What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[To Far Away Times]

Super Mario Wonder. Game is so awesome. It feels like anything can happen while playing. Like if you smashed in the creativity of Yoshi's Island into Mario.

I saw a post online that said five people worked on Super Mario Bros in 1985, and four of those people worked on Super Mario Wonder 38 years later. Crazy to think about.

[Marc]

Just attempted to start Hollow Knight. Unimpressed. Drab and directionless.

Do you like metroidvanias generally? I could see plenty of people on this forum buying Hollow Knight based on the hype surrounding the game/Silksong, then realizing they dislike console game design and metroidvanias in particular.

HK has souls-inspired resource gathering and boss design, but is generally more pure metroidvania (imo) than soulslike. I think HK is for its generation was Super Metroid was for us boomers.

I'm currently playing Haak and I think it's very enjoyable. The game has a really unique atmosphere, gripping story and excellent quality-of-life features. Movement feels just right too. Very intuitive run speed, jump height and dash distance. The game gives you the good toys early so you can play with hookshotting and air dashing from the very tutorial.

In general, I love them. Though the last one I played was the first Ori game, and I found that pretty shite.

Started Monster Boy instead, this seems like fun.

[BurlyHeart]

Interesting. I generally don't like metroidvanias but I loved Hollow Knight. Go figure.

[guigui]

Interesting. I generally don't like metroidvanias but I loved Hollow Knight. Go figure.

Hollow Knight is definitely metroidvania, but it has that little souls things that I found most pleasant. I'd say the "directionless" aspect makes most of it, as well as the atmosphere and the very numerous DS references.

One ragret I had playing it is that I could beat most bosses by tanking and wacking them as fast as possible (and using heals). Never really had to learn their patterns and git gud at them. I love grinding though, so maybe I was a little overpowered and this technique is not available to non-grinders.

[BurlyHeart]

I don't really like souls games either

I am sucker for visuals, character design, world building, and story-telling though. Something Hollow Knight has in abundance. The combat was good too, I thought.

[Sima Tuna]

Combat in Hollow Knight was good once I equipped the badge that stops your character from being knocked back when attacking.

[guigui]

Combat in Hollow Knight was good once I equipped the badge that stops your character from being knocked back when attacking.

Oh yes, I did not even remember that one. Equipped it as soon as I got it, never unequipped it after.

[To Far Away Times]

Making a big ass game like Hollow Knight with two people is really impressive. Some incredibly smart work in maximizing asset use and keeping things simple. Very good direction and product management that I think many could learn from.

But as a game I just didn't really have that much fun playing it. Depressing atmosphere with aimless exploration and really nothing to work towards.

[cfx]

Making a big ass game like Hollow Knight with two people is really impressive. Some incredibly smart work in maximizing asset use and keeping things simple. Very good direction and product management that I think many could learn from.

But as a game I just didn't really have that much fun playing it. Depressing atmosphere with aimless exploration and really nothing to work towards.

I think I don't often agree with your opinions, but I'm 100% with you here.

[Marc]

Making a big ass game like Hollow Knight with two people is really impressive. Some incredibly smart work in maximizing asset use and keeping things simple. Very good direction and product management that I think many could learn from.

But as a game I just didn't really have that much fun playing it. Depressing atmosphere with aimless exploration and really nothing to work towards.

I think you've just discouraged me from bothering again ha.

Started to make my way through the hundreds of Switch games I've picked up for pennies. They get five minutes. And deleted if I'm unmoved.

First up: Danger Scavenger. Twin Stick shooter, enemy energy bars, horrid visuals, crafting. Deleted.

Second up: Galaxy Champions. Superb Smash TV rip with simple but effective visuals, and a great 'feel'. Gameplay is mostly easy to read - something I occasionally didn't feel with Xeno Crisis- controls are smooth, power ups and upgrades are effective, but well balanced. A keeper.

[XoPachi]

Making a big ass game like Hollow Knight with two people is really impressive. Some incredibly smart work in maximizing asset use and keeping things simple. Very good direction and product management that I think many could learn from.

But as a game I just didn't really have that much fun playing it. Depressing atmosphere with aimless exploration and really nothing to work towards.

