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[melos]

I'm curious about XC (what a cool abbredviation) . I think I could only manage to play through that one if I was playing along with a friend, though. There's a new one coming out for only Wii U, too . Idk what it will be lke...

I forgot to mention Pikmin 3. Hm.  It would be neat to play any of the old 3D zeldas again. Havent done Wind Waker in 10 yeras or so! I wonder if I could get into Monster Hunter 3. I played it before college started but coudl never get into it (didnt have enough patience...)

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I played through Brothers today. Mixed feelings on it. we'll talk about it on the Jon Sean Show Super Show

[kittakaj]

Felt kind of tired/slightly sick the past couple days. So basically I just finished working on this wedding invitation design and got a test print (my sister is getting married).

And I started playing Defender's Quest last night. Lars, the dev, was helpful to us around the release of Anodyne... talking numbers and stuff, I forget exactly what. Defender's Quest is a very though-out game, which is nice. There are a lot of options and settings... kind of reminds me of Bravely Default in that sense, but here it works a loooot better than in BD. Because it's a Tower Defense game, so speeding up time, or pausing time, or setting various difficulty settings feels a lot more natural to the whole... because playing the game feels kind of like making a Rube-Goldberg machine and seeing how it runs. I'm not explaining this great, but I'm tired, whatever. Anyway I got kind of hooked on it and played it a lot today. I don't unequivocally love it, but I think it's a pretty good and thoughtful game. I haven't played a lot of Tower Defense games, usually don't like them much, but this has kept my attention.

[melos]

Was at home the past weekend...not much work. Well today, I did some ambient music then saw a college friend. My first Wii U game (not counting Nintendo World), Wonderful 101, came today. Too bad the Wii U hasn't come, yet...oh yeah we got Wii Us on saturday, finally. Excited to try it out.

[melos]

Finished up 1 song so far today. Would like to do more. Kind of didn't do much. Too excited abuot my Wii U + business stuff + college friend things. I'll do more song stuff. Weird having most of the songs done, I think.

want to play wii U...

[Innomin]

Hey folks, it's been a while. I actually found the EtO demo in my humble keys, so I figured I'd come back here and say some things about it. I know it's outdated now, but anyway...

The balance mechanics were cool! I didn't feel like I had total control over my movement yet, but it seemed like something learnable. I almost wish you could get stuck unbalanced for the purposes of learning your limits, but over time I'm sure I'd pick it up.

The interactables were all interesting and gave me some ideas for puzzle designs, which is always a good thing. I think my favorite was the wind - that wind-spike combo in the playground reminded me of VVVVVV a lot. The platforms that moved away when you touched a wall/floor seemed less solid to me - they were either moving too fast or the combo of wall slide and pushing was tripping me up. Again though, this is probably learnable.

One thing about the balance bar design felt a bit off. The red delay in the bar when you take a hit was kind of in the middle of being useful and pointless, because it wasn't long enough to save yourself from a big hit, just to say "damn it" before you died. Since making the delay longer makes everything easier, maybe you could do the old HP-bar trick where getting hit again forces the bar to its final state first. This would allow you to save yourself from one spike hit (a 40% adjustment!?) but not two spike hits (since the second hit would instantly kill you). It wouldn't really have an effect on other gameplay (if you use the final position to control movement speeds like I think you do), but it would feel like more of a chance to recover from a sudden mistake, and let you have 'bosses' that insta-unbalanced you in one hit.

Okay, now bugs. I glitched through a blue spike in the mini-gauntlet after the beach power plant. It was where the purple beam, wind, and blue spike were in the same place. I think I was guarding left and getting enough purple to offset blue spike hits, then I jumped and glitched past the blue spike with a big blue hit on the bar. I'm pretty sure it was the last section before the exit.

In the keyboard settings, I changed cancel to Z and select to X, and the controls didn't update in the menu. This means when I hit X (the old cancel button and new select button), it closed and re-opened the keyboard settings menu in one frame. I think they usually update keys in the menu to avoid this, but you could also just ignore [select] input on the first frame in a menu...


