Idle Digging - Shovel Knight

[Korax]

Intent matters, sure, but the final product is far more important. And history matters too, but then emulators (and the massive amount of game literature) do a perfectly good job at that. With modern work I'm much more interested in how creators can take the older work they love and reimagine it in a modern context.

 

 

They also incorporated more modern things, too. Those checkpoints probably wouldn't have been in a NES game. There is no extra lives system that makes you restart the game if you die more than 3 times, you can just keep at it until you beat a level. Even the fact that you can save and have multiple save slots is a slight modernization, because you just didn't have that in early NES. You either beat it in one go or had to write down a bunch of clumsy passwords. Why do they take a bunch of mechanics from NES-era games? Because they wanted to. It's the game they wanted to make, and it was their choice to use them.

 

At this point it seems like you're just ignoring things that have been said to justify your dislike of the game.

[SiN]

My idea of "reimagine" goes well beyond adding checkpoints, multiple save slots, and not making you restart large portions of a game for fairly arbitrary reasons. Those are like, the minimum requirements I'd expect for a game made in the last 10 years.

 

 

It preserves the things it should, and pushes things that need to change in a new direction.

 

I agree with what you're saying, but from what I've read/watched re SK, I'm either not seeing the new direction bits at all, or they just aren't being pushed far enough for my tastes.

 

 

 

So? What's wrong with that? Very technically advanced graphics are interesting, and so is this.

 

Are they interesting though? I actually agree, but then I challenge you to find another thread on the forum where we've discussed something like a DX11 shader advancement in a game as much as we've discussed the innards of the NES on this thread.

 

[edit] This was kinda flippant, but the point I was originally making is that a game who's major selling point is "retro aesthetic and gameplay!" [1] is about as interesting to me as a game who's MSP is "very technically advanced graphics!"  Both are interesting for sure, but not enough to make we want to actually buy and play the game.

 

[1] and just to be sure I wasn't missing something, I checked out the SK website and the first sentence contains both "classic" and "8-bit retro aesthetic".

[Gormongous]

I think there's a lot that can be unearthed in trying to revisit a seemingly outmoded idea, a keen design sense can not just rediscover what was great about those things, but build out on them in different ways from what brought us to where we are with games now.

There's always the risk of somebody just parroting something without really deconstructing it, but Shovel Knight is certainly not such a game, everything about it felt thoughtful and considered to me. It preserves the things it should, and pushes things that need to change in a new direction.

 

To push your point a bit further, there is a lot of art out there that derives its cultural payload from being created using new tools within historically prescribed bounds. Ignoring or dismissing those bounds because you might see them as irrelevant or just limiting verges on missing the point of why they're even there, which means missing the point of what makes a given work unique.

[Merus]

I agree with what you're saying, but from what I've read/watched re SK, I'm either not seeing the new direction bits at all, or they just aren't being pushed far enough for my tastes.

 

I think that's the sticking point - it's not particularly new, what works about it is that it is rock-solid execution. It takes appealing ideas from the popular games of the era and uses them thoughtfully - Zelda II combat except with 30 years of experience; Mega-Man style bosses except with appropriate gating so players can't pick the hardest level first; Castlevania items except item acquisition is permanent and the mana costs are balanced; an economy that has just the right amount of pressure without being stingy or generous etc. etc.

 

I don't think the game would work nearly as well with modern graphics - not only is the design drawing heavily from touchstones of the era, but the concept itself, a knight that wields a shovel, works better the more abstract the game around it is. A game with modern graphics couldn't get away with Shovel Knight without making it goofy and cartoonish.

[SecretAsianMan]

As someone who is quite nostalgic and has played and enjoyed most, if not all, of the classic games that are often referenced as influences in Shovel Knight, I have to say I'm not into the game at all.  I don't think it's bad, I don't think it's poorly made.  Quite the opposite in fact.  I recognize what people liked about it and agree that it was done well.  But frankly nothing about it grabbed me the same way those original games did.  I had to force myself to finish the game and once I did I promptly forgot all about it.  The music is great, the aesthetic is pleasing, the gameplay is pretty solid, so really I should have loved it.  I just don't at all and I can't entirely explain why.  It's my most personally disappointing game from last year.  I was really looking forward to playing it and really bummed out that I didn't care for it in the slightest.

