We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

A novel idea. I like it! In fact, let's yank male characters from games as well. Let's insist all devs craft player avatars and NPCs that look like this from now on -



Boom. Problem solved for all.

somebody didn't play illbleed

well, that was my snarky message for today, i'm going back to ninjagunzshooter

oh right

gamemaker studio standard is being currently available for free (perhaps as a gateway to gamemaker studio pro, as if having three tiers of a program makes sense) so if you're into angrily shouting at software, now's the best time

you can even get some practice ahead of time when you realize that the download speed is like molasses due to everybody else piling in for a taste

note: do not let the program autolaunch, close the installer and open it up the application yourself, watch the program update itself, then when the option shows up, select the beta channel for updates, close the program, open it again, install THOSE updates, and you'll get the option to register for the standard edition, which will send you a registration code to your email

note: if you are averse to spam mail from yoyos, don't use an "actual" email address

Supes i forget do you have a peacethree list o'games because i just remembered that its my birthday/holiday season next month and i got a now """"obsolete"""" sony console library to look into

For exclusives, I can recommend the Sly Cooper games, the Uncharted games, the LittleBigPlanet games, InFAMOUS, the Ratchet and Clank series, and Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.

Yes I know you didn't ask me.

Edit: Shit how did I forget about Journey. Buy that one.
Also Persona 5's gonna be a PS3 exclusive.

as far as i can tell, this is the full standard version (but not the full "pro" version) that is normally a paid thing, but it's free for the time being, but will not be in the future, so i expect people who buy it would not very much like watermarks slathered all over something they purchased

as opposed to the free free version, which will remain free

additional note: the email for the license code might take a while due to once again the system sort of being under heavy load

yahtshaw has made a new horror game

it's actually pretty freaky so maybe be in a safe mental place before trying it

I'll never understand the term "brogames"

So I got Link Between Worlds AND M&L Dream Team

between the two, I beat the zelda game - 100% too - in less time. Not to say LBW isnt fun! but in a lot of cases it feels like the unique change nintendo made to the item system eats the difficulty: most traditional items are rented from this weirdo Ravio (who is secretly a douche, you'll learn at the end) for relatively small fees. however, rented means two things: one, you can have a full inventory before the third dungeon, and two, if you die you wake up at your house (Ravio's shop) and have to pay for them all again. THIS IS MITIGATED ENTIRELY by saving frequently as you can just return to save however...
in addition, your new wall merge power and all ravio's items run on the same recharging meter, which I assume is why nintendo made it so every dungeon requires only one of ravio's items to complete. don't get me wrong, some of the puzzles are a little difficult, but part of what I like about LoZ is getting new equipment and having somewhere new unlocked, finding new secrets, etc.

in tLBW, once you beat the dungeon that gives the titan gloves, you can basically clear the entire overworld. that's... a little underwhelming imo.
and you can't even really use the net as a sword now...

it's still fun for a while, but it didn't make me want to play it again like say... twilight princess? ...yea okay cruel analogy

Dream Team otoh held my interest for apparentley 14 hours straight, and I'm still not done! Luigi is a great character, and making him the star was a great decision :>

wow thats long 3ds post. sorry, id spoiler it but edit doesnt like opera browser

...eh
just because the idea isn't ORIGINAL that doesn't mean it can't be fun. personal opinion but hey

otoh I get where you're coming from with that

(also deckbuilding gun game could either be amazing or terrible)

First thing I think of upon hearing "guns" and "decks" is the ridiculous inventories to be had. You just draw a gun from the deck, unload it into whoever, and when your ammo runs out toss it and draw anew. It seems to be what happens in action movies much of the time in any case.

In my experience customizable guns don't get much sillier than in Resonance of Fate. I didn't think much of the story, but the gameplay is, I think, unintentionally hilarious. Like, it wants to be this super-gritty, hardcore American action flick, but it quickly devolves into Ridiculous Backflips: The Game, co-starring How Many Barrels Can I Tetris Onto This SMG. There are also some neat world map mechanics where you have to unlock individual squares and connecting certain tiles with the same color grant bonuses, and there's also outfit customization, but that's not what you end up remembering.

It's not an FPS so it's not quite what you're looking for, and I don't know if I'd recommend it exactly, but it's a spectacle in its own ways and looking into it might help flesh some of your ideas out, if you actually want to pursue this.

E: This vid is probably better for a full suite of Things That Can Happen, but the player's... not great.

In other news, Risk of Rain is a lot of fun so far. I usually get frustrated with difficult games like Binding of Isaac and Dark Souls, but I actually ended up playing RoR until my fingers hurt.

I had forgotten that Risk of Rain came out! I played the alpha a while ago and it was super fun.

Teleglitch is a similar rougelike/Diablo-like that I've been meaning to buy for a while.


re: Supes and Norivia's conversation, I got into the Card Hunter beta earlier this year and I didn't find it nearly as cool in execution as it sounds in concept. I wrote some stuff about it. It may have gotten better since then, I dunno.

Modular gun-building game sounds awesome, though

I find it personally difficult to reconcile Teleglitch with the term “roguelike”. I find it easier to say it’s more like a procedurally generated Robotron or a top-down Doom because roguelike usually has a deemphasis on real-time action but at that point people start sighing loudly and walking out of the room.

Yeah, the term "roguelike" has expanded to include any game with procedural generation and permadeath in my mind. I know that's not strictly accurate, but that's how most people use it.

I think we need a better word for games like that. Like "Metroidvania", it's become kind of silly and outdated.

Maybe we should just make yet another game called “rouge”, this time with levels that switch various roguelike features on and off. Then roguelikelikes can be called rougelikes.

I've heard the term 'Rogue lite' banded around for games which just have roguelike elements in them. I kinda like that.

Also yes Risk of Rain is real fun.

