Urthman

Bennett Foddy's "Getting Over It" is my favorite game trailer of 2017

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Yup - if you look at the sum-of-best-splits for the top 5 speedrunners, most are below 2 minutes now (around 1 minute 40-something for the top 2). It's just a matter of one of them having a consistent enough run for us to go sub-2 min.

 

(Meanwhile, I'm approaching 3 hours in and still haven't even gotten to the devil's chimney.)

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Turning on track pad mode for my actual mouse and maxing sensitivity in game, in windows and the slider on my mouse helped a lot.

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I've never been comfortable using the mouse as a game interface so there's that.

 

It's funny how this game makes higher sensitivity feel like I'm super strong. It really fulfills my power fantasy about being a hammer jar man.

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Damn, spoiled :/ I was hoping to discover myself what things I find on the way. Just made it to the slide, but fell down all the way :/

 

[edit] oh well, now decided to watch the video since I've seen so many youtube screens already of things to come and now I again wished I hadn't :)

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My advice above is garbage, I forgot to swap to max sensitivity on the mouse and just sped up the mountain to the orange. I've gotten past the orange once but (spoiler for the bit above the orange but before the hat)

 

 

the fucking jump scare bats fucked my rythm even though I was expecting them!

 

speaking of the hat, I saw my brother get a present dropped there, has anyone else found that?

 

This isn't too spoilery right? It feels vague enough

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18 hours ago, Jutranjo said:

My advice above is garbage, I forgot to swap to max sensitivity on the mouse and just sped up the mountain to the orange. I've gotten past the orange once but (spoiler for the bit above the orange but before the hat)

 

  Reveal hidden contents

the fucking jump scare bats fucked my rythm even though I was expecting them!

 

speaking of the hat, I saw my brother get a present dropped there, has anyone else found that?

 

This isn't too spoilery right? It feels vague enough

 

I've not gotten that far yet (I still can't do the Devil's Chimney at all consistently, and the two times I managed it I fell down after getting stuck in

Spoiler

the "Beware of the Fall" in Spanish bit (I can't escape it if I fall into it, and I can't cross it - I know about the approach that avoids it, but I definitely can't do that, either)

, so my last 3 and a bit hours have mostly been repeatedly failing to do the Devil's Chimney, which is getting boring, tbh).

However, I know enough about the game to know that there's a trigger for getting a present dropped where you mention it.

Spoiler

 

You get it after you've been touching the anvil for more than a certain total time, IIRC.


 


As an aside, the thing that confuses me about Bennett's espoused philosophy of design of Getting Over It is that he clearly hasn't met anyone who's bad at games. I'm bad at games, and I don't find Getting Over It frustrating at all - you never lose anything but pure progress, and you need to repeat things to practice them anyway [games which actually take collectables away from you are super frustrating, sure - eg Shovel Knight is awful for this - as are games which steal other things, like time (I'm looking at you, games with unskippable cutscenes before boss battles)]... but I'm bad enough at it that repeating the same section for hours on end is just boring.

 

From audio that I've heard,  Bennett seems to be concerned about not making "throwaway" content, and the way in which modern games are constructed in such a way that any challenge you encounter you know you will be able to solve it [presumably eventually]. But this is only true for people with a certain base level of skill within a "reasonable time" - there's plenty of games which I've never completed (in fact, I don't think I completed any games of my youth - except maybe Lemmings) - and this this also true of plenty of modern games. Whilst, sure, sometimes this is due to what Bennett wants to call "bitterness" - frustration with lost progress - I think Bennett also underestimates precisely how much "failure" someone poor at games experiences, and how, at this low skill level, boredom becomes more of a factor than "bitterness" over time.

I'm not losing progress much any more with Getting Over It - I'm just repeating the same 10 or so seconds of activity over and over again, for hours on end. What I'm learning isn't that "overcoming loss makes success sweeter", it's "learned helplessness".

 

That's not to say that we shouldn't have challenging games - or that every game has to be completable by everyone. What it is to say is that Bennett fails to understand why people don't complete challenging games. It's not "aversion to bitterness"; it's "wanting variety". It's not "fear of losing progress"; it's "inability to make progress/running out of content". (The most depressing thing about Getting Over It is that Bennett runs out of "inspirational quotes about failure" very quickly for low skill players, as he plays stuff on every major progress loss. Those quotes are the only new content we get to experience for most of the game, so they actually made the game less boring - losing progress is something we just expect as low-skill players, so getting additional content that way is nice, not nasty. With them gone, there's even less reason for us to keep repeating the same actions endlessly). 
 

(He also fails to really make his point universally with Getting Over It anyway, as "high skill" people will fail less, and learn less of a lesson about "overcoming bitterness" and the way in which success is sweeter after adversity than low-skill people (who already know this - we've been overcoming adversity in every damn game we've played in our lives). Compare the "2 and a bit hour" run length of someone who "gets" Getting Over It with the "25 hour+" runs of us over in the low-skill corner.)

