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FPzero posted:
You're really underselling how tonally jarring the last half of Iconoclasts is. The final boss against the weird alien space worm opens with him more or less mind-raping the main character and forcing you to fight metaphorical representations of the 3 main relationships in the game. Your brother a heavily maimed revolutionary who has just completely given up and is looking for any excuse to die. Your 'girlfriend' a rather disturbingly gung-ho revolutionary who can't really see the harm she causes outside of the 'good' that she is doing. And the wide-eyed idealist religious person who understands that things are bad if not just how bad and is completely shattered by the revelation that the frankly ludicrous amount of human suffering that allowed him to be brought to the point where he is able to confront 'god' is entirely meaningless. After that you have your fight with the eldritch space worm until it finally slumps over in a bleeding heap. Then the top of the worm's head opens up, revealing that the alien space worm is actually just a space big rig! Complete with rear view mirror from which a pair of fuzzy dice are hanging! And the alien trucker parrot hops out and starts screaming at you that the gas station is out of fuel because the religion used most of the fuel killing thousands of children trying to find one who was capable of being the next pope and then you have a wacky fight against the trucker parrot who also for some reason has a giant spinny wrench like you do.
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Apr 24, 2024 04:26
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I honestly like that the entire setting of Iconoclasts is completely misunderstood by the cultures that live there. It doesn't exactly recontextualize the destruction that takes place over the course of the game, but it does help hammer home how meaningless it all was. All this death and bloodshed over what's basically a 7/11 that's already been looted. I didn't read it as an anti-religious screed in general. The religion in Iconoclasts is a lovely religion, sure, but that's because of what it does to the world, not because of the basis for its beliefs. If you want to believe in something absolutely inane and provably false, well, you do you as long as you're working to make the world a better place. Same if you worship something that is unprovable either way. EDIT: as for the "nothing truly mattered" aspect: the protagonist of the game does tear down a tyrannical world government and create the opportunity for a fresh start. It'd be nice if we got some view of how things got rebuilt for the better afterwards, of course. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 15:36
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 Episode 8: It turns out that wasn't salad D-Delicious...? ---------------- Kurieg posted:You're really underselling how tonally jarring the last half of Iconoclasts is. I truly did undersell it on accident. Man I didn't remember all of that leadup. While labeling it as anti-religion in general could be an overreach, it definitely felt, at the very least, anti-Christian, what with its pretty overt Christofascism complete with a pope at the top and a military arm to enforce everything. It's a very strange game in the end.
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Apr 26, 2024 00:04
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A couple notes on the Chozen Armor: - There's heat damage in the game. I'm pretty sure the armor is optional. However, if you skip it, you have one gigantic heat run that you have to do, to unlock the path to the final boss. I never tried to do that without the armor, but I expect it's possible if you have enough E-tanks and good execution. I think there's a couple of E-tanks during the heat run, too, as single-shot refills. - If I recall correctly, the visor flashes rainbow colors in hot rooms. It's a neat effect, and makes me wonder if the vanilla Varia has some visible effect when it's protecting you from heat. Also, the Baby Metroid is such a good jump scare 
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Apr 26, 2024 01:13
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FPzero posted:
Don't forget how the game sets up a prophecy of the worm coming back and everything, and at one point Royal and Robin break a machine, which sends a signal to the Starworm. The entire rest of the story is driven by its impending arrival. The entire planet is doomed if it arrives and devours their Ivory. Then it turns out it's just the ship of a space trucker bird here to refuel. There's no reason it arrived when it did. The transmission was meaningless. The ancient civilization and stuff had pretty much nothing to do with it. There is just no connection between its arrival and the rest of the game, except the game tried really hard to convince you otherwise. Without that explicit connection, the entire story falls apart and just becomes a massive coincidence. If he hadn't needed to top off his tank, everything would have proceeded exactly the same except in the end, everyone would just be standing around wondering where the Starworm was.
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Apr 26, 2024 01:15
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Kurui Reiten posted:Don't forget how the game sets up a prophecy of the worm coming back and everything, and at one point Royal and Robin break a machine, which sends a signal to the Starworm. The entire rest of the story is driven by its impending arrival. The entire planet is doomed if it arrives and devours their Ivory. That's a valid interpretation, but I think there's too many unknowns to say with certainty that the story hinges on a coincidence. The transmission could easily have been, like, the alien equivalent of an advertisement saying "get your gas here!" or something. In any event, the alien trucker actually showing up is irrelevant to the rest of the plot, which is about what humans do when faced with a perceived impending apocalypse. The main differences between "trucker shows up" and "trucker doesn't show up" are a) Royal probably lives, and b) the truck's gas tank doesn't spill. The star in the sky could've been a comet or something similarly meaningless, and the story could easily have played out the same, complete with reactions from the players of "wait, that's it? it was all meaningless?"
