Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Indie Gala (and Humble Bundle to some extent)
Why do they keep featuring games I don't want?
Humble is at least slightly better in that there are occasionally things i want, but there seems to be a big fetish for games like Super Meat Boy, Braid, and Gratuitous Space Battles in general. And then they occasionally do weird things like (non-videogame) music and books. (By the way, if you want a videogame music bundle, go to gamemusicbundle.com.)
Indie Gala...I really enjoyed getting their very first bundle. Their second one kinda interested me. After that, my interest has pretty much dropped off. The current bundle and most recent previous bundle are both...ehh.
On the other hand, Indie Royale comes out with a bundle with stuff I want every other bundle.
Comments
Anything that's vaguely retro (by "retro" I mean "a platformer", because you apparently can't innovate in a genre that's been around for more than five years) is the "in" thing in the indie game scene right now. Has been for awhile.
I have no idea why, honestly. I like platformers, but they kind of get old. Most of them are also too hard for me, so I guess that probably has something to do with it.
Maybe they're rediscovering the platformer medium slowly and reinventing the wheel a bit, lol.
Well, here's one thing that annoys me--the trend for super-hard platformers. As opposed to ones with very difficulty-balanced gameplay, and probably an interesting premise.
Considering that the limiting factor to a game idea becoming reality is programming (there are far more interesting videogame ideas than programmers), you understandably get programmers running the show, and while I don't like to stereotype, I don't think that they're that great at things like coming up with scenarios, narratives, and artwork. Might not entirely be their fault either especially if they're pressed on time--they naturally focus on the thing that's most important, which is putting the nuts and bolts together, even if it's not absotively perfect in presentation and stuff.
In fact, one notable difference between pixel art these days and pixel art in days of yore is that back then, pixel art was the result of space constraints, and meant to display and represent something of theoretically far higher resolution, while pixel art these days intends to be simple. The way the art is drawn is influenced; you get fewer shades of color than the usual 16-bit presentation, for example.
Eversion's actually a good example of a platformer that's not about being hard as hell but being an interesting experience. I like that game.
I don't like incredible difficulty being treated as an objective merit, though.
I love the Touhou games too, but I consider their immense difficulty to be one of their major flaws, if anything.
Touhou is really not that bad as far as shmups go, bullet hell or not. Unless you're playing on Hard or higher (in which case you deserve what you're getting) it's pretty darn reasonable once you hit the cognitive plateau of filtering through everything going on.
Like, looking back on some of the SNES stuff, Touhou feels easier.
IWBTG is...I'm not sure I'd call it difficulty. It's chock full of dick moves, but checkpoints are spaced very reasonably. It's balanced around throwing yourself at stuff repeatedly to learn enough muscle memory to do it once. Compare to NES era, where you had to do stuff that was almost as hard with limited lives.
People always tell me that.
This is largely the reason I don't play shmups very often despite quite liking the genre.
Also as a note to game developers, if you are making a game with an Easy difficulty, but making it impossible to beat the game on Easy, consider just removing the Easy setting.
Eh. I don't really find Touhou all that hard on Normal anymore. Like I said, there's kind of a plateau where the patterns just somehow make more sense and break down into clearer components, and you naturally start looking more at the stuff ahead of you and just trust yourself to not hit the stuff you looked at a second ago.
Once you get into Hard+, you start seeing stuff that moves fast enough to actually push your reflexes, but up till then there are usually only a few total douchebag patterns and Orin being Orin.
The main thing is when it finally clicks in your head that like 99% of what's on the screen isn't actually threatening you at all until you wander into it yourself. Your priority shifts from "don't get hit OH GOD" to "these two are the only ones coming at me -- be somewhere else for a second". Which is half of why Orin is such a PITA, because her spellcards all send large things at you that force you to squirm laterally through her other stuff very quickly.
I dunno, I'm good at gimmicks. The stuff that kills me is things like the grand finale spells that just do something idiotically simple but fast.
My complaint about intentional platform hell games like IWBTG is that it basically becomes a high-risk performance game, where you're constantly under pressure to reproduce some perfect set of moves, and there's nothing much else to do. It's not about reflexes or being able to adapt oneself quickly to novel conditions. It's not about thinking through complex situations. It's merely about rote memorization and reproduction. That's it. And it's boring and frustrating, in my opinion.
On the other hand, I much prefer procedurally-generated games such as Nethack or Spelunky because they really are much more about learning skills rather than memorization. There's a lot more problem-solving involved, in some cases at high speeds (such as Spelunky) which makes it even more exciting, as opposed to just reproducing some super-precise solution that you already know about but just haven't trained your fingers to do yet.
IWBTG isn't really an actual game. It's deliberately designed to piss people off when they play it, whereas Super Meat Boy is an actual game, just really difficult.
I think he means it wasn't meant to be a genuinely enjoyable experience whereas SMB was meant to be enjoyed.