What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Squire Grooktook]

Everyone should play Resident Evil 6, but not before watching a few advanced combat tutorials and playing as many rounds of Mercenaries as necessary to master the mechanics.

I put a few hours into Mercenaries Mode and it convinced me to drop the game.

Core mechanics? Great. Sliding and flopping all over the place while shooting is rad. Too bad enemies don't actually encourage you to use them at all. High scoring Mercenaries replays essentially play it as RE4: run up to enemies, stun 'em and melee finish or wait for them to do their own melee and qte counter. Repeat for entire duration of the run. I don't even want to think about playing out that same disappointment within the banality of the campaigns awkward level design and awful presentation.

I can appreciate playing a game for style, even to the point of smoothing over issues, but there's only so much awful level and enemy design one can take before it stops being worth it. RE6 to me is a terminal case study of great engine, terrible environment.

[Licorice]

Ok my PS1 to USB came in the mail today. A month ago, I had bought a Negcon, and was patiently waiting for the adaptor to come back into stock, and then be delivered, so that now I can finally use it.

And use it I did. I played Outrun 2, it was amazing. I got my first clear. So much fun with the Negcon, and so easy to hold a line.

I guess I'll be taking a break from my Falcom romp to enjoy some Negcon racing + Electrosphere. Next up Ridge Racer 5.

[Ghegs]

^- neGcon + Side By Side is absolute bliss.

[Stevens]

Never knew Negcon existed until now.

Wonder why they didn't catch on? Racing/driving games are certainly popular enough and not everyone who loves them wants/has the space for a steering wheel.

[Searchlike]

I can appreciate playing a game for style, even to the point of smoothing over issues, but there's only so much awful level and enemy design one can take before it stops being worth it.

I say it is worth it. And I do believe people should try the game, use Mercenaries for pratice and then go to the hardest difficulty to get the most out of the game. Enemies in No Hope are a lot more satisfactory to fight than in Mercs, where you are showered in ammo and stamina management is not as important. RE4's combat is way too simple for such a long game, I would love if other 3D action games opted for the shorter and diverse paths of RE6. Much more replayable IMO.

You say the game doesn't encourage you to play in a fun way, but does Vanquish? You can safely boost your way out of many battles and your suit's cooldown period is way too long and activates with a couple shots on God Hard leaving you helpless. Most people use cover for the majority of the game and do just fine. The game is also far from flawless. How about those granades from military allies which can accidentally kill you with little to no warning. Nothing in RE6 is as cheap as that and any gimmicky section becomes a non-issue in subsequent replays. You don't even have to play those as the game's chapter select allows you to skip them and get to the good parts instead. If only I had this option in my favorite Kamiya and Nakazato games.

RE6 is a top action game for me, so is Vanquish, I just like the former a little bit more.

You also do need to be a certain level to meaningfully damage bosses

My only regret is that I didn't play on Hard and that I overleveled against some of the bosses so was able to beat them the first time around (including final). I never did any grinding, but sometimes right before a boss I realized I was only a few kills away from a level up so went back to kill a few enemies. Probably wouldn't have mattered on Hard or up, but I trivialized some very fun challenge this way.

This is exactly why I can't play these games, why can't they just be action games?

[Licorice]

I know. But they do have a boss rush mode that you unlock after you beat them the first time. There are a lot of bosses, they are the meat of the game. There is no levelling during this mode. You start each boss at the same level as the boss and with all the abilities you would have had at that point in the game. A perfect run through the boss rush takes between 30 mins to 1 hour depending on what difficulty you choose and the game records your time which is like a score.

[Searchlike]

I knew about Boss Rush, I also read somewhere that it gave you unlimited retries so wouldn't that feel a bit like credit feeding? I like time attack games, but from my limited time with Nightmare mode I could not tell if I would enjoy fighting those bosses over and over.

[vol.2]

Wonder why they didn't catch on?

I think because it takes getting used to. It's not really at all like a wheel and not everyone likes them. Also, I don't think it's really that difficult to put a wheel on a desk for a racing game, and most people who are "into racing games" are going to fork out for a wheel and find a way to use it.

Negcon is basically a novelty controller that always had a small following which picked up in recent years because they are cool looking and different. Also, they are specifically suited to certain games that wheels aren't as good for, and I don't think that was as obvious early on when they first came out.

[Licorice]

I knew about Boss Rush, I also read somewhere that it gave you unlimited retries so wouldn't that feel a bit like credit feeding? I like time attack games, but from my limited time with Nightmare mode I could not tell if I would enjoy fighting those bosses over and over.