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Apr 26, 2024 12:24
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 Episode 9 (FINAL): A ghost in the machine And that wraps up Eris! I'm glad Simon helped convince me to finish it off, as we had a lot of fun talking over it. I have one more video after this one to post and then I'll be taking a short break because my backlog is finally depleted and I haven't had the opportunity to record lately. But that's okay, a break is good every now and then.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:08
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I really love what this creator does with visuals. Do they have anything besides this and Vitality? Metroid or not
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Apr 28, 2024 03:36
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:I really love what this creator does with visuals. Do they have anything besides this and Vitality? Metroid or not Super Metroid: Cliffhanger is an earlier hack by them that does similar stuff as Eris visually.
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Apr 28, 2024 06:44
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Cliffhanger is much more conventional in its appearance, mostly using the vanilla tileset the way it's used in vanilla. There's a few rooms where you can see Digital Mantra (the hack creator) experimenting with making more weird stuff, but nowhere near to the extent that Eris does. On a side note, Digital Mantra also made an official soundtrack for Eris. I'd characterize it as meandering, moody, definitely more atmospheric than melodic. Thanks for finishing out Eris! I'm glad both you and Simon seemed to be having fun with it...for the most part, anyway.
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Apr 28, 2024 14:59
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Thanks for powering through, this was definitely an impressive piece of work in spite of its flaws. The concepts are there - wanting to make the base game more challenging and draw out more from its scarier atmospheric elements - but yes, it certainly takes things a bit far, which is to be expected of an amateur project. There's no way I could have done any better with the same time and experience, surely. The biggest things for me that could be improved are setting up a more consistent visual design language about what is foreground/background/solid/pass-through, and making more use of the full colour pallette to smooth out the visuals in general. I think you can generally pick which tiles are new from the amount of sharp light-to-dark transitions lacking mid-tones for antialiasing? The weird parallax rooms where it looks like you're moving on a background layer are a neat idea - especially when the game might want to put some visual element really front and centre to make sure you notice it, bring a sense of scale to a big and otherwise empty room, or possibly even do a bit of fourth-wall breaking by showing a detail in the foreground that is obvious to the player but clearly cannot be seen by the player character. Environmental storytelling was good, but by the end I'd kinda forgotten why we were there other than to cull metroids and gently caress up space pirates.
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Apr 29, 2024 00:52
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Crazy Achmed posted:to cull metroids and gently caress up space pirates. Isn't that the plot of every metroid game?
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Apr 29, 2024 04:34
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jkq posted:Isn't that the plot of every metroid game? There's usually a bit extra to it aside from in the first game, hell, even Super Metroid has you on the trail of the baby and you see it or the container it was in a few times (only like three, but still). Eris doesn't have anything like that, or at least I couldn't see anything. Edit: I guess there's the Alien room but it doesn't tie into anything and may as well be an easter egg. Epicmissingno fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Apr 29, 2024 |
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Apr 29, 2024 04:45
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Do you have any plans to show any of the one-room hacks? These were very early on in the hacking days, generally someone would just take the landing site and turn it into a maze of spikes, morph ball tunnels, and finicky platforming. They're a historical curiosity at best, I'd say, but I do feel like they made their mark on the scene. This was from a bit ago but I felt like I should reply. Short answer is that I'm not sure. Not because they aren't an interesting historical curio, but more because I don't know how entertaining they'd end up being overall. Maybe I could sneak one or two in somewhere just to show off their existence.
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Apr 29, 2024 22:57
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FPzero posted:This was from a bit ago but I felt like I should reply. Short answer is that I'm not sure. Not because they aren't an interesting historical curio, but more because I don't know how entertaining they'd end up being overall. Maybe I could sneak one or two in somewhere just to show off their existence. Maybe just a live stream curio, where you play a few of them until you're fed up and move on to the next one?
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Apr 30, 2024 00:31
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jkq posted:Isn't that the plot of every metroid game? For the early first-party games, yeah. But it feels like Eris wants to have a deeper plot, and I think they could have dropped in a bit more storytelling, environmental or otherwise - were there any hints that there were even likely to be any survivors? Were there any implications we could see in-game of the knowledge that the child was getting from the Chozo?
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Apr 30, 2024 01:22
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There's one, called Super Metroid something Hospital that has a story. Samus downloads text logs through the map stations, and they're pretty regularly spaced out. I can't for the life of me remember anything about the story though
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Apr 30, 2024 02:11
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:There's one, called Super Metroid something Hospital that has a story. Samus downloads text logs through the map stations, and they're pretty regularly spaced out. I can't for the life of me remember anything about the story though Darkholme Hospital. The story is fairly standard "WE DABBLED IN THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW and it killed all of us, sorry" tropes, if I remember right, but it's a fairly cool hack.
