My 7〜8 hours-in review of LIVE[color=#FF0000]A[/color]LIVE:
Less 10/10 games should get 7/10 re-releases.
More 7/10 games should get 10/10 re-releases.
Lost Levels is really fun especially in the SMBDX framework. Just finished 5-1, a very interesting level
And then 5-2 is even more interesting
Finished organizing all gameboy ROMs today
Booting up SMB2 on FDS I did notice one downside to using SMB DX physics is there are some turtle stomping shenanigans that are somewhat lost due to having less rebound height. But it’s fine, there’s still a lot of fun turtle bouncing I’ve been doing in DX.
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If anything the shorter rebound has made me better at video games. Used to find the shortness of the SMB1 rebound to be very tricky.
SMB2 FDS has a lot of stuff that would become SMB staples and did a lot of near level design ideas for the first time that would also be repeated in SMB3. It’s also not as hard as they would lead you to believe, I guess, but I’m only on world 5, and I have beaten SMB DX
Really loving Final Fantasy Tactics. I think it manages to be more innovative than Tactics Ogre and Triangle Strategy.
It builds off what Tactics Ogre did, of course, but also makes the battles smaller without losing complexity. So when you come to a difficult battle, you're not continually replaying the same hour of combat. This was also something that bothered me with regard to grinding in Tactics Ogre. Every battle just took too long, had too many combatants.
But it's funny how much more flexible the system is than Triangle Strategy, which simplifies combat and unit customization in a productive yet boring way. Like, I think there are advantages to having fewer things to worry about (such as weapons and armor), but I think it goes too far in that there's essentially zero customization to be made to your units. Which I would be more sympathetic to if the units themselves had a lot of character. But, uh...they don't.
I read UKLG‘s The Lathe of Heaven a couple weeks ago and have just started playing Zachtronics’ Eliza. Assuming they won‘t really end up being about the same things but there is an interesting amount of a shared premise early on which I wasn’t expecting.
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@“rejj”#p78790 but I’ve opened the bag on a few games currently and I really should eat them up before they go stale (as is far too often the case for me).
... so of course I bought the cat game and started it. Having a good time so far just being a cat.
@“edward”#p79298 refreshing to hear someone new to tactics and liking it. seems like everyone I‘ve spoken to who tries it for the first time just doesn’t get it. “the game that plays itself” etc.
maybe the fact you played ogre battle and triangle strategy first helped you appreciate it more, haha.
@“treefroggy”#p79361
Well, it's not my first time. Just my first time in, like, twenty years(!?), which makes it sort of like new, yeah?
Playing Mario + Rabbids a few years ago reminded me of the genre and how much I loved it when I was a kid.
Speaking of tactics games - excited to play Into the Breach again with whatever these new updates are. That game defined the up all night experience of being a new dad for me.
Soooo, I finished the cat game and feel like sharing some thoughts.
First of all, I wrote this @"JoJoestar"#p78985 before the game introduced the backpack mechanics and a bunch of robots started talking to me about a whole lot of things I personally didn't care about. I think it's a huge misstep how the game sets up a non-verbal experience about being a cat in a post-apocalyptic city during the first hour or so, figuring out the narrative via environmental clues, only to then do the switcheroo and introduce a bunch of bland npc's displacing the whole narrative to whatever nonsense they suddenly start dropping over you.
That's one problem, but it's something you can choose to look past (I personally did) and then you'll be finding the second problem, which is that this is a game a bit too sparse and unfocused in most ways. This is the kind of experience that keeps throwing surface level ideas to the player without developing or providing any depth to most of them, constantly recycling itself to fill the duration of the adventure (which isn't even that long, took me about 5 hours).
Keep in mind that most of the ideas are functional and do what they are intended for at least decently, they aren't brilliant but they don't suck either. The issue here is that the game ends up feeling a bit too lightweight and frankly bland. It's not a bad game by any means, what I mean is more along the lines that it's not going to leave a very deep mark in most people and in most ways.
