Sno

It sure is. All of the audio in that game is great, i think it's probably one of the best examples of a cohesive, purposeful sound design in the 16-bit generation.

I have never played Grim Fandango before. I am enjoying it so far, and perhaps may have more thoughts later.

So there's been some footage coming out for Turtle Rock's first post-Valve game. Based on the initial descriptions of the game, i was expecting something more like a survival horror, but it definitely looks very shooty. So a squad of differently-classed marines with powerful weapons and limited supplies have to hunt down, in a large open-ended environment with many spots to hide, an evolving monster that grows as it feeds on ambient creatures that are hostile to both parties. Sounds like there will be different monsters on the different levels and victory states beyond just wiping out the other team. Seems neat.

The original Homeworld remains, i think, one of the best RTS's i've ever played. Terrific both as a narrative campaign and in multiplayer skirmish. I always had some issues with Homeworld 2 though, primarily from a campaign standpoint. Mainly that the story doesn't make a lick of sense and has some messy retcons, and that the scenario design cheats to a degree that is wildly unfun. You can never stack the deck in your favor, the missions will always spawn in more than your present force can respond to, and if you play like an intelligent person who plans out in advance, your attack force that is bumping up against your production cap will be met in kind with an even larger force you now cannot possibly respond to given the production barrier you have already put yourself up against. I would be completely fine with Gearbox building a baby mode into that game, because that campaign was way too hard. HW2's a great skirmish game though. I'm a little disappointed that Gearbox apparently couldn't nab the rights for - or wasn't interested in remastering - Homeworld: Cataclysm, the sometimes divisive "1.5" game released between Homeworld and Homeworld 2. It's a much further departure from the first Homeworld than HW2 is, but it does a lot of really fun and interesting things. The campaign was solidly enjoyable and though the two factions kind of felt very unbalanced for skirmish play, the variety in those factions and the game's unique mechanics made for entertaining competition. Also, that Shipbreakers game that was meant as kind of a free to play multiplayer-centric spiritual successor from some members of the original team is apparently now, with support from Gearbox, going to be a full game with its own campaign, and properly set in the background lore to the first Homeworld. (Which sounds super cool to me, as anybody who has seen the manual for Homeworld knows there's a lot of really elaborate, cool history there... Shit, i hope they include a PDF of that thing with these re-releases.)

The feel of the jump, the feel of the knockback on attacks, it all feels so muddy and unpredictable to me in Rogue Legacy. (The game is also super finicky if controlled on an analog stick, which doesn't mix well with the 360 pad having a kind of shitty d-pad.) I also think the incredible ambiguity of the hitboxes relative to the sprites themselves is incredibly frustrating. I had around seven hours into that game and i never really had a clear sense of where the hitbox starts on the hero sprite, i was constantly getting hit by projectiles i thought i could avoid. You know, and i also think the level design in Rogue Legacy is just so bad. Yes, the world layouts are randomized, but the individual rooms are not, and are built with just absolutely no flair or character. There's also the way it presents you with rooms that require certain weapons to solve, which just... That just feels really dumb when your weapons are so determined by chance, and the layouts change on each respawn. Am i supposed to just lock down the castle for multiple respawns and take the ridiculous currency hit so i can hit up a few chests that won't be worth it after that's factored in? No, of course i won't. It's a piece of design that makes no sense. Really hate those bosses too, and the wildly unbalanced classes. It also felt like it was balanced to just be a ruthless grind. I get that some pro players are able to beat all the bosses at low levels, but it's done death-by-a-thousand-cuts because you go into that game so incredibly weak. I couldn't find grinding through the progression loop enjoyable either because i just found nothing enjoyable about the act of playing that game. I hated that game, i was surprised how much i hated it, i always go in willing to dig for a redeeming hook and just did not find it.

This thread prompted me to replay the game, curious if i was misremembering anything in my unwavering praise, and nope, Shovel Knight is definitely awesome. Having caught up on Rogue Legacy, a game that does very different things with very similar influences, has as a contrast kind of made me appreciate Shovel Knight even more. Rogue Legacy just sucks so much, it feels terrible to play.

I want so, so much to play this. Also, Fract OSC is probably relevant to this topic's conversation, i just recently played through that and absolutely loved it.

I got to a point where i realized a lot of the gaming podcasts i listened to were more or less reiterating the exact same things as eachother, and they were all always things i had already read about. I ended up culling a lot of the podcasts that didn't bring any unique voice to anything and sort of ended up with the gaming podcasts i had initially started out with, more or less. Then i started seeking out podcasts concerning other subjects to fill out the gaps in my listening schedule and was much happier for it.

