Speaking of Mario, do you still believe it's an unforgivable sin against game design to have a run button?
What are you currently playing?
- Thread starter Nick Calandra
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Mario was not controlled with an analog stick... There were no degrees of movement in the D-pad, it was digital. This is a terrible gotcha because the games I listed in my epic critique of run buttons and their overabundance all have analog movement. Super Mario 64 dropped the run button because it was no longer needed. (The long jump is overpowered, but that's another matter.)
I hold B almost nonstop in SMB, SMB3 and (the inferior) SMW, but I can't claim it helps because it took me 130 minutes to beat SMB Remastered.
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I'm pretty sure that unless you're a speedrunner, you'll actually get better results out of not running all the time and occasionally slowing down to have finer control in difficult segments. It's part of why Crash Bandicoot 1 is an absolute pain in the ass; Crash has one movement speed and it's too fast for the level of precision expected for levels like The High Road, Slippery Climb, or even just getting all the boxes as early as N. Sanity Beach.
The Lost Levels, included with fan-project Super Mario Bros. Remastered, is weirder than I remember. Jumped way over a castle and my reward was a pipe back to world 1. There was a hole to kill myself with in case I declined.
Shinobi: AoV - The mountain level is surprisingly lengthy. I didn't double back to the extra areas, as I wanted to go to a new stage. I'll check for for collectibles later. I do love how as you get further, you can select levels in whatever order you want. On towards Neo City next.
Audio Mech (demo)
This game was introduced at The Game Awards with a demo and it looked cool.
The whole gimmick here is that everything that happens in the game is responding to any music you wanna listen to. The game literally starts with having you select your music source (Spotify, Youtube [my choice], iHeart, your PC's default mp3 player).
Then you play as some dude fighting waves of enemies. Whenever music stuff happens, both your weapons AND the enemies happen. So your melee sword responds to bass, your gun responds to mid-range, and bombs react to treble and vocals. Everything is bright shining neon colors, which on the one hand hurt my eyes but on the other hand helped navigate the battle when sometimes you can only do damage using certain weapons.
It's a mix of silly fun and frustrating moments. It's weird when you wanna shoot something but you can't because it's the quiet instrumental bridge of a song or something. But then when the music swells up and everything lights up and you bomb everything it's exhilarating. You also get odd silly moments like when one song ends, before the next one begins, and the enemy just sort of takes a nap lol.
The playlist I chose on Youtube music was the sort of general "supermix" which just takes your most commonly played songs and similar, because I wanted a good mix of stuff. I had Dream Theater, Dean Martin, Lightnin' Hopkins, Smashing Pumpkins, Annie Lennox, etc (most of my music listening is personal files and physical media, streaming is just for random stuff and walking around so it doesn't really reflect what I'm really into at the moment). I giggled when the big band swelled up in the Deam Martin song and the video game reacted with lights and animation like it was a final boss rush.
I was able to play two stages of this game, I think that's all the demo allows, unless I missed something. I heartily recommend it as a free way to kill 30 minutes. Dunno if I'll actually buy the game, but I am always looking for some game to play on mute while I listen to music and this kind of takes that ultimate chill activity to the next logical step.
This game was introduced at The Game Awards with a demo and it looked cool.
The whole gimmick here is that everything that happens in the game is responding to any music you wanna listen to. The game literally starts with having you select your music source (Spotify, Youtube [my choice], iHeart, your PC's default mp3 player).
Then you play as some dude fighting waves of enemies. Whenever music stuff happens, both your weapons AND the enemies happen. So your melee sword responds to bass, your gun responds to mid-range, and bombs react to treble and vocals. Everything is bright shining neon colors, which on the one hand hurt my eyes but on the other hand helped navigate the battle when sometimes you can only do damage using certain weapons.
It's a mix of silly fun and frustrating moments. It's weird when you wanna shoot something but you can't because it's the quiet instrumental bridge of a song or something. But then when the music swells up and everything lights up and you bomb everything it's exhilarating. You also get odd silly moments like when one song ends, before the next one begins, and the enemy just sort of takes a nap lol.
The playlist I chose on Youtube music was the sort of general "supermix" which just takes your most commonly played songs and similar, because I wanted a good mix of stuff. I had Dream Theater, Dean Martin, Lightnin' Hopkins, Smashing Pumpkins, Annie Lennox, etc (most of my music listening is personal files and physical media, streaming is just for random stuff and walking around so it doesn't really reflect what I'm really into at the moment). I giggled when the big band swelled up in the Deam Martin song and the video game reacted with lights and animation like it was a final boss rush.
I was able to play two stages of this game, I think that's all the demo allows, unless I missed something. I heartily recommend it as a free way to kill 30 minutes. Dunno if I'll actually buy the game, but I am always looking for some game to play on mute while I listen to music and this kind of takes that ultimate chill activity to the next logical step.
