What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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Air Master Burst
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Air Master Burst »

So I started RE4 and, for the first time in my entire video gaming career, I actually got motion sickness from playing after about 30 minutes! Not cool. I'm not sure if it's just a shitty PC port (it has the usual lazy Capcom remaster issue where the video lags behind the audio in cut scenes; it's only 3D Capcom remasters but they all do it on my PC) or a fluke, but if it does it again tomorrow I'm gonna have to skip it.
guigui wrote:RE fanboys here ! I want to troll : isn's Silent Hill 2 considered to be better ?
Really depends on what you're looking for. SH2 is an average game with excellent writing and atmosphere. RE2 is a great game with laughably bad writing and very good atmosphere. They both have comically inept voice acting. Which is better depends mostly on what you want from the experience.
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vol.2
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

I remember contemporary reviews of RE4 pointing out that the extra crispiness of the PS2 port made the game less visually pleasing. iirc, PS2 didn't do fog very well or they decided to "clean up" the fog present in the GC game, but I'm not sure if that would give anyone motion sickness. I can confirm for me, it was much better with the GC controller than the Dual Shock 2, and I agreed that the GC game looked better. I keep the GC versions of the 1, 2, 4 and Zero.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Air Master Burst wrote:
guigui wrote:RE fanboys here ! I want to troll : isn's Silent Hill 2 considered to be better ?
Really depends on what you're looking for. SH2 is an average game with excellent writing and atmosphere. RE2 is a great game with laughably bad writing and very good atmosphere. They both have comically inept voice acting. Which is better depends mostly on what you want from the experience.
SH2's voice acting apparently suffered in part because the actors weren't able to record together in the studio and had to do their lines separately. Not sure how the early RE games worked though.

RE2 is definitely a great game. The only real bad element in it is the lack of a quickturn function, which makes it really awkward to turn around and run from anything, thus meaning most encounters involve killing stuff before it kills you, or running past the enemy's side as the primary means of evasion.

SH2 and SH3 share similar progression in gameplay the way RE2 to RE3 do; SH2 actually has the ability to block melee attacks, but it's explained so poorly in the physical manual and implemented so badly that most people never realize it's doable. The first enemies you meet use unblockable spit attacks, and it's not until the mannequin enemies that you can even try blocking, which is done by pressing and holding the Run button right before an attack hits, but with your weapon lowered, which makes it really unintuitive. There's also no animation unless you actually block, or stand still holding run for too long, unlike SH3 which lets you block by simply tapping Run while having your weapon up, with a very obvious animation to show the timing.

SH2 also has awful melee combat for actually attacking things. The PS2 version used the pressure sensitive buttons to determine your swing, which made it really awkward compared to SH3's simple tap vs hold melee controls. If you tried to swing the wooden plank while moving, James will sometimes automatically walk past the enemy in the swing animation even if you tried to stop. Heather is far at the whole moving and swinging thing with the pipe and can accurately control where she wants to go when swinging.

In the same way, RE3 vastly improved on the controls, and in some ways did so in unintuitive, but very technical ways. You can now quickturn, the knife isn't terrible on damage, and you can pre-emptively shove zombies: press R1 or R2 to raise your weapon, and if the zombie tries to bite you when you're in the weapon raising animation, you'll do a shove instead. The timing window is greatly increased if your side or back are turned to the zombie too for some reason as long as auto aim are on. Dodging is also it's own thing, where if you shoot as an enemy attacks it'll instead evade the attack. What's neat is you can actually do it while running: hold Run + Shoot (Square + X), and then tap one of the Aim buttons as you're running if you're about to get hit by something like a Hunter or Nemesis.

RE2 is a solid game because of the atmosphere and because of how all the files really add to the horror and the plot. RE3's a great game too, but the plot isn't anywhere as strong due to various reasons:

• Jill's adventure is largely a solitary affair. Her interactions with the mercenaries aren't terribly engaging and she's just trying to get out of the city. RE2 has several far stronger supporting characters by comparison.

• The city isn't as strange or mysterious to explore as the barricaded police station being sabotaged by the chief is. It's fun to explore, but it's not quite the same feeling of claustrophobia, and Jill largely feels like she's bouncing from one random place to the next.

• The files you find and read generally aren't interesting compared to RE1 or RE2 where you read about how the various survivors are desperately struggling to stay alive and getting slowly picked off. A lot of them are now simply low resolution photographs. Some of the more interesting ones are also really difficult to get, like Jill's Diary, or all the bonus endings scenes you get for replaying the game like 8 times which show what everyone from previous RE games are up to.

• If you've played RE2 you'll already know a lot of what's going on, and very little happens to flesh out the events in Raccoon City aside from the fact that missiles are sent to wipe it off the map.

• Jill's tube top outfit frankly sucks. Some of the bonus ones are decent and the white suit's actually pretty snazzy though.

However, if you stick with RE3 and appreciate the game for the gameplay itself, the monsters are fun to deal with, zombie behaviour is more dynamic (they can RUN at you), the boss fights are interesting and give you freedom how to deal with things, the mercenaries mode is INCREDIBLY FUN, and the controls are very snappy and responsive, allowing you to become an expert at ducking past enemies. There's really nothing wrong with RE3 in terms of how it plays; it's simply not got any truly memorable or impactful environments compared to the mansion in 1 or the police station and Umbrella facility in 2.
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Air Master Burst
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Air Master Burst »

RE3 also has the shitty ammo crafting that they wisely never brought back, and not nearly enough non-zombie enemies. Nemesis isn't really too much different from Mr. X, apart from being able to chase you through doors. The whole thing feels more like an expansion pack for RE2 instead of a proper sequel, they even atraight up reused a good chunk of the police station.

That said, RE3 actually has a few good puzzles compared to RE2's pathetically easy ones, and at least Carlos doesn't suck nearly as bad as Steve. The RNG elements are a nice touch too, although the Live Selection events are pretty clumsily executed; half of them do almost nothing and the other half heavily impact the ending you get without any sort of indication that this is the case.