Now for more games that don't really fit in this topic because they are not really games which can exactly be completed, but are still things that i have played recently and have played a lot of, and starting out with a couple of party games that were thrown at me and have turned out to be things i enjoy. Mount your Friends is real, real dumb in a way i can't help but enjoy with a goofy grin. I kind of love how opposite the absurdity of the depicted event is a musical accompaniment grows increasingly dramatic as a match lingers on, all while surrounded by a loose set of presentational trappings one would expect of a televised sporting event. It frames itself as competitive QWOP, in essence, and is pretty much guaranteed to end every match with held breath and shocked gasps. 100% Orange Juice is not a thing i would have ever bought for myself. A Mario Party-esque digital boardgame with a crossover cast from a handful of mostly unfamiliar japanese indie games and the most anime-ass art possible. Oh god though, i keep coming back to it, i can't stop. So you pick a character and that character has a special ability and a series of stat modifiers, and you're set out on a gameboard with 3 other players. Rolling dice to move around, landing on star tiles, battle tiles, draw tiles, home tiles, and various other tiles. The goal in any given match is, initially, just to collect some stars, but once you've collected your stars, you have to land on a home tile and turn them in. Then you choose your next goal, either collecting more stars, or winning battles. Oh, yeah, there's also a simple rpg battle system in here. Oh, those draw tiles? It's also a deck building game. (With no freemium hooks, somewhat surprisingly, everything is gradually unlocked as you keep playing aside from a small handful of DLC characters. Also, everybody's cards are mixed into a single draw pile, so the trick is finding cards that uniquely synergize with your character's stats and special ability.) The game goes on like that, people fighting eachother, fighting enemies on the board, collecting stars, spending stars to use cards, losing and gaining stars in fights, setting new goals for themselves when they hit previous ones. (In general, it's easier to gain stars than rack up fight wins, but you can lose stars just as easily.) Speaking of those home tiles, your own home tile is the only one you can choose to stop on when passing by, but any of them work if you can get lucky enough to land on it. If you're having horrible luck, not being able to turn in an objective doesn't prevent you from gaining stars and wins well above the requirement, you can end up with well over 200 stars despite lagging behind in objective completion, and then just need to hit home tiles a few times in a row to win. In that way, it's kind of what i like about the game, you're given a lot of flexibility in how you go about winning, and it seems to kind of give you a lot of room to course correct if things go wrong due to the horrible specter of RNG. There's some real weirdness in this game though, you apparently have to play a solo mode to unlock characters, but the "story" mode AI's appear to play with weighted dice rolls, and this kind of aggressive cheating is not fun to bang your head against. On the other hand, i've seemingly unlocked some characters by just playing online, so i don't know how much truth there is to that requirement. Also, a lot of the "shop" unlocks don't seem to do what they're advertised to do. The game generally just has a super confusing progression path and i have no idea what is happening ever. (A lot of things in the shop are also tied up behind level requirements that you can seemingly only raise through by playing online, either against randoms or with friends.) Still, kinda love it. Now the one that was just for me - BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend's Steam version is a suprisingly solid and serviceable PC port of my personal favorite fighting game. (Aside from the incredibly perplexing issue of there being literally no way to disable the in-game voice chat while in an online lobby, meaning that short of pulling the plug on your mic, you can't stop broadcasting out through the game. It's basically the only thing marring an otherwise phenomenal online experience, as ArcSys did some kind of crazy sorcery with the netcode used in this engine.) Saw a lot of people bitching that it wasn't Chrono Phantasma being released on Steam, but i think there's value to be had in having the final revision of a stellar fighting game prior to it going through some fairly dramatic and in-flux redesigns.

Tekken 7 actually isn't in Japanese arcades, nobody has played that game yet, and even then, it's going to be a very select crowd that has the opportunity to play it. (Namco will apparently try to get cabs out to interested american arcades and events, but...) MK9's presence at Evo was pretty divisive for the couple years they ran it, but i always felt like the spot was earned, the game was good. MKX is coming in pretty hot though, and MK9 definitely had its share of issues at release. (MKX hits shelves in april, evo's in july.) Definitely don't like seeing brand new games at the touranment, because even if the game is good, the players themselves don't have time to prepare and the matches suffer because of it. I mean, and there's no way around it, the Tekken 7 thing comes off as more of a promotion than a real tournament. I am actually a little surprised Skullgirls hasn't happened, that community seems like it's been gaining mommentum for a while now.

I was referring to the fact that none of UMVC3's content is available on digital services anymore, whether it's the game itself, its DLC, or any patches. The timing of all of that, which i had forgotten when i wrote that post, means that it would have been an issue at last year's Evo too though. I'm curious how Evo's organizers and the players of that game work around that, then.

The theory i've been seeing going around is that the closure of Club Nintendo is a prelude to Nintendo trying to properly unify their user accounts and game licenses infrastructure. Perhaps wishful thinking.

