I recently started playing BallisticNG, having never played the Wipeout games. I’m finding it hypnotic and the controls feel great. I’m still on baby speeds by the game’s standards.
Out of curiosity, I looked up videos of the PS1 Wipeout games for reference and they looked slow in comparison!
The game says it uses the modern SRS rotation system. But pieces spawn in odd orientations, like the letters they’re named after. Wall kicks are inconsistent. The configuration files literally include a “–99, –99” coordinate—developer shorthand for “don’t use this”—as an actual kick entry. It shipped like that.
I love people getting deep into the mechanics of a game to optimize their play, the kind of stuff that casual observers don’t notice.
Looks like you enjoy retro-style 3D platformers. Get Corn Kidz 64!
Like Pseudoregalia, it’s another N64-style 3D platformer released in 2023 with a goat protagonist trapped in a dream. This is an oddly narrow coincidence.
I played around with the pixel settings in the Next Fest demo. It’s honestly more of a curiosity than something that really matters, but I’m glad someone on the game thought of this. The most notable change with pixel-perfect mode is the text font becomes lower resolution to be strictly snapped to the grid. Other than that, you’ll find that the backgrounds scroll choppily. I’d imagine it would feel good that way on a smaller screen.
It’s that eternal struggle you may have seen if you play modern games with pixel art. How strictly should the game follow the grid? I think Pipistrello’s default “soft” mode is my sweet spot. Rotated and resized pixels are yucky, but I’m okay with smoother scrolling and sharper text. Celeste is that way as well.
I was super impressed with the demo from Steam Next Fest last year. It’s definitely high on my list for Steam sale purchases.
One neat feature the game has, which was unnecessary but that I appreciate, is the pixel perfection settings. The game uses “soft” pixel precision by default for smooth scrolling and sharper text, but you can enable strict pixel precision, which snaps everything to the pixel grid.