Not much this week, just taking our time with Terraria.
We’ve been hanging out post Plantera, waiting for the Angler to give us the materials for the shellphone. I think my favorite feature in this version is the banner menu, going on a mining trip and not having banners fill my precious inventory space. Also happy April fools day I forgot about it so I don’t have anything silly lined up so, how’s everyone else this week?
Haydee is a 2016 Metroidvania-style third-person shooter that centers exploration and platforming…and survival. Many people would consider those descriptions somewhat redundant to “Metroidvania-style” but I think it’s important to point out survival was an aspect of almost all video games of the Metroid and Castevania era, and an important distinction for those games and the “genre” as a whole is that later exploration opens up areas seen but not available early in the game. Survival in Haydee is much more like early Resident Evil games: you have to avoid getting hit and conserve your ammo, medpacks, and saves. On top of that, your inventory is small and non-specialized and save points are rare. And just as you have to have a typewriter ribbon available in Resident Evil to operate a save point, Haydee must have a diskette…a separate inventory item. Over the past decade two sequels have been released to increasingly positive ratings. But I suspect most people don’t notice the game until they see the cover art:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Play It For The Articles: Haydee”
So, last week I talked about how RE9 felt like 2 games superglued together. Since then I’ve played through the game 3 more times in the hunt for the platinum trophy and I am fully committing to what I wrote before. Leon’s sections of the game are an action-packed blast akin to RE2make and REm4ke. It still keeps the weird particularities of Resident Evil games’ identity but isn’t exactly hard. Grace’s sections are scary and have you feeling underprepared and nervous at all times. It’s a very entertaining, though messy experience.
I’m basically bedridden with the man flu right now and don’t have much else I want to discuss, so I will instead ask you all a question. What’s you’re favorite 7 out of 10 game? Like, you know it’s objectively not great but you still love it anyway for whatever reason.
This week was just Terraria.
We haven’t really made much progress since last week since my sibling and I are jumping between different playthroughs. Our main world is early hardmode, and our second world is almost caught up at just before the Wall of Flesh. The only thing noteworthy about this run, is that through sheer determination and luck, I got a shadow key from the dungeon without killing Skeletron by using a hoik to get through the walls of the dungeon, I did die many times but it was worth it for the novelty alone.
What’s everyone doing this week?
This “review” will be spoiler free for Resident Evil Requiem.
I rarely preorder games anymore. I’ve learned to wait to see if a game turns out to be a disaster or if I lose interest. My backlog is big enough. I don’t need to add to it and waste money at the same time. On this particular release I deviated from that path for Resident Evil: Requiem because I’ve grown very attached to the series in the recent past. Also the few trailers I ended up seeing sold me on it. Now that I’ve gotten the game and gotten through to the end of it, I’m left conflicted. I enjoyed my time, but was the game actually good or do I just love the IP?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Can’t Decide If I Like Resident Evil 9”
This week was just Slay the Spire 2 and Terraria.
So far the update for Terraria is their normal array of additions, quality of life improvements, rework of old items, and new items to fill out the more sparse parts of the game. I don’t have much to say, I like Terraria, the update is good.
Slay the Spire 2 is good. Still playing it this week, I finally got some good runs with the Regent, I got a good star based build going with the main highlight being an X cost card that uses stars instead of energy, it deals 5 damage to a random enemy, but I got enough boosts to that cards damage to get it to 11 damage, and I got to use it with thirty stars. I also got a forge build working. It definitely takes some time to get it going, but it does so much damage once it gets going.
I’ve learned that just was the case with the first game, I am terrible at playing as the Defect.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
With the recognition that horror movies broadly, and slasher movies explicitly, had to be made within the context of an audience and cast that knew how horror movies functioned, the tropes that made the original franchises work were…sort of…put to rest. At least they were retired as “high-concept” ideas. Really they already had been to a degree. “Escaped mental patient kills babysitters with no motive” was a great idea in the late 1970’s. But despite John Carpenter’s intentions the series couldn’t escape from the trend of “just doing the same thing over again.” As good as I would argue Halloween 4 is, you wouldn’t be wrong to point out it’s just a different take on the original, using information developed in the second film. From the beginning Friday the 13th was designed as a cash-in on Halloween and other early slashers. It proved to be a repeatable hit thanks to extremely low budgets. That it occasionally even did something interesting was just a bonus. A Nightmare on Elm Street arguably had the loftiest goals and cleverest idea. But even though New Line pulled the rug out from under Craven, the second film has subtext that didn’t reach a wider audience until years later and the Dream Warriors era that dominated the sequels successfully re-imagined the franchise in a new way. So thoroughly, in fact; that Craven was able to revisit his original idea through commentary to try to remind everyone what the point was (or points were, depending on your argument.) Horror movies hadn’t been doing as well at the box office since the late 1980’s, but even as the latter half of the 1990’s saw a resurgence in interest, the major slasher franchises would produce future installments as remakes, re-imaginings, reboots, or even just simple genre films.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Horror Slasher Evolution: Final Villain”
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
T w e n t y S i d e d