This one's hard to explain so I did an image. When you walk off that platform there's an updraft, but I expected to just fall down the gap. I think this is because you have no y acceleration when you leave platforms this way, and updrafts only affect her while in the air. I would either avoid placing wind like this, or make wind only affect her lower body, or some other quick fix.

And here's a couple design ideas I had for the interactables, feel free to ignore them. Huge miasma areas that slowly unbalance you one way, so you need to keep taking hits. Rebalancing pass-through spots (automatically center the bar), which would be very useful at the start of areas to make sure gates can unlock (I died once from this). Maybe even have orange colored versions of everything center you, so you don't always have an easy way to get to unbalanced levels of jump/run. Electric fans that adjust wind direction (can also cancel out natural wind), that could unlock windy paths and might even make sense in a power plant setting. Orbs that can pass through cannons (you can set cannon directions by jumping in them, then orbs can follow a chained path of cannons and hit targets at many angles). I have more, but I'll stop there - there's actually a lot you can do with no mechanic tweaks anyway...

Okay, I think that's the last big post for a while. I also liked this song you did, it had a great buildup and a strange melody that went interesting places. Nice one. And I'm worried about the Wii U ever since I saw this list with Dreamcast, but the Wii U has sold 3 million more since the last time I saw it so maybe it will pull through. Have fun!

[kittakaj]

Hi Innomin, thanks for the feedback!

Energy Bar
We thought about having further hits kill you instantly when your bar is orange all the way to the end, but it kind of ends up making it more complicated and not all that different. And we do like how you can pull out of close scrapes in certain situations (and that the further you were from death upon a dying blow, the more time you have to save yourself). I think we're thinking of "saving yourself after taking a fatal blow" to be more of an advanced/fortuitous technique rather than a standard practice, so I think it's okay if it's pretty hard. The average player will just be careful to avoid taking that damage in the first place, but daring players can plan ahead if they scope out the environment (to say hit a spike then immediately fall onto a pod of the opposite color). But spikes are supposed to be very dangerous, and mostly to be avoided completely, as they are in many platforming games a one-hit KO.

Thanks for the bug notes! A lot of those awkward situation things with strong wind we'll be ironing out of the main game. Have our eyes on those.

We actually have some things similar to those entity ideas in the game already ! And many others...

Wii U
Got my monitor today, played a little bit of New Mario U! I'm trying to get into Mario. Visually, it's more interesting than it looked from trailers somehow. I'll def give it a healthy chance. Looking forward to Bayonetta though. Sean should get his Wii U today and play Wonderful 101.

I finally got around to trying Fez yesterday. I love how it looks and moves... very sharply designed interface, etc. Base gameplay/narrative is not really my cup of tea. The idea of just going around all these little areas and finding all the gold blocks hid in the different angles and doors kind of just feels stressful to me. It's hard to ever get your bearings because there are these 4 distinct worlds (angles) that interact in sometimes confusing ways. It was interesting to hear Phil talk about how he just wanted to create this "nice place to be" or something like that. I feel like that's undercut a bit by the stress of trying to orient myself and collect all the little thingies.

It's strange thinking of it as both this huge monumental deal and Phil's first game. Because it is highly polished but at the same time feels sort of first-gamey. Just kind of the really basic structure of collect all the things to move to the next place where you collect all the things, etc etc. And the way the dialogue is just like all tropes but 1-step removed from responsibility for it because it's tongue-in-cheek. I'd say Anodyne is kind of like this too. Or at least that's how it comes across due to the vagueness.

[melos]

weird dream
man i just had this weird dream within a dream. the premise was that i fell asleep in a mcdonalds after an allergic reaction and then had another dream while passed out for 4.5 minutes. my wii u is getting here today...I hope...maybe that's why I had a weird dream...well I've been trying to write too, so maybe that's why too.

relation to the most recent posts in this thread

this TIG post was weird bc I thought I went back in time. That demo's from the end of march...so...almost 7 months ago (wow!!!) i'll look at the comments later but a lot has changed since then. thanks 4 playing!

[melos]

Fez (the (mini) review)

Note I'm not hoping this to be personally offensive towrads the devs (Renaud is super nice and from what I hear, Phil is super nice too)

If you (jon) know the whole game stuff (and you probably do) then I can say a bit more, but I played an hour of Fez a month or two ago., I also originally played it in April 2012. Spoilers below I suppose.