Disagree on the bosses. Actually, does RE3 even have any bosses besides Nemesis and the stupid Tremors worm? I guess there's the helicopter in the one ending? Nemesis was a decent fight once, but way too much of a bullet sponge to enjoyably take on repeatedly.

ETA: also lining up the kill shot on final form Nemesis is janky as fuck.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

Lander wrote:
Air Master Burst wrote:ETA: I like how even though everyone has different preferences when it comes to Resident Evil, pretty much everyone agrees that RE2 fucking rules.
Hell yeah it does. I put that down to it being the most refined non-remake version of the classic formula; it built new stuff out from the core while polishing it up and not making any major flubs or changes in direction.
I think that's an interesting take. Maybe RE1 was more like 2 than I realise, since I'm a normie casul who only payed RE1 via its remake, but playing OG RE2 after that, it really felt to me like a massive different take on the same basic core gameplay.
Essentially making it more of a mildly strategic action game than the resource based survival affair RE1make is. In RE2 you get such absurd amounts of ammo that you can just kill everything in your path with the best wepons you have without ever worrying about running out, and that really changes the overall game experience

Not that that makes it bad, just very different. But it does put it very squarely below RE1make in my book.

guigui wrote:RE fanboys here ! I want to troll : isn's Silent Hill 2 considered to be better ?
As a game? Probably not. As an atmospheric and narrative experience SH2 is phenomenal and more importantly very unique. And while not really super scary (compared to SH1) it's still much more of a horror game than any RE game is.
So yeah it's easy to misunderstand the RE games on that premise - comparing SH and RE directly was what caused me to skip out on most of the latter series.
Last edited by Sumez on Wed Nov 02, 2022 8:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

Air Master Burst wrote:RE3 also has the shitty ammo crafting that they wisely never brought back
RE2make has ammo crafting.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Air Master Burst »

Sumez wrote: I think that's an interesting take. Maybe RE1 was more like 2 than I realise, since I'm a normie casul who only payed RE1 via its remake, but playing OG RE2 after that, it really felt to me like a massive different take on the same basic core gameplay.
Essentially making it more of a mildly strategic action game than the resource based survival affair RE1make is. In RE2 you get such absurd amounts of ammo that you can just kill everything in your path with the best wepons you have without ever worrying about running out, and that really changes the overall game experience

Not that that makes it bad, just very different. But it does put it very squarely below RE1make in my book.
See, and I always have more ammo in the remake of 1 because zombies are so easy to avoid compared to the older games. They also give you a shitload of those reactive weapons, so actually getting grabbed almost never happens. You can even beat or bypass most of the bosses without firing a single shot, so conserving ammo isn't really much more of an issue here than it is in RE2. RE2 on hard mode makes you work for it a bit, but running out of ammo is less of a concern than just straight-up dying.

OG RE1 is much more of an ammo management affair than the remake; if for no other reasons than zombies are harder to dodge, and there aren't any defensive weapons to get out of grabs.

Interestingly enough, RE0 is actually by far the stingiest classic entry when it comes to weapons and ammo, and CVX is the hardest despite giving you an absolutely insane arsenal.

ETA:
Sumez wrote:
Air Master Burst wrote:RE3 also has the shitty ammo crafting that they wisely never brought back
RE2make has ammo crafting.
Just installed it this morning, and this only dampens my enthusiasm a little bit. I haven't played enough to form a real opinion yet, but that's only because I spent like half an hour modding in the classic-style content warning splash screen before starting it up for the first time. It was absolutely worth the time spent!
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by drauch »

RE4 PC port *shouldn't* be giving you motion sickness based on my experience. I've played it quite a bit with none, and I'm prone to it. RE 4 VR is a different beast.

Love 'em both. I have a hard time comparing RE and SH at all. You're highly competent and combat proficient in RE, with military-issue gear. You have a ridiculous amount of ammo in 2. Part of the survival appeal in SH is you're normal and incompetent, and have very little in the way of weapons outside of something obtainable by a civilian. SH feels much more like surviving a nightmare; RE feels like a shitty day at the office.

*also Jill's tube top rules 8)
Last edited by drauch on Wed Nov 02, 2022 3:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

RE and SH aren't really competing franchises. I would say most RE fans I know probably like both, but for different reasons. Drastically different kinds of games.

They are more like different restaurants on the same block that encourage more foot traffic to both locations (as opposed to gas stations across the street from one another).
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

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guigui wrote:RE fanboys here ! I want to troll : isn's Silent Hill 2 considered to be better ?
Tepid. DOS Alone In The Dark is clearly the superior game.
Sumez wrote:I think that's an interesting take. Maybe RE1 was more like 2 than I realise, since I'm a normie casul who only payed RE1 via its remake, but playing OG RE2 after that, it really felt to me like a massive different take on the same basic core gameplay.
Essentially making it more of a mildly strategic action game than the resource based survival affair RE1make is. In RE2 you get such absurd amounts of ammo that you can just kill everything in your path with the best wepons you have without ever worrying about running out, and that really changes the overall game experience

Not that that makes it bad, just very different. But it does put it very squarely below RE1make in my book.
REmake is transformative over the original; between the survival items, crimson heads and extra touches like the breakable door handle, it's arguably the most refined of all the fixed-camera iterations in terms of routing and careful resource management. One of the few games I wish I could forget and experience completely fresh again :)

Though I think RE2 was always more generous, opting to rely on the fear factor to scare players into behaving conservatively rather than doing it through genuine scarcity.
I suppose that style dichotomy culimnates in RE3 where you can pick Very Easy and rambo your way through with heavy assault weaponry, or go Very Hard for the constrained survival experience.
Air Master Burst wrote:
Sumez wrote:RE2make has ammo crafting.
Just installed it this morning, and this only dampens my enthusiasm a little bit. I haven't played enough to form a real opinion yet, but that's only because I spent like half an hour modding in the classic-style content warning splash screen before starting it up for the first time. It was absolutely worth the time spent!
2make's crafting stuff is less overly intrusive than 3's, I'd say - between the slicker UI and not having to lug the craft-o-matic around, it's less of a dogma and more of an option select.
Last edited by Lander on Wed Nov 02, 2022 11:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