Also on the Pragmata demo, the Deus Ex: Human Revolution-like close range super attack was lame. Unnecessary to make it a mini-cutscene with alternate camera because the game is already in third-person view. The combat lacks pizzazz.
Painful amount of chromatic abberation.
Before I could even play the game, it compiled shaders (whatever that means) for like seven minutes.
Painful amount of chromatic abberation.
Before I could even play the game, it compiled shaders (whatever that means) for like seven minutes.
To you. It has pizzazz, but your standards are overly strict and ever flippant.
Compiling shaders is basically taking high-end/complex shader programs and optimizing them so that GPUs that aren't as powerful as those that the shader programs were written on can still run them properly. It's a pretty good thing to have.
ETA: Knew I was using the wrong word with "simplifying", but couldn't remember the right word until just now, so edited in the word I meant.
Morsels
This is bloody difficult so don't expect any insight beyond the first few levels here. Only bringing it up cos noone else has afaik. Is somewhat of a mashup of binding o' Isaac/Enter the dungeon with a vaguely Ren and Stimpy aesthetic/world where everything is slightly more...meat problems? Instead of guns apparently it's more like Pokémon where you collect new creatures, possibly all mice though it's hard to tell through the .. meat of it all. Oh and the collectable creatures are cards too for some reason I'd rather not think about? It definitely feels like it's intending to aim for the trippy LSD side of a biological Cronenbergocalypse. This feels like it's someone jam, who can past the third level at least lol. I, however, remain too shite at videogames. Feels perfect for 4am mindless distraction while waiting for the last nights drugs to wear off at least. Lots of curiously satisfying bubble pop noises make up the majority of my memory playing this, no idea why and not going to think about that any further for sake of own sanity.
Oh yeah it's an Annapurna Interactive published one forgot to add, if that makes any difference to anyone. Available on... all? the? platforms?
This is bloody difficult so don't expect any insight beyond the first few levels here. Only bringing it up cos noone else has afaik. Is somewhat of a mashup of binding o' Isaac/Enter the dungeon with a vaguely Ren and Stimpy aesthetic/world where everything is slightly more...meat problems? Instead of guns apparently it's more like Pokémon where you collect new creatures, possibly all mice though it's hard to tell through the .. meat of it all. Oh and the collectable creatures are cards too for some reason I'd rather not think about? It definitely feels like it's intending to aim for the trippy LSD side of a biological Cronenbergocalypse. This feels like it's someone jam, who can past the third level at least lol. I, however, remain too shite at videogames. Feels perfect for 4am mindless distraction while waiting for the last nights drugs to wear off at least. Lots of curiously satisfying bubble pop noises make up the majority of my memory playing this, no idea why and not going to think about that any further for sake of own sanity.
Oh yeah it's an Annapurna Interactive published one forgot to add, if that makes any difference to anyone. Available on... all? the? platforms?
Still playing GigaSword. It's a longer game than I thought it would be, and that's not ncessarily a bad thing, but a lot of it feels like bloat. It's in dire need of either axing some very repetitive puzzles - the kind where figuring out what you're supposed to do, and actually doing it, are equally trivial - or implementing a different kind of rewards system. You spend half the game either making progress or going the opposite way in order to be rewarded 'a small key' so you can double back and actually make progress. All chests look the same, and there's no telling 'small key' chests from 1/5th heart pieces and collectible scrolls. So let's just say that whenever I puzzle my way through a room in order to be awarded a 'small key' I'm a little flustered. It always feels like a dead end, and not the literal way forward.
This is in dire need of a fast travel system. Apparently the dev is working on one but I can't be bothered to wait. There's a room with an owl statue and a list of ??? options for every area in the game and it looks like what a fast travel station would look like but doesn't do anything, and I can't tell if this was even added with today's patch (only started finding them today) but it's bugged out. Cause it's a very buggy game too. It gets patched weekly since release, and the latest one bricked saves for some people. If and when that happens to me I'm calling it quits.
This is in dire need of a fast travel system. Apparently the dev is working on one but I can't be bothered to wait. There's a room with an owl statue and a list of ??? options for every area in the game and it looks like what a fast travel station would look like but doesn't do anything, and I can't tell if this was even added with today's patch (only started finding them today) but it's bugged out. Cause it's a very buggy game too. It gets patched weekly since release, and the latest one bricked saves for some people. If and when that happens to me I'm calling it quits.
It is cheating.Nice, after failing The Lost Levels 5-4 and having to start the world over, I found another major skip in 5-2. Feels like cheating to skip over so many levels.
It's HARDER in ultrawide. In 4:3 I could move right until the turtles disappeared and then hit the second block that would allow me to jump from a run to the platform, but in ultrawide they are still in the picture and start rushing me. Switching to 4:3.
