Don’t know if it’s the greatest joy, but I absolutely adore the sound effect in the original borderlands where you set a Crimson Lance person on fire and they scream before being disintegrated after their health depletes. Sounds horrible, but it’s just a sound I think they did a really good job on.
I’ve played a couple of non Zelda Zelda-likes over the years. Here’s a list of some of them.
Anodyne
Blossom Tales
Hyper Light Drifter
Tunic
Ittle Dew
Lenna’s Inception
Ocean’s Heart
Tunic
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
World to the West
I might have forgotten or misremember facets of them by now. Some of them have sequels now, some are more of the same and other more experimental.
Anodyne and Ittle Dew were the most puzzle focused of the bunch from my memory.
Tunic is kinda vague, it tries to capture the feeling of playing a retro game with a missing manual. I remember it having more secrets rather than puzzles. I kinda got the same vague feeling from Hyper Light Drifter too. The vagueness might not be for everyone.
Blossom Tales and Ocean’s Heart felt much like copies of Zelda games. I remember feeling kinda underwhelmed with Ocean’s Heart.
Lenna’s Inception at first glance look a loot like the Gameboy era Zelda, but it does some wired storytelling and also randomly generated worlds.
Hyper Light Drifter was probably the most action focused of them.
Ittle Dew and Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion got a lot of humor. Check their store pages or reviews if it’s your style before going in.
World to the West used a bunch of character switching to solve puzzles around a whole world map. Not so much classical go save to world story and setting, but I remember having a decent time solving some of the puzzles.
Anodyne, Lenna’s Inception and Hyper Light Drifter had kinda bleak stories. Most Zelda games are pretty cozy, at least initially. If you’re not prepared for the tone, that might be off-putting.
Someone named CrossCode, while I don’t really think it’s a Zelda like it’s a great game nonetheless. While definitely not a Zelda like, Toki Tori 2 is a pretty cool mix of metroidvania and puzzles. You only got a few abilities and have to figure out how they interact with the world and it’s critters to progress.
I also remember a scene on the street outside the missing friends flat (apartment) and the protagonist talking up to a woman hanging out an upstairs window. Think he convinces her to throw down the spare key for his friends flat.
River of Sorrow in Metal Gear Solid 3. First regular then as “no kills” run. It’s something that made me genuinely question everything while playing a video game. Everything.
It was bitter-sweet, because you ::: spoiler have to leave one of your companions behind, him being a spirit of the land; while you ride off to the land of eternal rest with your new love interest spoiler :::
I’d say LoZ: Echoes of Wisdom tried to be like this, unfortunately it’s a bit bland. Might be worth checking if you haven’t yet though.
For something I enjoyed more, CrossCode is a fun top-down action RPG, but it’s more of a sci-fi/fantasy thing and a bit more on the action side. It does have extensive dungeons with lots of puzzles though (often relying on switches, timing, movable blocks and clever ways to use your ball-shooting weapon).
It might be fine for non-interactive stuff where you can get all the frames in advance, like cutscenes. For anything interactive though, it just increases latency while adding imprecise partial frames.
And that’s while ignoring the extra processing time of the interpolation and asynchronous workload. That’s so slow, that if you wiggle your joystick 15 times per second the image on the screen will be moving in the opposite direction
The basic flow is
[user input -> render 33ms -> frame available]
It is impossible to have a latency lower than this, a newer frame simply does not exist yet.
But with interpolation you also need consistent time between frames. You can’t just present a new frame and the interpolated frame instantly after each other. First you present the interpolated frame, then you want half a frame and present the new frame it was interpolated to.
So your minimum possible latency is 1.5 frames, or 33+16=59ms (which is horrible)
One thing I wonder tho… could you use the motion vectors from the game engine that are available before a frame even exists?
No, modern game engines produce a whole lot more than the necessary information to generate a frame. Like a depth map and such. One of those is a map of where everything is going and how fast.
It wouldn’t include movement produced by shaders, but it should include all polygons on screen. which would allow you to just warp the previous frame, no next frame required
I went outside of my usual wheelhouse and tried playing some of the Wario games for the gameboy advance. Finished Warioware in one afternoon (very fun short little collection of mini games) and currently on Wario Land 4. It’s a platformer with light puzzle elements, and I’m quite surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying it, as I usually don’t mesh with platformers.
In a way, it reminds me of one of the later Commander Keen games, but with much better level design and variety in gameplay.
It’s a polished and quirky little game, and its handheld roots lend itself to short sessions, which has been all I have time for.
I think I’ll be investigating the earlier entries after I complete it. Certainly recommend it if you have access to a handheld emulator!
I often get game choice paralysis, so I have extensively categorized my game library to help with both decision making, but also time management. I use numbers to force my categories to sort in the order I want rather than alphabetically by category name.
Also worth noting I only started doing this after I stopped playing an MMO and reclaimed whatever % of my life.
First is my “currently playing” category. This contains roughly one game from each other category/genre.