Agreed. I got rid of Hollow Knight a long time ago. I got sick of getting lost in mostly samey environments that aren't designed to really be getting lost in. Often, I thought I was about to find something only for it to be, at best, a worthless trinket. This is a trend I'm generally sick of today in both AAA and indie gaming. Genres that cut their teeth on rich moment to moment gameplay and reward systems are now getting these overhyped entries that give less of it in exchange for bloated art focuses and "atmosphere". So you get a lot of aimless, unrewarding meandering that feels like I paid to have my time wasted. Thankfully, search action games aren't too inundated by it, but the top picks by many have these problems.

Ori's another popular, "artsy" search action game I couldn't get into. But listening to it's fans over the years, apparently we're supposed to love it because "it's sad and story rich! The little animal characters make sad animal moans and big sad eyes when the main conflict happens. It's got emotion because the game holds up signs to tell you when to feel an emotion like a Disney movie!" Then you play it and you actually DO want to cry because the game is an eye melting visual mess with really spotty physics making it frustrating to play as fluidly as it thinks it's being. I don't know what 1 is like as I only played 2. But I've heard it's just overwhelmingly better than the first which REALLY says to me I should never touch it.

I'm not even going to say any of those are anything close to bad games because that would be an absurd take. But they're grotesquely overrated and did enough to massively annoy me that I didn't bother to finish them. There were other far more fun search actions released at the time I got them and I just couldn't be bothered to force myself. Monster Boy is better than all of these games and it was not talked about nearly as much as it should have been. It might not have been as "pretty" as HK and Ori, but that game was incredible. It was $40 which turned off people but I thought it was $40 well spent for a game that constantly engaged, challenged, and rewarded me for my initial 25 hour playthrough.

[Marc]

Ori's another popular, "artsy" search action game I couldn't get into. But listening to it's fans over the years, apparently we're supposed to love it because "it's sad and story rich! The little animal characters make sad animal moans and big sad eyes when the main conflict happens. It's got emotion because the game holds up signs to tell you when to feel an emotion like a Disney movie!" Then you play it and you actually DO want to cry because the game is an eye melting visual mess with really spotty physics making it frustrating to play as fluidly as it thinks it's being. I don't know what 1 is like as I only played 2. But I've heard it's just overwhelmingly better than the first which REALLY says to me I should never touch it.

I will. Ori 1 is a BAD game. It controls like butter and initially seems amazing, but quickly descends into challenging you by:

A) asking for exacting movement, with visuals that don't communicate that
B) killing you because we autosaved a moment ago. It's entire ethos is 'you won't lose too much progress, so eat this'

Its shit.
I'm only 2 hours into Monster Boy. While it's tricky, it's tricky done properly.

[XoPachi]

I will. Ori 1 is a BAD game.

Dying right now. lmfao

I'm only 2 hours into Monster Boy. While it's tricky, it's tricky done properly.

The game is loaded with meaningful shit to do accompanied by very good platforming and fun fights. Seriously seriously varied, complex game. It and Aggelos are some of the most painfully overlooked modern search action titles to come from the indie space. Aggelos is masterful in it's authenticity without having to ever reference it's inspirations once. If it did, I missed it because the game wasn't obnoxiously self conscious.

[Marc]

I need to go back to Aggelos. I got stuck on an underwater box that required a bunch if floating about or something, and such is the backlog, I've not yet been back. Fully jntend to, I was really enjoying that one.

[Sima Tuna]

I decided to go back and give Blasphemous another shot. I am enjoying it more, but I'm not quite up to the sections that I remember pissing me off. Precision platforming with ladders and instant-death spikes was very obnoxious in the early days of Blasphemous on Switch. So we'll see if the tons of updates made to the game have improved control any.

I wish metroidvanias would reconsider corpse runs. You can't just take a thing from Souls and put it in your game without thought. Blasphemous vaguely penalizes you with "sin" and wastes your time making you walk back to where you died. Which is 99% of the time going to be next to a spike pit or a bottomless pit.

Come to think of it, I'm also playing Astalon and it has exactly the same problem. It's so desperate to force you to die (because dying lets you level up-another shitty mechanic that shouldn't be in metvanias,) that it places fucking spikes everywhere and makes you complete 5+ precision platforming segments every time you want to walk back to the room where you died. Even sillier is you don't lose anything from dying in Astalon. Walking back to your corpse just gives you an Overheal. It's nice, but sometimes the walk back can be so time-consuming and full of so many BS jumps that it's not worth the trip. On Switch, Astalon has a habit of ladders bugging out too. Your character will wig out when you reach the top and then fall off. So I found it's best to spam-jump up ladders instead.