This is gonna sound sarcastic because it's coming from me, but I'm genuinely unsure why you were playing an NES game in ultrawide in the first place.It's HARDER in ultrawide. In 4:3 I could move right until the turtles disappeared and then hit the second block that would allow me to jump from a run to the platform, but in ultrawide they are still in the picture and start rushing me. Switching to 4:3.
Lost Levels world 8 took hours, on my god. I barely, BARELY slipped under Bowser. The first time I got by him he turned around and got me from behind.
Again, can't figure out how to use the continue cheat in the original version, supposedly B + Start on Game Over, so I'm glad to have this mod. Previous playthrough was SNES version that had unlimited continues like this version, but (more) altered graphics.
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Again, can't figure out how to use the continue cheat in the original version, supposedly B + Start on Game Over, so I'm glad to have this mod. Previous playthrough was SNES version that had unlimited continues like this version, but (more) altered graphics.
Nothing. Got bored with Hades 2, Ball x Pit, and quickly lost interest in my aborted time with Where Winds Meet (which was already just an exercise in curiosity).
Gaming break through/for the holidays, followed by a brief mini-vacation, so right now I'm looking at not picking up a controller until the middle of January. Subject to change, always. But I feel refreshed after such gaming breaks and like to occasionally remind/recommend them to folks feeling burnt out.
Gaming break through/for the holidays, followed by a brief mini-vacation, so right now I'm looking at not picking up a controller until the middle of January. Subject to change, always. But I feel refreshed after such gaming breaks and like to occasionally remind/recommend them to folks feeling burnt out.
Let me know when you get to double dragon revive. I've been bouncing between Shinobi and DmC 2013. With some og Street Fighter Alpha 1.
Well, I put myself in an odd gaming position. I just completed my latest gaming pc build. My last two were built to play specific games just ahead of release. The first was for Skyrim, the next for Fallout 4. But this one... I built it because my prior build was on a motherboard/cpu that wasn't supported by Win 11. So I went to test it, and realized all it could do that my previous couldn't was run Baldur's Gate 3 without horrid loading time and lowest graphical settings that still made the framerate chug. Hell, the whole reason I got an Xbox is for the couple of games that I knew my pc couldn't handle that have come out between BG 3 and now. And so now I'm in an odd position, what do I play now? I will start a new character in BG3. Maybe I'll try Borderlands 4, I haven't heard as much complaining about it as I did with 3 when it released. Then again, with Gearbox wait a couple of months and there could be a massive sale or a giveaway on EGS.
Or, back to the backlog.
Or, back to the backlog.
Gave Neon White a brief try. Love the aesthetic of it, definitely a stylish game that stands out. Voice acting was mediocre at best, and sadly, going into the menu to try to change to what felt like the appropriate Japanese was a no-go because the language options are written in the native language, so the only way I would have been able to change it to Japanese was if I could read Japanese. I cannot. Ah, well, still gave the game a try...and it's a first person puzzling platform game. Insert Mr. Krabs "Wait a minute, I hate golf!" meme here. I still gave it a bit of a try, but even halfway through the tutorial, I could tell that the puzzle/timing stuff was just going to frustrate me more than anything, and constantly having a medal system where having what felt like a great run to me MAYBE getting me a silver (which is actually the 3rd rank, second being gold and first being platinum I presume) would only add to the feeling that I wasn't good enough, which I don't play games for. I acknowledge it is not a poorly made game, and for those who enjoy that style, I can see why it gets the love it does, just not for me.
Also played a bit of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. Souls-like by Team Ninja. So far, not much more to say about it than that, but I haven't bounced off of it yet like several Souls-like in the pasts, so Team Ninja did something right. Although if I can't get past the first boar without dying, I don't have high hopes of my longevity in the game.
Finally, thanks to it being on Playstation Plus Premium, having some old-school nostalgia fun with Soul Calibur III. Only through the tutorial of Chronicles of the Sword mode so far, but still loving those memories, even if I feel like I should go into practice mode and actually learn the weapons/combos rather than try to learn on the fly. I'm stubborn, though, so I don't see that happening.
Also played a bit of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. Souls-like by Team Ninja. So far, not much more to say about it than that, but I haven't bounced off of it yet like several Souls-like in the pasts, so Team Ninja did something right. Although if I can't get past the first boar without dying, I don't have high hopes of my longevity in the game.
Finally, thanks to it being on Playstation Plus Premium, having some old-school nostalgia fun with Soul Calibur III. Only through the tutorial of Chronicles of the Sword mode so far, but still loving those memories, even if I feel like I should go into practice mode and actually learn the weapons/combos rather than try to learn on the fly. I'm stubborn, though, so I don't see that happening.