A story driven RPG (Witcher 3 at the moment, the Metro series after)
A rhythm game (McOsu, an Osu mod)
An optimization/building game (Shapez 2 but maybe back to factorio soon)
An action rougelike (going back to Hades before Hades 2)
A deck builder (currently MTGA, but my group really wants to ditch WotC)
A puzzle game (probably Blue Prince once it comes out)
A dedicated indie game spot (the Cairn demo)
A few other odd games that I like having quick access to because I like them
There is sort of a secret bonus game to this section, but it also sits outside of this system entirely, because I will ALWAYS go back to it. And that’s the “block game” category. For a long time this was various flavors of modded Minecraft, but I’m so fed up with Microsoft enshitifying my baby that I’ve jumped ship. I’m playing Vintage Story (also heavily modded) and it’s just a better game top to bottom in my opinion.
Then there is an “Interesred” category for games I’ve either been told I should try and also think I might enjoy. I try to keep this small, following roughly a similar “one per genre” as the previous category. I honestly don’t really touch these much, it’s more there for when a spot is freed up in the “currently playing” section. This is also where demos for unreleased games go.
Then there is a “favorite” and “liked” category which largely contain games I’ve played before or are intentionally hyper replayable. This has a lot of my favorite puzzle games, a lot of the various rogue likes with a different game as the core mechanic (think peglin and ballionaire) stuff like that. Basically things to sift through if none of my current games are sparking an interest.
After this is just genre categories used for storage essentially so I can collapse them and not be sick scrolling the whole list.
I have a decent amount of time to game, but also work a very physical job, so I need to be very into a game to prioritize it over sleeping and such.
I have sort of a love hate relationship with this series. I’ve played most of the games, but think that they went the wrong way and that the management and directors just can’t fulfill the potential of this series.
AC1 Great idea and for the time it was actually something new and different. The setting was wholly fresh and the story telling was leading to something and had a payoff that worked really well. It was also a clunky game 😅
AC2 Absolutely loved it. This was the game that made me fall in love with the series. Great setting, again very original and fresh. Great set of characters. Story was interesting and Ezios was actually executed good, but the modern day parts were underdeveloped and had no pay off. The ending was very bad, because it didn’t make sense and was not explained in the game, but rather in some doc in one of the following games. Stupid. Had shock value though.
AC Brotherhood + Revelations Both good games that didn’t really change Much of the formula. I liked the bombs in R. Revelations had a great ending for Ezio and be But again underdeveloped modern day which lead nowhere.
AC3 Very interesting story and a strong conflict at its core. Actually this was where I wanted the series to go. Unfortunately the rest was not so good as the main Protagonist was less appealing than the villain. Was most disappointed with the main protag honestly. Setting was not fresh nor original. Didn’t really fit in with the Parcours. Introduced the ship battles! Absolutely botched the modern day and gave up on it altogether. Disappointing in the end.
AC Black flag Great setting, boring characters, boring Story. But the ship battles were fantastic! Really liked this one!
AC Unity Great art direction! Likeable characters. Tragic, but that’s whatiI like about this series, it’s not always a happy ending. Can’t even remember the story.
AC Syndicate Horrible. I liked the main twin pair. But the story is forgettable, the setting is okay and beautiful. The controls with the hook was horrid and didn’t work reliably.
AC Origins Fresh gameplay! Finally! Really liked this one as it had great setting, likeable characters and new stuff to do. Story was okay. I kinda rushed though, because I played it on one is the free weekend events.
AC Odyssey Same as Origins. Less original, but still good. Less interesting characters. Didn’t finish it.
Didn’t bother with Viking.
The new shadow one looks interesting. But before I play that, I want to try Ghost of Tsushima.
Thanks for the long and interesting writeup! I’m still working through AC 1 and enjoying it, I’ll see if I stay on the train as long as you :).
I did play Ghost of Tsushima. One of the most beautiful looking games I’ve ever played with amazing combat and good characters. For me, it was just way to long and repetitive. I eventually found the solution, playing each of the three acts and the DLC with a long break in between each time, so it felt fresh again. In the end I even got the platinum trophy for it, but I still see it as a great 8/10 game that could have been an all time favorite if it was trimmed to about half its runtime. Here’s hoping that they don’t make the same mistakes for Ghost of Yotei. If they can keep the good and trim the bloat, this could be the game of a generation.
During the few months of the year I consider to be my “gaming season”, I mostly stick to 1 game at a time as my primary focus, but I’ll often have a game or few on the back burner that I’ll work into the schedule now and then.
This year I’m focusing on the Doom remake (Doom 2016) as my main game. To be honest, the game is stressful for me, so even though it’s been an absolute blast for me to play, it’s nice to have some alternative games to switch over to after I’m done with Doom.
I agree, it’s very hard to keep up with the stories when juggling multiple games at the same time. Almost as hard for me, if not harder, is keeping up with the controls. Every game is different. Games in the same genre can and will have vastly different control set-ups. Even games in the same franchise / series can have different controls from game to game. Yuck.
So, the control aspect and the story aspect are part of my inspiration for my secondary games. Right now I’m playing Halls of Torment. I guess there’s a story? But it doesn’t seem super relevant or necessary to keep up with. This game is in the same genre as another secondary game I play (and the main one from last year) called Vampire Survivors. Controls for both of these games is super basic. As I mentioned, if there’s even a story line to them, it’s irrelevant to my enjoyment of them.
I also have the Castlevania Dominus Collection which is includes all the metroidvania-style Castlevania games from the Nintendo DS. I played all of them back in the day on original hardware, so there’s a great deal of “recall” in terms of controls and story. And this is probably one of my favorite genres of game.
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