Just started watching the AGDQ run and they’re playing a specific world seed? One that the player has clearly used before? That seems kind of counter to the spirit of the game but whatever I guess.
Speedruns of heavily procedural games that have seeds are almost always localized around a single seed (or even have different categories for different seeds that are each interesting in some way). Otherwise competition would be impossible. You might just have a record because you happened to get an amazing seed.
That makes sense, I guess.
Gonna suppose the seed wasn’t an agreed-upon competition seed because it was the runner’s name with two periods.
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dropping this here for all virtual hydlide heads, a 1998 amiga animation that is sort of unrelated but by dint of similar visual language (cut-out sprites cycling through animations in various abstract 3d spaces in very fixed perspectives) ends up feeling like a spiritual collaboration between that game and the Hylics guy.
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this is awesome
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i don’t know how i missed this thread but i have always been super curious about this game, and i realized just now it is entirely because of the ‘joke’ in the name wherein all of the other ‘virtua’ / ‘virtual’ games on the Saturn were like, ‘virtual’ versions of activities that are immediately intelligible (fighter, racing, cop, etc.) and then you have this and ‘virtual on’ which seem to indicate the existence of real world things you can do called “hydlide” and “on” and thinking about that is just funny to me. ok
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super hydlide is a great game
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I forgot there’s a game store a few blocks from here with twelve copies of NES Hydlide. I… think I need to return there, now that I am established in this locale.
Establish yourself even more by buying ALL of them. That’s making a statement.
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If only they had lock-on technology…
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Super Hydlide is on my list of RPGs to play. I’ve only dabbled but it looks interesting! I also have Hydlide 3 on Famicom, which I think is the same game.
I’ve been curious about Hydlide ever since I saw the NES version as a kid.
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I swear up and down that the NES game at least is really really good. You just need to figure out how to play the darned thing, and find a way to keep the one short looping piece of BGM from driving you to kill and eat your family.
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i like how totally alien something like Virtual Hydlide feels today. at the time it might have just felt like a compromise on the part of the devs and hardware they were using that was less-than-ideal. everything was so focused on technological progress once 3D started catching on that it forced devs to make weird compromises in order to fit in with the idea that suddenly everything needed to be in 3D now. it feels like it was a really traumatic time for the games industry, and probably why a lot of companies that did pretty well 80’s and 90’s ended up dying once the late 90’s/early 2000’s hit.
now stuff like Virtual Hydlide feels totally mysterious and like it comes from another planet because it’s comes from an awkward period in transition of technologies that were being used that didn’t last for very long before everyone seemingly settled on a particular technological/design vocabulary that became universal. but for people who are indies now and used to stuff that’s done on a lower scale, it’s become something that feels doable and appealing in its own right.
it’s just weird to me how time can change how we view stuff and it gains a sense of artistic value that it might not have had before. stuff suddenly gains a lot more meaning and resonance that may or may not have ever been an intentional part of the experience… i feel that when looking at a lot of older games that ended up being sort of evolutionary dead ends for the mainstream industry tbh.
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holy shit we have a hydlide thread?
hydlide whips ass
i also did a virtual hydlide stream back in january go watch it if you got a couple hours to kill
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mute
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Yes. I meant to bring that here.
When people said they’d worked on a golf game, I didn’t imagine it would be this obvious.
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we played this at sbcon 2, it’s pretty fucking hard lol
also i want to say it takes up wayyy too much space on the saturn internal memory
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That somehow makes sense. I can see a mess like this manspreading with a hand down its pants, and yelling “What?!” when you shoot it a stern glance.
Chiming in to say I’m astonished this game isn’t a shmup, based on the title