lobotomy42
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Posts posted by lobotomy42
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I should probably finish my other tactical RPGs before diving in, but I'm really excited about this! (Which is really saying something - I was not a Shadowrun fan at all, really, prior to the Kickstarter and the success its had)
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After putting it off for seven years, I finally got and beat Chibi-Robo! I think I might even 100% it, since I'm already so far in all of the sidequests and I'm still really enjoying the gameplay and super quirky and adorable nature of everything else.
One thing that makes this game hilarious in 2013: Remember at DICE this year when David Cage mentioned that another developer had told him that his game wasn't a real game if it wasn't about shooting dudes, driving cars, or jumping on platforms? Chibi-Robo has the exact minimum of all of those things. The exceptionally brief combat is just sort of tacked on to make the game slightly more conventionally exciting, there's a tiny minigame where you play chicken using toy cars, and there's some mild platforming (all done with a character who cannot jump). It's hilarious.
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I've been playing Attack of the Friday Monsters! and am liking it so far. Mostly I'm interested because I could never get past the language barrier in the interesting My Summer Vacation Games (the background artist is also the game designer! which explains the pure-exploration fun of the game). It has a basic card game that serves as the 'gameplay', while the rest of it is just wandering around and talking to people. It has made me laugh a few times-- which usually never happens with Japanese developed games. It really reminds me of retro games challenge in a way, in its overall feel.
I like these guild games, they basically dispose of any tutorial bloat and let a proven designer make a small solid game with fitting production values. I'm looking forward to the next Guild announcements.
They're also not crazy long, like most games these days. I'm at the point in my life where more than 20 hours in a single game seems insane. I'd happily pay MORE money if designers could all agree to keep there games at the 12 hour mark, like most of the Guild games. (And yes, cutting the tutorial crap out is a one great way to do this.)
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Attack of the Friday Monsters, the third Guild 02 game, is up on eShop.
It looks cute, has anybody played it?
Also, SMT4 is out, that's kind of a big deal.
What was the second one?
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Well, episode 5 was fairly devastating.
I know, right?
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People who aren't normally gamers probably don't own a PS3.
Touché!
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Tell them to get the PS3 version. Two playthroughs, no problems.
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Looking forward to seeing this, Edge typically has a good take on things. The headline seems a bit sensationalist but I'm hoping they'll play on it by not taking the easy shots and having some broader in-depth analysis of where Microsoft is going rather than the predictable 'lol drm' angle.
Back in 2004, they had a cover story about the (then-upcoming) XNA and the headline was "Microsoft ends the console wars."
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Just played a game of Tales of the Arabian Nights. It's a sort of competitive choose-your-own-adventure board game that can be weird and hilarious, though some of the systems in it seem unnecessarily complex at times. One of my friends had an encounter with a talkative barber who kept pursuing him after his haircut was finished, and eventually drove him clothes-tearingly crazy.
Oh man I have played that too many times. It's not even a "game" really, as much as it is "read from this random list of stuff that has happened to you." It can be hilarious, but I've never even finished a game, I don't think, because after a few hours it's usually clear that none of us is any closer to completion.
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Jeremy Parish's impressions from 90 minutes with the game. Apparently it's a little bit of a roguelike now? I'm really excited for this.
Also, the planet being named "Page Not Found 404" completely went over my head.
Wow, I also totally missed that joke.
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They have some occasional modest sales and permanent price drops, but nothing comparable to Steam.
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I'd also imagine that a lot of the development time has gone into the engine and such, leaving mainly the art team to finish up work on the second half one the first half ships.
Sure. My question wasn't "Why is there such a disparity in development time between the halves?" as much as it was "Why do all this if it only buys you three months of development time?" I'm just trying to imagine what their financial situation could be such that they need some money RIGHT NOW (in January) instead of RIGHT NOW (in April.) Unless they're planning for people who buy the pre-release/part-one/whatever to pay for the game twice, then all they've really done is time-shift some of the potential game sales forward a few months, right?
Put another way: if they think that game sales will pay for development costs, just not soon enough, then why not just take out a three-month loan? And if they DON'T think game sales will pay for development costs, then what does this change do to solve it?
Put another way: I am not a businessman.
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After watching the video, the situation seems even more ambiguous.
So, despite all this talk of the need to release something imminently, the "Part 1" isn't coming until January? And then Part 2 is just three months later, in April? So the issue is, they needed three months worth' of additional funding?