[Sno]

I think that's the sticking point - it's not particularly new, what works about it is that it is rock-solid execution. It takes appealing ideas from the popular games of the era and uses them thoughtfully - Zelda II combat except with 30 years of experience; Mega-Man style bosses except with appropriate gating so players can't pick the hardest level first; Castlevania items except item acquisition is permanent and the mana costs are balanced; an economy that has just the right amount of pressure without being stingy or generous etc. etc.

 

I don't think the game would work nearly as well with modern graphics - not only is the design drawing heavily from touchstones of the era, but the concept itself, a knight that wields a shovel, works better the more abstract the game around it is. A game with modern graphics couldn't get away with Shovel Knight without making it goofy and cartoonish.

 

This is a big part of it, that it takes from so many influences and remixes them in previously unseen ways and with some 20-30 years of hindsight. It comes across as a great exploration of NES games to me, the way it simultaneously breaks down so many different games from the era and tries to extract the best and most iconic elements of each, but as part of that process seemingly paying considerable attention to why and where it's using the things it's drawing out. Things that you would not necessarily expect could work together are made to work together in this game.

Korax was arguing that checkpoints wouldn't have been in an NES game. They actually would have been, just not in the ways this game handles them, which are complete anachronisms. Being able to risk skipping a checkpoint by smashing it for extra currency, and having a Dark Souls-style corpse run instead of a set of limited lives, these are much, much more modern pieces of design. These are clear breaks from the game's influences, pulling in modern elements that can arguably improve on the formula in ways that design ideas contemporary to the influences its largely pulling from would not have allowed.

 

Also, given that they come and go pretty quickly, It would unfortunately be easy to overlook that levels in the game often have wholly distinct sets of mechanics which are often quite original and interesting in their own right. (The mole knight stage, for just one example, has a system of environment manipulation that interacts with enemies in some pretty cool ways.)

[melmer]

Just finished this about half an hour ago. So freakin good! If I had played it last year I would've herald it my GOTY.

Now I'm going to google shovel and shield knight fan art... What could go wrong

There it is, didn't take long

http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2014/238/c/c/shield_knight_is_so_lovely__by_canasominous-d7wrv8f.png

WHY

[Sno]

This thread prompted me to replay the game, curious if i was misremembering anything in my unwavering praise, and nope, Shovel Knight is definitely awesome.

Having caught up on Rogue Legacy, a game that does very different things with very similar influences, has as a contrast kind of made me appreciate Shovel Knight even more. Rogue Legacy just sucks so much, it feels terrible to play.

[Latrine]

I just finished Shovel Knight and I liked the game but not as much as I thought I would. I found the later levels difficult in a frustrating way. The boss rush took me a while too although it was enjoyable finally learning most of the boss patterns since you can brute force them the first time you fight them. 

 

Personally I liked Rogue Legacy more. I agree that the basic controls in Rogue Legacy are a little tougher to use but you eventually get better control of your movement with double jump or dash runes, and I simply found the roguelike elements more interesting than straightforward platformer levels.

[Sno]

The feel of the jump, the feel of the knockback on attacks, it all feels so muddy and unpredictable to me in Rogue Legacy. (The game is also super finicky if controlled on an analog stick, which doesn't mix well with the 360 pad having a kind of shitty d-pad.) I also think the incredible ambiguity of the hitboxes relative to the sprites themselves is incredibly frustrating. I had around seven hours into that game and i never really had a clear sense of where the hitbox starts on the hero sprite, i was constantly getting hit by projectiles i thought i could avoid.

 

You know, and i also think the level design in Rogue Legacy is just so bad. Yes, the world layouts are randomized, but the individual rooms are not, and are built with just absolutely no flair or character. There's also the way it presents you with rooms that require certain weapons to solve, which just... That just feels really dumb when your weapons are so determined by chance, and the layouts change on each respawn. Am i supposed to just lock down the castle for multiple respawns and take the ridiculous currency hit so i can hit up a few chests that won't be worth it after that's factored in? No, of course i won't. It's a piece of design that makes no sense.

Really hate those bosses too, and the wildly unbalanced classes. It also felt like it was balanced to just be a ruthless grind. I get that some pro players are able to beat all the bosses at low levels, but it's done death-by-a-thousand-cuts because you go into that game so incredibly weak. I couldn't find grinding through the progression loop enjoyable either because i just found nothing enjoyable about the act of playing that game.

I hated that game, i was surprised how much i hated it, i always go in willing to dig for a redeeming hook and just did not find it.