Astalon's level design is certainly tight and compelling, but metroidvanias have a different set of requirements than linear action-platformers. Or they should. Astalon is more like if CV3 had all the same bullshit traps, but was just a pure metroidvania and you had to run those segments over and over while exploring. It becomes draining after a while, because you've already solved that segment. But the sections are still difficult and punishing enough that you can fuck up and lose 10+ health because you weren't split-second enough in evading that spike trap. There are a loooot of jumps onto retracting spike tiles that require you to jump while the spikes are still out. Easy to screw up the timing on that. You might have to do 3, 4, 5, maybe even more variations on that kind of platforming screen (doding fireballs and acid drips too) just to walk back to where you died.

Game difficulty in itself isn't exactly the problem here. It's more a case of the difficulty undercutting design. Travel is a laborious process, hp recovery is very rare, punishment for mistakes is severe and recovery takes ages. All of these things discourage exploration. I'd say the game is at its best when the area you need to explore is close to a fast-travel point. At those times, un-puzzling all the little tricks and traps of Astalon can be very enjoyable. But... There's a reason that La-Mulana lets you warp from anywhere, right? Astalon doesn't let you.

[Sumez]

Ori is overlooked? Among the sea of modern indie metroidvanias its probably one of the most popular, challenged only by Hollow Knight (but probably trumping it, when looking at a wider slightly mainstream audience)

It being a bad game isn't much of a hot take though. Haven't played it myself, but most other people who enjoy good action games have echoed the claim the the game is all form and no substance.

[Volteccer_Jack]

Playing Assassin's Creed Mirage. Never thought it would happen again, but Ubisoft has surprised me by making an Assassin's Creed game where you play as an Assassin. It unfortunately still uses the dogshit parkour system from Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla, but in every other respect I'm having a great time. The world design is heavily based on AC Unity, with tons of building interiors to freely run or sneak through and endless intertwining paths leading every which way. It's got customizable bombs like Revelations, and a vastly improved version of the rush assassinate from Odyssey. Social stealth is back too, with a very aggressive notoriety system that strongly discourages you from pissing people off. Combat is awful, but pretty clearly awful on purpose to make you want to avoid combat, and fleeing from guards hasn't been this fun since the Ezio games. Can only hope Ubisoft sees fit to make more stuff like this once in awhile between their annual RPG shitfests.
 

frustrating to play as fluidly as it thinks it's being.

The incredibly fluid and skillful platforming is THE reason to play either Ori game. Literally git gud.

Ori 1 is a 2/5 game. Ori 2 is a 4/5 game. The sequel is an overwhelming improvement, the main thing holding it back is when bits of the first game's suckiness occasionally pop up.

[XoPachi]

Ori is overlooked? Among the sea of modern indie metroidvanias its probably one of the most popular, challenged only by Hollow Knight (but probably trumping it, when looking at a wider slightly mainstream audience)

It being a bad game isn't much of a hot take though. Haven't played it myself, but most other people who enjoy good action games have echoed the claim the the game is all form and no substance. :)

MicroSoft puts him on their main stage...well when it's getting a new game. I don't think it's overlooked at all. Seems like a premier game in the genre. I think it's funny that Ori handles better in Rivals of Aether than his actual game.

Ori 2 is a 4/5 game.

Ehhh...3/5.

[Steven]

Live Wire patched 9th Sentinel Sisters, so I tried it again. Before, it was a desperate and often futile struggle for survival where random chance determined how far you got. Now the game is ridiculously easy and not especially interesting. Somewhere in the middle is best, but there really isn't a reason to play it at all in its current state.

[null1024]

Dig Dug II.
I didn't even know there was a Dig Dug 2. It's fun!