Well, Ninja Gaiden on the Famicom gave you unlimited retries, so isn't that like credit feeding?

It would have been nice to have a lives system and continues just so you have some kind of "par for the course" where you can say hey "I 1CC'd this". As it is you only have "I 1LC'd this" or "I nLC'd this" (where n is any number). But IMO it's not a big deal.

I think if you enjoy the action you would enjoy fighting just the bosses. The mobs in the base game you can just run around. They are mostly a complement to the dungeon crawling, and they work with the action fundamentals, but on their own they wouldn't make sense in an action game.

I agree that action and RPG make for an awkward marriage. I don't think they are wholly incompatible. The trick IMO seems to be to cap XP or gold or whatever gain.

The obvious way to do this with single spawn enemies interferes with the dungeon crawling as now when you're coming back from your dead end or whatever there's no prey or predators. But, easily solved by making it so you only get XP the first n times you kill an enemy, but they respawn no matter how many times you get lost and have to re-enter the room. The original Xanadu did something similar, but different, where enemies would only respawn 4 times (yet to play through it, but it's on my radar).

The real problem is that many in the RPG crowd want leveling as an escape hatch for being a scrub. Others just like the fact that they can feel powerful, and are willing to "work" in order to get this feeling. IMO, both are vicious.

Anyway, I found none of this super offensive in Ys Origin. I don't mind that there's an escape hatch for scrubs, let there be. It's my own OCD fault I over leveled the bosses.

[Squire Grooktook]

You say the game doesn't encourage you to play in a fun way, but does Vanquish?

I don't recall Vanquish having a stage where you slowly trek up a mountain in the snow hunting for key cards and then slide all the way back down whenever you use one of your fun mobility moves. So yeah, I'm giving the superior level design award to Vanquish.

Both games have fun core mechanics but I don't think there's any argument which one you actively have to fight against the surrounding game more to enjoy those mechanics, or which one explicitly awards and encourages the ideal style play, or which one also manages to be fun and functional even when you're not using that ideal play style.

This is exactly why I can't play these games, why can't they just be action games?

Ark/Oath/Origin basically use the leveling system to encourage you not to skip any fights but kill everything on the way from point A to point B, and if you do that you'll generally be fine (I recently completed a nightmare mode run in Felghana, with a house rule of "no grinding, kill everything from point a to point b and then never again" and the balance was perfect, bosses never felt damage spongy). If they locked you in a room with every encounter devil may cry style it'd hurt the exploration and pace, but if they did away with leveling entirely you'd have no reason to actually fight most enemies beyond self-imposed challenge. It's a janky compromise but it works.

Origin has the issue a bit harder than Felghana though because many bosses sport annoying healing gimmicks which overextend the fights if you're not playing either uber-aggressively or a little higher leveled than you would be. A shame, if it wasn't for that one misstep on those fights it'd probably be a better game than Felghana in nearly every way. Even in boss rush mode they're really frustrating to deal with and encourage an annoying playstyle (Felghana's boss rush helped me appreciate the game much more, Origin's boss rush lowered my opinion of it as a whole, though I still love both as two of my favorite games ever).

[Marc]

There's still Resident Evil Revelations 2 to look forward to. It's my second favorite of the over-the-shoulder REs, Jill-sandwiched between 4 and 5. My recent attempts with Silent Hill: Homecoming (which I dropped BTW) actually gave me the urge for a Rev2 replay. Too many games are vying for my time right now...

Of course, "play Vanquish" is also good advice.

I finished this one last week as well. It's pretty good. Kinda reins in the over the top parts of the action based RE games. It's budget nature shows a little bit with the reused areas but all in all its pretty solid. There's a few self aware one liner gems in this one like "Why couldn't it be a normal factory, why'd it have to be a fucked up factory?" And "What in a moist barrel of fucks?". Unlike RE5, This game knows exactly what it is and what it wants to be.

I dropped this at the end of last year. I mean, it's alright, but too angled toward shooting for me, and my over-riding feeling during playing it was that I'd rather be playing Resi 4 again. Or I'd rather be playing ReMake / Zero than either of them.

[Licorice]

Origin has the issue a bit harder than Felghana though because many bosses sport annoying healing gimmicks which overextend the fights if you're not playing either uber-aggressively or a little higher leveled than you would be.

There's two I remember. One is the flower boss with those little flowers that heal him, and the other is the praying mantis boss. I was over levelled for the latter, but I liked the healing mechanic in the former. You had to get those little flowers fast (I used red charge shots cause I could hit multiple at once), and when there were 6 of them you didn't have time to whack the tentacles so you had to deal with their sand throw pulse wave attack (by jumping).

