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In Cadence of Hyrule there’s an “enemy” (more like a trap really) that’s a pair of white hands coming from the ground which grabs you and prevents you from moving for a couple turns. I am pretty sure it’s supposed to be that guy.
It’s not a floor/wall/ceiling master, there are wallmasters in the game too and they’re a lot bigger and brown coloured.
Dragon Quest Builders (2) attempted something between RPG and minecraft-style building, and at least it released. It looks pretty good for a blocky game, it has spectacular block and item diversity, and great building tools. As a mostly creative game with a bunch of silly NPC villager interactions, it’s fun.
Unfortunately, there’s only the hint of a great base/town builder in there, but it’s too shallow in the end. You’ve got different classes of NPC villagers with needs and skills, but there’s no challenge, only the satisfaction of seeing your town run sort of well.
Story mode also teaches you to build defenses and traps against monster attacks but monster raids are scripted and very dumb. After the story ends and you get into full free build mode, you’ll never have a monster raid again, making it all basically useless.
And also there’s very little procedural gen in the game. Main islands are big, but static. Small islands are procedural each with a set biome, but their primary goal is to be destroyed for materials. You can only save 3 of them to use them as (small-ish) new landmasses for your builds.
If you are actually talking about Mario Bros., i.e. the game that’s only about kicking turtles, crabs and flies coming out of pipes, yeah, I’d say that one was hardly a new thing.
Super Mario Bros. though? Hard disagree. Back then, that’s a scrolling platformer with controllable jumps, inertia that let you do sliding tricks, and relatively complex physics (acceleration, positional damage, shells, …)
Also very good readability with mechanics that were easy to learn on the spot.
Look at what most platformers played like around that time, and even what basic design errors a lot of them kept doing long after that. SMB was lightning in a bottle.
Not really. I am just a bit younger, growing up between the 80s and 90s. I still play old games, only those that aged well though, but sometimes decades after their prime. I play new games a lot too. And games from any time in between, as long as they do something right.
And there are many, many games around which you can bond just as well as you could back then. Not even talking specifically about multiplayer games (which I don’t play very much at all) I’ve always been a fan of “co-piloting” games, just sharing the experience of playing, spectating, commenting around a game.
Some games are fantastic for this. Some games are rich enough that you can share your experience and discover other people do stuff completely differently. This sort of always existed (for example, what’s the right way to complete Legend of Zelda?), and this is still true even for somewhat simple games, but possibilities have only increased in range. I am pretty sure nobody plays a game like Rimworld or Tears of the Kingdom the same.
I have the Switch 2. MK world is nice I guess, but it’s nowhere near what 8 was. It feels like they were so proud of their connected gimmick they decided they would create nothing for this episode.
8 cups, almost all of them redone old tracks. The “highways” connecting them feel very similar except a couple areas (and those include, again, bits of old Mario Kart tracks). I mean, the way they redid these old tracks is cool, but base MK8 also did that very well with its 4 retro cups, and had 4 main cups full of awesome new tracks. And that’s before DLC/Deluxe added 4 extra cups. Not counting the pass for the Tour tracks, those were subpar.
There’s a lot of music… But apart from that game’s theme, all of it is remixes from Mario games. The karts also are almost only rides from previous episodes.
The free roaming mode is frankly not that great. I had loads of fun messing around in Forza Horizons games, but here it’s just a bit boring. Challenges must be activated and interrupt your driving, they’re mostly so easy you can mess up and still clear them, and though they do track records, they don’t do anything to make you want to improve them. Also you don’t meet other players. For fuck’s sake, the last actual Mario game had you meet and play seamlessly along random people!
MK World is like 90% fueled by nostalgia. This is not what I expect from a new Mario Kart game.
That makes absolutely no sense. Nintendo does enough shit that you don’t need to invent some.
Console wars have never been about doing the exact same shit. Game boy Vs Game Gear? N64 Vs Playstation Vs Saturn? Even SNES and Megadrive/Genesis had very different designs, and that’s enough to be noticeable in the games if you are familiar enough with them.
