Video Game News & Discussion 2.0

Picross E9 is on the horizon. No US release date at this time. It seems odd to work picross into my monthly budget.

:ok_hand:

Dead Cells just showed up on my radar. Looks reeaaal buttery.

Yep. This and the Hollow Knight seems to be the Metroidvanias of choice. Might play soon.

Usually Procedural Generation raises some red flags for me, but I’ve heard enough people being quite positive about Dead Cells that I think I’ll check it out.

Also on note of Metroidvanias released this month, La-Mulana 2 came out last week. It’s not a game I recommend blindly to anyone because it’s a very particular taste, but it’s almost only thing that provides what it does. And I mostly enjoyed it quite a lot, but I’m the kind of person who liked going through the hundreds of screenshots of hints, riddles and other miscellaneous texts, trying to figure out what to do next.

Also Hollow Knight, is really good and I’m just waiting for all the DLC to come out so I can replay it again.

I liked Rogue Legacy, so…

I liked Togue Legacy fine, but the level design was not it’s strongest point.

Rogue Legacy used to make me actively angry with it’s hit detection.

I played Dead Cells. It’s a LOT like Rogue Legacy. If you like Rogue Legacy, you will probably like this, but be aware that it is much more difficult.

Although the game is fun, and I will play it more, it’s not the greatest. It makes the same mistake I think that a lot of Metroidvanias make in that the creators clearly believe that the combat is the fun part of the game. They heavily developed the combat system with lots of enemies that are challenging to fight. They forget that in Super Metroid, enemies were relatively sparse. Exploring the maze is the fun part, with only occasional bad guy fighting. Dead Cells is all about bad guy fighting, and the map is kind of sad.

1 Like

Have you played the 2014 Strider remake? While that game has a lot of enemies, for the majority of the game, they’re pretty easy and most of the fun is flipping around the map and climbing walls to explore places.

The game is definitely more about the combat. But the combat works much better than other games of its ilk. Builds are based around combat load outs. The levels are just there to provide a bit of an obstacle. I kinda like how the focus is changed.

I’ve been playing Chasm a bit lately and while the map doesn’t change for a save, you can see where the level structure kinda sucks in certain situations given the random seed generation. This was sort of how Rogue Legacy was for me too. Random level generation has never felt good to me, so the fact that Dead Cells kinda escapes this to some degree is kinda nice.

Once I am bored with Dead Cells I’m going to try Hollow Knight and MoonQuest.

It’s going to rain this weekend, so I’ll be mostly inside…

Overwatch. Overwatch. OVERWATCH!
/sung to the tune of McDonalds!

Gonna make the LEGO Voltron.

1 Like

Hollow Knight is a much better version of a Metroidvania than most other games. Takes a bit longer than I would like to get going but once it does it’s :ok_hand:

There are so many god damn indie castleroids and Hollow Knight is one of the only ones that feels like a good, actual video game.

I think a lot of the indie developers don’t realize just how much work it is to make that kind of game. Making an enormous, interesting, dynamic and cohesive map by hand is a Sisyphean task. This is why so many go for procedural generation. They’ll say, oh, it makes it more repayable when it changes every time. Sure, that’s true. But guess what? Super Metroid and SotN are fun to replay even though it’s the exact same fucking thing every time.

Hollow Knight’s map is a joy to explore, so look forward to that.

See also: Advance Wars clones.

From what I gather, the main reason they didn’t make more AW was that it took too much human game design to make even one game.

Instead they just make Fire Emblem bullshit that is mostly designed to kinda fuck you over, partly because they seem fairly slapdash and can usually just be overcome with leveling crap.

Add some VN, some romance options, and you’ll cover a lot more ground than AW could. For better or worse.