I mean I can see how they would be rage inducing too lol, but I liked them.

[Squire Grooktook]

Origin has the issue a bit harder than Felghana though because many bosses sport annoying healing gimmicks which overextend the fights if you're not playing either uber-aggressively or a little higher leveled than you would be.

There's two I remember. One is the flower boss with those little flowers that heal him, and the other is the praying mantis boss. I was over levelled for the latter, but I liked the healing mechanic in the former. You had to get those little flowers fast (I used red charge shots cause I could hit multiple at once), and when there were 6 of them you didn't have time to whack the tentacles so you had to deal with their sand throw pulse wave attack (by jumping).

I mean I can see how they would be rage inducing too lol, but I liked them.

There's also Velagunder (Wailing Blue end boss), who on nightmare mode will heal himself by eating the little maggots he spawns. He's particularly irritating because that healing gimmick is combined with slippery/inertia controls when stepping over the slime/blood trails of the maggots, and he's one of the first bosses you fight for all 3 characters which is kind of a deal breaker for boss rush mode.

Darm also has it too but it's less annoying and I never quite figured out how it worked.

[Sengoku Strider]

I'm discovering that Vampire Savior is my favourite of the Capcom crazy characters + long chain combo fighters. I liked it when I played it in the arcade, which was something since I had tried to like the first two Darkstalkers games but just didn't get into them. Until now I've never owned it to really have a chance dig into it though.

I've been going through Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes & X-Men vs. Street Fighter on Saturn (don't have Marvel vs. Street Fighter yet), then gave Savior a spin after all of them. I really came to appreciate that it was a middle ground between Marvel & Alpha. Some of the characters really break the mould for how they play, too. Jedah as one of the main characters is a pretty bold move considering how unorthodox his play style is. But he's also awesome and now I'm kind of down that this series was effectively done with this game. But I am left feeling that it might well be the best fighter on the system (maybe one day I'll find it in me to spring for Alpha 3, but I did have the Dreamcast version back in the day), and maybe even a top 5 Saturn game overall.

[kitten]

played through all of outer wilds (not to be confused with "the outer worlds," which is actually also good) in a two-day (two... sleep cycle...?) period, probably dumping something like 24 hours (it's often quoted as 20-30 in length) within that span of time. first time i've spent hooked on something like that in probably a year. i think it is "quite good" despite also believing it could have trimmed fat and condensed spaces to be the same game with half as much dead air. it's rare that i recommend a game that will eat this much of your life.

worth recommending to fans of myst-like games, as it contains that same kind of humble encouragement and reward of curiosity without being preachy, condescending, or just dumping lore on you. it's largely unpretentious and allows you to come to your own conclusions while believing an inherent value in the natural desire to discover and learn in life. be prepared for a serious investment and lots and lots of spaceship/jetpack physics wrestling, though. i think its greatest benefit is that it sticks the landing - the conclusion is so good that i think i will misremember the entire experience as almost nothing but that vibe and watch it slowly bubble to being a favorite over time.

- - - -

also tried playing the house in fata morgana, a highly-esteemed visual novel. i hated it somewhat profoundly. a lot of my favorite movies are often criticized as slow or communicating too much through subtlety, but playing this felt like i was being tortured. found it impossible to invest in any character or event even an iota (the game fails at both showing and telling, often repeating how much characters like each other rather than writing any sort of comprehensibly believable romance or even human interaction) and within something like 2 hours of play the only interaction was a single question that affected nothing but the next sentence of dialogue.

poor audio mixing plays loud songs over mountains of uselessly purple prose - i think i stopped right after reading "flaxen" (a word almost exclusively used to describe hair color anywhere else) used as an adjective for someone's eyes for the fifth mother fucking time while some woman sung gibberish at a volume that consistently interrupted my reading. i went to adjust the volume and found no text speed option despite often missing two-to-three word sentences because text loads in so slowly that you'll press once to make it come in faster and accidentally just scoot past that to the next passage. oops. this is a game where all you do is read, by the way. not only can they not get simple text delivery to be painless but god forbid they take advantage of the Video Game format and do something like phoenix wright or undertale with the way words load in at different speeds and with different sounds for different characters/sound effects.

i don't feel anything at all was being said while i played, and i apparently only made it a few sentences into the first paragraph of the wiki summary for the game's plot despite reading and reading and reading. i am usually pretty easily charmed by visual novels, but this was just agonizing. fans almost unilaterally say nothing happens for hours and hours and it can take more than a literal dozen before you even begin to know what is happening, but a glimpse at the plot summary plays out a predictable tale of love overcoming a tragedy carrying through numerous reincarnations, which it was obvious the game was about from just the opening. maybe people who like this game are just really fucking stupid, i don't know. i cannot imagine it going anywhere and i doubt it was just the localizer flubbing it, seems pretty bad.