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Yeah, I've read it - everything in it indicates he has no idea what it's like to be bad at games :)

 

For a start: Getting Over It isn't as frustrating as restarting most games - because the only thing you lose is a (variable) amount of one-axis progress. Restarting most games, especially games of the era that Bennett remembers (and that I remember too) would lose you tons more than that. And, architecturally, you don't even lose much time - one of the frustrations of losing and restarting in 8-bit and 16-bit era games is the sheer time lost to loading (especially in the era of multi-floppy-disk games, where reloading from some points might involve multiple disk swaps and reads, only to fail again within minutes) - Getting Over It gives you back control within seconds, and you can usually recover to where you lost progress faster than the time it took you to get there the first time.

 

For a second: Spelunky is less frustrating than Getting Over It, for bad players, not because "you can blame your failures on randomness", but because you get something new and different each time you play it. Or, to rephrase it in terms of my prior post: Spelunky's random generation makes restarting endlessly less boring by introducing more variety. [In fact, this is true for all Roguelikes, and Roguelikelikes.]

 

For a third: Bennett's two completions of Getting Over It are less than 5 hours (4 and a half hours the first time, and 30 minutes the second). That's comfortably within the median time to complete Getting Over It (and from Bennett's comments, vastly less than the mean), and much less than the time investment that, say, I've put in managing to get barely 25% of the way into my first climb.

And yet, I feel none of the "frustration" that Bennett thinks I should - I just feel bored.

[To use Bennett's own lexicon of "flavours of frustration" (http://www.foddy.net/2017/01/eleven-flavors-of-frustration/ ) - Bennett seems to think Getting Over It should be evoking #2 (Starting Over), but anyone who's actually bad at games is inured to #2 by now. What Getting Over It comes closer to evoking is #5 (Getting Nowhere) and #8 (Others Can Get There, But I Can't), and possibly #11 (We've Been Here Before) - although, again, anyone who's bad at games has experienced all three of those in every single game they've played, ever, and is basically inured to them. All that is left is boredom - which is why making games hard for their own sake is kinda missing the point.]

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I have not played Getting Over It, deliberately so. I couldn't really articulate a specific reason why either, but I think @aoanla is hitting on something very true for me as someone who is also bad at most games. It doesn't feel novel to watch progress slip away in a game. I think there's a fetishization of this feeling by people who are good at games (highly acclaimed examples include: the Dark Souls souls disappearing if you die before completing your corpse run, this game, cuphead, and an overall love of 'hard games.') I experience this in virtually every game that doesn't have an easy mode though, and like aoanla basically never finished a game as a child because they were too hard. I basically didn't finish a game until I was in high school and kingdom hearts 2 had an easy mode where the first one didn't and I got stuck and never finished. Here's a list of some games that were too hard for me to ever finish:

  • spyro for PS1
  • legend of zelda: link's awakening for the game boy
  • legend of zelda for the NES
  • Kingdom Hearts
  • Final Fantasy IX
  • Rugrats: Search for Reptar for PS1
  • Persona Q

These are all games that I wanted to continue playing but were simply too difficult for me to ever finish.

 

I think the spelunky point is particularly interesting and apt though, because despite never getting past the ice caves in that game, it was always fun and exciting to see new things & new interactions, even if I wasn't good at executing what the game wanted me to do.

 

thanks for posting here aoanla, because this helped give me some insight into why I was pretty actively uninterested in this game as an exercise in frustration and futility. It can't give me anything that other games don't already. I appreciate that it works for lots of people, but I don't think it will succeed at its goal with me as a player.

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Did anyone ever have these "game too hard to beat" issues with PC games growing up? I feel like usually there was just a cheat code or something back when I was a kid if I was having issues.

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Okay so I can appreciate how mousing for this game has more have more granular fidelity in mallet manipulation then timidly pawing a track pad.

 

As I play the game I can't help but ponder the nature of the hammer jar man.

 

Sitting in his cauldron he resembles a man conjured by a witch. Or perhaps a man who has will soon be eaten, and is indeed trying to escape his fate as a meal. Bennet says the jar is to protect jar man's feet. I believe it is actually to protect his head, to keep jar man bottom heavy.

 

Hammer jar man resembles a man at work, with his ripped abs and toned guns. A man who shall fastidiously attend to his Sisyphean task.  A man whose bare nipples exudes his human form, animal, sexual, macho. He is one with his tool, the hammer. One with his task- to conquer the insurmountable. Hammer jar man is the true avatar of a hard core gamer.

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52 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

Did anyone ever have these "game too hard to beat" issues with PC games growing up? I feel like usually there was just a cheat code or something back when I was a kid if I was having issues.

 I mean: yes, if you count the Commodore Amiga as a "PC". There have definitely been games which don't have cheat codes on non-console platforms - and I've definitely failed to complete them. Hired Guns, IIRC, didn't have any cheat codes, as the first example which springs to mind. I don't recall Cannon Fodder having any, either, nor Frontier (Elite II).

 

(But also: just because cheat codes exist doesn't mean you know about them - I grew up before the WWW, where you only heard about cheat codes in magazines, and if you never knew the cheat codes, then you'd never manage to complete them. So, yes: another lesson I learned, moving from the late 80s to the mid 90s, is that the only way to complete a game was to cheat at it. But I think that's a side effect of the general experience In my previous posts, not a solution to the "problem".)