Phil wanted it to be a nice place to be, and the intro home area does a nice job of it, but there's this first-game-y-syndrome (at least like Anodyne , too) conflict of having this ineffective narrative which then requires semi-stressful collecting (vs focus on the environments). I have issues with moving around traditionally beautiful spaces without learning the context behind them...it's this game-culture-wide-worshipping of exoticizing and essentializing foreign things. The game gets intro trying to explain its culture but it seems stubbornly set on wanting you to puzzle it together and form theories. I never really liked this. Like there's a few time-travel (probably) doors that go to other stages in the culture's lifespan but there are never books there despite them having writing...even just a date marker. Even if you can figure out the narrative, it isn't easy to figure out, and most areas are just like...no context.

But purely-mechanically, it's crazy to me how good moving Gomez feels. Renaud did an amazing job with the floatiness and it's in such a way with the level design that slightly-out-of-reach-feeling-but-not-really jumps feel good to make. The level design and controls of Gomez feel good.  And the framing of the architecture of a level, with open space around it, helps to narrate your progress through an area. The control mechanics do make the world a 'pleasant place to be'.

Past that, the collection, mystery, unresolved narrative really ruins it. I'm glad there's a minimap though, but it's curious to think what would happen if they went to a more extreme non-narrative and Yume Nikki'd things up, or if they did provide more context clues. The post-game has some parallels to Anodyne, weirdly - well, just the final content in Fez (The heart thing) in terms of Phil and I (inappropriately, I think now) drawing from personal stories to "blur between the game world and our minds". That sort of trick still interests me a bit but I think I have better ways of doing it now that make more sense (at least Jon and I have some plans for post-game in ETO...)

It's totally first-game-y but bizarrely polished at the same time because of the 5 years it took to make, and the excellent programmer there was and calming use of color, and music. Feels weird to win the IGF though, compared to the social and design value of Cart Life and Papers, Please in later years...

On a side note, maybe I'm subtley upset because, being an actual 2-person-team doing everything,  the game was heralded as a 2-person-effort...when it was more like...3 people with major roles, 9 if you count the bizdev, SFX and animation people, not to mention all the funding...and the companies they worked with (though I am working with companies too). That's not really the devs' fault more of the media and how they like to attribute things to small groups

Oh, this is sort of a FEZ review. uh...I give fez a 37/100. It's worth playing to study the spaces and aesthetics and the reveal of the "SECRETS!", but outside of that there's not much about it that feels particularly relevant to me in terms of real life. It does all of this mystery and calming experience to just not say much. This is coming from someone who doesn't value escapism, essentialism or exoticism, though (I think games have enough of it. and there's tons of stuff for escapism (I know all games have it to a degree, but those that emphasize it) out there)

[kittakaj]

New Super Mario Bros. U
God I hate how Mario games are named. Anyway, I played through a couple worlds of this game this morning! It's pretty fun. I always think it's weird how there are these 1-time use opportunity things. There's a big emphasis on replaying for mastery I guess. Instead of being able to master things in a single run. Like I got this weird baby Yoshi and it had all these special techniques that I had no idea how to use... it was well-suited to this one particular level but then i died because I didn't know what I was doing and the baby Yoshi was gone forever I guess. It came from the overworld.

But basically my suspicions are being confirmed, I feel. In the sense that... I never really like Mario games much, but I was thinking that was because I don't already "get" the Mario feel. And not just that, but there are a lot of little unspoken rules about how the physics and movement and interactions work. When Mario fans boot up each new game, I think they forget how many of these little rules they know already. It's weird reading reviews for Mario games, because the reviewer has probably played tons of them. And I really haven't and because of the numerous little quirks, my experience is going to be really different, and my perception of how accessible the game is.

All these quirks of course, are what make Mario deep, creating a lot of different kinds of interactions and ways of moving through space. I guess that's why people like them, but also why they can be kind of annoying to an "outsider". We'll see if I become a Mario fan.