They sell video game systems and games, they’re competitors. So is Valve. So was freaking Ouya.
The fact they’re doing thing differently enough that they’re not completely interchangeable is the competition.
I thought Impossible Lair was pretty good. Of course, it was a complete different genre, and basically that genre was just “Donkey Kong Country”. Nevertheless, great execution.
I played the actual YL after that one, and… Yeah, I went through it all and barely remember it. Sure, I don’t even have a lot of nostalgia for collectathons, except if you count the 3D Mario kind… But it was definitely bland, and had annoying design problems.
It’s kind of the point I was trying to make though. They could have unlocked CPU speed for O3DS games by default, and they chose not to. I assume they didn’t because of all the games, there will always be the odd ones that behave unpredictably when they’re running on unintended specs. So they went for 100% compatibility unless the game was specifically patched for N3DS.
Even though this time it’s software emulation, they could have played a bit safer by emulating exactly a Switch 1, including clock speed. Turns out Switch 2 seems to have very good compatibility, with only a couple problematic games they are working on, so in the end, good that they did it that way.
I didn’t expect it would enhance framerate at all without a game patch to be honest.
I was expecting something like new 3DS, where all games that were not specifically patched for it ran exactly the same. But I guess the difference is that new 3DS must have run in pure hardware old 3DS mode for those.
I felt DQB2 was already somewhat playable, but I probably never did very crazy builds. I remember people warning that destroying mountains on the main island for example was a very bad idea, because they were supposed to limit how much of the island the game had to render. Maybe I should check my old island on Switch 2.
Kinect being nerfed is something that was known.
The device was supposed to handle the movement analysis on its own with an internal processor, but they cut costs and had it processed by the console instead. Causing a lot of extra load on it, and because of that kinect games probably performed a lot worse than they could have, and were probably simplified quite a bit.
Stop Skeletons From Fighting has a good video about kinect : https://youtu.be/MmJ3LICVtsY
Of course, Molyneux is Molyneux, and just because of that, even with the superior kinect prototype, I’d call bullshit on almost all of the Milo demo.
And Sonic the Hedgehog for being anti-authoritarian and having little PSAs about tolerance and being a good person.
That would be very funny to complain about those because those PSAs were enforced on the studios by the FCC. Lots of cartoons from that era had them, including fucking G.I. Joe (that’s where “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle” comes from).
Later Animaniacs parodied the shit out of these with absurd “wheel of morality” segments.
The first trailer of Breath of the Wild had a lot of people literally wondering whether that Link was a girl. I didn’t see a lot of complaining about it, I wasn’t looking for some though.
Also, Gerudo town. I’m not sure what kind of mental gymnastics you’d need to shit on “wokeness” and somehow filter out BotW completely from it.
Many diverse characters all fighting back against their unfair economic situation.
“… and that’s terrible.”
I also remember Portal 2 being on that list for “Most male characters are being depicted as incompetent compared to female characters” or something.
Dude. There are 4 characters in the whole game, counting one that’s dead but probably has the most characterization. Two are male. One guy is definitely a moron by design, but the other was definitely not incompetent. Mad, evil, sure. But he certainly achieved stuff.
This certainly sounds the right way to do this.
But I really wonder about the stuff at bungie being “just” incompetence, because their defence is “weren’t aware of this, just used assets left by a former Bungie employee that’s not here anymore”… And yet the art director had been following the plagiarized artist on twitter this whole time.
And they have an history of “just taking” when they think they can get away with it, as they’ve done with fanart. So, shitty studio culture sounds a definite possibility at that point.
Placeholder doesn’t need to be anything more than basic featureless textures on cubes, and you should own them completely. If you made your placeholder to look like it fits, you’re asking for it to be forgotten and left in place. Which might not be too bad if it’s finally not too out of place and it’s yours.
Especially in a professional studio, they should know better than using stuff they just “found” as placeholder. To me it’s either terrible incompetence… or worse, they thought nobody would care anyway.