Lander wrote: REmake is transformative over the original; between the survival items, crimson heads and extra touches like the breakable door handle, it's arguably the most refined of all the fixed-camera iterations in terms of routing and careful resource management. One of the few games I wish I could forget and experience completely fresh again :)
I remember it being punishingly difficult on harder levels (though it's been some time since I played through). Especially that you had to burn the zombie bodies or they would come back, and there wasn't really a way to burn everybody, so you end up having to strategically leave zombies around to avoid in the future. I think it was easier to avoid the zombies though, owing the superior controller of the GC, and just some amount of refinement that had been done on the game.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Air Master Burst »

vol.2 wrote: I remember it being punishingly difficult on harder levels (though it's been some time since I played through). Especially that you had to burn the zombie bodies or they would come back, and there wasn't really a way to burn everybody, so you end up having to strategically leave zombies around to avoid in the future. I think it was easier to avoid the zombies though, owing the superior controller of the GC, and just some amount of refinement that had been done on the game.
Real Survival mode makes it a bit harder (or maybe a lot if you suck at inventory management) since the item boxes aren't magic anymore, but burning bodies is only really an issue if you don't know the routes and have to backtrack a bunch. I never burn anything on my runs, just a waste of time and inventory space. I dunno, I never thought it was very difficult since they added defensive weapons and made zombie dodging so easy, but I've also been playing these games pretty regularly since like 97, so I might not be the best judge of this anymore.

One Dangerous Zombie mode can lick my taint, though.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Durandal »

Nex Machina! Housemarque and twin-stick shooter genre pioneer Eugene Jarvis team up to create what might very well be the best twin-stick shooter to date.

One of Nex Machina’s strongest points is the immense variety in its room/enemy design. Rooms are not mere square boxes á la Robotron 2048, they can take on all kinds of shapes and paths of progression. This can range from winding linear stretches to ring formations, to dense rooms populated with (in)destructible geometry, to half-circles with enemies in the middle, to certain platforms being locked off until you destroy specific enemies, to the standard squares where enemies spawn all around you, to even a chase sequence where you’re being chased by a massive rolling boulder.

The variety in enemy design is just as amazing. Enemies can impede you directly or indirectly, by directly chasing/aiming towards you, aimlessly moving around the stage/covering the stage with bullets or lasers in a straight line or a sweep, and/or spawn bullets/enemies around them on death or kamikaze towards you. All archetypes can come in high-HP variants which demand more commitment to dispatch than others. Some turrets are invincible, which means that at times you just have to deal a sweeping laser across the entire stage. Then there’s all the enemy types related to scoring, which requires its own separate section to explain. Nex Machina makes all these enemies work by staggering enemy spawns behind intervals or certain triggers, while also pre-spawning in several enemies. This way the player has the breathing room to take in their surroundings and form a plan of action, but it also allows Nex Machina to recontextualize the same areas by simply spawning certain waves of enemies in certain positions.
While there might have been room for more complex stage hazards or enemies, one should consider that Nex Machina’s non-stop arcade pacing and “easy to pick-up” nature wouldn’t work as well with gameplay elements that aren’t immediately understandable. All new elements that Nex Machina does introduce rarely deviate from the basic “shoot everything to move on to the next area” setup. Sometimes your progress in an area is locked until you destroy a new enemy type (so you can get a better look at what it does), or they’re introduced gradually alongside previous elements in areas that lower the intensity a bit. Either way, both approaches allow beginning players to properly get eased into the systems, while returning players can simply speedrun through and remain engaged because of the scoring system.

Nex Machina’s core and stand-out mechanic has to be its dashing. These grant total invincibility, can be chained up to three times, let you shoot while dashing, and have a (relatively) noticeable recharge time once fully depleted. On this own this isn’t a terribly interesting system, but what makes it stand out is the Dash Explosion. Namely, each dash generates a small lasting explosion that can instagib any non-boss enemy and cancel any nearby projectiles. Enemies that will otherwise take a massive beating before going down can be deleted in a second if you simply dash into them. This is especially useful against enemies that spawn smaller enemies on death, since the lasting property of the explosion means that all its offspring and revenge bullets will also be immediately deleted. And even against bosses it remains useful by being able to dash in and out of bosses for extra damage. So dashing in Nex Machina has not just a defensive, but an offensive usage as well. Playing aggressive means phasing through bullets and enemies while one-shotting high-HP targets, and then getting out to safety as you spend your last dash charge.

While triple dashes + dash explosions make dashing immensely powerful, it remains balanced because of how crowded the stages can get with enemies, bullets, and lasers. The small AoE of the explosions means that dash explosions cannot reliably clear out entire crowds of popcorn enemies, and thus shouldn’t be used for that purpose. In larger rooms there can be a significant amount of distance between you and a high-priority target with bullets/enemies between, so spending several dashes just to gib that enemy can leave you in a terrible position with no leftover dashes and no hope of survival. Sweeping/aimed lasers, expanding energy circles, and dense bullet vomit regularly force you to dash at the right angles and moments, so you cannot always mindlessly spend all your dashes on offense. What’s more, in the later stages Nex Machina throws another curveball by having certain enemies fire distorted lasers, which cannot be dashed through at all! All these combined makes dashing a versatile yet situational tool that can be used creatively but must be used intelligently.