- - - -

aaalso gave sakuna: of rice and ruin a shot. not sure if i'll be going back to it. it's """charming""" (so sick of this as the primary adjective for so many non-AAA games) and everything, but the combat is seriously just like a hodgepodge of every 2d game from the last ten years and the rice farming feels a bit more ancillary, like a post-combat minigame. i bought it more because i was interested in a narrative that would develop via a goddess gaining power through piety via her literally bringing about a good harvest with her own two hands, but they can't help but do some pseudo-metroidvania minmax custom moveset & equipment hell bullshit. i miss when a video game would just. fucking. be a god damn video game. not a collection of activity loops and piles of mechanics thrown into a box. jesus.

i really don't want to hate this one, but i am not made of time and energy. when new games demand something like ten to twenty times the investment 1cc/1lc'ing a classic does for the first time, well, why the fuck should i bother? forget speaking of other hobbies and entertainment and what better they might be doing for me lol

- - - -

and i ran through all of banjo kazooie, getting all the stuff that would matter when showing your save file. unsurprisingly hated it. you know, i've been a serious critic of mario 64 since day one, but that game genuinely seems like a work of art compared to this. fuck-ugly euro cartooning that can only express itself through cretinous "satire," can only engage with its audience through irony and ugliness. flush yourself down a living, burping toilet and walk through shit to collect a bauble. collect facts about how a fat retard enjoys the taste of sweat and smell of diapers so that you can pass a quiz show later on. win a girl walking by with big hooters in the ending as the bird in your backpack talks shit about everyone you know. so many people describe this as "all good fun" and i seriously wonder about what is going in their lives. this is ten times sadder than saying you "like movies" and then just listing pixar shit.

the game is so small-minded, filled with contempt, and almost aggressive to the idea a game could express something beyond adding extra facets to the meaninglessness of wasting your time with the lower-than-animal impulse to Collect Things like jingies and jimbos. banjo kazooie as a thing that exists is a darker statement on what the lowest mind enjoys when playing video games than i could possibly make through criticism of it. secrets upon secrets, all of them in service of stupid noises and dumb cartoons saying nothing about anything. boring levels, horrible enemy designs (something like 50% of the game's enemies are "thing that comes out of a wall and you step back and then hit it once" and the other half are common objects or insects with eyeballs that hop around), and a complete lack of imagination.

here's rusty fish in a gross tank of water. that's a level. here's a swamp. here's a second swamp (or was this just the world map, my memory is already coalescing). here's a boat in a semi-realistic boatyard. who are these characters, what world do they occupy, why are they doing anything, why should you care? the game is hostile to all of these questions. playing a video game is fun. collecting is fun. shut the fuck up and eat out of the toilet, you slobbering idiot. christ, at least give me a long jump to make traversal less tedious. please.

jesus christ. god. fuck. the movement options suck and you do nothing for seriously like 10 or 15 hours. this came out in 1998. we were already doomed in 1998. god.

[Rastan78]

I've been going through Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes & X-Men vs. Street Fighter on Saturn (don't have Marvel vs. Street Fighter yet), then gave Savior a spin after all of them. I really came to appreciate that it was a middle ground between Marvel & Alpha.

I always loved the Vampire series for this reason. The Marvel series was always a bit too frenetic for me, and the Alpha series felt a little bit stiff after Vampire. It's a shame that it was never easy to play this game in the US against other people. I lived near one of the best fighting game scenes in the US and it was really just SF, Marvel, KOF and Tekken if you wanted people to actually play against.

Did you ever give Last Blade 2 a try? You could make the analogy that SF is to Vampire as Samurai Shodown is to LB.

[Searchlike]

I don't recall Vanquish having a stage where you slowly trek up a mountain in the snow hunting for key cards and then slide all the way back down whenever you use one of your fun mobility moves. So yeah, I'm giving the superior level design award to Vanquish.

Both games have fun core mechanics but I don't think there's any argument which one you actively have to fight against the surrounding game more to enjoy those mechanics, or which one explicitly awards and encourages the ideal style play, or which one also manages to be fun and functional even when you're not using that ideal
play style.