But hey, it's a game about being a cat, there aren't many of those. If nothing else, the art direction and the music carry it forward, and traversing spaces designed in human scale with a creature that is significantly smaller is fun because you need figure out where to go, so I get it. **In fact:** here's when I do a 180º and say that, while yes, this is a wobbly and low nutritional value game in most ways... man, it's summer, it's too hot, it's hard to think about anything too important and it's alright feeling inclined to put time into something that is easy to digest and doesn't demand too much of you. If that's the particular mood you're feeling right now, Stray is the perfect game to fill the spot.
In contrast to @“JoJoestar”#p79395 's very reasonable and informed critique after playing the game, I will exercise my inherent right as a #HaterForLife and offer a baseless hot take about the cat game for no real reason, please do not misconstrue my crankiness as any judgement upon anyone who likes the cat game though, Anyway, you have been sufficiently warned of the incoming blistering Haterdom:
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“Can I pet/be the cat/dog in the videogame” is the new “touch my butt and buy me pizza” for the 2020‘s. Which is to say, petting/being cats and dogs in videogames like butt touchin’ and pizza speak for themselves and something powerfully repulses me in the idea that said unambiguously good things are being loudly associated with something in order to pander. Annapurna Interactive ass game…
Well, okay, to take a complete 180 and be more serious... cw toxic workplaces and abusive auteurs:
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Well, to be honest, I think I mostly just have a hard time divorcing how I feel about games published by Annapurna Interactive due to the reports of Annapurna having a bad track record on bankrolling indie/smaller studios with projects helmed by auteurs, those of which who were later found out to be abusive and manipulative tyrants, with Annapurna actively sidestepping accountability for it.
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Is Annapurna culpable for the actions of the people actually being tyrannical and abusive, who are not even employees of Annapurna? I mean, I dunno, it does seem like to me that their publisher is directly responsible for creating or maintaining their positions of power and influence over people, and especially with regards to the character of these games, is creating a vested interest in auteurs who make squeaky clean or cute or artsy videogames, which I think is at least partially facilitated by obscuring any incongruent elements of how those squeaky clean, cute, artsy games are made. Annapurna was called upon to address the toxic elements in studios of games they were the publisher of and it seems they were pretty uncooperative.
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I dunno, I‘ve said this before in probably a few other places, but I’ve got a pretty low tolerance for twee (tweelerance if you will) in general, so a lot of games Annapurna publish are kind of repellant to me to begin with. However ever since I watched that People Make Games video I linked above, I have a hard time not thinking about the tension between Annapurna having such clear aesthetic inclinations towards this kind of artsy, wholesome harmlessness, while at least having shown to be quite negligent towards actual harmful and toxic environments, of which they have a lot of influence over. It really skeeves me out, overall.
Here‘s my gripe about Stray: it is not a game about being a cat. The opening two scenes are promising; it looks like the goals of the game are to do cat things: a prowl, a nuzzle, a hunt. But very quickly, you’re essentially playing a human story, something which >!becomes depressingly more apparent the further you get!<. The game essentially refuses to acknowledge you‘re a cat: you don’t need to do any of the things cats do, and none of the other characters have ever seen a cat before, so they basically treat you like a small, jumping robot, which as far as the objectives and quests are concerned, you might as well be. There are certain contextual actions that are extremely feline, and whenever they came up they felt like vestiges of the original vision for the game. They are crafted, but they hang loose, and mean less.
I had a good time, most of the time, and there is genuine beauty in there, but _Stray_ is not The Cat Game. And my fear is that people will think that it was, and therefore, it will never actually get made.
