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Jake

GDC 2012: The Death of Nick Breckon

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The part that stumped me was the beavers.

What got me was that it involved a bit of timing. You had to do a thing, and then do the next thing quickly, which hadn't been part of the game's vocabulary prior to that.

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I remember I finished Grim Fandango without any cheating through the internet, except for two parts, which I think are the worst puzzles ever:

- The dumb sign post in the forest

- I had no idea I could move with Chepito underwater after picking him up for his lantern, there was no precedence of those types of controls before

Otherwise I felt pretty fulfilled in finishing such a long adventure game without much cheating. That's more than I can say about my patience today. It was worth the two months spent. I didn't mind the wandering around figuring out what to do as all of the parts taking place within the cities were enjoyable to just meander.

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Super Metroid!

I don't really have anything to say, but it was great hearing people actually acknowledge how freaking weird it is that Nintendo made such an atmospheric and mature action game.

I still think games today could learn a lot from the environmental story-telling that goes on in Super. It's a shame that many of its own sequels seem to have strayed so far from that, with Fusion and Other M being messes of ponderous nonsense dialogue scenes.

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Nintendo finally released an update for the downloadable NES games on the 3DS, enabling people to create save states wherever they want. So that finally makes those tough-as-nails games a little more playable for modern audiences. I've been playing a little of the original Metroid and even that game's a triumph of atmosphere. Super Metroid is of course better in every conceivable way, but Metroid has always been quality.

The prime series was very fun. And I really enjoyed Metroid Zero, the remake of the first one. I've yet to play Fusion, but I will.

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Fusion is pretty good but felt really linear to me. Metroid: Other M has been the only Metroid game I haven't been thrilled with.

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Fusion is pretty good but felt really linear to me. Metroid: Other M has been the only Metroid game I haven't been thrilled with.

I like Other M as a game, i think it does some really cool and interesting things. The story is what i take issue with, having unskippable cutscenes and unavoidable story events in a series people like to speed run, and disastrously offensive and backwards characterization for the series protagonist.

I have similar issues with Fusion. That is a game with a built-in goal for speed-runs that clock in under two hours, and you'll end up with like a third of that time being spent trying to punch through its dialogue scenes. (They don't "count" towards the in-game timer of course, it's an issue of it wasting your time.)

That seems like maybe an esoteric concern, but Metroid fandom has a long, long history of speed-running.

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TSHIRT idea:

Front

"The Idle Thumbs Podcast Kickstarter"

Sklick visual

Back

"You heard it here first"

big :tup:

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Fusion is pretty good but felt really linear to me. Metroid: Other M has been the only Metroid game I haven't been thrilled with.

Fusion was very much built to curb sequence breaking as much as possible. Even Metroid Prime was more sequence-breakable than it. The biggest things that stop it in Fusion are wall-jumping launching you a forced distance from a wall and the high amount of sealed doors for the sake of being sealed. Though, I've seen some TAS runs that solved the wall jump problem.

That's why Metroid: Zero Mission is so, so good compared to it. Aside from the recreation of the first game being very well handled, bringing it up to par with Super Metroid, they left sequence breaking in. They obviously stopped it to -some- extent, but for the most part just like Super Metroid there's a perfect path of sequence breaking to get an incredibly short gameplay time while collecting 100% of items. It's a little harder to do than Super Metroid because the controls are more rigid.

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The part that stumped me was the beavers.

What got me was that it involved a bit of timing. You had to do a thing, and then do the next thing quickly, which hadn't been part of the game's vocabulary prior to that.

I spent for the longest time trying to Rambo my way through the bridge by running on it and then trying to get out the extinguisher before they make Manny run back out.

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