Fez
I don't feel very motivated to keep playing. Well. I feel like I'll keep playing but if it gets hard then I'll basically just want to stop. How much leeway is there in terms of how much completion there is to play through the game?

[melos]

Fez never gets difficult platforming wise but tracking down the last few things can be annoying. Unlocking the mysteries feels good, but like "The Room", it sort of feels old after a while...

After the golden cubes there's something else which will take longer and is probably not that fun now (it was fun when the game first game out for certain reasons). Will take long if ou don't use a guide. I don't remember how many rooms are exclusively existing for those...other things, but as a designer it's worth seeing the different sorts of spaces Fish constructed.

[rj]

there are 3 of those such rooms.

you need a total of 32 cubes to beat the game, and 64 cubes to complete the game with the second ending (which is probably less satisfying than the first one). finding all the stuff isn't terribly difficult as long as you pay attention to the map and what rooms have been cleared and what ones haven't.

anyway, i love fez dearly (it's one of my favorite games of all time); i find the smidgen of narrative thread and the lack of willingness to help you out on that part is part of what makes the game interesting! i love yume nikki-esque things (though i think that yume nikki has more narrative thread than you're letting on) but i love that fez essentially puts you in the role of an archaeologist; you have no context besides an outsider's and you're forced to piece it together. you get exactly as much out of it as you put into it.

which is obviously not for everyone, but it was pretty much the perfect game at the perfect time for me.


i'm actually laughing in real life reality time now

please. there wasn't a "reveal all." that happened years ago. nobody paid attention then and nobody pays attention now. it's not a "tell all" of "corruption," it's a legitimate complaint about human nature (which will always be a problem with any awards show).
 
73

[melos]

please. there wasn't a "reveal all." that happened years ago. nobody paid attention then and nobody pays attention now. it's not a "tell all" of "corruption," it's a legitimate complaint about human nature (which will always be a problem with any awards show).
 
73

Wait, what are you referring to?

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My feeling towards why I don't credit Fez for that archaeology feel is that it's emphasis isn't on actual cultural understanding of the society whose cubes you're collecting or helping find again (besides guessing at the progression of some given culture). I put a lot into it at the time, but it felt in retrospect, like an empty mystery. I didn't really learn anything from studying this culture, everything's too vague - the designer didn't give the tools to tell us what observations of the world they have - instead I have to project myself in to some extent to get something out of it, which works to varying degrees for different people. But my feeling on art in general is to prioritize that which communicates to a player something to change the way a viewer interacts with and reasons about their world. I suppose it could be argued that Fez does this by getting you to dig for secrets and make theories. Hm. Mixed...

On release I loved Fez and its creation plus IG:TM definitely was inspiring to me at the time, but thinking back on it, past that it's hard to tell if I gained much as a person (outside of design). As a designer I think it has lots of nice things about framing the architecture of a level, etc, which does influence me as a person. But in terms of review that's very specific...er...I guess I'm reviewing games moreover to how I think they might be useful in general for people.

Yume Nikki definitely is more easy to interpret b/c the world design feels more...focused on one person, what I meant to say was in terms of less words or dialogue, Fez could have gone in some angle to explore Phil's head instead of this nice place to be. Or have more words and just been stronger overall. By the same argument I have issues with Yume Nikki, and also issues with Anodyne as I've written in the past. Though they serve as good examples for self-expression, but not as much as accessible to the average audience person. Fez, Anodyne, Yume Nikki definitely make players *feel* things, but I like going further than that??? hm

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Got my Wii U today.Pretty fun so far - Nintendo Land, Bayonetta 2 Demo, Wonderful 101. Playing more W101 tonight.

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Did two ambient tracks for ETO today.

[rj]

please. there wasn't a "reveal all." that happened years ago. nobody paid attention then and nobody pays attention now. it's not a "tell all" of "corruption," it's a legitimate complaint about human nature (which will always be a problem with any awards show).
 
73

Wait, what are you referring to?

this turns out to be my response to another post in another thread, which i accidentally copied and pasted from my clipboard. so uh, really sorry about that. i didn't catch that my first way through and i'm not sure why

anyway yeah, to each their own re: fez. i agree it could have been a little stronger with a few more words but i guess i don't mind nearly as much about the impact that has on the game!

