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

[osmosisch]

Just now, aoanla said:

Well, lets clarify that to: bringing back games which are "solely hard" just punishes people who are bad at games.

 

 

Once again, I'd say it just broadens the spectrum of available entertainment. There are millions of games out there which are not made with me in mind. That's fine. Spelunky, for example, is way too hard for me to ever see the end. I don't care, it's obviously a great game. I just don't play it.

 

I mean, I agree with you that the culture around games and difficulty is irritating, but I don't conclude from that that every game should have an easy mode. 

[aoanla]

Spelunky's way too hard for me to see the end - but it's still fun to play if you can't complete it. (It's actually an excellent example of a game which is both "hard" and also enjoyable for people who aren't good at games.) 

[Merus]

I think your points about where Bennett Foddy's interests and blindspots lie were very good. What I was driving at was that the market is far too large for the 80s and 90s model of hard games to ever be the dominant form of video games, because nothing can be. And meanwhile we've learned about people who have quite serious disabilities playing games, and so the model of, say, Space Quest, where it's mostly not time or reflex dependent except for some sequences where it is and you can't progress if you don't have them. I don't read Foddy as fetishising difficulty in the way that Salt & Sanctuary or Hyper Light Drifter do. He seems to be reaching for something more... esoteric, and looking at the game and saying 'well, fuck that' is an intended and acceptable response. (I think the Dark Souls series does the same thing: its world and story seem to suggest that giving up partway through is a satisfying and complete end to the story the game is telling.)

[Urthman]

On 1/9/2018 at 6:13 AM, aoanla said:

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 100% agree with this.  I'm "bad" at games compared to an average Gamer, but I can't ever remember quitting a game out of frustration that it was too hard.  But I've quit plenty of games out of the boredom you describe. 

I was shocked to enjoy Dark Souls because it sounded like it was full of the the kinds of things that bored me in other games, but I loved it because repeating the same sections of the game over and over until I was good enough (and/or leveled-up enough) to progress further never got boring.

[Latrine]

Under 2 minutes

 

 

[plasticflesh]

Re: Hard

 

From the most cynical point of view: 80s games, if they were arcade games, might have been hard to increase money spent. 90s console games often had hard 2nd or 3rd levels to prevent the game being beaten within the 1 or 2 day rental period. So those scales of hardness are often about obfuscating game play to increase profits.

 

I think the "Dark Souls" hard and to a lesser extent "Kaizo Mario" style "hard" is more about challenge in and of itself.

 

Dark Souls hard is something I love, because it's about embodying the challenge in that world. But it's also about freedom of exploration and player choices. Getting Over It is almost like a rhythm game, in that it is so linear, and thus a very limited amount of solutions or strategies possible.

 

Perhaps a hardcore version of Diamonds should be developed, perhaps titled "Dark Diamonds" or "Diamonds Souls" or "Diamonds with Bennet Foddy" so that it can employ the tag line: "Nothing is harder than Diamonds."

 

The mouse-input puts me right off of Getting Over It, sadly. I just really, really, hate using the mouse to play games. I wonder if it would adapt well to a game pad? 

 

What would be really interesting is a bespoke giant force-feed-back mallet input device for Getting Over It. Perhaps for the Arcade Edition. Ofcourse also while sitting inside a jar.

 

Re: Speedrun

 

Spoiler

That bucket jump was awesome. Sub 1:56 looks like it is totally possible.  

 

[aoanla]

1 hour ago, plasticflesh said:

Re: Hard

 

From the most cynical point of view: 80s games, if they were arcade games, might have been hard to increase money spent. 90s console games often had hard 2nd or 3rd levels to prevent the game being beaten within the 1 or 2 day rental period. So those scales of hardness are often about obfuscating game play to increase profits.

 

To some extent, sure: but there's plenty of PC/Amiga/C64 games which weren't arcade games which are also stupidly hard. You could argue that they were part of the same cultural zeitgeist, and were just hard because the people who wrote them expected games to be hard, because arcade games, I guess. But there was also just a tendency to make hard games in genres which were never in arcades - there's tons of early FPSen which are incredibly hard, for example.