The lineup for Evo 2k15 was just announced, and there's some pretty interesting elements to it, perhaps most notably that they're going to run tournaments for both Melee and Smash 4. The popularity of the Melee tournament last year must have had quite an impact for two games in the series to be run side by side this year. (Other interesting elements are the particularly strange circumstance of a Tekken 7 tournament - for a game that will not yet have had a home release at the time of the event - apparently being run on arcade cabs, MKX showing up when it'll be barely a couple months old at the time, two ArcSys games getting official tourneys when seeing even one isn't guaranteed, and seeing Evo determined to continue running UMVC3 tournaments when the game has effectively been buried by licensing shenanigans.)

If you just want to move stuff from one SD card to another, just copy and paste through a PC. (Make sure the folder structure remains intact.) It's moving licenses between different 3DS's where things get weird.

This is a big part of it, that it takes from so many influences and remixes them in previously unseen ways and with some 20-30 years of hindsight. It comes across as a great exploration of NES games to me, the way it simultaneously breaks down so many different games from the era and tries to extract the best and most iconic elements of each, but as part of that process seemingly paying considerable attention to why and where it's using the things it's drawing out. Things that you would not necessarily expect could work together are made to work together in this game. Korax was arguing that checkpoints wouldn't have been in an NES game. They actually would have been, just not in the ways this game handles them, which are complete anachronisms. Being able to risk skipping a checkpoint by smashing it for extra currency, and having a Dark Souls-style corpse run instead of a set of limited lives, these are much, much more modern pieces of design. These are clear breaks from the game's influences, pulling in modern elements that can arguably improve on the formula in ways that design ideas contemporary to the influences its largely pulling from would not have allowed. Also, given that they come and go pretty quickly, It would unfortunately be easy to overlook that levels in the game often have wholly distinct sets of mechanics which are often quite original and interesting in their own right. (The mole knight stage, for just one example, has a system of environment manipulation that interacts with enemies in some pretty cool ways.)

I mean, the demo's in the wild, codes went out to a bunch of people, and nobody has an N3DS yet, so i would assume the retail game won't suddenly not run on normal 3DS hardware.

I think there's a lot that can be unearthed in trying to revisit a seemingly outmoded idea, a keen design sense can not just rediscover what was great about those things, but build out on them in different ways from what brought us to where we are with games now. There's always the risk of somebody just parroting something without really deconstructing it, but Shovel Knight is certainly not such a game, everything about it felt thoughtful and considered to me. It preserves the things it should, and pushes things that need to change in a new direction.

Or your internet connection fails, or the hardware locks up, and your games get lost in some kind of weird database limbo. Those games still don't truly tether into any accounts, it's all still just hardware serial numbers.

I'm somewhat apprehensive about doing that license transfer process again, it always feels like it's holding together on a hope and a prayer, i'm afraid things are just going to vanish into the ether.

Manami Matsumae collaborated on a few of the tracks too, the OST is amazing.

An interesting thing to point out about Shovel Knight is that its soundtrack was composed under the constraints of a late-famicom custom soundchip used, most famously, in Castlevania 3. (Only in the japanese version, to be clear.) They tried to present the best possible version of an authentic NES experience. The soundtrack is both something that could run on real hardware* and is something styled after one of the system's high water marks. (* - Though it's noted that the size of Shovel Knight's soundtrack would actually fill up an entire Famicom cart, heh.) The game is so thoughtful about what it preserves and where it breaks, that it's styled after an 8-bit game is a significant distinction. There's the thing about how the HUD is drawn as a background element that object sprites can render in front of, they did that because they thought it was an iconic idiosyncrasy of NES games and did not detract from the gameplay. Whereas the game has no system of limited lives and instead adopts a wildly anachronistic Dark Souls-style corpse run because they think it makes more sense and makes it a better game. Every aesthetic and gameplay design choice the game makes is framed against 8-bit hardware restrictions and design principles. Also, with the little side conversation going on about whether or not the game is actually good, i'm throwing my hat in with it being absolutely incredible, i adore it. (I... Also felt it was actually a little too easy, except for that NG+ bossrush, fuck that.)

Same thing happened to me, i stone-walled at the NG+ bossrush.

The N3DS underclocks itself when running games not designed to take advantage of the added power. (Or else things could break in strange and unpredictable ways.)

When i came to the conclusion that video games were probably going to continue being an important part of my life into the forseeable future, i made an effort to familiarize myself not just with the games that were coming out at the time or the games that i had played in my own youth, but the games that came before that as well. I would expect the same of anybody else who claims to be able to present an authoritative and informed opinion about the medium. As you note, the information is certainly out there. It's easier to obtain now than ever before. So no, i don't think you're being an arsehole at all, unless we're both arseholes. That said, everybody's gotta start somewhere.