48

[Innomin]

Since everyone here is reviewing it, I'll put two cents in on Fez, though it's been a while. I played it when it was bundled, but I intentionally avoided guides as long as possible (which means I cracked the two "things" manually). Story-wise it was very obfuscated, not only because the language of characters and backgrounds was a coded puzzle to solve, but also because after being solved it provided very little info on the world. I remember one of the NPCs was joking about the rectangular shape of your head, which is nice and all but is completely devoid of story content. The main conflict had zero urgency, and when you do figure out what the hexagon is saying it's a complete let down. Exploration for the sake of exploration, nothing else really.

At a certain point I got stuck (26+ anticubes?), and I had to go online and find the solutions. Which was where my other big problem with the game was - some of the puzzles are downright unsolvable, unless you want to dedicate 20+ hours to solving each one. One in particular was solved by the web only by brute force, and in the years since the game's release no one has solved it properly. This is a complete failure of puzzle design, unless it was intentional...

But my biggest problem with the game is the multitude of glitches. I was running version 1.05A or something, and it still hard-crashed at least 5 times on me. In the room with 6 stackable blocks it would crash every time you stacked more than three on top of each other. In the gameboy area, the moving platforms would duplicate every time you paused to check the map (breaking the current room until you left and returned). I can't remember any other bugs offhand, but it was bad.

All that being said, the "bad end" of the game is one of the most interesting experiences in gaming I have ever had the pleasure of playing through. It was brilliant. I wish the good end had lived up to it, but this is one of those moments in gaming I will never forget. So definitely get the 32 cube ending, and see if you change your mind about the story having a lasting effect after playing through that.

[melos]

Been playing a lot of W101, Bayonetta and Nintendo Land recently...uh...I have thoughts I guess...I did some music yesterday. None today, but probably some tomorrow. making progress on that front!  maybe i'll break for event scripting some time? idk. or level design...hm...but i have so many other things i like doing too.

[kittakaj]

Yep so we both got our Wii U's! I'm really happy with it. Just Dance 2015 is super fun, especially for my partner who doesn't play many games. We have just barely enough space for it to work well. Probably will try to play multiplayer at some point but that may be pushing the space limit. Started up Bayonetta today and am enjoying that.

But it's also the start of a new week! So back to work. I'm making more area sketches, palettes, graphical styles. Feeling more pressure about the scale of the game, which seemed much smaller when we were working on just the ideas of it... I remember sketching out most of the themes and basic NPC ideas for all the areas at/around GDC. It's hard not to let it feel like a burden.

[melos]

a bit of music today. then bayonetta...hehehe...anyways. action games always make me sort of nervous. I hate havin a little bit of life left and usually just have myself die so I reset. er..too lazy to write anything of significance on Bayonetta...

gee, it's already almost halloween....better finish those songs faster...

i'm on track to finish the songs by the end of...nvember? ihope ? aghhhh

[melos]

I think I've lost my patience and ability for games like Bayonetta over the past years...I got to a hard battle on normal and died a few times so I got upset and played on Easy. Easy is too easy though...just the idea of going through a stage on normal and getting stuck part way through and having to lose my work is sort of nagging at the back of my head now and I don't like wasting time :/ ... and I barely have the motivation to get better. blah. it's a good game though, I'm just not that skilled at it. But like Easy vs normal is ridiculous, Normal is reasonable for the most part but Easy is not satisfying at all and I may as well be running through the stage. It gives you a single full health bar adn two meters of magic and for some reason I always have full magic. And if you don't unequip it you have this item that if you button mash does really good combos -_- it's great for accessibility but I feel like that stuff should've been Very Easy and Easy just makes enemies do a little less damage, w/out the health and magic bonuses.

 I had trouble in Normal b/c I kept getting comboed fighting this pair of enemies (and after you beat them you fight a pair of them AGAIN with no save) and the combo did like 1/3 of my health (why???)....plus the battle was on a staircase so the camera was hard, too...(this was half way through Chapter 6).

okay, anyways.

[melos]

music progress...

[kittakaj]

wow, good progress! I should have a doc like this for graphics