In this one, you're on an island with a bunch of enemies and you get to jackhammer spikes into the ground to create fissures in the land. Enemies can't cross the fissures without phasing through like in OG Dig Dug, and if an entire section of land is cut off by fissures, the smaller section rapidly crumbles into the sea and everything on it gets dunked.
This leads to very exciting situations where you try to speedkill everything without getting hit by a lone enemy deciding to phase through the fissure, or trying to get everyone over onto the small side of the island without getting hit.
Right now I'm getting like 40k points around level 10. Should be a lot higher at this point, but when I try to corral the enemies so they die all at once, I tend to get hit.

[Sumez]

There's also that Dig Dug game on DS which combines elements of both Dig Dug 1 and 2

[Marc]

frustrating to play as fluidly as it thinks it's being.

The incredibly fluid and skillful platforming is THE reason to play either Ori game. Literally git gud.

Ori 1 is a 2/5 game. Ori 2 is a 4/5 game. The sequel is an overwhelming improvement, the main thing holding it back is when bits of the first game's suckiness occasionally pop up.

My problem with that is that the visuals get it the way of that. It occasionally demands pixel-perfect movement, with visuals that don't lend themselves toward that. That's before we get into the occasional issue with foreground scenery obscuring the play area. Its too concerned with looking nice, rather than looking clean and clear.

And those teleporter bits? Fuck those.

[null1024]

I've been playing Capcom's Mad Gear, a top-down futuristic racing game by Capcom where you get to jump over stuff. It's pretty fun, and surprisingly stylish.
Has a really obnoxious issue where eventually the road is barely there and courses become like 50% jumps over the abyss. I suspect it's to make up for how much less of a challenge the early stages are, but boy, it's a bit much.

I'm also still playing Dig Dug II, made it to 50k points. I'm getting too greedy -- not one run made it to level 10, but my scores are higher.
I'm getting killed by the Dig Dug grid movement a lot, I want to do some fancy shimmy and then I get locked onto the grid and die.

There's also that Dig Dug game on DS which combines elements of both Dig Dug 1 and 2

Oooh, neat. Might check it out, I've also never heard of this one.

[XoPachi]

Finished up Corn Kidz 64. I think in terms of level design and authenticity, this is really on point to it's inspirations. I just can't wait to get one of these that's a classic length. So many games like this are 3 hours long. A lot of prototypes, "chapter 1's", game jams, or abandonware demos (Sonic fangames). Corn Kidz's main world you have to complete is gorgeous, charming, very full featured and really just damn good. If there were 4 or 5 more of these and an ability/tool to get in each, this would easily sit among or top Rare's N64 outings. They've really got something here.

I'm praying The Big Catch is sitting at a similar length to Banjo 1 with the density and novel ideas of Corn Kidz.

My problem with that is that the visuals get it the way of that. It occasionally demands pixel-perfect movement, with visuals that don't lend themselves toward that. That's before we get into the occasional issue with foreground scenery obscuring the play area. Its too concerned with looking nice, rather than looking clean and clear.

That's exactly one of my main concerns. The sheer amount of blobby lighting effects, bloom, depth of field, foreground fuckery, and other garish visual gunk just makes the action a smeary mess at times. It's less aggravating as it is just...tedious to work around. I booted up the game and immediately got into a fight with one of the three eyed club guys in the desert. Some wooden scaffolding in the foreground almost completely obscured both of us and I had no room to fight him from the direction you fall down into. So I had to stop what I was doing, get over him, and resume the fight just so I could SEE.

Beyond that, you hit an enemy once with your edge and it's like being flash banged. It makes Crimzon Clover look like an NES game with the sheer amount of actor obscuring particle and lighting effects that fly out from the point of impact like a JRPG. I wish you could tone some of that down but the only sliders were for FPS and motion blur.

[null1024]

Came terribly close to 1CCing Virtual On in the arcade. Lost to Fei-Yen though. The machine was set to first-to-3, so I was on there for ages for my one credit.
I use Viper II. Amazing attacks [homing feels super busted, any laxity in movement means you just eat shit when you get hit by it], but every little hit is suffering and I've lost like 60% on round start lol. Probably would have been better off if the sticks weren't so worn, there were a few moments where I'd try to jump or jump-cancel from a standstill/neutral jump and it'd hesitate or not come out at all. Didn't feel like the usual recovery on actions that VO has.

[Sima Tuna]

Aria of Sorrow. True Ending. 5 hours 17 minutes. 99.1% map completion.