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Apr 30, 2024 06:42
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Metroid doesn't need a plot  Environmental storytelling is fine, just don't interrupt the vibes to talk at me.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:42
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 Bonus: Some of my personal SM hacks After finishing Eris on stream, Simon asked if I had any projects of my own. They aren't recent, but I do have a few projects that I've worked on over the years so I felt like showing a couple of them off. I might do this again with another small stream, since I still have one or two others I worked on. As mentioned last update, we're on a break for the time being until I'm able to record more things! Stay tuned.
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Apr 30, 2024 23:00
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Metroid doesn't need a plot Plot is how we ended up with Other M and too many  in Fusion
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Apr 30, 2024 23:22
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Plot also gave us Dread. In conclusion Plot is a land of contrasts that will be exploded by a timebomb in 3 minutes.
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Apr 30, 2024 23:31
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Metroid doesn't need a plot I agree. If the atmosphere is nailed as good as it is in (most of) the main games, I'm fine with the plot being minimal. I like that Metroid doesn't have a particularly deep lore. We get just enough to keep us invested and have fun exploring. As a self-proclaimed Lore Lord that hurt to type
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May 1, 2024 03:39
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pointlessone posted:Plot is how we ended up with Other M and too many Fusion has a lot of story segments, but I wouldn't say the plot is what holds it back. It's just the linearity, which could be worked around by keeping the plot mostly the same. The plot is fine. The structure is too narrow is all.
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May 1, 2024 04:27
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The funny thing is that Fusion absolutely nails the atmosphere. The BSL is creepy and dangerous. They didn't need the briefings before each section of gameplay, except insofar as that you have objectives that are "go interact with this console" instead of "get the powerup to get past this obstacle". And I guess to make the twist at the end not come out of nowhere.
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May 1, 2024 11:49
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The problem with Other M wasn't that it had plot. It's that it removed Samus' agency, and also broadly speaking had Fusion's plot, again, but as a prequel, which retroactively made Samus an idiot for not seeing the writing on the wall during Fusion way sooner. Particularly since in the timeline they're back to back.
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May 1, 2024 14:23
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The funny thing is that Fusion absolutely nails the atmosphere. The BSL is creepy and dangerous. They didn't need the briefings before each section of gameplay, except insofar as that you have objectives that are "go interact with this console" instead of "get the powerup to get past this obstacle". And I guess to make the twist at the end not come out of nowhere. The run from gravity suit to the big reveal is still one of my favorite sections in all Metroids. It's one of the best power gain sections while still dropping an SA-X on you right as you're starting to feel cocky to remind you you're not the apex predator in this station. I know they were trying new things, but they could have cut the navigation room stops in half and none of the cuts would be missed. The nav room, elevator, nav room, power up, nav room, repeat pipeline absolutely destroyed the feeling of adventure for the first half the game. Cutting the destination nav room or more breaking out of the walled gardens earlier would have done wonders for both the narrative of Samus really not following orders well and allowing players to really get lost in the place. A couple SA-X encounters while you're outside of where Adam suggested you go to drive home that you're at risk by not following instructions and suddenly that twist at the end feels more like a betrayal and less like another god drat cutscene to mash through. pointlessone fucked around with this message at 22:25 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 22:23
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Yeah, agreed, the real charm of a metroidvania and metroid in particular for me is the feeling of being lost in an unfamiliar environment. As such it's not the quality of the plot or characters that bother me for Fusion, it's that they hold your hand so much - the segments where you go off-grid like the elevator breakdown or find the Tourian-like section are some of the best parts, I think, and they're way too short. I'd say they could cut out way more than half of the nav rooms: maybe just give Samus a checklist of things to do when she arrives, and at most two more conversations for the biggest plot beats (her phoning home to ask WTF is up with the SA-X and the metroids). Basically I think it needs an equivalent philosophical treatment to the early sequence in Doom 2016 where Hayden is trying to exposition via a computer and Doomguy cuts him off by smashing it. I guess the equivalent here would be Samus getting her briefing, nodding once, then ignoring it to explore everything suspicious and poke around where she's not meant to, rather than dutifully reporting back every five minutes. There's a reason she's a bounty hunter and not a career soldier.
