toblix

Hotline Miami

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A common thread I'm seeing in people critical of 2 is that they played 1 fast and loose and don't like the careful play 2 often requires. On C&C, Thursten mentions hardly ever using lockon, the far look or guns and resented needing to do so in 2. I can't imagine not using those.

I also played 1 as more of a puzzle game than as a test of frenetic execution, so the fact that it leans more heavily in that direction hasn't harmed my perception so far.

 

Well, I don't mind careful play, which was how I played the first Hotline Miami until I got really good at it, but the fact that there's a scoring system that punishes hesitation doubly (through a lower or nonexistent "time bonus" score and through shorter combos) makes it a bit frustrating. Clearly, Hotline Miami 2 wants me either to take my time or to accept a lot more cheap deaths, but only the latter is really the only one recognized as valid by the game's internal system of evaluation. I know people are going to say that it was a problem in the first game, too, but Hotline Miami 2 is so much bigger that all of its inherited problems are substantially worse.

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Hahaha, there's a lockon? Millions of people just realized they unwittingly played Hotline Miami on hard mode.

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I think sightlines longer than you can actually look are the big problem. Like, enemies won't see you if you're past that point, but it means you can't tell before running down that hallway if there's someone coming down it to meet you halfway. I think if they'd taken it as a level design principle never to have sightlines longer than 2 screens the game would have been stronger for it. Fortunately the levels that are longer than that are fairly uncommon and mostly loaded into the middle of the game.

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Hahaha, there's a lockon? Millions of people just realized they unwittingly played Hotline Miami on hard mode.

I actually started playing the real hard mode last night out of curiosity and it rotates the level 180 degrees and sprinkles Fat Dudes throughout. I'm not sure I'll be super into that. Fat Dudes are fuckin' annoying. A few levels in it's not too bad but I can definitely see it being really awful in the longer levels.

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Yes Punch Mode is my favorite mode! On some levels, though, I can't imagine doing that successfully. On hard mode when there's more dudes in general? Ahhh.

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I find free aim is more efficent than lock-on, though it takes practice to be able to land shots consistently on target. I think that Hotline Miami is a game where aiming with a stick is superior to the mouse, flicking the stick in the direction I want to fire is just faster and more intuitive than mouse aim. 

 

I just played though the first two acts of HM2, and I've found it to be quite managable, I did sharpen my skills with a playthough of the first beforehand, though. I have to say that the soundtrack somehow blows the first out of the water, been listening to New Wave Hookers on loop.

 

Also the Swan Siblings are the best characters so far, The chainsaw is like a knife with more range, and if you use gun bro to grab as much attention as possible, the combos get ridiculous.

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I find lock-on to be a must since you can tag guys with long view through walls and then move yourself to a on open line of fire and blast them, even if they're off screen. Then again, I also find mouse and keyboard way better, but that's just a taste thing. 

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I find mouse aim clumsy because I keep losing track of my character's facing, which gets me killed a lot. Found sticks clumsy as well at first, but after playing though the first game on the Vita, I don't want to go back.

 

With offscreen enemies, I find that with an smg or a shotgun, it's fairly easy to hit them once I know where they are, doing it with a pistol is tricky, though.

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I ended up buying HM2 on PC because I actually prefer the mouse controls. Which is weird, because I actually prefer a controller for all FPSes. Sticks are a little better for melee, but mouse is better for guns I've found.

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The level in a nightclub is doing my head in. I can't see what weapons anyone has, and I rarely notice if i forgot to kill someone. Boo at whoever thought that not seeing enemies in a game like this was a good idea.

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Finally wrote down some thoughts on why I dislike the second game so vehemently, mostly because its nature as a follow-up leaves little doubt in my mind that it was deliberately designed to be cryptic in order to score points with the artsy crowd while also enjoying unironic success. It's a violent video game about violent video games that half-assedly tells us we're bad for playing it, but never considers its own role in providing us with more of the same. One game is about shocking your audience, maybe. Two games are about pandering to it, one way or another.

