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Over the course of the last few weeks, I ended up playing all the Metroids except the DS spinoffs and Other M. I probably should have been liveposting in here cause most threads love that sort of thing, but alas. I figured I'd write up my opinions on them at least, and possibly drop some Hot Takes in the process. Games are listed in the order I played them. Metroid Prime (remaster): Wow! I had modestly fond memories of this game from when it was new (I think I got it shortly after prime 2 came out), but my memories were seriously underselling it. Looking over the series as a whole, this is the only game that I think really captures the world structure Super has (besides Super itself, of course). The game did a great job of making you figure out where to go next using your brain, without being either handholdy or obtuse--a difficult balance to strike (with the possible exception of where to go after spider ball being a bit too hard). The remaster of course nailed the controls, as everyone knows, and the individual rooms were a lot of fun to move around in, with a ton of the oh-so-crucial feeling of old rooms becoming easier and easier as you get more powerups. Pretty much the only whiff is that impact crater is kind of lame, but they pretty obviously just ran out of time there. Metroid Dread: I didn't buy this when it came out, but heard all the hype--and, since I was in a Metroid mood, figured why not? I ended up with sort of mixed feelings. It was a joy to move around, and the boss fights were utterly sick, but the constant one-way doors were serious buzzkills. I get that there's sequence breaks you can do with advanced tech, but I felt like every time I tried to go exploring, I was cut off by a one-way path--either one that had closed behind me earlier, or one I'd stumble on when I was trying to go my own way and accidentally went the intended path without realizing. Eventually I just accepted that I was along for the ride, knowing that I'd eventually end up missing my chance to explore, because it was too frustrating when I kept being cut off. However, that ride was a great one. I don't think it really sold much of the titular feeling of Dread (getting checkpoints before every EMMI room took the tension out of them in a really unfortunate way) but it did sell a great feeling of a scrappy underdog biding her time until she was ready to kick rear end. Metroid 2: I played this next mostly on a whim, because it was the only easily-emulatable one I hadn't played yet. I had heard it was a game with some neat ideas, but which doesn't really hold up because the gameboy just wasn't powerful enough for Metroid. I think that's completely wrong. The game was a truly magnificent experience, and even at the end of my journey, it's my favorite. It's a horror game far more than Dread is. The tiny little gameboy screen makes you alternately claustrophobic (in the narrow corridors where you can barely see anything) and agoraphobic (in the gigantic caverns that dwarf your field of view). The all-black background really sold the idea that you're in untrodden caves in the depths of a hostile planet. The mounting tension when you find a metroid husk, and wonder if you can handle it or if you should go back to refill on health. The sudden adrenaline spike when you expect a routine fight but, when you approach the metroid metamorphoses into a new form. Not having a map and only being able to see a few feet in front of your face means that *anything* could be up ahead--a feeling they reinforce in a number of different ways. I hope I've convinced the people who haven't to play it now, so I'll spoiler tag the rest, because I think it's truly incredible to experience blind. The one metroid that appears *before* its husk. The powerup that attacks you. For the first half of the game, the map is very cleanly split into three chunks: the downward spine of the planet, where heroic music plays, the chozo ruins, in vast caverns, where you find powerups, and the narrow tunnels, where metroids make their nests and the "music" is unsettling electronic beeps. Then they start breaking those patterns--first, metroids start appearing in the ruins. Then they start appearing in the 'spine'. Then the ruins stop appearing altogether, and the enemies other than metroids start disappearing. The game never tells you how many metroids you need to kill per zone, so it's a complete surprise when an area you don't expect to have any metroids turns out to have them. The sudden spike in the metroid count right at the end--and the way that you can only have one beam at a time, so you probably can't even hurt larval metroids! So you run through them to the other side, and find a broken chozo statue, holding another copy of ice beam. Every step of the way you're reminded that SR388 is the metroid's planet, and you're an interloper, a hunter, someone who doesn't belong. And at the end, when the baby hatches, Samus decides to be merciful. The tension is lifted. There's no more enemies. The music