BigJKO

Cuphead!

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Alright. This looks like something I would never enjoy playing, but Holy Shit Look At Them Graphics!

 

 

 

Like a 30s cartoon, it looks like! Ahhh, so good..

 

This is what I wish Epic Mickey would've looked like.

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Yeah, the gameplay looks so "meh", but the graphics look so glorious. I really hope there is more to this game that what seems to be some sort of arena boss fights?

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The graphics do look amazing. I felt the same way after seeing this press release for the new Guilty Gear game a while back too. I have no interest in the series, but oh my does it look amazing. Especially 1.10 in.

 

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I'm a huge fan of this game. I think the only thing I could really bring up as a complaint were a few questionable hitboxes and some minor related bugs, but I never reached a point in the game where I wasn't having fun. It's a shame the conversations about the game so quickly turned to "what does the difficulty of this say about us?" as opposed to "is this actually difficult?," because I don't think it really is. It requires more pattern recognition than some games, but once you understand those it doesn't seem to require very high reflexes (I certainly wouldn't be able to beat it if it did.)

 

Anyway, my point is that everyone should try out Cuphead.

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On ‎11‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 10:45 AM, Kyir said:

I'm a huge fan of this game. I think the only thing I could really bring up as a complaint were a few questionable hitboxes and some minor related bugs, but I never reached a point in the game where I wasn't having fun. It's a shame the conversations about the game so quickly turned to "what does the difficulty of this say about us?" as opposed to "is this actually difficult?," because I don't think it really is. It requires more pattern recognition than some games, but once you understand those it doesn't seem to require very high reflexes (I certainly wouldn't be able to beat it if it did.)

 

Anyway, my point is that everyone should try out Cuphead.

 

I really want to play this game, not because I think it looks especially fun (though it does look fun) but because I want to prove to myself that it's not as hard as people say (or that I'm better than the people I see playing and everyone else is a baby).  From what I've seen of it, it doesn't seem THAT difficult.

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3 hours ago, SecretAsianMan said:

 

I really want to play this game, not because I think it looks especially fun (though it does look fun) but because I want to prove to myself that it's not as hard as people say (or that I'm better than the people I see playing and everyone else is a baby).  From what I've seen of it, it doesn't seem THAT difficult.

 

It is very difficult. I totally appreciate that for some people it might not be, but I think by any reasonable standard relative to most video games, it's very hard. I'm pretty good at games like this and I found it often to be exhaustingly tough. I'm sure there are plenty of people for whom no version of this game would present much challenge (you may be such a person!) but I would never tell a random person that this isn't a difficult game, because I imagine that statistically, that would probably not be true in their case.

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I watched one streamer, who I've seen play I Wanna Be the Boshy and other tough platformers, have a tough time with Cuphead, and I've seen Chris play platformers like Spelunky before and Chris said he had a pretty tough time with Cuphead, so that suggests that it's pretty fucking hard. My impression is that it's hard enough that I probably wouldn't enjoy it a ton, which is one reason I haven't bought it despite the fact that it seems like one of the most beautiful games ever made.

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You're both probably very correct.  I consider myself an outlier in regards to platformers and other similar games in that I find even the "hard" ones less difficult than it seems most people do.  I'm no expert but I'd like to think I'm above average.  Who knows, Cuphead might kick my ass.  The two things that I constantly hear about Cuphead are how amazing it looks and how hard it is.  The first part I agree with.  The second part I just keep thinking about other games that are known to be brutally, punishingly hard to the point of being unfair and yet I feel I've heard more said about Cuphead's difficulty than those.  Maybe because Cuphead being hard is unexpected?

 

And to be totally clear, I'm not trying to belittle anyone who thinks the game is hard.  This is entirely one of those cases where I see something and I think "I could do that" regardless of whether this is true or not.

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I think one reason people consider Cuphead's difficulty worthy of frequent mention is because of the KIND of difficulty it is. It's difficult in an old-school platformer way--games like Spelunky or Dark Souls are "hard" but when you understand the system very well, you can adapt to new difficulties you haven't yet encountered in a fairly intuitive way. That's true to some extent with Cuphead, as with any game with repeating systems, but a lot of it really comes down to learning specific patterns and practicing specific reactions to specific bosses again and again until you get it right. Some people love this but I think to a lot of people (including myself to a large extent) the part of it that's "hard" looms larger than the part of it that is "interestingly challenging." I do not consider Cuphead to be "interestingly challenging" for the most part, so when I'm talking about its difficulty, the "difficult" part is what's emphasized more than the depth or whatever else.