This was just a casual run-through. I used to play the shit out of this game on gba, so I was mostly test-driving the Switch port and seeing what I could remember. As far as metroidvanias go, this is still easily top 3 for me. There's no fat on these bones, map-wise. The entire game is all killer, no filler. By the time you could start to get tired of the game, you're gearing up for the Drac Attack and credit roll. The little plot variations to Castlevania's format are nice and dialogue is sparse and to-the-point. This is still my favorite implementation of the Soul system. Three souls is enough to play with but not so many you get overwhelmed. As much as these games have a reputation for farming, I only farmed twice in my entire run. Once for Flame Demon (killed him maybe 4 times) and another for Chronomage. The latter I didn't even use.

Of the three demons required to get the True Ending, Giant Bat is given to you for free. Succubus is incredibly likely to drop as you play, thanks to the endgame corridors stuffed with the lusty ladies. Flame Demon is an asshole farm though, I will admit that. I got lucky and he dropped his soul without any fuss, but his location is behind a secret waterfall you need another soul to access.

But hey, that's the True Ending. For a standard clear, absolutely zero farming is required. If I ran the game again and removed a lot of my faffing about/trying to remember shit, I'm sure I could trim an hour or two off my time. I wasn't using any speed tech.

Short metroidvania? Good metroidvania. Not always, but often. Each area of the castle is immediately visually distinct and the castle is small enough that the warp system is sufficient for backtracking needs.

As far as the Switch port goes, I have only one complaint. There are zero filters whatsoever. Now, that's not normally an issue for me. However, I will typically throw on the very mildest blurring filter when I'm playing a Hamster arcade game. I don't use scan lines, but something to ease the chunky RAWness of these pixels would have been nice. On my giant Switch screen in handheld, those pixels were SO RAW. On a GBA, GBA SP or DS, they're nicely fuzzed by the sd-quality screen and you don't notice the RAWness so much. Switch port does nothing to clean up the look in the transfer to high fidelity screens. The sheer percentage of the screen devoted to RAW pixel when playing on my high-definition screen gave me a bit of eyestrain. The image looks much nicer when zoomed out a bit or blurred slightly is all I'll say. I don't normally moan about lack of filters in pixel games because it doesn't usually bother me. But when an image ceases to be what it's supposed to represent in your mind, and becomes a morass of pixel sludge... Some options would have been nice.

The port includes save states that I never used. Save states are pointless for Aria. Controller remapping was nice though.

[null1024]

Been playing a lot lately.

Hacking away at getting better at Beatmania IIDX, doing some 5s now. It's slow going, but I'm still going.

Still at Dig Dug II, got 110k pretty recently. Made it to level 12.
There are a couple of stages that I don't have a good plan for, so I'm still leaving a fair bit on the table and/or dying for no reason, but eh. It's fun.
Probably should keep better track of my scores. I think there's supposed to be a config setting+extra files in MAME to make games retain scores on close, I just never did it.

I started playing Panikuru Panekuru, which looks like it's made by the same team that did Mr. Driller.
Very fun action-puzzle game where you have to keep yourself from getting boxed in while stones appear on the playfield.
You capture stones like in reversi, and then they disappear after a while. The easy course is... well, easy, and I'm trying to clear the middle course.
[edit] looking at it again, there are two courses and an endless option, no "middle" one.

I've also been playing Flicky's arcade release.
I really love this game. Pretty much all of my deaths are later on with the stupid lizard that runs up walls. I've been jumpscared by that thing too much.
The sprites are also really, really nice, way nicer than the Genesis version. The backgrounds are just okay, but the characters all have this nice, rounded, smooth look to them and are well animated.

as an aside, I really should go get Armored Core 6, I was going to buy it last month and didn't

[To Far Away Times]

Whenever I'm in between games I try to climb the titular spire in Slay the Spire.

This game is endlessly replayable. I think I have about 120 hours in it.

[Marc]

Double Dragon Advance on Switch, fuck yeah! Launched at a VERY reasonable price stand-alone, a little less than an AA title.

Also DL'ing LAD: Gaiden. Daytona 2, finally.

[SuperDeadite]

Tempest for 3DO!
Damn cool project:
https://youtu.be/vpnwJpWj8Nk?si=xa_ULSfkKnBPJZkT