is calming. You just have a moment of introspection to consider how much more comforting mercy is than killing. It's so good!!! Play Metroid 2, I'm begging you. It doesn't even control bad! I have to imagine people who say it's aged poorly either didn't give it a chance or just went "well, it's not like Super, which is How Metroid Is Now." AM2R: I went right in for this after 2. Despite being a fan game, it duplicated the controls and movement of Zero Mission and Super flawlessly. Shinesparking is a blast in this one. But I feel like ultimately, any attempt to make Metroid 2 more like Super Metroid is a bit of a whiff. They did their best to keep the atmosphere, but having a map, and being told the number of metroids in each zone, having real music instead of weird electronic beeps, and having a big field of view takes a lot of the tension out of it. It was still a great game, but a little disappointing as an adaptation. It's certainly incredibly impressive for a fan game though, and better than a number of official games. Metroid Zero Mission: This just sort of felt light-weight. Not much to it. It was a fun little romp over in a few hours where you're taken on a guided tour of Zebes by the chozo statues. Maybe it'd hold up better on replays where I try harder to break off the path and sequence break, but I sort of felt like on a first play it lacked both the fun navigation puzzle Metroid usually has, while also not having much that stands out in my mind in the individual rooms. Nothing terrible about it, but I've already mostly forgotten everything before Mother Brain. Of course, after Mother Brain is really cool! The feeling of having to play a stealth game and dodge enemies you'd normally crush easily, until you get your suit back and have a victory lap over their graves, is an incredible one. Metroid Fusion: I had played this back in the day, and remember not liking it much, for reasons I don't think will be a surprise to anyone. The computer talks to much, and it's really annoying how zones you aren't supposed to be in are completely locked off. And I also get why anyone in 2002, who hasn't had a Metroid since 1994, would be intensely disappointed that this was what Nintendo put out. However, going in knowing what it is, I found that I actually really really liked it. Rather than navigation being completely braindead, I think the fact that you're locked into a relatively compact zone made them feel free to go all out in making that zone confusing. They're like zelda dungeons--you're never confused about which one you're supposed to be in, but there's still plenty of ways to get lost inside them. The answer to each conundrum is inevitably to find the breakable block, but I feel like it does a great job of letting you use your brain to figure out where the breakable block is. There's no X-ray visor, because you don't need one, because you can always puzzle it out by thinking logically about the spatial layout of the area. And ironically, despite only one sequence break existing in the game, it's the only game in the series where I found it lol. And with all those words about the gameplay out of the way, the more important thing: the atmosphere is incredible. SA-X is badass, and it's super tense whenever she's on screen. The way the station feels like it's slowly breaking down, with elevators turning off and doors being blasted open. The zone where the X don't show up until you open the locks and let them in. The ice X that specifically target Samus' weaknesses. Metroid keeps coming back to being a horror game, and when it nails it, it nails it. Metroid Prime 2 (original GCN): This was my least favorite of the bunch. There's a good chance that that's due to playing this with gamecube controls, when I played the other Primes with other control schemes. The world structure was fine, but I just sort of felt like a lot of the individual rooms kind of sucked. It had just enough story that the fact that it was boring was annoying. The fact that you don't get any offense upgrades between hour 2 and hour 8 or so meant that fighting enemies remained a chore even in rooms you'd been through a million times. Managing ammo was annoying--not because it was hard, but because it was so easy that it was just pointless busywork to select a beam every time you destroyed a crate. About half the bosses kind of sucked. I didn't really hate the game but there's not much I loved, either. Dark Samus was cool. The third zone had a great aesthetic. Metroid 1: I tried this but it was too brutally hard. Not even the thing everybody mentions of destructible blocks being hard to find, just the enemies were insane. I tried it for about an hour and gave up. Super Metroid: I played this on Wii VC back in the day, but for whatever reason it didn't make much of an impression on me. I can only assume I was a big idiot, because this game is still the goat. I went into it last week expecting it to be a good game overhyped by nostalgia, but nope. It really is that good. I think about the only complaint I have in the entire game