...Anyway! Does anyone want to try Risk of Rain multiplayer sometime? I'm curious as to how that'd work out.

multidiscussion time

@Stij
I bought Teleglitch, it's pretty damn fun. It somewhat annoys me that they made kiting really easy and chose to limit its effectiveness by not giving you enough ammo to kite with rather than making enemies faster/more dangerous, but that's just me.

@cc
Several of my friends have Risk of Rain and they also all like it, but I hear that multiplayer is broke in that it scales unreasonably as you add more players.

@Superfrequency
what about metroid fusion
Fusion got retroactively forever stained by the sins of Other M and that sucks because it was pretty good, also for some reason they're not willing to go chronologically past it
It did lack total freeform exploration in that you did areas in the order the plot told you, but Cave Story had pretty much the same deal going on

And as a final note, the casuals are ruining my gaming experience once again.
*shakes fist at heavens*
I've been playing Fire Emblem: Awakening, and it's annoyingly easy, but if I stop grinding to outlevel the enemies then it just becomes impossible. It seems like the designers made every level map really small so it would be easy to see on the 3DS, so there are always a huge number of enemy units 2-3 moves away from your start position, and there's no valid strategy other than turtling and hoping you get lucky enough to survive 5 attacks a round on whatever the AI decides to focus. Unless of course you've overleveled to a ridiculous degree and can just charge 1v6 fights (which is where I am now), which is sorta fun but has no tension because the enemies are too weak.
It is a tremendous letdown after the balanced but extremely tense encounters of Radiant Dawn. It's pretty clear that Awakening was made to appeal to a more casual market, but I don't see why they had to completely flip the game dynamic around like this. I could try a no-grinding run but the last 5-ish levels would almost certainly get to the point of requiring RNG to win for me, and that's less "legitimate strategy" and more "really aggravating". See previous sentence for my feelings on Lunatic Mode as well.
In conclusion I am filled with despair and Dark Souls 2 is my last ray of hope, also SMT4.

I don't agree with classifying Mega Man Zero as a platform adventure. The fact that the areas are connected isn't significant to the overall game design, and if you took those connections away entirely it wouldn't be counted as one.

Basically, Zero's connected areas are more like if there was a door leading from Chill Penguin's stage to Flame Mammoth's that you could only use after clearing both of them. The game's progression is based on the missions, and you can return to an area after clearing a mission in it to find items you may have missed - and that's basically the same as every Mega Man game where you can return to Robot Master stages for upgrades, every Mega Man X game, and the other games in the Zero series. The only difference is that the areas are directly connected, but this is just done for the sake of connecting them, not because it's actually important or even relevant to the gameplay at all.

Going into your specific criteria, I would say it doesn't count as one because it does have discrete "levels" - the missions themselves are without question "levels" and are designed as such, and they're also the entirety of the game progression that you're required to do. The connections between them are an afterthought, never relevant to the gameplay.

If you had to actually explore the world in order to unlock new missions, that would push it over the line for me. But as it is, the game is "complete missions, then you can walk back to where they took place if you missed something or if you just feel like it, otherwise you can move on to the next mission".

What do you mean by "freedom of movement"? The other two points apply to Mega Man Zero 2 and that's clearly stage-based, so this would have to be the deciding factor.

As for missions, I don't think the idea of missions is inherently in conflict with the idea of a platform adventure. Rather, I think the type of missions presented in MMZ are in conflict, because they're designed as stages (backtracking is possible, but not encouraged in any way and literally every design choice is about pushing you to keep moving forward) and have the presentation of stages - you pick one from a list, you get transported there, clear the stage, get a ranking screen and are brought back to base. If not for the physical connection of how you revisit them, they would be unambiguously stages, and this is easily shown by looking at MMZ 2-4 where this is the case.

I'm asking this because I really don't understand the difference between where you're drawing the line and where I am in this case. My position is, essentially, the elements that keep MMZ from obviously being a stage-based game are superficial and completely incidental to the game design. Do you think that they aren't, in which case could you be clearer about why, or do you agree that they're superficial but think they still count towards classifying it even so?

oh, so, all I meant with regards to Fusion is that it came out right before Cave Story

Also it's been 11 years and they're making only prequels to it even though the story was open-ended and I don't understand \(*^*)/

...eh
just because the idea isn't ORIGINAL that doesn't mean it can't be fun. personal opinion but hey

Kind of an oversimplifcation of my opinion but hey

kkkind of doesn't read that way super

Okay, fair enough. Mostly I just wasn't clear on why we disagreed, now I am.

I don't really have comments on most of the rest of the list; I've played the Metroids, most of the Castlevanias, and Battle of Olympus once but I don't remember anything about it.

I've also seen Strider played and most of what I remember about it is how awkwardly the adventure elements are implemented, you either have to keep dying or walking all the way back to the start of the area to get to the level select screen. When my brother first played it, he couldn't figure out what you were supposed to do at all and just got stuck at a block-off point in the first area. I'd certainly say it counts, though.

The point about games with locked doors is an interesting one, personally I'd be inclined to say it counts if you regularly have to go far out of your way for keys/switches/whatever else unlocks them. I guess for me the deciding factor would be "is the game about exploration".

To be more specific about that, what I mean is essentially a game which requires or strongly encourages going down side paths, and where said side paths aren't just alternate routes through a level or secret bonus areas. I also wouldn't count a game that has one or two exploration-based levels and the rest aren't - for instance, Subspace Emissary's last level in SSBB is exploration based, but the rest of the game is all "keep moving forward" levels with the occasional minor secret area.

On an unrelated note, I just rediscovered this video.

How is that even a game, that is like the epitome of "Quicktime events: the game"

I'd love to bark in cutscenes in Okami, or yell Mario in Luigi's Mansion.