bump-mapped look. I guess they used their own in-house engine?
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yeah I remember it seeming like a weirdly effortful one-off exclusive even at the time, when neither capcom nor the 360 launch lineup really had a lot of hits
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is there some shitty ass documentary on the making of dead rising online somewhere? Iâm curious now.
yâall are gonna make me replay that game
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