Oh. That guy. Thanks for the reminder.
Important context for whatever he has to say, between the rants about teh woke gaem jernalizm and cancel culture, and being called out as an edgy harassing asshole by his own employees.
I guess there are some cultures, especially work cultures and those enforcing them, that I don’t mind being “cancelled”, if only it worked.
Those of us in Web3 gaming are well aware that things aren’t working
You can stop there. That’s because so-called “web3 gaming” solves a problem that only exists in the mind of the dozen vocal idiots that want it to happen. And that problem is mostly “I don’t really like video games, but I would play if that game was just about thinly veiled real money transactions instead”.
A map made of blue rectangles with white outlines joking, saw quite enough of those already.
A pet peeve of mine : a new ability should not be used to just go through one or two obstacles and never again. Best case is it has potential uses outside the ability gates, for example it gives you new moves or options you can exploit in combat and such. Because if not it may as well be just an ordinary key, and though it’s okay to have a couple locks and keys in your game, your new “power” being reduced to that is frustrating.
As an example of what not to do IMO, there’s an item called the Spinner, a cogwheel machine you can ride in The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess. It looks crazy and cool as fuck… And you use it 3 times in the whole game, because it works on rails, there are very few rails and it’s completely useless everywhere else. Boo.
Back then on my GBA I got stuck in a Zelda Oracles dungeon for quite some time until I looked up what I was supposed to do. Turns out there was a hint, I had read it, but it was mistranslated and was garbled in my language.
It’s supposed to tell you running makes you jump farther. Translated text doesn’t mention jumping and instead sounds like a weird nonsensical idiom about “travelling far”. Specifically travelling in the sense going on a trip, not just going from place A to place B.
I had tried a few times before, but the first time I actually completed Metroid 1 was just after its remake, Zero Mission. The original game was included (also as a bonus in one of the Metroid Prime).
The thing is, the map structure is the same (just with extra levels, more puzzles and ability gating). Power-ups and bosses that already existed in 1 are at the exact same spots. Helps a lot if you can just remember where important stuff is supposed to be.
Yeah, the maze with button platforms is catacombs, that was definitely the one that had me stuck the longest time. Partly because of the maze-like structure and partly because it relies on a few climbable walls that are a lot less obvious than the usual and a very missable teleport tile.
There’s also plenty of places especially in treetop village where I was like “how the fuck am I supposed to go there?”. Turns out none of them is really necessary (and some might just not be normally accessible, even though they have items?) but that’s still confusing.
And even though I didn’t get lost too bad in it, Final confrontation surprised me. From the name I went into it expecting maybe a short level and the boss fight. That thing took forever to go through. I even had multiple moments where I was like, “lots of ammo, music is becoming ominous, here we are, boss fight”… And… No. Just another room full of enemies.
I am not really seeing it. I did finish it without a guide back then. It was the Windows 9x port, but I don’t think it changes much.
Really in my case a guide would not help for the hardest parts, which were mostly the crazy moves needed to push those floating things to break rocks and to swim against currents with boulders.
They weren’t nearly so patient with Okami around that time. They barely communicated around it, killed the studio, then commissioned a port they…barely communicated around again, and then they complained the game was doomed to be a commercial failure because… I don’t know.
It’s basically like one of the better classic Legend of Zelda games, only with a unique universe and charm and about twice the size of those.
It was criminally overlooked on PS2, but they have zero excuse for not turning it into a major hit for the Wii. One of the best game on a console with an absurd install base and that had almost no competition for it at that point.
It’s not a very notable thing, and we don’t see who the hands belong to, but it just seems like what they went for IMO.
Cadence of Hyrule is pretty good, more forgiving and more of a connected map with item-based puzzles compared to Crypt of the Necrodancer. The map is reordered between games, but it’s mostly designed rather than fully procedural. It’s fun.
It borrows heavily from a Link to the Past visually, but has references to many episodes. You’ve got enemies from Breath of the Wild, Gerudo, Goron, even a full Majora’s Mask inspired DLC.