ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

We have to get THPS3 before that, surely. It’s widely considered to be the best one.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Mine is probably the oddball pick with Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. I know it’s hardly the first game with a light and dark world mechanic, but I really appreciated the way you traversed in and out of them, and how each world replenished the opposite ammo type. The multiplayer in that game is also underrated, but probably not as good as in the DS game.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I know a lot of people, myself included, got frustrated with the EMMI sections. Unless we all missed something about how they work, that the game could stand to explain better, you could end up walking into the room with bad RNG and the thing could be right on top of you. If you’re speedrunning the game, presumably you have a trick to avoid that scenario, but it was quite common and brought down my opinion on the game, for sure.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Well, what I meant was that you could enter the door and immediately be stuck in that quick time event that you usually fail because the window is so small, and you couldn’t see where the EMMI would be before you crossed the door’s threshold.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Okay, but did you ever play Hunters multiplayer?

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

But that’s what I’m saying. It’s so unlikely you’ll make it out of it that when you walk into the room and the EMMI is already occupying the space you walked into blindly, it’s a frustrating unavoidable fail state.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Axiom Verge had a lot of hidden passages through walls and otherwise same-y environments that just made getting back to where I wanted to go a chore. I don’t remember a compass, but if it had one, it didn’t help.

With Hollow Knight and Symphony of the Night, the maps are so large and contiguous, and they give you so little information as to why you didn’t fully explore a corner of the map, that you end up either easily missing a thing that you needed in order to progress or you get there and say to yourself, “oh, that’s right, that’s why I was stuck”, wasting a lot of time traveling there to come to that realization. In most Metroid games, the map is broken up into chunks with lots of entrances and exits connecting to the other chunks, which can keep the map screen small and easier to read. Plus, if there’s an ability that the game wants to make sure you get before you leave, they make sure you’re trapped in there with no option except to find it and make sure you know how it works first.

EDIT: Some of my favorites in the genre would be Batman: Arkham Asylum, most of the Metroid series, Ori and the Blind Forest, and the roguelike A Robot Named Fight.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The “metroids” and the “vanias” do definitely feel different, but the cross section in that Venn diagram is pretty obvious, and that’s what the genre is named for. I prefer the “metroids” to the “vanias”, but even the “vanias” have tons of non-combat upgrades.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I’ve never heard of B: AA described as a metroidvania… How do you figure that one?

It is a metroidvania. It fits the definition exactly. You backtrack over a space as you get more and more upgrades to unlock parts of it that were gated. The sequels weren’t really that so much, because they were open world games that gave you access to the entire map, give or take a few interior areas.

A Robot Named Fight is a fairly obscure indie game, but if you wish you could get that experience of playing Super Metroid for the first time over and over again, this is as close as you’ll get.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

But that’s exactly why we have the word metroidvania.

The term Metroidvania initially referred to entries in Konami’s gothic 2-D action Castlevania series whose mazey maps closely evoked the Metroid games

It was sometimes used derisively in forums, but it was to tell apart the likes of Symphony of the Night from the likes of the linear ones. And then as we got more Castlevanias like Symphony of the Night in the GBA era, it became part of the definition of what this genre is.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Then you’d be excluding the Metroid Prime games from the genre, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Disco Elysium isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It certainly wasn’t mine. And I love Outer Worlds.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

There have been so many great games in the last few years that it’s been hard to keep up, but they haven’t required those new consoles.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

In a lot of ways, I liked it because of how short it was.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

The worst part is that Tom Clancy should not be a power fantasy. That brand means nothing in video games anymore.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

From Jeff Grubb:

And also, to be kind of a shit, I think the complaints about being underleveled and not having the right gear, mostly come from games like these being streamlined to the point where they usually have no friction. The obstacles in this game aren’t just tolerable, they’re the main reason I love it.

I definitely read a review where the reviewer was frustrated that he was underleveled and annoyed that his companions kept yelling at him to upgrade his gear, lol. But seriously, this sanding down of any sort of friction is something that has gotten to me with plenty of games in the past decade, so I appreciate someone laying it out plainly.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I understand that reviews are subjective. I just found it funny that the characters in the game were shouting the solution to the reviewer’s problems at him for so long that he found it frustrating.

Jeff Grubb’s not-a-review was speaking to exactly the kind of thing that’s important to me in games and why he likes this one so much, which did me a great service, so I’m not sure why you’re shitting on him for spicy takes here, lol.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Grubb has no ill will toward his colleagues. But there are plenty of them praising games that he and I found disappointing for that sanding down, so I understand frustration when there are reviews knocking down a game for delivering what we feel games “ought to be” doing. You get short snark because it fits better in a character limit. If you want more nuanced opinions of his, they come in podcast form, not written form.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Well, yours is certainly one perspective that I don’t share. I’m sorry his post wasn’t polite enough for you, but I promise he is and will continue to be friends with all of these people afterward; it’s a small industry and only getting smaller.