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@“captain”#p79301 The Lathe of Heaven
-absolutely **rules.** I think I read it in three sittings, I was so gripped. I love how silly some of it was.
oh man… this forum is very tiring to visit…… logging off
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@“Salloumi”#p79409 I was so gripped
I liked it a lot, though somewhat humorous is the first few sessions I kept trying to read when it was too close to bedtime and would doze off. Thankfully my dreams are not "effective"
@"KennyL"#p79411
???
@“LeFish”#p79012 Unless a “but one more thing” happens I‘m at the climax of The Centennial Case. I’ll answer my rhetorical question on whether it's a good dinner time game with “yes and no”. The first four chapters are good time, feature length standalone-but-part-of-a-wider-narrative murder mysteries whilst the fifth is one long puzzle book ended by brief FMVs, whilst the sixth, and seemingly final, chapter is mechanically one long reasoning / deduction phase - sections that are the “game” part of the package in which you review information to create different hypothesis.
I must admit that these sections sometimes feel arduous to go through because each hypothesis has a brief, unskippable animation to watch that has some lines of text to expand on the hypothesis, and when there are some 30+ to view in later chapters I felt like I needed an "I get it" button. However, I do like that these sections plant tonnes of red herrings forcing you to actually deduce what happened, unlike say, 420 Shibuya Scramble which is a passive experience in that regard.
Would I recommend this? If you like murder mysteries written from the likes of Agatha Christie, then absolutely. The Centennial Case captures the vibe of a Poirot or Marple story, and if your only experience of either is from the TV shows then you'll get a kick out of this. If you're not certain on whether you might like it or haven't experienced much of the mystery genre and don't want to pay full bucks for it, I would highly recommend [The Honjin Murders ](https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tLP1TcwKTSqzDIzYPTiy8jPy8rMU8gtLUpJLSoGAHj8CTE&q=honjin+murders&oq=honjin&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j46i512j46i175i199i512l2j0i512j46i175i199i512l2j0i512j46i175i199i512l2j0i512j46i512j0i512l2.4458j0j7&client=ms-android-motorola-rvo3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8) by Seishi Yokomizo. If you enjoy that then you'll enjoy this.
@“Salloumi”#p79408 I would personally describe it as a platforming adventure where you play as a cat. It's not a cat simulation nor the game is putting any real effort to make you inhabit the body or mind of the creature. But at the same time the traversal and controls feel decently cat-like, and you do some cat stuff, as you said. So maybe not the cat game but definitely cat-adjacent, I would say.
The fact that it's a human narrative about humans/humanoids constantly talking to the cat and asking for stuff is one of the most disappointing aspects though. I wish I/the cat couldn't understand all of that dialog so damn much.
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@“JoJoestar”#p79437 platforming adventure
This is another game I would like to see! But I can’t square _platforming_ and “press x to make jump perfectly”. I kind of got it thematically - in my mind, cats see a jumpable spot, and they just do it, almost without thinking. There is no way to simulate catlike precision in a game that isn’t press button, make jump (maybe something more flowing, like AC’s “hold x for parkourey stuff”?). But it meant that my main game verb was “look for x icon”, and that’s not feline to me.
But yeah “adventure game with platforms”, absolutely. Especially that last third.
Edit: I will NOT be linking to the article I read entitled _Stray proves you can have adventure without combat_ that starts with “I have only played the first hour of Stray but” at this time
@“JoJoestar”#p79437 THIS. There‘s several bits where it goes that direction and you know they were able to go no dialogue to that, and it’s so infuriating since you know they were capable, but I felt the insecurity of pandering to a bigger audience versus trying to steer into a more ubique direction. I like the game, but it frustrantes me so much sometimes…
@“Salloumi”#p79409
I think The Lathe of Heaven is Le Guin‘s most direct statement about the Gao Te Ching. It’s a wild novel, but also deeply Taoist.
@“edward”#p79463 how similar is the Goa Te Ching to the I Ching? My favourite piece of SF trivia is that The Man In The High Castle not only features extensive I Ching use, but was written by Philip K Dick consulting the I Ching as he went.