What makes Nex Machina really gel even across many replays is its highly optimizable scoring system. Each area not only keeps you occupied with a legion of baddies to shoot, but multiple layers of scoring objectives. The main one is ‘human chaining’, where you get more points the more humans you chain (a bonus which maxes out when having chained 20 humans). Here it’s not about grabbing all humans as fast as possible, but rather spacing out the rate at which you grab them so that your chain meter won’t go empty before you clear the area. This is then complicated by tankier enemy types that will try to capture your humans if left unattended for too long, making you prioritize either taking down those enemies or simply grabbing the humans right before they’re captured. The second major part of the scoring system is the multiplier, which multiplies the score you get from everything (Including humans) and is raised by killing enemies or finding multiplier tokens. Because the multiplier is global, you want to prioritize raising it and picking-up multiplier tokens where possible before picking up humans, which can be tricky given that your human chain meter depletes within six seconds. Some areas even come with pre-placed multiplier tokens (extra life spawns turn into multiplier tokens if you have the max. amount of extra lives, and some areas have ‘multiplier blocks’ which drop a token but can only be opened using a subweapon) which score-hungry players can risk prioritizing over all else. What’s more, each area gives you a Level End Dash bonus if you dash right before you get teleported to the next area. On its own, this may seem like a nifty and easy QTE to get some bonus points, but when you consider the context of trying to get the multiplier tokens and humans at the last possible second, where you are often dashing towards the last human before time runs out, cleanly clearing areas with a level end dash suddenly becomes a whole lot more complicated!
Spoiler
And then there’s all the secondary scoring objectives! Beacons are scoring targets placed near the edges of the screen, whose high base point value makes you want to delay destroying them as late as possible when your multiplier has been raised as much as possible. Visitors appear in the middle section of fights to move through the stage in a set path and drop a multiplier token when all of them are destroyed. Secret exits are hidden in some areas that require you to commit to shooting them either up close or with your subweapon, and upon being triggered will send you to a secret bonus area after clearing the current one. Disruptors are passive enemies that will try to run away from you of which only 4-5 can spawn per world and one per area, but the areas in which they spawn are randomly picked, with the intent to (as their name suggests) disrupt your precious route by introducing more chaos to the mix. Areas can also feature secret humans, which refill your chain meter by ~8 seconds rather than the standard 6, thus enabling more flexible chaining opportunities where you can grab the secret human first to get as many multiplier tokens as possible before the chain depletes or leaving the secret human for the last so you can enter the next stage with an overcharged human chain meter. You also receive a time clear bonus at the end of each world, so not only do you want to do all the above, but you also want to do it as fast as possible. And as for the micro-est of optimizations, destroying background objects also gives you tick points, so yet on top of all this again you want to cause as much background destruction as possible.

The result of all the above, combined with the existing legions of baddies coming at every direction, is gameplay where you are making a ludicrous number of micro-decisions per second. At any time and place there are multiple scoring objectives at different edges of the screen begging for your attention and enemies from every angle begging for your death. High-priority enemies that fill the screen with bullets are combined with high-priority enemies stealing your humans are combined with high-priority Disruptors/Invaders that are only on-screen for a limited amount of time are combined with secondary scoring targets that should be destroyed before the stage ends are combined with enemies that spawn revenge bullets/extra enemies on death are combined with an ever-depleting human chain meter that’s seconds short of running out. Replays of Nex Machina remain engaging because of just how intense and demanding it is, with almost no downtime to speak of. It’s pure and utter arcade.

What’s often the case with arcade games like these is that the spur-of-the-moment decision making they encourage eventually devolves into rote memorization as players try to beat 20-50 minutes of non-stop carnage more consistently, but Nex Machina remains chaotic to the point where improvisation is a more valuable skill to have. The way it accomplishes this is by combining highly volatile mechanics (i.e. mechanics where increasingly smaller differences in input create increasingly different outcomes) with minor (pseudo-)RNG-driven impulses in order to force a deviation in inputs, and so create unpredictability--or chaos for short.

Something similar was done in Ms. Pac-Man. While the original Pac-Man had a lot of volatility due to the way the ghosts would react to the slightest difference in movement, it was also 100% consistent, and the Ms. Pac-Man developers noticed how high-level Pac-Man play would revolve around executing the same ‘perfect’ route, thus largely doing away with the improvisation factor what drew most people in at lower and medium levels of play. To counteract this in Ms. Pac-Man, they had the ghosts move towards a random corner in the scatter phase at the start of each round, before resuming their standard non-random AI routines. This way, the player couldn’t solely rely on preset routes to survive but had to read and predict ghost behavior on the fly. It’s RNG, but it’s so minor that it’s only noticeable at higher levels of play. The minor RNG in Nex Machina serves the same purpose: making improvisation still relevant on higher levels of play, but without introducing too much inconsistency at any level of play. Of course, memorizing a strategy or a route still plays a large part when chasing high scores in Nex Machina, but it’s not all memorization, and that’s what helps keep it feeling fresh.

Nex Machina has volatility in spades. Because hordes of enemies and bullets moving towards you is a near-constant factor, the slightest deviation in inputs easily spirals out into unpredictable situations. The inaccurate nature of the twin-stick control scheme means that aiming or moving in the exact same directions each run is hard to consistently reproduce. The presence of long-term systems like the human chain meter and item bar means that micro-differences in input have future micro-consequences: entering an area with 25% chain meter left instead of 50% affects how long you can afford to delay grabbing humans or how much of a priority they are, which in turn affects future decisions and decisions after that. The item bar being filled by destroying enemies means that because of the massive and dense waves of enemies, you can only roughly predict where exactly an item will drop. Forgoing to kill optional enemies in turn makes it harder to memorize when said items might drop. Enemies that spawn bullets or smaller enemies on death add even more stuff on screen that makes things harder to control. On Master difficulty enemies will on death shoot revenge bullets towards you, thus making small deviation spiral out even more noticeably (in addition to enemy types that do on-death attacks on any difficulty), and both the player and the enemy move faster, increasing the pressure and making it more likely to make imperfect inputs. On Hero difficulty you must deal with even faster/denser revenge bullets and every power-up drop spawning an expanding laser circle, whose positions you can also only roughly predict.

Then there’s the little pockets of RNG. Some enemies move in random directions or have a slightly randomly offset spawn position, which combined with the way item drops work makes their spawns even harder to predict in advance. Humans don’t completely stand still but instead randomly and slowly roam about their spawn point, which then affects where human stealer-type enemies will go and which human they will prioritize, on top of you having to adjust your human chaining routes. Some enemy types begin bouncing or shooting in random directions or orientations on spawn. The most notable example of RNG are the Disruptors, whose placement and appearance are certainly randomly picked out of a handful of preset solutions.