[Merus]

I don't think the Dark Souls hard is really the same as Kaizo Mario hard. Kaizo is definitely about comedy - it's hard, but it's hard because unexpected things happen that just happen to kill you. I Wanna Be The Guy is strongly inspired by Kaizo Mario, and it's why the first screen of the game has apples that fall down on your head and kill you, then apples that fall up as you're walking over the trees.

 

Dark Souls is trying to invoke despair. You're in a lost and broken kingdom, trying to do something which no-one seriously expects you're able to do. You're supposed to feel a little overwhelmed and frustrated when you're playing it, punctuated by slivers of elation when you manage to find a bonfire or defeat a boss.

[plasticflesh]

4 hours ago, aoanla said:

 

To some extent, sure: but there's plenty of PC/Amiga/C64 games which weren't arcade games which are also stupidly hard. You could argue that they were part of the same cultural zeitgeist, and were just hard because the people who wrote them expected games to be hard, because arcade games, I guess. But there was also just a tendency to make hard games in genres which were never in arcades - there's tons of early FPSen which are incredibly hard, for example.

 

I agree. Completing most games was never a consideration for me as a kid due to this hardness. Perhaps some games did have surmountable challenges, but most of the time I used cheat codes in order to just explore the game world. Eventually I discovered the hint book market and eventual via AOL, online walkthroughs.

 

 

I never played the amiga/c64 era games in ernest. The closest was C64's Mission Impossible or Paradroid at a friends house. My family owned Montezuma's Revenge, but on EGA DOS, which is not the way to play that game... so, extra hard!

 

[plasticflesh]

1 minute ago, Merus said:

I don't think the Dark Souls hard is really the same as Kaizo Mario hard. Kaizo is definitely about comedy - it's hard, but it's hard because unexpected things happen that just happen to kill you. I Wanna Be The Guy is strongly inspired by Kaizo Mario, and it's why the first screen of the game has apples that fall down on your head and kill you, then apples that fall up as you're walking over the trees.

 

Dark Souls is trying to invoke despair. You're in a lost and broken kingdom, trying to do something which no-one seriously expects you're able to do. You're supposed to feel a little overwhelmed and frustrated when you're playing it, punctuated by slivers of elation when you manage to find a bonfire or defeat a boss.

 

I agree about your Dark Souls thematic despair, and you sum it up very well. Would you think that Getting Over It is attempting a slightly similar  but tonally parallel, premise?

[Deadpan]

On 1/13/2018 at 7:31 PM, Latrine said:

Under 2 minutes

 

 

 

Lol, I didn't realize that the achievement icon for beating the game 50 times is a galaxy brain picture.

[osmosisch]

On 1/14/2018 at 7:16 AM, Merus said:

I don't think the Dark Souls hard is really the same as Kaizo Mario hard. Kaizo is definitely about comedy - it's hard, but it's hard because unexpected things happen that just happen to kill you. I Wanna Be The Guy is strongly inspired by Kaizo Mario, and it's why the first screen of the game has apples that fall down on your head and kill you, then apples that fall up as you're walking over the trees.

 

Dark Souls is trying to invoke despair. You're in a lost and broken kingdom, trying to do something which no-one seriously expects you're able to do. You're supposed to feel a little overwhelmed and frustrated when you're playing it, punctuated by slivers of elation when you manage to find a bonfire or defeat a boss.

While I agree, I think I should note that the Souls games' tendency to have gotcha kills and surprising elements should not be underestimated. One of the main draws of those games for me is the novelty/surprise factor. They are willing to do stuff that most other genres aren't and that's worth a lot to me. It's also a reason I'm falling out of love with the genre a bit: the games are starting to repeat themselves.

[Henke]

BRECKON VS THE MOUNTAIN

 

 

Game starts at 8:45.

 

Nick finally makes it up the Devil's Chimney at 1:30:35.

[Jutranjo]

I finally got over it, took 3 hours 22 minutes!

[Spud]

New WR speedrun! 1:38.585. I think this guy had a prior WR as well