It's also not totally clear on what this split means for the game itself. Part 1 is being simultaneously described as "the first half" of a two-part game (like a miniature episodic series) but also as a "pre-release" (as in "Here's what we've got so far, let us know what you think!") I guess this matters more for branding than in practice, but it definitely muddles the sense of what the game actually is. Is it a two-part game, the first part of which is released in January, or is it one single game, which will have an incomplete "preview" available in January? Answering this probably doesn't matter in practice, but it does affect, for me, weirdly, whether I will want to play the stand-alone part 1 when it releases or wait for the entire thing.
Also, not to be a back-seat driver, but I'm worried that selling this pre-release on Steam will not bring in as much revenue as they're hoping. But presumably they are better at predicting that number than I am.
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Funny that this thread should pop up - I just now finally started the first Professor Layton and the Curious Village. It's better than I thought it would be, but some of the puzzles drive me nuts. Specifically, any time a puzzle relies on you finding some specific ambiguity in the instructions and exploiting it, while still discounting answers that exploit some OTHER ambiguity in the instructions. This kind of "brain-teaser" has always struck me as unfair. Essentially, it comes down to "I have explained this problem to you poorly, now see through my poor explanation and find a solution to the actual problem rather than the one I described."
/rant
That aside, I have mixed feelings about so starkly separating the puzzles from the plot. It makes both pieces feel like placeholder until the next section. When I'm reading dialogue, I'm thinking "Ok, just shut up and give me a puzzle already," but when I'm completing puzzles, I'm thinking "Ugh, I'll just guess at this until I get the right answer to move the plot along." This sounds really negative, but this dynamic has the effect of keeping my short-attention-span brain occupied. I've plowed through what seems like a solid portion of the game already. We'll see if I still feel positively about it after I finish it. (Is it just me, or is the plot mostly adorable nonsense?)
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I certainly wouldn't want Tim to compromise his vision if he can figure out a way of making it happen in a realistic manner, which is why my above thing doesn't actually bother me. But at the same time I hope he learns from this experience so he's not forced into this situation again.
Here's the thing, though: artistic visions are not permanent fixed decrees delivered to man from God in pure form. This kickstarter, more than any of the other big game projects, was the least defined at the beginning, so in that respect Tim actually had more flexibility to come up with a vision to match the scope of the project than many others. As we've seen in the documentaries thus far, Tim has resisted at least a few attempts from other team members to start limiting the project. (I haven't watched the most recent one yet, but I'm assuming the trend continues.) So I don't think it's totally fair to just laugh at the "nerd rage" of people disappointed in scope creep. This isn't a personal attack on Tim or any member of Double Fine, just an honest expression of disappointment.
As with many in this thread, it's no particular skin off my nose, but if I were someone more personally invested in this project, then perhaps it might be.
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I agree with the sentiment that the gamepad is a flop. It just is't nearly as innovative as motion controls were for the Wii. By the time it came out Microsoft had already implemented Smartglass (which has been pretty lame in my opinion) and Sony had already done somewhat similar stuff with the PS3/Vita. To make matters worse, they only used a 480p screen without multi-touch support. I think most people, even the casual crowd, just won't get excited by the gamepad when they already have phones with at least 720p resolution and all of the modern features they have come to expect out of a touch screen.
As far as enhancing gameplay is concerned, it disappoints me that Nintendo's main focus has been on off-screen play using the gamepad. This is something they already did with the Gamecube and Game Boy Advance. In fact, I had a friend that had some Pac Man game for Gamecube where 3 people played as the ghosts on-screen with a limited field of view around their ghost and the other person played as Pac Man on the Game Boy Advance (and it was really fucking fun too). Having had these experiences from Nintendo before, I cringe every time I hear them tout off-screen play as a new feature. Maybe they will eventually do something truly innovative with the screen but so far I feel like they are just re-hashing old ideas and not really offering anything new.
That being said, it looks like some games are starting to materialize. I am starting to become mildly interested in a few upcoming games (notably Pikmin 3 which Miyamoto seems really excited about and in turn is kind of making me excited) but not interested enough to want to buy the console yet.
I think you're conflating off-screen play with asymmetrical multiplayer. The GameCube game you're referring to was Pac-Man Vs, essentially the same thing as the "Luigi's Ghost Mansion" mini-game in NintendoLand. That's asymmetrical multiplayer, and it *should* be the Wii U's selling point, since it's the only thing the Wii U can do significantly better than the competition (other than "have Nintendo games.")