is that it's kind of annoying to switch between so many projectile types with a single button. The game does so much so well that was seemingly forgotten by the rest of the series. The controls were successfully duplicated (or even improved on) in future titles, but in just about everything else, Super takes the cake. Bosses are the exact right balance where they're hard, but in a way where you can choose whether you want to overcome the challenge with skill, or by exploring and finding more powerups first. In Zero Mission, it felt like even passing exploration would make you so powerful that you could just mash missile and win. In Dread, the bosses did so much damage that you were forced to learn them like a dance, and it almost didn't matter if you powered up because even at full upgrades they'd still wipe the floor with you if you didn't git good. Super strikes the perfect balance. And the world design is perfect for making sure you'll never be lost for too long without holding your hand with explicit hints. Crateria and Brinstar form a big loop so you'll go through the same rooms over and over to get anywhere, which means the areas you can't access yet get seared into your mind--you'll remember that grapple point leading to the wrecked ship because you've seen it a half dozen times before you get the grapple beam. Norfair is a miniature version of the same idea, with the very first room being a corridor with a bunch of doors branching off of it so you'll see the blocked paths several times to let them stick in your mind. Wrecked ship, Maridia, Kraid's lair, and lower Norfair are all respites from the global exploration puzzle, as you're dropping into self-contained zones that you can complete on your first visit, before returning to the core of the world with more equipment and a boss kill under your belt. It's really astonishing how perfectly they nailed the feeling of finding your way--not being told your way, and not being so stumped that you stumble onto the path, but using your brain to figure it out. Just about the only misstep is the infamous glass tunnel leading to Maridia. Absolute classic game, and one that modern games could still learn from, because so many seem not to have internalized its lessons. Metroid Prime 3 (primehack): First off, primehack is sorcery. I don't know how they managed to make it feel like a native PC game, but I'm glad they did. Just do yourself a favor and bind turbo A to a button so you don't give yourself an RSI mashing left click. Anyways, I think of Prime 3 as the Twilight Princess of Metroid. This isn't some weird own on either game, I just think they're very similar games. They both absolutely nail the atmosphere, and have great individual rooms, but (seemingly intentionally) abandon the idea of finding your way as a core pillar of their respective series. (Nearly) the entirety of Prime 3 is set up as a linear series of rooms, where the correct door to go through is the only one you have access to that isn't the one you came in from. That is a bit saddening, but in exchange, they polished those rooms until they shone. Just about the only part of the game I didn't enjoy was the cringy NPCs, who are on-screen mercifully rarely. Samus Returns: I went into this expecting it to be a fine game that did not in any way capture the essence of Metroid 2, and, I was completely right. It's a fun game. Mercury Steam knows how to make a kickass boss fight and how to made Samus control well. But reading through my effusive praise for 2, I think there's only one thing I mentioned there which is still in Samus Returns. It either fundamentally misunderstood the game it was remaking, or intentionally decided it would rather emulate the tone of Super. The biggest offenders, in my mind, are area 5, where the backgrounds are lush and green and friendly-looking, and everything after the Metroid Queen, which just utterly massacred the original. I don't regret my time with it or anything, but this is a forgettable remake of an all-time classic. And here's all my hot takes in the form of an easily-quotable image: 
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Mar 13, 2023 01:43
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the holy poopacy posted:Also, that final ice beam is easily accessible before you encounter the OG metroids and anyone who's played a Metroid before is going to understand the implications immediately. The gauntlet you ran wasn't intentional, you just picked left instead of right and didn't check out the road untaken. Yeah I know you can access that room from the other side, but the path to the metroids is much easier to access than the path to the ice beam and I expect most players will do them in that order, even if they don't do exactly what I did.
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Mar 13, 2023 02:18
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WHY BONER NOW posted:You fool! You UTTER DOOFUS!! You didn't put AM2R in your tier image Oh yeah the tiernaker didn't have it and I forgot to say in words. It's in A tier.