[Trip Hazard]

Sorry to dig this thread back up (haha, I'm so funny) but as I just got my XBONE pad in the post, I thought I'd give Shovel Knight a play for the first time.

 

So far, so joyous. Thankfully, the d-pad on this controller is pretty good - albeit a bit slippery after a while - so I managed to get through a couple of stages with no problems. The boss designs are fantastic, and I thought there were some really neat touches in Spectre Knight's stage, like the lightning flashes and the plants that you can send into the sky and then bounce on to get higher. The ghosts are straight out of Mario, but that's okay: I'll be generous and say "homage" instead of "rip off"

 

What the fuck is up with Troupple tho. That thing is weeeeiiiirrrrdddd

[Merus]

Well, it's a trout and an apple

 

I hope that answers your question!

[tberton]

This just reminds me that I'm still waiting on tenterhooks for the Plague Knight expansion. Gonna be so good!

[BobbyBesar]

I played this fairly recently on the 3DS, and while I liked it a lot, I don't think I loved it.

 

I really liked the artistic direction. The ice level was fairly novel. The very clear references to Metal Man and Air Man, Castlevanias, etc. But I didn't really like the progression. Tackling the levels in different order didn't really seem to matter, since unlike Mega Man, beating one boss didn't really help you with the next one. (Or at least, it was clear that everything was designed such that it could be beaten without artifacts, so using them felt like a crutch). I almost never used the artifact abilities outside the treasure forest levels. 

 

The best feeling level to me was the Hall of Ancestors or whatever, since it combined some puzzle solving with accessible but not repetitive level design (no checkpoints needed), and a nifty boss fight.

 

I was really disappointed by the New Game+. I was really expecting tweaked levels with different enemy layouts. Just making everything hit harder and live longer was not an interesting variation to me. It's the laziest possible implementation of a difficulty level. It did make me better at the game, particularly the NG+ boss rush), but that also kind of ended up with me just hoping I'd get a favorable draw order.

 

When all is said and done, I also did not care for the way they implemented the checkpointing system. It felt like the levels were very much tuned around the normal-mode checkpoints (specifically with regard to the insta-kill pits/spikes), and then they just removed some from the New Game+. The levels felt too long to play without all the checkpoints, and somehow too short with the checkpoints in there. Again, this didn't feel interesting to me. It just meant that when playing, I needed to repeat the room before the insta-kill room many, many times.

 

The world-map wanderers seemed a little off, too. For one, the Lobo-guy with the whip who appears first seemed harder to me than the later ones. And they didn't really seem to serve any purpose. They undermined the death system (it's trivially easy to recover loot bags when dying to them), and they didn't serve as a significant barrier to progress on the world map.

 

It's also in an uneasy sweet spot for me length/content wise. It isn't an elemental beat-in-a-sitting type challenge (like I would do with Mega Man 2). But it also isn't long enough to be a keep-plugging-away for secrets journey (Mega Man X).

 

It definitely did what it set out to do though.

 

Is there a "bad" ending where Shield Knight doesn't survive? Maybe if you don't catch her in the dream sequences? It's trivially easy to catch her, so I always did.

[tberton]

The world-map wanderers are there as Kickstarter rewards. That's probably why they seem off. As for the length of the game and New Game+ complaints, like I said, the Plague Knight dlc will be released soon and will be free. There will be two more free dlc campaigns after that, as long as they maintain their Kickstarter promises.

[BobbyBesar]

Well, I don't just mean in the design (which is a little odd), I mean in the function within the game. i assume that they planned for the world-wanderers to exist, and just let the backers slot in design ideas. Was the Hat Baron backer-designed too? He fits into the world better than the others.

 

They just didn't really have an interesting function in terms of changing the layout of the map. Basically, you either beat them right away, or you poked them until they moved enough so that you could get past them to get to town / troupple pond and then you stocked up and then beat them.

 

I had no idea about the DLC. That's pretty cool, I'll probably play them if they're available on 3DS.

[BobbyBesar]

One other thing though: I could easily see Shovel Knight becoming a regular in the speed-run circuit / AGDQ, because there's lots of different variable. Beat once, beat New Game+, no relics, 100% items, get all achievements , etc.

[SecretAsianMan]

One other thing though: I could easily see Shovel Knight becoming a regular in the speed-run circuit / AGDQ, because there's lots of different variable. Beat once, beat New Game+, no relics, 100% items, get all achievements , etc.