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My perception has probably been somewhat skewed by too many IWBTG fangames, and I hadn't meant to suggest anything negative about anyone who considers the game to be hard. It's certainly harder than a large portion of games, but I don't think there's anything about the game that would actually prevent most people from beating it provided they have a desire to do so and a sufficient amount of time. That's pretty much how I feel about Souls games too, so take it as you will.

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33 minutes ago, Kyir said:

My perception has probably been somewhat skewed by too many IWBTG fangames, and I hadn't meant to suggest anything negative about anyone who considers the game to be hard. It's certainly harder than a large portion of games, but I don't think there's anything about the game that would actually prevent most people from beating it provided they have a desire to do so and a sufficient amount of time. That's pretty much how I feel about Souls games too, so take it as you will.

I'm very surprised you think that. I suppose it depends what you mean by "a desire to do so and a sufficient amount of time." Given broad enough parameters, that could certainly be true, but I think for most people, especially given how few people actually complete ANY given game, no matter how much easier than Cuphead, I would definitely not share your expectation.

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I see one big difference between old-school-hard games like Cuphead, and the new-school-hard games like Dark Souls and Spelunky, and that is the degree and employment of pattern recognition.

 

New-school-hard games create what feel like non-linear patterns to memorize, and therefore feel like an experience of intuitive reaction and discovery.Spelunky does this with RNG worlds and systems interactions, and Dark Souls does it with 3D world exploration and elaborate patterns of enemy behavior.

 

Where as old-school-hard games have a lesser degree of pattern variation, creating a linear pattern memorization scheme.  Cuphead and other oldschool SHMUPs. I really enjoy the original "Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes" for this version of linear pattern memorization. If anything the most pure old-school-hard games are not just SHMUPs, but also rhythm games like Thumper or Guitar Hero.

 

In a way, old-school-hard uses declarative memory, I memorize the answers and recall them accurately during the recital. New-school-hard games use procedural memory, I learn the rules and phrases of the game, and instinctively switch in and out of them in a freestyle.

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Cuphead is very difficult but never insurmountable, in much the same way as a Contra or similar was. It is something which require replay after replay and memorization, not lightning fast reflexes. There is definitely a rewarding feeling to seeing yourself get a little further with each attempt, and a huge swell of pride and "that's right, FUCK YOU" when you finally pull off a win. It's actually been really interesting to me to see kids take to this game. They love it. I work with ten-year-olds, and they know that I have it as well so they like to swap stories at break times. I have one boy in my class who has been playing it nightly since the day it came out and is just up to the final phase of the flower boss. He's playing it almost exactly the way I played Contra 3 when I was his age, and it's neat to see. Blew his mind that I could beat 6 bosses in a sitting last Sunday. The fact that he's taking it slow doesn't dampen his enthusiasm though. He's making Goopy LeGrande fan art and seems to have latched on to that character specifically as a favourite. This makes me very happy for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Good times.

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I am of the mind that it isn't all that hard (same as the Souls games), you just have to be okay with the idea that you might have to die quite a few times before you get the hang of it.

 

It took me about 8 hours and 302 deaths to beat it, and I certainly don't fancy myself that great at the game. However, talking about it with someone else, they told me they found the game to be quite difficult indeed. It took him about 16 hours and some 790 deaths to do it.

 

Now I don't know what to think anymore. Am I actually really good at the game and am judging others by an unfair standard? Does the guy just suck at the game? I have no idea how close either of us might be to the average person's playthrough. I wish there was an actual bell curve of some sort where we could check.

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Wow I feel like a giant baby. This game took me 30 hours to beat (I do think that there was a decent amount of time I left the game idling, but it can't have been for more than 10.) I did think the game was quite difficult, but overall really enjoyed my time with it.

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Based on conversations I've had with other people, I think a lot of this comes down to whether or not you've put a lot of  time into similar games. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about the way movement works in Cuphead, and some of the attacks are pretty standard for the genre (though there are plenty that were shocking the first time through it,) so practice with related games counts for a lot.

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