I am in my 50s and I’ve missed a couple of decades of games - stopped gaming in the days of vice city and just started again recently when I got a steam deck. There’s a pretty big backlog of stuff that people highly recommend, but remasters and remakes offer me the opportunity to play these games with modern graphics. For someone who grew up with 8 bit graphics the stuff we can do these days is amazing and I want to enjoy games that are also good to look at. Recently finished bioshock remaster, enjoyed it immensely. So yeah, while it’s probably better for studios to focus on creating new stuff, there are people who enjoy the old stuff updated.
The video starts by showing a side by side of original Arkham Asylum and Return to Arkham Asylum, talking about how the remaster ruined the art style. At first, they’re unlabeled, and I thought, “Oh yeah, that sucks, that is a bit worse.” Then they labeled them, and the one I thought looked better was the remaster. What’s more is I’ve only ever played the original PC release of Arkham Asylum, one of my favorite games, and the remaster looks the way I remember Arkham Asylum looking.
I recently played Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox Series X. I was amazed at how great it looked when output at modern 4K with 60fps and 16x anisotropic filtering. The gameplay was still crap, but amazing to look at given it was on 360 originally.
Because of that experience, I am a little more forgiving for 360/PS3 generation. Those games were mostly running 720p frame buffers (or worse) and seriously gain a lot when given some shine.
(This completely ignores the fact that PC would naturally have these abilities without an additional purchase)
There is a demo out on Steam, if anyone wants to try it.
Edit: So, I played the demo. Takes about 30 minutes. The game has a lot of charm, but that much was clear from the trailer. The gameplay is… basic. There is a map on which missions pop up. You choose the hero to send there, based on their skills. You get some hacking minigames and every now and then you can choose what your character says or does in a cutscene.
If I had to critique something else besides the basic gameplay, it’s the lack of feedback after a mission. You get a voice line and a little graph that shows how well your chosen hero’s skills matched the requirements of the mission. Also some missions were clearly meant to be done by one specific hero, but if they are on cooldown or already busy elsewhere you have to send someone else. Made me feel like I did something wrong. I think the game will be its strongest after you have already played it once. Knowing who to send where and being aware of character specific missions. But at the same time, a lot of the charm of the game will be gone by the second time you play it, since you already saw most of the very well done cutscenes.
Exactly my experience. I tried 3 runs, bat was on cooldown for “his” mission on the first one, he was in the wrong form in the second one, and I failed the rng on the third one, like, I just wanted to see the good outcome from that mission (:
It does have some replayability on the map section by just sending different people to different jobs to see different unique dialogs (eg: sending someone good at dealing with fires to the “shit’s on fire yo” mission, or sending the Pyro that caused it), but I’m not sure it’ll entice a second run if the game is mostly a linear story.
The dispatch loop is extremely similar to a game called This is the Police. Any good management game like this will have situations where there is no correct decision, and the fun of it is having to make those tough calls. I’m curious to see if the core loop holds up over the full runtime, because it ran a little thin in This is the Police. The story bits between that harken back to Telltale are some much appreciated new special sauce on the formula in This is the Police, but that alone won’t keep the core loop fresh. Still, I’m looking forward to this.
thought this was a very early april fools joke with the literal 1/100 scale Virtual Boy "accessory"
I mean as someone who is old enough to remember calling Blockbuster every 30min to see when they got the thing in stock to rent out...sure have at it I guess. But man you REALLY need to take breaks otherwise your retinas will crust over. Although when you are done playing it was neat to see the entire world in a shade of red afterwards.
I was a kid when this was in blockbuster, and I remember playing it in the store using the demo setup. I was glad to have tried it, but I was good after that, lol.
OK, never played hollow knight. this seems to be a “sink one million hours into it and git gud” game, and I have an arcade stick that I’ve been dying to use constantly on a game with.
Does hollow knight use both analog sticks? can this be played with a standard 1 stick, 8 button arcade stick?
yep, actually I use 9 keys but one of those is quick cast which really good for quick combat but it’s not actually needed since you have the same thing on the regular spell button, just a tad bit slower
It’s a melee oriented Metroidvania. Think Ori And The Blind Forest but with more insects and inexplicable frilly faux-Victorian edifices, and less pokey combat. You could play it on a SNES pad if you wanted to. I got to 100% on it back when using a cheap wireless keyboard from my couch.
I don’t know about you, but Hollow Knight’s main contribution to my household is that my wife and I still call any filigree wrought ironwork benches we see “save points.”
If it will be like the first it won’t be a wall of difficulty checks thrown in your way. What I liked most of Hollow Knight it was how masterly designed it was. It took you by your hand and thought every skill check you needed beforehand. You got good as you progressed. It it not frustrating as Dark Souls, it has a curve that kept increasing.
At least what the perception of proc gen is. I can only name one metroidvania roguelike (A Robot Named Fight; Dead Cells doesn’t count, regardless of its marketing), so this genre is probably way harder to make with proc gen. To me, someone who doesn’t enjoy Hades, it feels a lot like people only played Hades, acknowledged its proc gen is bad, and then said all proc gen is bad and asked for hand crafted levels as a response. There are so many games that are good at proc gen.
Absolutely. Procedural generation is not the same as AI generated. Spelunky’s level generation is great and the different combinations of hand-created rooms with smart rules on how they connect. Unexplored (that’s the name of the game) is a full on multi-level dungeon with puzzles and combat. Proc gen gives these games their life, but designing a good proc gen system is level design unto itself.
The sudden flood of roguelike is what really killed the reputation of procgen. In the early days, it’s seen as something fresh because every playthrough is different and you have to adapt to situation. Games like binding of issac(the first release) and spelunky(the free one) pushed the boundary on how level design can be assigned randomly and still be good, then more and more game started to capitalise on this sort of design but conveniently forgot they still have to be designed to be good. To a lot of people(including me) , the fatigue set in and the mere mention of procgen is revolting, even though they might also enjoy game like dead cell or hades. Then comes the AI and people are simply too weary on all these stuff.
I’m not saying this is what prompted them to include that tagline in their marketing, but i’m not surprised if it is.
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