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52 minutes ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

Did anyone ever have these "game too hard to beat" issues with PC games growing up? I feel like usually there was just a cheat code or something back when I was a kid if I was having issues.

 

there were lots of cheat codes for console games. there just weren't very many games on the PC that interested me as a kid and were too hard. Maybe like SimCity 3000. 

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1 minute ago, jennegatron said:

 

there were lots of cheat codes for console games. there just weren't very many games on the PC that interested me as a kid and were too hard. Maybe like SimCity 3000. 

 

My theory is that Goldeneye 64 made a bold step towards murdering cheat codes in games. By making the cheat-like systems a reward for skillful play of the game. Instead of making the cheat system a sort of tourism-mode way of exploring the game.

 

Were there other games that had Goldeneye 64-like unlockable cheat systems?

 

I also like something fart I forget what i was going to say. Oh right, I also like how speedrunners use programming exploits to find "hidden features," Quake's rocket jump being a famous one for becoming a real feature.

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I mean: I'm also not against people being awesome at playing games - I love speedruns (and I'm dipping into AGDQ as it runs this year, as every year), and I think discovering exploits in games is impressive and painstaking work. (I watched a bunch of Getting Over It speedrun practice, too, and the high skill bar is really impressive, too.)

But unlockable cheat codes really did miss the cultural point of cheat codes. 

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I think it's not a case of Foddy 'forgetting' about low skill players and more that he deliberately made the game for a specific audience. As the trailer says, it's made for a specific kind of person (to hurt them). If you don't get anything out of the game because you don't have an artificially inflated idea of how good you are at games, that's fine, you're just not in the audience for it.

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I feel the list of games I completed without cheats or walkthroughs in the 90s wouldn't be longer than 3 items.

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21 minutes ago, Jutranjo said:

I feel the list of games I completed without cheats or walkthroughs in the 90s wouldn't be longer than 3 items.

ugh so embarrassing, git gud

 

(this is true for me as well, and is probably only snoopy tennis & pokemon red for the game boy)

 

edit: (oh god, i just remembered that I had a complete paper prima guide for pokemon red that i used. strike pokemon red and replace it with pokemon the trading card game the video game for game boy)

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22 minutes ago, jennegatron said:

ugh so embarrassing, git gud

 

(this is true for me as well, and is probably only snoopy tennis & pokemon red for the game boy)

 

edit: (oh god, i just remembered that I had a complete paper prima guide for pokemon red that i used. strike pokemon red and replace it with pokemon the trading card game the video game for game boy)

I am just glad we live in a world where we dont have to go to a website called happy puppy to get cheats and guides.

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13 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

Did anyone ever have these "game too hard to beat" issues with PC games growing up? I feel like usually there was just a cheat code or something back when I was a kid if I was having issues.

For sure, from the c64 onward. I mean, some of my happier early PC gaming memories come from messing around with iddqd, but in general especially early on in my gaming life, finishing a game wasn't really the point or the goal, it was about play. Just getting a bit further every time.

 

That's actually part of the Souls appeal for me, it brings me back to this more sensible (in my view) approach to play rather than a single hand-held linear progression with no restarts.

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9 hours ago, Merus said:

I think it's not a case of Foddy 'forgetting' about low skill players and more that he deliberately made the game for a specific audience. As the trailer says, it's made for a specific kind of person (to hurt them). If you don't get anything out of the game because you don't have an artificially inflated idea of how good you are at games, that's fine, you're just not in the audience for it.

I mean: sure.

 

But buried in my complaint is a set of more nuanced points. 

Firstly, that Bennett also doesn't really understand the frustration of "hard games" because he's never been bad enough at them. (See his misrepresentation of why Spelunky is good, for example).

Secondly, that Getting Over It probably still doesn't hit its target: surely the people who most need to learn about the value of set-backs in making progress feel more awesome are the very people who are also completing his game in less than 3 hours. I don't think it's possible to make a game which will teach the "left-hand side" of the bell curve this lesson, without making it utterly impossible for anyone else. [See also: why we have difficulty settings.]

Thirdly, that, as @jennegatron notes, this is part of the fetishisation of "hard games", which I would really like to fight, because, again: the 80s and 90s were great for hard games only if you were good at games. Bringing back hard games just punishes the people who are bad at games.

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28 minutes ago, aoanla said:

Bringing back hard games just punishes the people who are bad at games.

I'd say it just broadens the spectrum of available entertainment.

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Well, lets clarify that to: bringing back games which are "solely hard" just punishes people who are bad at games. I've nothing against high difficulty modes - Bayonetta, for example, does this well in both directions, because it has "very easy" modes which automate some of the harder stuff for you, a spectrum of "normal" modes, and then "very hard" modes which basically make things ridiculously unfair. 

Now everyone is happy.

Fetishising "how you could have games, once, which you couldn't ever complete, ever" kinda misses the point.

 

 

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