There are two or three autoscrolling sequences in Vanquish along with a few pointless "stay behind this turret sections" that are much longer than the part you are describing in RE6 which is over in a few seconds. And again, you're completely in control in any situation of RE6 and not to the mercy of bad RNG like the aforementioned military allies' granades in Vanquish. I didn't fall in my last attempt at climbing that mountain, I made smart use of my sniper rifle by shooting the enemy that comes rushing at you with a snow bike and borrowing his vehicle for the rest of the hunt. It was over quite quickly.

That's one of my favorite things about RE6, it's a 3D brawler with excellent shooting mechanics. I play that way anyway, the key to enjoy the game to its fullest is to spent less time aiming and more on the move. I won't list all of the ways the game allows you to play offensively while staying on the move since I'm confident you know about them. They are all super useful and can be used consistently too.

Vanquish is THE third-person shooter IMO, while, like I said before, I think of RE6 more like a 3D beat'em up and a very innovative one. Sure, it's derivative of RE4, but so is God Hand. The thing I like the least of RE6 is the fact that it is a Resident Evil game. I bet people would be a lot more forgiving of its issues if it was an original property, because it's just as much as a departure of RE4 as that game was to the original Biohazard series. Capcom shuld have done what they did back with the first RE4 prototype and give us a new franchise. Devil May Cry deserved to be its own thing and I think RE6 did too.

Then again, RE6 is one of the best selling games in the franchise so the series name gave it a boost God Hand never benefited from. Hardly matters though, I doubt Capcom has the courage to revisit this title's gameplay. They developed one of the best combat systems out there with God Hand and then did nothing with it. My love for RE6 comes from the fact that ever since its release there's nothing that plays quite like it and the genre is complacent with just delivering DMC clones and sequels. Practically alll of the best games in the genre are still deeply rooted in DMC principles, Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta, The Wonderful 101, Assault Spy you name it.

I'm not even sure I would like another RE6 with better level design, I'm playing the game fairly often already and I'd rather have Capcom take another risk and give us something completely new. I can live with one single God Hand and one single RE6, Capcom's indifference has make me settle for that. Let them be the cool antiheroes that dared to be different in an industry that sacrifices creativity and innovation in the name of profit. Games aim for the respectabilty of the film industry, right? Then let the industry sell its soul as well, just like Hollywood.

In fact let's just change the name of the genre, we never liked that silly Character Action (wtf), Stylish Action (lol) nonsense. Let's rename it "Devilmaycrylikes" or "DMCvanias", less confusing and much more fitting. Most games in the genre are not stylish and lack character anyway. It's a bit tragic to hear from people like Mikami and Itsuno that their best time's as game developers where not when they were working in RE or DMC but when they created their personal dream games, God Hand and Dragon's Dogma respectively. And those dreams only materialized, because they managed to make lots of money for Capcom. Mikami knew God Hand would hardly make a profit and still went through developement, what a boss.

I love most aspects of RE6 and I even like the director's previous game, Zack & Wiki. I remember, back when Platinum was formed, me and a online pal, Aragami777 (I'll never forget you bro), where lamenting Capcom's decison to close Clover and loose Mikami and Kamiya in the process and just maybe their abilty to create an awesome, innovative game too. I suggested to him to try Z&W, he bought the game and we both agreed the team responsible for that title was a light of hope for gamers looking for cool, original content within Capcom's more conservative output. Little did I know back then that the director of that title would go on to make my favorite Resident Evil game. Well, let's just call it one of my favorte action games, I don't even like RE much, just 6. I prefer Fatal Frame and Dead Rising for survival horror stuff.

I'm not particularly adressing you with this, Squire, you might agree with some of this and at least you recognize that the mechanics are good, I'm just taking the opportunithy to share my love for this game and there's so much I love about it. Aside from the combat I love the fact that each campaign is short and gives you the ability to choose from two very different characters with unique weapons and melee abilities; I love that since the game is objective based you are not allowed to skip over most figths; I love that the beginning of Leon's campaign seems like a self-conscious throwback to classic slow as snail RE suvival horror gameplay with how most of your moveset is restricted at that point, but then soon after the breaks come off and RE4 Leon is back performing wrestling moves on zombies; I love Chris and Piers' bromance; I love Sherry and Jake's romcom movie scenarios; I love all of the shameless Sherry fanservice (hi, Bobby Jones 12:51); I love Leon's dual wielding pistols (this game is a John Woo simulator too, did you know?); I love that one of Jake's weapons is his bare hands and this give you the most unique moveset of the game which even allows you to dodge bullets, etc.