What then prevents Nex Machina from feeling like uncontrollable chaotic nonsense is that the player has the tools to deal with everything consistently, and that Nex Machina does not demand absolute precision. The most notable example of this is how often Shield pick-ups are dropped (provided the player has all other item upgrades), which means that small one-off mistakes do not result in immediate death spirals. Similarly, the game is quite lenient with extra lives, which are completely divorced from scoring and can be found in secret spots, of which there are about 2-3 in each world. The human chain meter is also quite lenient in how fast it depletes (especially when compared to other chaining systems like those in the Dodonpachi series). Each area is designed to always have a close-by human near each starting point that you can always reach in time, provided you nail the level end dash of the previous area (which replenishes a bit of human chain meter when nailed). The triple dash gives you a lenient amount of i-frames to dash through bullets and enemies with, and recharges relatively fast. Subweapons allow you to dispatch multiple tankier enemies at once, and your primary shot with the spread upgrade is wide enough that aiming accurately isn’t that important. The RNG in Nex Machina does affect potential clear time and the potential end-of-world score bonus you get for clearing the world quickly, which might suck if you’re speedrunner. But thankfully, this score bonus always caps out at 4 minutes and 30 seconds. If you clear it under that time, you will get the highest possible score bonus, meaning that getting slightly subpar clear times (because of RNG) won’t be damning to your score. To conclude, even if some details are unpredictable or have random deviation, it’s well within your toolset to deal with them.

It's when you don’t have that toolset that Nex Machina feels like some straight bullshit, which the Single World mode nicely showcases. There you start each run in a world of choice without your upgrades--your triple dash, weapon spread, dash explosion and weapon range--leaving you only with a narrow peashooter and limited mobility. For the first world this is relatively doable since it’s designed around you starting naked, but in the later worlds (or starting the first world on higher difficulties) you are increasingly dependent on the random upgrade item order to give you the actually useful upgrades first (triple dash and weapon spread) because of how quickly things spiral. I often find myself having to restart a dozen times in the first world after making a small mistake that with all my upgrades either could have been avoided or compensated for.

Not all implementations of RNG in Nex Machina are ideal, of which the random upgrade item order is the most noticeable. Some upgrades are more helpful to the survival of your un-upgraded ass than others. Triple Dash and Weapon Spread, for example, make it much easier to control crowds than Weapon Range or Dash Explosion. Shields seem useful to have at first, but the other four upgrades are better at preventing you from being in a situation where you’re in danger of being hit to begin with. The upgrade order is completely out of the player’s control, and scoring/survival can deviate strongly because of that. For that reason, it would have helped if the upgrade order was static (where Triple Dash and Weapon Spread are preferably the first two), or if the player could control the upgrade order somehow, or if power-ups were styled a la Cho Ren Sha 68K/Crimzon Clover where it’s a spinning circle of all possible power-ups from which you can pick only one.

The chaos that Disruptors create is also not used as effectively as it could have been. If Disruptors spawn close enough when you teleport into a new area, then you can gib them in a second and deal with the rest of the enemies as usual, which makes Disruptors not disrupt much of anything. It then would have helped if Disruptors did not spawn immediately when the player enters a new area, and if Disruptors always spawned outside your range or behind other enemies, where it could then sow more chaos. It would have also helped if Disruptors could never spawn in the penultimate areas leading up to the boss fight of each world, which are intentionally always easy breezy to build up the boss fight coming after. Disruptors then spawning in those areas feels like RNGesus giving you a freebie, which is why they’re better off always spawning in the ‘real’ areas of each world.

Although the boss fights in Nex Machina are built up as the climax of a world, they ironically feel more like moments of rest compared to the intensity of regular gameplay. Human chaining and secondary scoring objectives cease playing a role during boss fights, so the only optimizations left are not getting hit and dealing as much damage as possible. The target prioritization and crowd control of regular gameplay barely play a role in boss fights, as bosses instead opt to throw bullet patterns at you. Combine the lack of scoring opportunities with the relaxed intensity, and you end up with boss fights in NM feeling like a lesser mode of gameplay. Arcade games with chaining systems do often relax scoring requirements during boss fights or slightly alter how it works for bosses only (since it’s hard to ‘chain’ a single enemy), but they make up for it by having the boss be more intense to fight. In Nex Machina, the only truly intense bosses are the TLB and the fifth boss; the former takes the kids’ gloves off the bullet pattern design and goes all out, and the latter attacks you from multiple angles using multiple destroyable parts, which is more in line with regular gameplay. It could have been neat if chaining humans was still a thing you had to do during boss fights, either by spawning more of them in as the fight progresses or by relaxing the depletion rate of the chain meter for bosses only. Having boss fights be designed around spawning multiple targets (like the Architect fight) would also make them more in line with the strengths of the rest of the game.

One downside of Nex Machina’s reliance on secrets for scoring is that it creates a massive knowledge barrier if you want to begin scoring semi-competently. While most arcade games feature scoring tricks that’s more a matter of knowledge than being able to apply them, at least you usually won’t know about their existence and what you’re missing out on. Secrets in arcade games can be useful for staggering the rate at which the player is taught about the game instead of overwhelming them from the get-go, but having too many secrets can turn people away due to the sheer amount of stuff they need to memorize. This is further exacerbated by the fact that you’re made very aware of the existence of secrets in Nex Machina. At the end of each world, you see all the secrets you missed, which is psychologically more deflating than if you never knew you missed some to begin with. Thus, it gives off the feeling that the game wants you to go look up all secrets beforehand. This goes double when you consider that extra lives aren’t tied to scoring, but that they’re placed in secret spots you must shoot. Even if you just want a basic survival clear, memorizing the spots of all extra life pick-ups becomes essential, and having to look up external videos or analyze replays just to learn about the secrets is a hurdle more suited for score-chasers than people who just want a basic 1cc.