 

Locking on is only really good for tagging an enemy before you burst into the room to make sure you don't have to worry about keeping track of them too much. Way too slow to actually use in bigger firefights.

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Not in the sense of being hard to read necessarily, but more on the level of burying its supposed critiques under a whole lot of other faux-profound garbage. And, well, there's that.

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Not in the sense of being hard to read necessarily, but more on the level of burying its supposed critiques under a whole lot of other faux-profound garbage.

 

Yeah, I think one of the big problems there is that the first Hotline Miami was so inarticulate that it came off weird and confusing in a way that felt cool and deep, even if the secret ending revealed that such a feeling wasn't intentional. In Hotline Miami 2, it's still inarticulate, but it's less excusable both because it's a sequel that should have the tone nailed down and because it's so long that it becomes obvious when the writing stretches thin that it's got nothing to say. It's cryptic, I'd agree, in the sense that it's unable to say what it means... not to imply that it has anything meaningful to say.

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Not in the sense of being hard to read necessarily, but more on the level of burying its supposed critiques under a whole lot of other faux-profound garbage. And, well, there's that.

And I'd like to emphasize the supposed there. Because, honestly, it seems to me a lot of the criticism of Hotline Miami and its sequel centers around declaring that it's trying to do something and then lambasting it for doing it poorly, when I kind of don't think that's what it was ever trying to do at all. It feels like a lot of people are primed to expect only one possible message about violence in games, that we're bad people for enjoying it, so any game which is about violence but fails to convey that very specific message is perceived as a failure. I mean, what in the actual text of Hotline Miami even suggests that's the intent at all? There's a lot in there pointing out that humans have an innate drive towards violence, that that violence has causes and effects which usually source back to more violence, and that we'll use any justification we can find to find an outlet for it. What message is in there anywhere about how you're a bad person for enjoying video game violence?

 

It's frustrating, to me, that when so few games address the violence that's omnipresent in their mechanics in any real way through the narrative, one of the few games that takes the relatively minimal step of acknowledging its own violence is considered pretentious for not moralizing enough about it.

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Especially when the overt text of Hotline Miami was literally the developers inserting themselves into the game and saying "none of this means anything, we made you do this because we know you like it. You're welcome" Nothing I've ever heard about the Dennaton guys make me think they're actually that thoughtful about violence in video games, or anything other than what is rad and stylish.

If anything, I thought HLM was a reaction against shallow moralizing in video games like Spec Ops or BioShock; its just utterly nihilistic and hedonistic with no pretense of deeper meaning. A dirty indulgence of your fascistic id.

The meaningless nonsense lore dump you got for getting the secret ending seemed more like a final joke on the player looking for a deeper truth.

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Also another thing about Hard Mode.

 

Guns have half the ammo and once you pick them up, if you throw them, they lose all ammo. The latter may be true in normal mode and I never noticed, but i don't THINK it is.

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Finally wrote down some thoughts on why I dislike the second game so vehemently, mostly because its nature as a follow-up leaves little doubt in my mind that it was deliberately designed to be cryptic in order to score points with the artsy crowd while also enjoying unironic success. It's a violent video game about violent video games that half-assedly tells us we're bad for playing it, but never considers its own role in providing us with more of the same. One game is about shocking your audience, maybe. Two games are about pandering to it, one way or another.

 

Locking on is only really good for tagging an enemy before you burst into the room to make sure you don't have to worry about keeping track of them too much. Way too slow to actually use in bigger firefights.

Gave up on this one graph in.

 

I think it's ludicrous to call the game bad because you're not enjoying it. You can dislike it, sure--but I actively love this game. I find it challenging, and I feel rewarded when I successfully navigate between levels, even if it takes me 100 retries to reach the final screen.

 

Criticism's all well and good, but I think your approach here is misguided. HM2's design is certainly intentional, but I wouldn't ever call it intentionally bad.

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It is not

Yeah didn't think so. D:

Also the two-barrel shotguns don't have ANY ammo when you pick them up. DANG HARD MODE WHY YOU SO HARD.

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