While several reviews are knocking the game for things that he and I find not only to be non problems but in fact solutions, I found value in him sharing that perspective coupled with a negative review detailing the opposite, which is why I put it here.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I could be sold on it. Is it super random like Mario Kart, or do they avoid the likes of blue shells?

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Sounds worth a shot at least. Thanks for the write up.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

It’s an original game. Many assets are not original. Many others will be. This is a very normal part of game development. As much as “asset flips” were an issue back when the Steam floodgates opened, people seem to have really misunderstood what the problem actually was.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Crysis 3 wasn’t a trainwreck. It wasn’t as good as Crysis 1, but few games are.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Boy, it sure is a good thing that Sony charges a subscription fee for any and all network multiplayer traffic.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

You used to be able to type in an IP address whether or not the official server is running. Sometimes you still can, but seeing as Baldur’s Gate 3 has LAN and direct IP connection on PC but not on PlayStation, it sure seems like Sony is asking them to specifically remove the feature if they wanted it in the first place.

Then beyond that, you’ve got a mismatch behind what your money is actually for. It used to be for paying for their servers, but you often don’t even connect to Sony’s servers anymore. Plenty of games behind that same paywall have their own servers, like Call of Duty for instance, but Call of Duty’s multiplayer is behind the same paywall as Helldivers 2, which is running servers on Sony’s dime. And beyond that…the reason multiplayer is free on PC is because your purchases are funding them. The majority of game sales on consoles are now digital, just like Steam, and that is a trend that’s accelerating. Meanwhile, the subscription fee compared to free online on PC is probably one of a multitude of reasons that people are leaving consoles for PC.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.

It sounds like that requirement is just a bad deal for the consumer. And they charge you for it. And they can’t guarantee uptime.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Cloud saves that are free on PC, and they don’t block your access to transfer saves without it like consoles do. Playing online on PC is free, and we know exactly how to make it free on consoles, but they’re not interested in doing so. No one can guarantee 100% uptime, which is why it’s a bad deal to make the subscription for that stuff mandatory instead of allowing things like direct IP connections.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in

Less and less as time goes on, is my point, for the reasons we’ve discussed. Maybe any one or two of those reasons aren’t doing it on their own, but in the aggregate, it appears consumers are slowly deciding not to put up with the downsides anymore.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Mouse and keyboard hasn’t been so much a requirement for the better part of 20 years on PC, but the rest tracks.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m not mixing anything up. If they allowed for things like direct IP connections, you could still play Baldur’s Gate 3, online, regardless of this downtime. It wasn’t organically that we arrived here. It’s objectively worse.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

It would help people who wanted to have a functioning video game. Then you could ask your friend (or someone on Discord) what their IP address is and play with them.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

The thing I’m criticizing is that they make this other kind of server impossible, even though it would be exactly the kind of backup plan you’d want for a situation like this one.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I’ll bet that number is significantly higher than zero, but as per reporting some months ago, much like with Redfall, Rocksteady saw a significant exodus during Suicide Squad, since the studio was tasked with building a game they did not want to make.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

You didn’t think Machine Games could make a great game about a character who hates Nazis?

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

It is not completely struck down, as Ross points out on his channel. There is still value in signing if you live in the UK, especially as they once again did not understand the petition.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I miss when Rainbow Six was Rainbow Six. The first version of this game felt like Rainbow Six with a few oddities to it, like healing someone by throwing a syringe at them. Now it’s some wacky version of GI Joe.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Rumbleverse did not go well for them.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

They do a lot of support work, but now and then they get out a project of their own. Rumbleverse was well regarded by its audience, but it was also like the 90th battle royale to come out, and it never stood a chance.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

CvS2 is not an underdog game, but this is a hell of a collection. I never got to play Power Stone back in the day, so I’m looking forward to those.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

It was a competitive mainstay for years. Like with MvC2, they could probably charge for this one game what they’re going to charge for the whole collection, and people would pay it.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

What’s the multiplayer situation like for these games? They don’t list LAN in the features for the first game, but there’s mention of it in the Steam forums, and I’m not sure if it was removed or something. Presumably no split screen?

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I can’t get excited about it until they stop their weird online requirements. Otherwise I’d be very excited.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

That list counts very generously, even with those filters applied.