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Mar 13, 2023 02:33
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I'm sure if I played it with trilogy or primehack controls it'd go up a tier. Consider it a tax for gamecube controls
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Mar 13, 2023 02:39
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ExcessBLarg! posted:Huh? After going through the ceiling above the final save point you have three options: The left and right ones are easier to get into because you can spider ball right up the wall into them. All three are kind of a pain to access with space jump iirc. So my thought process is that the middle room is hardest to get into and most likely to be saved for last. Idk maybe thats just not true. The cool part is the contents of the rooms anyways, even if I lucked into a really tense order to hit them in
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Mar 13, 2023 02:51
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Humongous Pear posted:Metroid II does tell you how many Metroids are left in a zone. All you have to do is pause the game what the gently caress i take it all back, trash game
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Mar 13, 2023 03:30
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I honestly think it looks fine in the original black and white and that that contributes to the foreboding atmosphere but I also might be a fanatic lol
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Mar 14, 2023 01:41
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Bismack Billabongo posted:Taking my time with Prime Remastered. Just got the spider ball. Did they not add the ability to boost ball off a spider track until Echoes? Or is it only in certain spots. I can’t remember idk if it's impossible because I don't think I tried, but it's definitely not required anywhere. Wouldn't be surprised if it was added between games.
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Mar 20, 2023 03:47
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The only thing shutting down is the payment processor, I think
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Mar 27, 2023 20:40
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Xenomrph posted:Okay so I’m stuck in Metroid Prime 2. I just found the trooper shuttle outside, got the missiles, killed some dark critters, didn’t know where to go, backtracked to a now closed gate that says it can be destroyed with “high yield explosives”, pumped 5 missiles into it to no effect. What do I do? hint: some things can only be destroyed with charge shots solution: there's a big crate in the outdoor area that can be destroyed with a charge shot and has a powerup inside
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Mar 29, 2023 04:42
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Electromax posted:I'm giving Metroid 2 an honest try for the first time in the NSO but man... I'm dying without a map. As a kid I beat Metroid 1 but I only had a few games and endless time then. here's a few tips which you can discover yourself (I did), but will help with mapless navigation if you just want to skip the discovery process:
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Mar 30, 2023 01:58
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I kind of like tank samus
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Apr 11, 2023 08:46
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Metroid 2 kicks rear end
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Dec 31, 2023 22:47
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Metroid 2's map is designed in a way that, if you understand how it works and what it's trying to do, you don't need to hold the whole map in your mind at once as you explore. It reward thinking about the structure of the game, because once you figure out the structure you never get lost again. In spoiler tags because I thought it was a lot of fun to figure out myself: The region where the heroic music plays is the "spine" of the planet; it connects each area to the next. There is never any need to go here while hunting metroids. It's just the highway between zones. Each area has a big cave with chozo ruins in the middle. This helps reorient yourself because there's only ever one big room per area; if you ever get lost, you can just wander around a bit till you find it and you're re-centered. Treating the big cave as a central point makes it easier to be systematic, as well. If you go into the ruins, you find powerups; if you go out from the ruins, you find metroids, in the caves. There's a few exceptions, to keep things fresh. But it's safe to think of the cave as a hub, with caves radiating outwards and ruins rooms going inwards. If you cycle around the outer and inner edges, you'll find every path. Those paths are sometime a bit confusing, but they're never large. Worse comes to worst, they're small enough you can hold the whole thing in your head. And then, once you explore it, you can forget it forever.
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Jan 2, 2024 04:22
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Seems like a bad idea even if you could get it to work
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Jan 3, 2024 02:17
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I'd prefer metroid prime 4
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Jan 3, 2024 02:19
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Xenomrph posted:So in OG Metroid 2 the way you switch between beams is by going back and actually re-finding the beam you want to switch to, right? you're correct, you can't easily switch the distribution of beams is designed in a way where you don't really have to think about this problem
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Jan 8, 2024 20:52
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Xenomrph posted:What do you mean? I mean that if you just sort of bumble through, it'll be completely fine and you'll never really be in trouble, beam-wise. The game is not going to try to own you by giving you a bad beam and forcing you to backtrack to the last good one. It's nice to the player.