 

I share most of your opinions on the game and wasn't a big fan of it myself.  But I will admit that the speedrun from AGDQ 2015 was pretty good.

[Badfinger]

Oh shoot I forgot there was more DLC coming! I'm re-excited!

 

The Speed Run was really quite good. Was that one where they had dev commentary as well? It's interesting, I never would have considered myself a big speed run person but between this and Axiom Verge and a few other things, there are some games that I am anticipating seeing good video game players speed running.

[SecretAsianMan]

The Speed Run was really quite good. Was that one where they had dev commentary as well?

 

Yeah, the devs were on a Skype call during the run.  It's part of the reason it's a good watch.  They talked about some of the things they did with the intention they would be used specifically for speed runs.

[Badfinger]

Yeah, the devs were on a Skype call during the run.  It's part of the reason it's a good watch.  They talked about some of the things they did with the intention they would be used specifically for speed runs.

 

Right, I remember now! And even with that in mind, he subverted their designs pretty often. As is the case with speed runs even when it's not glitched and broken.

[Ninety-Three]

I just finished this game, and I felt like all its attempts to make me care about Shield Knight fell completely flat. For some reason, the enemies in the Shield Knight dreams drop tons of cash, so I found myself letting her fall as I tried to earn more. When I got to the Enchantress fight, her AI made me resent her like a bad escort mission. She's invincible, why can't she follow me around, rather than randomly walking away from me and forcing me to dive through fireballs to get my shield bounce? The last straw was when the Enchantress did that "sweep the entire field" attack and Shield Knight kept moving back and forth between two pillars, and I got hit because I had no idea where she was going to be blocking. 

 

It also seemed like the game gave you way too much health. I literally never died from damage outside a bossfight: I could charge through the level taking hits like a berserker, and it just never added up to enough to kill me before I either found a heal, or died in a pit and respawned with full health. That also made the instakill pits/spikes/etc feel really jarring: enemies take off 5, maybe 10% of my health when I mess up, spikes take 100%. In bossfights, I'm used to health feeling like a margin for error, something that says "Okay, you can screw up this many times before you lose", but here it felt like a resource "Well he does 2 damage to me per cycle, but I can easily hit him 3 times in that cycle, so he's going to die first". It's not specifically that it made the bossfights easy, but it made me feel like I didn't have to get good at them: I didn't have to learn how to avoid all their patterns, just figure out a good way to damage them and I could out-DPS them. Tinker Knight and Polar Knight were maybe the worst examples of this, I didn't even try to avoid Tinker Knight knocking me off bouncing on his head, or Polar Knight's "throw four snowballs" attack, I just ran into them headlong because I was doing damage faster than the bosses. I thought the Boss Rush might force me to finally play well, but with a full heal after each boss, my berserker style remained valid.

[Trip Hazard]

Yes, I agree that with too much health (to be fair, you can choose to limit how much you have) the bosses are reduced to something of a slugging match. I never died to any boss in the game except polar knight, because I didn't notice that he'd uncovered some spikes on the floor.

 

I'm almost at the end of the game, and though I'd say that I do like Shovel Knight a lot, and indeed that I love some things about it (the music, the boss designs and backdrops) there are just too many insta-kill deathtraps. Perhaps it's my memory, but I don't remember there being that many in the Mega Man games, which Shovel Knight seeks to emulate above all else.

 

(Also, I think the game should've given me a bit more notice about the charge attack, which I didn't discover until the last couple of stages)

[Ninety-Three]

there are just too many insta-kill deathtraps. 

 

What exactly do you mean by traps? There's definitely too much instakill overall (or maybe there's just too little death to damage), but I didn't feel like there were many traps where you would die unexpectedly, I usually died in pits to foreseeable failures of dexterity.

 

(Also, I think the game should've given me a bit more notice about the charge attack, which I didn't discover until the last couple of stages)

 

I'm confused, you get the charge attack in the second town. Are you saying you never went onto the airship and found the shop, or did you buy it without reading the description and so never realize how it worked?

[Trip Hazard]

Maybe not traps precisely, but there are plenty of scenarios where the you're leaving for across a bottomless pit and - oops! - up pops a fish to knock you in it, or - oops! - I didn't know that fan guy would appear and blow be backwards.

And yeah, totally didn't realise I bought the charge attack. Had plenty cash by that point and just went on a shopping spree