I'm a big fan of RE6, I may go down in this board's history as that ONE RE6 nut and that would be an honor. I'll continue to speak favorably of this game just as I will of the similarly flawed, but totally original and timeless video games that Sega and ex-Sega veterans developed in what's more or less another wothless genre, the 3D platformer. I'm talking about Sonic Adventure 1 & 2, Nights into Dreams, Jet Set Radio, Super Monkey Ball, 2002's Shinobi, Nightshade/Kunoichi and Rodea the Sky Soldier. I'll defend these games as well as treasures among the sea of awful collectathons, so keep that in mind when discussing these games on this board Balan Wonderworld does look horrid, though, lol, not even Billy Hatcher tier.

My Resident Evil 6 love letter is done, I swear.

Ark/Oath/Origin basically use the leveling system to encourage you not to skip any fights but kill everything on the way from point A to point B, and if you do that you'll generally be fine (I recently completed a nightmare mode run in Felghana, with a house rule of "no grinding, kill everything from point a to point b and then never again" and the balance was perfect, bosses never felt damage spongy). If they locked you in a room with every encounter devil may cry style it'd hurt the exploration and pace, but if they did away with leveling entirely you'd have no reason to actually fight most enemies beyond self-imposed challenge. It's a janky compromise but it works.

Origin has the issue a bit harder than Felghana though because many bosses sport annoying healing gimmicks which overextend the fights if you're not playing either uber-aggressively or a little higher leveled than you would be. A shame, if it wasn't for that one misstep on those fights it'd probably be a better game than Felghana in nearly every way. Even in boss rush mode they're really frustrating to deal with and encourage an annoying playstyle (Felghana's boss rush helped me appreciate the game much more, Origin's boss rush lowered my opinion of it as a whole, though I still love both as two of my favorite games ever).

I'll have to take your word and Licorice's for this. I barely played these games, I got tired of talking to souless avatars in Felghana, unlike the weirdos of EarthBound for instance, and both it and Origin bored me with the exploration aspects that are never fun once you have explored them already along with the awful enemies, now these guys right here are not worth anyone's time. I'm generally allergic to RPG tropes outside of roguelikes so I should have known better. That said, I was thinking that if I would ever go back to one of these games I would pick Origin since at least I wouldn't have to deal with the happy little village visit trope, but then you say Felghana is better balanced, damn. I just want the boss rush right from the start, Mr. Game Developer. Back to Vanquish, you know what the coolest thing in that game is? The highest difficulty is unlockable with a cheat on the title screen. God bless Mikami!

Thanks for your time, guys, very informative stuff.

and i ran through all of banjo kazooie, getting all the stuff that would matter when showing your save file. unsurprisingly hated it. you know, i've been a serious critic of mario 64 since day one, but that game genuinely seems like a work of art compared to this. fuck-ugly euro cartooning that can only express itself through cretinous "satire," can only engage with its audience through irony and ugliness. flush yourself down a living, burping toilet and walk through shit to collect a bauble. collect facts about how a fat retard enjoys the taste of sweat and smell of diapers so that you can pass a quiz show later on. win a girl walking by with big hooters in the ending as the bird in your backpack talks shit about everyone you know. so many people describe this as "all good fun" and i seriously wonder about what is going in their lives. this is ten times sadder than saying you "like movies" and then just listing pixar shit.

the game is so small-minded, filled with contempt, and almost aggressive to the idea a game could express something beyond adding extra facets to the meaninglessness of wasting your time with the lower-than-animal impulse to Collect Things like jingies and jimbos. banjo kazooie as a thing that exists is a darker statement on what the lowest mind enjoys when playing video games than i could possibly make through criticism of it. secrets upon secrets, all of them in service of stupid noises and dumb cartoons saying nothing about anything. boring levels, horrible enemy designs (something like 50% of the game's enemies are "thing that comes out of a wall and you step back and then hit it once" and the other half are common objects or insects with eyeballs that hop around), and a complete lack of imagination.

here's rusty fish in a gross tank of water. that's a level. here's a swamp. here's a second swamp (or was this just the world map, my memory is already coalescing). here's a boat in a semi-realistic boatyard. who are these characters, what world do they occupy, why are they doing anything, why should you care? the game is hostile to all of these questions. playing a video game is fun. collecting is fun. shut the fuck up and eat out of the toilet, you slobbering idiot. christ, at least give me a long jump to make traversal less tedious. please.

jesus christ. god. fuck. the movement options suck and you do nothing for seriously like 10 or 15 hours. this came out in 1998. we were already doomed in 1998. god.