Off-screen play is when you can turn off the TV entirely and just use the Wii U gamepad like a non-portable Gameboy. It's arguable the polar opposite of asymmetrical multiplayer, though I agree, it makes little sense to tout this feature. ("You can play it in on our lo-res screen, too!")
My more general thoughts about the Wii U: it's an awesome device. Like shammack said, it's the first time I've felt that web browsing on a console is more of a feature than an annoyance. It's not revolutionary the way the Wii was, but it's an evolutionary improvement on the Wii. All the old Wii controllers are compatible, etc. Sales-wise, I am not as pessimistic as Thrik. (Not because sales are good -- they are abysmal. The GameCube comparison is not apt: GameCube sold not-so-bad during its first year and attracted third-party support. It was only in 2003-2004 that everyone started jumping ship. Also, during this time, Nintendo was still profitable largely because of the enormous success of the GBA. The 3DS has turned out to be a mild success for Nintendo, but not nearly as huge as the GBA or the original DS. Therefore, they do need the Wii U to actually be a success on its own terms -- they can't really subsidize it with the 3DS.) That said, if you look back at Nintendo's consoles, third-party support has been bad pretty much since the N64, so I don't think that will be a make or break issue.
My best guess is that Nintendo doubles-down on the Wii U, churns out software for it and tries to turn it around the way they did with the DS and 3DS, both of which met with initial resistance from the public. Why? Because they have to. The one reason people still buy Nintendo consoles is for Nintendo games. If they start bailing on their consoles before the "cycle" finishes, then they start destroying their brand credibility. The people they have left right now are the fanboys and early-adopters, and bailing now for some "me-too" PS4-clone would kill any incentive these people have to buy the next thing Nintendo does. I don't think the Wii U will ever be something that the rest of the industry looks at as a success, but I also don't think abandoning it is a realistic option.
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So this is a thing that exists now. I've played maybe an hour's worth.
It's, um, dated.
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Seeing that it's funded, I'm going to skip this one until it's done, I'm kinda fed up of all the projects I kickstarted and almost none of them are done yet, not even the comic ones.
I know, isn't it crazy? I feel like I've been funding these things forever and still none of them have finished except a couple of books. You'd think people would stop throwing money at stuff until they saw the output. Then again, I clearly haven't stopped, so there are probably more people like me.
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I'm going to be cliched and pick Grim Fandango. I had played many adventure games before, but this one was the first one (that I had played) with any narrative oomph behind it. There were just so many creative ideas here - it felt like the last time for a long while that there was a major effort to drive the adventure game genre forward. (I'm still not sure I can think of another good example, though Phoenix Wright might come close.)
I'll shut up now, because it's not like anyone in this forum needs convincing of its greatness.
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As I recall, I did "grind" a few times, but it's usually just trying out new abilities / combinations to see what would be effective. What I really liked about this game was the way you had to make decisions about what skills to include on a given character's item build - it felt like I was making real cost/benefit tradeoff decisions.
Of course, what I *didn't* like was the (intentional?) ambiguity of a lot of the skill descriptions, which meant that the only reliable way to determine good combinations was to actually test them.
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Yes! I remember it fondly. It's a shame this isn't the direction they decided to go in for the Tomb Raider series.
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Pretty much the only thing i got out of Donkey Konga was an awesome peripheral to display on my shelves.
Um, you mean a awesome peripheral with which to play the brilliant Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, right? Also: Donkey Konga was fun, sort of.
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I played the beginning of it, but I never finished it.
It started off great, but by the second chapter it felt like they were moving away from the really innovative stuff and regressing to slightly more conventional 3D puzzle design. But I didn't keep going very far, so perhaps I am mistaken. Frankly, I didn't care for the "storybook" presentation between the segments - it felt a little too blatantly childish for a game that seemed not to be intended for children.
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That lime green is pretty sweet.
Did anyone here get one of those cheese yellow GameCubes? Those were super-rare, although it wasn't so hard to find the yellow controllers.
Nintendo 3DS
in Video Gaming
Posted
I'm not crazy about it either. The primary virtue of the game, as far as I can see, is that you can play it for two minutes or less and actually make progress. So if you're standing in line and need to kill a very small amount of time, you can do that.
But otherwise, yes, it's way too easy, way too slow. And even the hard puzzles aren't much more fun, they just require a little bit more trial-and-error.