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May 2, 2024 03:20
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I think Dread got it perfectly with each of the interactions with Adam being just "Uh, yeah, just, like, keep going. I'm totally here and helpful"
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May 2, 2024 05:58
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Ehh. I understand people saying that there should have been fewer briefing room segments, but if Adam was just an initial briefing and a "come here for hints" option, I can't imagine anyone caring about the late-game "his interests are not your interests" and "any questions, Lady?" twists. Even the comm rooms that are just "walk in, Adam tells you your objective's still the same, get to it" establish a routine, and without that routine there's not enough of a connection to the character to care when his allegiances come into doubt. And I think the plot of Fusion is actually pretty good, so it'd be a real shame to lose that. That said, I'd totally be fine with any hypothetical Fusion remaster adding a "skip Comm Room dialogue" option for the second playthrough, or some sort of Second Quest that has you making use of the non-elevator sector connections for a different routing.
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May 2, 2024 07:13
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Crazy Achmed posted:Yeah, agreed, the real charm of a metroidvania and metroid in particular for me is the feeling of being lost in an unfamiliar environment. As such it's not the quality of the plot or characters that bother me for Fusion, it's that they hold your hand so much - the segments where you go off-grid like the elevator breakdown or find the Tourian-like section are some of the best parts, I think, and they're way too short. I'd say they could cut out way more than half of the nav rooms: maybe just give Samus a checklist of things to do when she arrives, and at most two more conversations for the biggest plot beats (her phoning home to ask WTF is up with the SA-X and the metroids). Everyone misunderstands that bit of Doom. They're projecting the attitude they think they should have about Doom's story onto the animation. It's not that the doom guy doesn't care about what's going on around him, he clearly does. He doesn't care for Hayden's justifications. He wakes up, first thing he sees is a demon, then he hears that this guy's opened a demon portal and is waffling about how it was for the greater good, and that pisses him the gently caress off. When he smashes the computer, the implied thought isn't "let me get to the gameplay", it's "when I find this rear end in a top hat his head isn't even gonna hit the ground".
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May 2, 2024 08:17
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Einander posted:Ehh. I understand people saying that there should have been fewer briefing room segments, but if Adam was just an initial briefing and a "come here for hints" option, I can't imagine anyone caring about the late-game "his interests are not your interests" and "any questions, Lady?" twists. Even the comm rooms that are just "walk in, Adam tells you your objective's still the same, get to it" establish a routine, and without that routine there's not enough of a connection to the character to care when his allegiances come into doubt. And I think the plot of Fusion is actually pretty good, so it'd be a real shame to lose that. I would go so far as saying that it's very deliberate by the game to present the routine as grating and restrictive, and I don't think it takes too long to ease the restrictions either - hell, they almost immediately tell you "the unlock rooms aren't allowed to be on a map so uh good luck". Could the dialogue overall be lessened? Absolutely. Could individual parts be less talky? Sure. Should they cut the aspect entirely and would the game work the same way? No and no. I am generally a big fan of games that are a curated experience and that were designed with deliberation and care. Fusion is that. Most Metroids are, which is why they are good games. The focus is just different. It's a purely psychological issue because Fusion says "here's a pretty linear path we planned for you" - and that is true for the first hour only - while other Metroids give you a pretty linear path in the first hour but don't state that.
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May 2, 2024 10:20
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Dabir posted:Everyone misunderstands that bit of Doom. They're projecting the attitude they think they should have about Doom's story onto the animation. It's not that the doom guy doesn't care about what's going on around him, he clearly does. He doesn't care for Hayden's justifications. He wakes up, first thing he sees is a demon, then he hears that this guy's opened a demon portal and is waffling about how it was for the greater good, and that pisses him the gently caress off. When he smashes the computer, the implied thought isn't "let me get to the gameplay", it's "when I find this rear end in a top hat his head isn't even gonna hit the ground". Also he deliberately destroys the energy converters rather than shut them down safely, it's played as him just having no time for it, but it's clear he doesn't approve of what Hayden has done. He goes out of his way to save his computer friend even when Hayden treats him as ultimately unimportant and disposable. Doom guy is very angry that he sacrificed himself upon the altar of war to defeat the demons the first time, and one guy took one look at hell and thought, "neat, clean energy."
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May 2, 2024 13:45
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There's a bit where Hayden says "it was worth the cost", and Doomguy's response is to look at a dead soldier, like "yeah, sure, it's easy for you to say that." God, the dialog from Doomguy is so good, and he never says a word.
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May 2, 2024 16:17
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:There's a bit where Hayden says "it was worth the cost", and Doomguy's response is to look at a dead soldier, like "yeah, sure, it's easy for you to say that." God, the dialog from Doomguy is so good, and he never says a word. Dread does that a lot as well, Samus says so much just through body language. Makes the times she does speak (I'm counting AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA as a word so there's more than one) all the more effective.
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May 2, 2024 17:30
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