This is why I called the genre generally worthless. I don't know how you feel about the Sega games that I listed, but at least their focus is on speed and mastering your avatar's movement mechanics along with some questionable camera decisions, but oh, well. I must say though, Mario 3D World looks fun enough, haven't played it, but I have no love for anything 3D Mario, I hate Nintendo level design in general and find it funny that my favorite big N sidescroller is Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat made by the same guy who made Mario's dull space adventure. Must be because DK's game plays a bit more like arcadey Sega.

Sorry for so many edits guys,

[Blinge]

Today in "i wish i didn't look at shmups forum."

and i ran through all of banjo kazooie.. fuck-ugly euro cartooning

wat. I don't understand your use of Euro as a perojative here.
Are you saying "and it's worse because it's not from America or Japan" cause it sure seems like it.

that can only express itself through cretinous "satire," can only engage with its audience through irony and ugliness.

What exactly does it satirise?
What else should somebody engage an audience with? Irony seems just as good a vehicle as any.
Then again, it's a childhood favourite of mine that I replayed once when I was like, 20. I've never given it much thought.

flush yourself down a living, burping toilet and walk through shit to collect a bauble.

Yeah the (literal) toilet humour's a bit much.

the game is so small-minded, filled with contempt, and almost aggressive to the idea a game could express something beyond adding extra facets to the meaninglessness of wasting your time with the lower-than-animal impulse to Collect Things like jingies and jimbos.

contempt how.

all of them in service of stupid noises and dumb cartoons saying nothing about anything.

"saying nothing about anything" !? jesus christ it's a 90's mascot platformer, what the fuck did you expect?
What does Spyro or Mario64 have to say about anything?

here's rusty fish in a gross tank of water. that's a level.

An oversized mechanical fish that you swim into for an interior area. You have to do gameplay challenges to get it open, and to interact with the level outside in different ways. Again just saying " Swamp, that's a level" is reductive to the point of white noise. You can do this with any game. Wow Ninja Gaiden has a stage that's just mountains, jeez, talk about uninventive.

who are these characters, what world do they occupy, why are they doing anything, why should you care? the game is hostile to all of these questions.

Nonsensical rant. You could this rant to literally anything. Why do i give a fuck that pacman eats fruit. Why can't I talk to monsters in Doom instead of shooting them!

Maybe we can talk about this in a week when your vitriol has calmed down. I just don't get it. Why bother playing, I reckon you knew you'd hate it before you started.

[Sumez]

Banjo-Kazooie is a fun game

[kitten]

"saying nothing about anything" !? jesus christ it's a 90's mascot platformer, what the fuck did you expect?

even a run-of-the-mill action game communicates something about the excitement of motion, violence, aggression, etc. at no point in playing banjo kazooie do i feel stimulated by anything. it's just ugly and contemptful and plodding, it's british 'comedy' that is the equivalent of blowing a raspberry and slapping your own ass in the face of effort with a purpose and caring about what you're doing.

mario occupies a distinct world with characters that feel they cohesively belong together and form themes, purpose. that you can identify "a mario game" by such a variety of its distinct elements standing by themselves is testament to the designers giving a shit. what is banjo? how do you go from metal rotting fish to a talking toilet to a woman with huge jugs? the world is seriously just shit thrown together with irony, ugliness, and rude banter glossing over an extreme emptiness and resentment for giving a fuck. rareware designers talk about taking 4 hits on bosses (as opposed to 5 or 3) in conker (gruntilda also does this, but i'm drawing from a conker interview) as sticking it to convention, that's about the level of design thought that we're operating on.

there's almost no iota of sincerity anywhere in that game but in its putrid humor that goes for fruit so low-hanging you're digging it out of the goddamn ground. i'd rather play an earnest garbage fire than such a dishonest romp through this bizarrely polished sewage.

[vol.2]

I'm a big fan of RE6, I may go down in this board's history as that ONE RE6 nut and that would be an honor.

Maybe.

Reddit is positively *filled* with RE6 fans, you'd probably dig that scene.

[Searchlike]

I like this place better, thanks.

[Mischief Maker]

If there's one thing I look for in video games, it's sincerity.

[kitten]

??? i think most people look for those with an earnest approach to their craft in almost anything worth appreciating. shmups as a genre (the uh, thing the forum is based around) are oozing with love, effort, and sincerity in the belief that what they're doing is worthwhile and cool as hell. even something like parodius oozes effort and deeply referential self-love. they're things of incredible craftsmanship.

banjo is polished but in no way could i say the designers "give a fuck." when i waste my time on entertainment, i tend to expect the persons who created it to believe in what they were doing. i don't think it's a high bar.

