I understand. I thought you had a better way of implementing the high jump with different properties, instead of just removing it altogether. To be fair, I’d remove it too and a double jump would probably be my preferred approach!
I like Mario 64’s triple jump, but I don’t think it’d be a good fit for a colectathon like this. I can’t put to words why I think it’d be different in YL, but I have a feeling that I’d get really annoyed if it asked me to use multi-jumps often to reach specific ledges. I don’t think triple jumps are ever required in Mario games, are they? I doubt YL would ever introduce a move and not flood the levels after that with obstacles that you need to use the move on to progress
Thanks for your write up! I never finished the game, it didn’t really pull me in as I expected it to. But on this topic:
My main gripe is just that they seem to have mapped controls in a retro way for nostalgia reasons and it holds the game back. Rather than triggering the moves organically through context, the left trigger is again used as a face button modifier. Jump with A, high jump with LT+A. Sonar ping with Y, Sonar explosion with LT+Y. They didn’t need to do that but at least the animations are short to trigger so it isn’t too painful.
How would you have done it? I don’t think I’m against the LT being used in this way. For instance, how would you have implemented a high jump like what they have? Or would you have removed the move entirely?
When thinking of space games with limited graphics, the first thing that comes to mind is ASCII Sector.
But the Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters (or whatever it’s name is now) gets my strongest recommendation. And Starsector looks inspired by it, so I’ll have a look!
Unfortunately, I agree with the other commenter. It’s very hard to talk about the game without taking a bit out of the experience.
I will say that it’s a space exploration game, where you fly around a tiny (handcrafted!) solar system and explore the various planets. There are a handful of mysteries around this solar system and you eventually figure out how the various clues intersect.
It’s also very much a game about information. You never gain upgrades or stats or anything, your character when you start the game is exactly the same as when you finish it. But you learn things about the solar system and your knowledge of this world and it’s mysteries increases, directing you on where to go next and what to do. The game also doesn’t present you with explicit goals, so at the beginning you can do pretty much everything you want, but there is an ending you will eventually reach by following the clues laid out around the universe (and I seriously recommend that you don’t stop before the ending).
It’s also a very hard game to replay, as after you know the answer to the mysteries, there’s a part of the appeal that is lost. I wish I could forget about it so I could replay it fresh!
I was almost not going to respond with Outer Wilds, since it feels like I played forever ago. But apparently I only played it in June of this year, so that’s my choice. It’s one of my favorite games now, if not my favorite game ever.
It’s so good, in fact, that it’s helping me get over this weird anxiety I have of talking about my hobbies with other people (including my closest friends). Outer Wilds is so good that even though I hate talking about games I like, I still feel the need to recommend it to people. And now that the floodgates are open I feel a bit more comfortable talking about my other favorite games, like Baba is You, which I got another person to play as well, and The Messenger, which I’m playing now and loving it.
- Feeling like I’m playing Pokémon with all the swords and shields… I hate shields. Shields making someone practically invincible on almost half of their body, and them having zero movement penalty when they are on someone’s back is absolute horseshit. Swords, where people can run faster because it’s a light weapon, and you can have the Double Time perk to move even faster, so that they can just rush you and slap you with an instant kill is also absolute horseshit. I DO love sticking a shield person with Thermite, but so many other things should work against them and they just don’t.
Wait, I don’t play CoD. Can you clarify what you mean by swords and shields? Shields I can imagine being some sort of body armor, but are people carrying around steel swords like they’re medieval knights in a game titled “Modern Warfare”?
Finally finished a few things that were keeping me working at home after work and was able to dive back into Mass Effect 2 (in the remastered trilogy). I’m enjoying it a lot, I just recruited the final squad member.
Before that, I did the missions on the Krogan homeworld and really enjoyed seeing how my companion from ME 1 is doing. I also like my Krogan squad member a lot, so it was nice.
Beautiful Katamari was the first time I recall seeing controversy about on-disc DLC. You had to buy a few stages, including the one they advertised the most that went from like 1cm to rolling up the sun iirc, and all the purchase did was toggle a key that allowed you to play the levels which were already in your CD. It’s normal now, but at the time I remember people hating it.
For what it’s worth I liked We Love Katamari (and the original, which I only played once the re-release came out) much more than Beautiful Katamari! They tried to mix it up in Beautiful Katamari where you not only needed to roll a sufficiently large Katamari, but also it needed to be made of specific categories of items, and while this is fun for a few levels it ends up being boring when they do it for almost the whole game.
Try doing something else for a while, go see other planets, other leads you’ve been following. A lot of places I thought I was stuck in I later realized it was a part of a different puzzle elsewhere in the game.
Where are you stuck?
Last piece of advice, don’t give up on the game. It’s one of those games where you’ll be glad you finished it.
He is the best billionaire. That may not be a high bar, but it’s something. If Elon Musk decided to retire and cure Malaria like Bill did (or maybe even just get back to space exploration or autonomous driving as he was doing before his Twitter craze, hopefully without fucking other people over?) I wouldn’t mind him as much
I think I’d like a game with those exact prices… In in-game currency