Second problem is that the discovery of secrets isn’t that interesting either. Your main methods of interaction with the world are moving around and shooting things, meaning that discovering secrets for yourself involves having to keep the last enemy alive and shoot/explore all edges of an area (all 70+ of them) to see what yells and what doesn’t. It’s a tedious and boring process. Watching a YouTube video or an in-game replay speeds things up, though arguably not having to consult external resources for a basic survival clear at all would be more useful. Nex Machina doesn’t have much in the way of exploration or puzzles or hidden interactions to make the discovery of secrets feel more exciting, nor would there be much potential to make discovery interesting within Nex Machina’s limited design scope. If there’s no way of making discovery of secrets more interesting, then it might have helped to make the secrets more obvious or announce their presence in one way or another (like how the presence of a Disruptor is announced at the start of each round), or to rework them to no longer be secret (f.e. having extra lives no longer be tied to secret spots).

One curious thing about Nex Machina is that its human chaining system is objectively an arbitrary system completely divorced from survival or normal gameplay, yet wanting to save the humans seems to come almost intuitively. The rate at which you gain extra lives is fixed, and the rate at which items are dropped does not increase the more humans you grab. But even so, you still want to try and save them (or at least, I hope you do). Why is that? The trick is entirely psychological: you care because the objects you must grab appear like fellow humans, even if they are a completely abstract representation of a human being. Rescuing humans feels good, and seeing humans get captured in front of you feels worse. The fact that the subject involves fellow humans instills more feelings than if it had been some featureless geometric shape. Even if rescuing abstract representations of human beings wouldn’t instill any feelings by itself, having them be actively taken away from you and having that loss be shoved in your face is certainly a feeling you would go out of your way to avoid. It is this appeal to humanitarianism that drives people to engage with an otherwise completely optional system that rewards you with nothing other than extra arbitrary points, which just shows how powerful and all-encompassing the indomitable human spirit is (although Mars Matrix proves that appealing to human greed and having to grab gold instead of human beings is just as effective).

I bring this up because scoring systems, or any gameplay systems for that matter, can appear arbitrary and forced when they don’t come “naturally”, leading to people refusing to engage with it or even despising its inclusion. If the base game has a certain gameplay/narrative goal (f.e. staying alive, or looking cool), and the system involves doing something that has nothing to do with that or even the polar opposite (i.e. letting yourself get hit and killed, like in Battle Garegga), then it’s quite literally counter-intuitive. The scoring system could objectively make the game more engaging, but people would nonetheless bounce off it or believe it’s overdesigned. The issue here too, is entirely psychological.

There must be narrative framing or synergy with existing gameplay systems to make systems feel more intuitive and feel natural. In Nex Machina, if you are good at not getting hit and keeping your shield, you are rewarded with a wider primary shot. Narratively that’s arbitrary, but gameplay-wise being rewarded for not dying comes naturally, since ‘not dying’ is in part what you are trying to do the whole game. In JRPGs, enemies are usually not resistant or weak to arbitrary shapes or colors, but rather real-life elements like fire or water. That fire creatures take more damage from water attacks doesn’t appear as an arbitrary rule (even if it technically is), it’s just common IRL sense that fire is weak to water. That flying enemies in Doom Eternal take more damage from the Arbalest does on the other hand appear to be completely arbitrary, because there’s nothing to suggest why they would take more damage from it or what makes the Arbalest so special. But if you reframed the flying enemies as being perpetually on fire and the Arbalest shooting ice stalactites then suddenly it feels a lot more intuitive, even though the underlying mechanics haven’t changed. Appealing to intuition is important for helping a player understand the game and intrinsically motivating them to engage with systems. In Nex Machina, that intuition is “humans should be rescued” and that intrinsic motivation is “saving humans makes me feel good”, and sometimes that’s all you need.

Visually Nex Machina can be unreadable nonsense with its many enemies and particle effects, but the user interface and sound design goes out of its way to make the game readable. So the player and all enemies have outline highlights to make them stand out from the backgrounds, off-screen enemies are telegraphed with arrows at the edges of the screen, your dash and subweapon gauge are displayed around the player character when used and play sounds for when they’re empty/recharged, the last enemy of an area is always highlighted with pink (in case you need to grab all remaining human first), enemy spawns are always telegraphed with silhouettes, the positions of humans are highlighted with arrows stretching from the player characters towards them, those arrows will blink red when the human is about to be captured by an enemy, and the state of your human chain meter (normally shown on the top right of the screen) is displayed double on each human in the form of a ring around the human that slowly shrinks the more the chain meter depletes, so you don’t have to take your eyes off the action to check a bar in the corner of the screen. About the only thing missing is a progress bar showing you the % of enemies you have killed per area, to give you a better idea of when you should draw out grabbing humans and when you should grab them ASAP.

It must be however said that despite being visually readable, Nex Machina’s visual style really does not lend itself to this kind of game. There is a lot of detail in the background and enemy design that, because of the speed of the gameplay and zillion things demanding your attention at once and the crazy neat particle/voxelization effects on top of everything, the player simply has no time to really appreciate or even take in the visuals. Like driving 200mph in a racing car, all the background and finer details turn into a blur, to the point where I feel that all the effort in the backgrounds and enemy design has been wasted. Shoot ‘em ups like the Raiden or Darius games can afford to have beautiful, detailed backgrounds because their scrolling speed is usually slow enough that you have the time to take in all the background details. In Nex Machina, I only started to notice the details on repeat playthroughs or when watching videos/replays. The zoomed-out top-down perspective is essential for the gameplay to work, but it also means you won’t often get a good look at the backgrounds or the enemies from up close. Enemies are thankfully distinguishable enough because of their silhouettes, but design-wise most of them come off as red blobs, which in turn comes at the expense of character. Here I wish that Nex Machina had a more abstract art direction to allow its designs and backgrounds to be fully taken in even at high speeds and under multiple layers of particle effects filling the screen. It might have helped with getting the player to connect with the game at a more personal level.
In conclusion, Nex Machina is a wonderful example of how well-designed scoring systems, little bits of RNG, and a love for humanity can further elevate an already great set of core systems. It looked for a while that this might have been the final high note Housemarque was about to end on, but it seems that with Returnal they intend to continue to enrich the world with more of that arcade goodness.