[Licorice]

there's almost no iota of sincerity anywhere in that game but in its putrid humor that goes for fruit so low-hanging you're digging it out of the goddamn ground.

Yeah, I'm also not the biggest fan of Rare platformers for aesthetic reasons. Even Jet Force Gemini I found reflected 90s East end London sensibilities a bit too much for me.

But it's not a Euro or even British thing. It's just a Rare thing. I mean compare Rare with fellow countrymen Psygnosis, Bitmap Brothers or Team 17.

Anyway one Rare game I do want to get into at some point is Blast Corps. I'm attracted to the whole time attack aspect.

In fact let's just change the name of the genre, we never liked that silly Character Action

I think 3D character action is a good enough name. Feels a bit broad, given it isn't, but then shoot em up and shooting game feel broader than they are too.

Here's a fun one. Try find instances of the genre in the 5th gen. IMO it's crazy how young the genre is.

It's the same with 2D character action, which started with Castlevania or arcade Rygar in 86 with no golden age predecessors fitting the bill.

[Blinge]

it's british 'comedy' that is the equivalent of blowing a raspberry and slapping your own ass in the face of effort with a purpose and caring about what you're doing.

How to take this.. assume you don't know what you're talking about re: comedy?
See it as an attack on Britain? (that's a safe country to attack)
Don't get me started on American comedy lol, you guys are proud of Anchorman? of Dodgeball? give me a fucking break.

I'd get more into the game stuff now but I think Sumez's response will do.
Again, it's a dead 90's mascot platformer. I simply don't understand such a volatile reaction to it.
Did someone repeatedly bludgeon your skull with the cart? Did they put googley eyes on all your stuff?

[Sengoku Strider]

I've been going through Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes & X-Men vs. Street Fighter on Saturn (don't have Marvel vs. Street Fighter yet), then gave Savior a spin after all of them. I really came to appreciate that it was a middle ground between Marvel & Alpha.

I always loved the Vampire series for this reason. The Marvel series was always a bit too frenetic for me, and the Alpha series felt a little bit stiff after Vampire. It's a shame that it was never easy to play this game in the US against other people. I lived near one of the best fighting game scenes in the US and it was really just SF, Marvel, KOF and Tekken if you wanted people to actually play against.

Did you ever give Last Blade 2 a try? You could make the analogy that SF is to Vampire as Samurai Shodown is to LB.

Yeah, I played it a little in the arcade but didn't really understand how deep it was. I got the PS4 release with online play that came out a while back, and really came to like it. But I didn't know just how good it really was until I saw Justin Wong playing it against the top online player a few months ago:

https://youtu.be/Ngz5FnfmLxg

[vol.2]

It's the same with 2D character action, which started with Castlevania or arcade Rygar in 86 with no golden age predecessors fitting the bill.

well that's really down to hardware limitations.

the NES was really created with side-scrolling in mind, which is why you had that rush of them later on.

and that's also only true if you impose an arbitrary year cut-off. by saying "golden age," you limit it to 83 (for no apparent reason), when there were some good missing link platformers in the intervening years like Pac-Land and Dragon Busters, etc.


to me, the best rare games were always Wizards & Warriors (even though it's super annoying I have lots of nostalgia for it) and RC ProAM (I guess 2 is better cause 2 player).

[To Far Away Times]

Banjo Slander...

I wasn't all that impressed when I saw Banjo back in 1998. Kinda felt like a "me too" game. You even jump through paintings to get into levels.

But I gave it a go on the Xbox 360 version many years ago and I actually had a good time. I still think its a hugely overrated game, but its pretty decent and playable for a 3D game made in 1998. It just isn't up there with the heavy hitters of its era that you'll sometimes hear.

[Licorice]

there were some good missing link platformers in the intervening years like Pac-Land and Dragon Busters, etc.

Certainly. But it didn't all come together to form the template till '86. I forgot the ultra strict definition I had in general terms, but it boiled down to something like Dragon Buster, but you can fall to your death, or Makaimura, but you can't always shoot, which underscores the fact that the elements were all there, but the combination wasn't. The closest was Green Beret, which is obviously recognizable as a proto-vania.

One thing that I find interesting is that the template ended up adopting Castlevania's ratios, which were present in Green Beret (like character sprite to screen ratio, or jump to character size ratio) instead of Rygar's.