Randorama wrote:Kitten, have you ever heard of Ian Bogost? If not, please avoid at all costs (re: spoilers).
far enough ahead of you that i hadn't even thought of the name in years, don't worry
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i just got the platinum trophy on
RUINER, a modern (and relatively recent) game that seems to bill itself as a top-down shooter but sticks its finger in too many pies, as most modern games tend to do. i do not understand quite what this game was going for, but i feel confident in saying it didn't achieve it. aside from the slick soundtrack (prominently featuring a track from susumu hirasawa's masterpiece album, aurora), i found almost nothing of substance, here, even in the oft-lauded visuals - which were more than a tad too grungey and plastic-feeling for my tastes. felt like someone spitshined a dreamcast game and then added a boatload of volumetric lighting effects.
combat is severely muddled by a level-up system that lets you redistribute points on the fly and configure some outright comically broken configurations that turn the game's mediocre combat system into a boring and easily abused joke. there are too many buttons and abilities but too little focus on the basics - i don't understand why on earth a game advertising itself as being as hardcore as this has to have the character physically turn in one direction before i'm shooting in it, and this delay in movement is KILLER with the rapid dashing you're going to be doing all over the place. enemies frequently fire weapons from offscreen that can halfway kill you and also frequently
teleport offscreen (once you're a little over a third through the game), but they're of little-to-no threat if you're just dashing around like a maniac.
the game constantly shoots into spurts of slow-mo that hinder more than help and disrupt the flow of combat, you have to actually manually look in a direction to shift the camera over there (it's zoomed out but not nearly far enough in many arenas), there are dialogue options (that almost unilaterally do nothing), some combat situations render an ability you have useless and nudge you to reconfigure your entire set-up, there's a hub world for god knows what reason, there's glory kills (euuughhh), enemy characters have dialogue and brief cinematics (that will replay if you die - i found myself wanting to twist my controller in twain at a few points), etc., etc. there are enough things in this game that throw a wrench into the pacing of what you would expect out of a top-down shooter that it starts to resemble some sort of shitty diablo than it does something like hotline miami - which it did actually draw quite a few comparisons to.
bosses are way too easy and simple, enemies have introductions for every new variety but generally act near-identically to each other, the weapon variety is totally pointless... i just don't understand this game. i mean i really don't get it. what was it trying to do? there's a heavy emphasis on its weak narrative and world-building that suggests being a shooter was almost secondary, but then there's so little to do in the hub world that it suggests it was supposed to be a shooter. neither are at all satisfying.
the game also has the
fucking gall to have a trophy for dying 666 times
and one for beating any difficulty on a single life. which is it? is this some sort of hyper-difficult perfectionist game where you're meant to die repeatedly, or is death something meant to teach you to never do something again? before the dlc was added, this game lacked new game+ difficulty, speedrun mode, and arena mode, but i had the option to play each. i did. i even beat the game on a single life on easy (there's way too much abrupt and frankly somewhat unfair death on hard and enough on normal i didn't want to restart a bunch of runs). after doing
everything and getting every single trophy in the game minus 666 deaths, i went to get that one.
(first off, mother fucking
lol at 569 deaths and S rank - what a stellar ranking system)
i had to die FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-NINE MORE TIMES to get the achievement, meaning i sat in place and summoned a supply drop to crush me for half an entire hour, solid. this means that during the course of
everything that i did, i died less than 100 times. in what
mother fucking universe does a person playing this die 666 times, naturally? what in god's name could cause such a thing to happen to someone? a speed-runner who has been practicing several times a day for months? someone in QA told to see if they could bug their corpse out of a boundary? who? who is this bad at the game that they would get this? i'd presume it's a joke if the game didn't advertise it as hardcore and actively tease you when you died. this is, according to charts, the rarest of all the achievements in the entire game (outside dlc), meaning i'm far from some sort of exceptional player in getting it last.
i generally tend to assume that an achievement or trophy is a barometer of the intended way to get the most out of the game, and holy moly does it suggest the designers of this knew jack squat about what they'd made. this reminds me of trash from a couple of generations ago, like hunter: the reckoning or fallout: brotherhood of steel. it's admittedly much more polished and has kind of a combat groove going on that kept me relatively engaged, but compared to something like furi (or even what i've seen of nex machina, which i've yet to get around to), i cannot see a reason to play this.
by the way, if you thought i was exaggerating about turning the game into a broken mess with certain abilities,
here's a video of me gradually breaking the game into sub 1FPS in the secret level arena (on NG+, which is the game's hardest difficulty setting), completely unable to be killed so long as i kept mashing a few buttons. don't worry, though, the combat system still isn't good regardless of how many self-limitations you try putting on yourself to pretend there's a real game, here.
in summation, here's a screenshot of a very selective portion of the screen in a select area to describe how i felt:
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i also played
ori and the blind forest, which, despite being a marginally better game, doesn't deserve as many words in an action thread. frustratingly simple and unpleasant combat that didn't need to be present in the game, platforming too inspired by the likes of DKC, needless gating and unlockables, and a narrative that didn't need words, cutscenes, a na'vi parrot, or animal crossing-esque annoying voices, but got each of them. most of the game is actually pretty, but i feel the visuals fall-apart late in the game. the areas start to lack the detail and compound background elements necessary to give the illusion of depth and it starts looking almost as flat & ugly as those recent rayman games (minus the unpleasant euro-cartooning). i had started to warm up to the game until i hit its last third and the platforming went full dkc - lots of trial and error and questionable footing/spacial distancing (how many weird moves do i need to do to cross this gap i can't see the other side of until jumping, etc.). i almost feel like the game got rushed toward the end.
like ruiner, ori wasn't so much outright bad as a technically over-polished hodgepodge of a bunch of popular trends with little substance. i remember seeing the designer on GAF talking about how he could improve mario if he were given the reins by having you gradually unlock each of mario's abilities. god damn, what density.
BONK IN HELL might work. Bit rude for the PAL market though!
| 
) brought me back to Ninja Gaiden, a game that I found to be nearly impossible many years ago - like Tatsujin for the Mega Drive, I couldn't get pass stage 3, if I remember correctly 
.
The infamous spinneh-mah-winneh invincible airborne death machine is just called Jumpslash around here, or some variant of. Can't remember the official name tbh. 
If you've ever done so (in any of the three), lemme know and you're in. It started off as a joke, poking fun at various incandescent ragequitters, but everyone liked it so it stayed. It's more of the Ninja Ryukenden Competence Force. 