Ne, ne, nex machine
Finland’s greatest arcade machine
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chum wrote:the thing is that we actually go way back and have known each other on multiple websites, first clashing in a Naruto forum.
Liar. I've known you only from latexmachomen.com and pantysniffers.org forums.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

Durandal wrote:Nex Machina!
Serious question here. Does this not qualify as a Shmup? I know that's sort of up for debate, but I thought bullet-hell games were pretty much thought of as Shmups.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by guigui »

No auto scrolling, twin stick game play : definitely not a shmup game for me.

But the best twin-stick ever made ? Fore sure, and among the best games this decade. Great write up Durandal, thank you.
Bravo jolie Ln, tu as trouvé : l'armée de l'air c'est là où on peut te tenir par la main.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

Okay. Thanks. The auto-scrolling makes total sense to me, I guess I was assuming that, if it was a bullet-hell game, it would be auto-scrolling.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Lander »

Tangential to Resident Evil, I booted up P.N.03 on a whim to try it on arcade stick the other night. Turns out to works surprisingly well if you map the stick to both analog movement and d-pad command inputs.

I'm not sure why I keep coming back to this one, seeing as it's a flawed and quite barebones game, but there's something compelling about Capcom's attempt to make an acrobatic auto-lock shooter out of highly restrictive tank controls - I suppose it's a similar appeal to what God Hand did for beat 'em up / character action, though God Hand has a lot more refinement to its mechanics and overall goofy charm compared to P.N.03's aggressive minimalism.

It feels like one of those concepts that could have been great if they'd had more time to polish up the core and create more varied content; the enemies being dumb robots works well with the movement mechanics, which are interesting and force you to string together dodges, quickturns and jumps in order to keep on the move and occupy enemy blind spots while maintaining a Gunvalkyrie-style awareness of your facing.
But, the movement palette is overall too limited, lacking a Ninja Gaiden rolljump equivalent to keep you engaged in the act of movement after all the enemies are dead.

And when it comes to moving through spaces with no enemies, boy... The 10 mainline missions are more or less fine, with decently varied layouts and powerup drops despite a generally samey aesthetic, but the actual meat of content is in the 5 optional challenge missions that are tied to each of those stages. And they are not good.

Imagine the worst elements of modern roguelike slap-together-a-bunch-of-room-templates design, and you've got a solid grasp on P.N.03's optional missions. Tons of repeated rooms in a nonsensical layout with no map and more three-way branches than any level designer should consider ethical, with minimal powerup drops that mean saving your Energy Drive specials - one of the more fun parts of the combat - is more or less mandatory for the last one or two super intense rooms. The whole thing boils down to backtracking through a maze using the left-hand rule, and trying not to second-guess yourself into exiting early when you reach a teleporter.

Why not skip them, you might ask? Because they give out exponentially increasing currency bonuses for completion - essential if you want to keep on top of the suit upgrade economy - and become inaccessible once you move on to the next mainline mission. So get ready for the grind.

In some way I find it echoes Vanquish, another Mikami shooter and much better game at its core, in that it shows a promising base with obvious room for expansion that never came to fruition in a sequel. With Vanquish it was the overheat system preventing abuse of the super cool melee moves, with a couple of no-limits story moments showing what the suit could really do.

With P.N.03 it's a more general malaise that feels like there came a point in development where they had to cut it, ship it, and move on. There's something worthwhile in here that bears trying (I may boot it up again tonight despite all this critique :) ), but you have to take the good with the bad more than in your average 'flawed gem' title.
vol.2 wrote:I remember it being punishingly difficult on harder levels (though it's been some time since I played through). Especially that you had to burn the zombie bodies or they would come back, and there wasn't really a way to burn everybody, so you end up having to strategically leave zombies around to avoid in the future. I think it was easier to avoid the zombies though, owing the superior controller of the GC, and just some amount of refinement that had been done on the game.
Yeah, it felt like a big win when you could engineer two or more zombies to die in a pile and burn them all with one unit of fuel. I think Real Survival was the toughest on account of forcing you to fundamentally change your route, whereas other stuff like hard, knife-only and the speedrun targets were initially quite intimidating but gradually fell to optimizing the same base run with some extra tricks and safety strats.

And they definitely polished up the tank controls - analog factor aside, I remember being quite impressed that the standing turn animation paused at 90 degree increments to make it easier to stop on a cardinal direction.
Air Master Burst wrote:One Dangerous Zombie mode can lick my taint, though.
Not being able to turn that guy off after unlocking him was pretty annoying. Though he only appears in a couple of places iirc, so it could have been much worse.

Invisible Enemy, on the other hand... Paranoia mode unless you're a memo god :lol:
Durandal wrote:Nex Machina!
Represent! One of Housemarque's finest, exploding (both literally and figuratively) with modernized arcade energy.
The voxel tech they used for the environments was great too - chunks flying everywhere, those big wave effects when you bomb, grand.
vol.2 wrote:Serious question here. Does this not qualify as a Shmup? I know that's sort of up for debate, but I thought bullet-hell games were pretty much thought of as Shmups.
I'd put it down as a run-and-gun, though that's probably getting into semantics when games like Out Zone can be that and also class as a shmup on account of sharing so many fundamentals with their parent genre.

Genres are a busted notion anyway :)
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Air Master Burst »

PN03 was severely handicapped in development by virtue of being the only Capcom action game of that generation that wasn't a prototype for RE4 at some point.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by SuperDeadite »

"Sales Discontinued." New game for MSX. If you like Sierra/Lucas Arts point and click adventures, you must play this one.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

SuperDeadite wrote:"Sales Discontinued." New game for MSX. If you like Sierra/Lucas Arts point and click adventures, you must play this one.
Oh yeah, I saw a youtube video about this. Looked interesting.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by To Far Away Times »

God of War 2018.

It's got nice production values and the character interactions are good, but this game is really just The Last of Us reskinned. Oops your path is blocked go find the macguffin. Millions of incremental things to collect to level up your character. 1 of 3, this, 1 of 3, that.

Change the shooting of The Last of Us to hitting people with an axe and you've got a game made on the same assembly line. Camera's the same, lots of walking and dialog, brief bits of action, lots of padding and slow traversal through areas looking for incremental upgrades or hidden items.

It seems like AAA games are on a template now and its just the same thing over and over.

What's here isn't bad, and its new for the series, but its all been done many times now.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by XoPachi »

I'm working to 100% Kaze and the Wild Masks. This game is very completionist friendly and so fun that I feel compelled to do it. What a great game.
Its nice to see people doing something with the Donkey Kong Country formula.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by -Fish- »

ASTLIBRA Revision on Steam.

Absolutely amazing action based hack n' slash JRPG. There is absolutely nothing else like it I'm currently aware of. From what I read it was 14 years in making by one dev. A true hidden gem.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by guigui »

-Fish- wrote:ASTLIBRA Revision on Steam.

Absolutely amazing action based hack n' slash JRPG. There is absolutely nothing else like it I'm currently aware of. From what I read it was 14 years in making by one dev. A true hidden gem.
Looks really nice, cant wait for the Switch version ?
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BurlyHeart »

-Fish- wrote:ASTLIBRA Revision on Steam.

Absolutely amazing action based hack n' slash JRPG. There is absolutely nothing else like it I'm currently aware of. From what I read it was 14 years in making by one dev. A true hidden gem.
This is mad interesting. Many thanks for the heads up.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by -Fish- »

BurlyHeart wrote:
-Fish- wrote:ASTLIBRA Revision on Steam.

Absolutely amazing action based hack n' slash JRPG. There is absolutely nothing else like it I'm currently aware of. From what I read it was 14 years in making by one dev. A true hidden gem.
This is mad interesting. Many thanks for the heads up.
It's no problem at all. I've been enjoying this since release. I believe it's around a 50-60 hr game. I'm only about 10 hrs in but my word of advise is to play on Hell difficulty for an amazing challenge (I know challenge can be subjective of course but hard difficulty felt slightly easy and impossible felt well...impossible).

Guigui, I'm afraid I haven't heard any specifics on a Switch release.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

ASTLIBRA Revision

looks amazing. putting it on the list
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

If I were to rate Hellnight, it'd probably end up somewhere around 6/10. It's a game that's utterly pointless to recommend to anyone who doesn't actually enjoy all the odd quirks it relies on. But if you do, however, it's one hell of an experience.

Image Image Image

It's one of the closest experiences I've had to classic PS1 era FromSoft without being classic PS1 era FromSoft. There's a really unique nightmarish and claustrophobic atmosphere to everything in the game, drawing very strongly on the peculiar look of early PlayStation 3D graphics, as well as a moody soundtrack, a limited first-person perspective with an abysmal draw distance, and the fact that the only other character to ever show up visibly in the game's 3D environment is the monster that stalks you throughout the game.

Every other NPC only pops up occasionally as a JPEG overlay out of nowhere, or in the invidivual single rooms which are also just flat graphics, and all have that unique FromSoft style bizarreness to them. They also have a similar tendency to show up dead if you go back and visit them later in the game.

When the game isn't a dungeon crawler style adventure game centered around finding items and using them the right places, the only actual gameplay focuses on trying not to get cornered by aforementioned monster which always exists somewhere on the same map as you, walking around semi-randomly. It moves around slowly normally, but if it chases you it will rush ahead extremely fast although it is somewhat slow at turning. You need to use this to your advantage, and avoid trapping yourself in dead ends, because there is no way to run around the beast unless you're in one of the few rooms wider than a single "tile".

This can get intensely grueling in scenarios where you are exploring yet unmapped areas and might be quite a ways from the last place you had the opportunity to save your game. The monster can kill you in a single hit, unless you're traveling alongside one of the game's five companions that can be found underway. In that case, the companion will take the fall for you and die permanently for the rest of the game. Who you are with affects the ending and many of the NPC encounters underway, so I stubbornly reloaded any time my original partner took a hit, never replacing her throughout the game.

That does become easier to avoid as you move forward throughout the game though. Learning how to approach the exploration, and how to manipulate the monster as well as anticipating the mechanics that governs its appearances in certain locations will ease the tension a lot - but if you manage to move far enough away from your last save, the pressure returns regardless.

As such the game is close to just getting kinda tedious by the end, but it makes up for it by going absolutely psychedelically bonkers in its final chapter. I'd hate to spoil that for anyone planning on playing the game.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sima Tuna »

Subnautica is currently scaring the piss out of me.

My first encounter with a Leviathon was probably one of the most pants-shitting moments I've had in gaming. I saw the dude swimming around, so I turned and booked it. I could hear something behind me, but I just kept swimming away. Eventually, I figured I was safe. So I turned around to check. Nothing there. Cool.

Suddenly, a massive Leviathon came clipping out of the ground! He had still been chasing me and just clipped himself into the earth while still following! :shock: I about pissed myself.

But hey, at least now I have my Prawn Suit and I can go all Kenshiro on rude sea animals that try to fuck with me. ATATATATATATATA A group of Bonesharks found out about that the hard way.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

playing Young Merliln for the SNES

I got sucked into a Westwood rabbit hole last night, and I wanted to try out some of their lesser known stuff.

It's not bad .

The character animations are pretty goofy, so it's not hard to see why people wouldn't exactly flock to it; the graphics are extremely lackluster for what the SNES was capable of, limited color palette, low resolution character sprites, little to not use of effects. In a lot of ways, it looks like a game from a previous generation console.

But it's pretty damn fun, and can be challenging. It features a system of magic items that you produce from gems that you find lying around or are guarded by enemies. It's a pretty clever mechanic that gives it an action adventure feel without leaving behind the arcade in the process. Individual areas feel a bit like a beat 'em up game, where you have a set enemy obstacle count and have to clear certain things out to
proceed. Really fascinating that this is the same studio that made Eye of The Beholder and Command and Conquer.

Only about 30 minutes or so into the game, but it's captured my attention enough to distract me from playing Doom for a little while.

I also played a little bit of Shadowgate 64, and I kind of like it, but I understand why people don't. It's kind of like Stonekeep with a less compelling maze dungeon and no real combat. The atmosphere is cool though, and there is a story there which is interesting enough to watch unfold.
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