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Jan 8, 2024 21:04
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Samus controls kinda weirdly but that's the point, imo. Even a simple room has something to keep your thumbs occupied because Samus just moves kinda weird. In a game where you're going to be going through the same rooms multiple times, it's nice to have even simple rooms remain interesting. And a game that controls buttery smooth from the start is necessarily going to have its movement be easier to master--or at least, the hard part of the movement has to come from the level and enemy design, not from the movement itself. Retro Metroid specifically is also designed under the assumption that dodging every hit from a boss just isn't how Samus plays. Like, if you grind the boss for hours and hours you can eventually do it, but Samus' movement just isn't designed for that kind of play. In Super, she's three tiles tall. Compressing to a morph ball requires multiple button presses. You don't have a dash to get out of the way. If the boss starts an attack and you're in a bad position, there might be legitimately nothing you can do to dodge it. Games like Hollow Knight and Metroid Dread are designed so that the bosses are fundamentally supposed to be dodged, and where, if you're sort of mediocre at dodging the boss, you 100% cannot beat it yet. If you go out in Hollow Knight and explore and find a bunch more mask shards and pale ore, you do make he boss you're stuck on easier, but realistically, not by very much. It's not that much harder to beat a boss at 3 health than at 4, or with one fewer sword upgrade. Because the fundamental limit isn't your resources, it's your ability to dodge. Having an extra point of health might turn a barely-lose into a barely-win, but your skill at finding loot in Hollow Knight or Dread aren't really the deciding factor in how hard the bosses are. Super has a very different philosophy. Getting better and better at them doesn't mean taking no damage, it means taking less damage, in a smooth progression. Having an extra E tank or two legitimately makes the boss a lot easier, because at anything below speedrunner skill levels, you're supposed to be trading hits. So if you get stuck on Ridley, you legitimately do have two options: to grind the boss until you get good enough that you don't take too much damage; or, to explore the world and find enough upgrades that it's beatable at your current skill level. It's brilliant design work, imo. None of this is really bashing on Hollow Knight or Dread, they're both great games. But I'm sort of sad to see stuff like this chalked up to it just being old and janky, and would be unhappy if this design philosophy just disappeared.
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Jan 11, 2024 19:55
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I move run to a shoulder button and give up on aim down. Generally dislike having face buttons that you're supposed to hold while pressing other ones
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Feb 3, 2024 09:01
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You can just navigate yourself, without using a map. The game is designed to make that reasonable
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Feb 4, 2024 03:48
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Having a map gives the designers more freedom to make worlds that are hard to navigate without one, but metroid 2 is designed to be perfectly navigable without. When I played it, I spent a bit of time lost in the first area before realizing what the game was trying to tell me, and then was able to navigate perfectly fine from then on. It's a really well designed world for maples navigation
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Feb 4, 2024 05:54
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the way the map is set up, you don't have to remember individual rooms like that. Each area is a hub-and-spoke system surrounding the big cave with the chozo ruins in the middle. Go outward intot he caves to find metroids, or into the ruins to find upgrades. It doesn't actually matter for navigation if the hallways look a bit samey because they don't loop around on each other in a way that actually makes it confusing. You go down each path in turn, picking up the upgrades or killing the metroids. All you actually have to keep track of is the layout of the spoke you're currently in, which is just 2-5 rooms and very easy to remember. I figured this out after a bit of bumbling in area 1, when I realized it wasn't a bunch of interconnected huge caves, but that I was repeatedly entering the same big cave. Very easy to grasp from there that you're just looking for paths off of that room, checking them off in turn. Had a blast doing it. Instantly assuming it's impossible and reaching for a map is denying yourself one of the best parts of the game.
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Feb 4, 2024 06:07
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To be clear, I'm not talking about the trunk-and-area structure. I'm talking about how the areas themselves are designed, as spokes around a central hub. It's a bit unclear if you understood that from your post. Assuming you did, and by 'metroid nest' you mean the path off of the ruins caves: I'm looking at a map now and I see maybe one metroid nest sub-area that might be a bit confusing, taken by itself (and you can take them by themselves, because if you ever find yourself back in the main cave, you can re-orient yourself, because it's a central hub for the area). It's pretty deep into the game, but if you're thinking of the bottom left part of area 3, then sure, I'll grant that one's a bit confusing--though it's not very large, at least, and you should be able to fully explore it relatively quickly even through sheer bumbling. I only see one way to really get lost in it though; it's shaped like a big loop with one side path to get back to the hub, and another to go down a fairly lengthy non-branching path to some metroids. You might do the loop a few times before realizing what's up. I think I did that actually when I played it, though it's a bit hard to remember my exact path through the map. There really just aren't very many opportunities to get lost in the game once you realize the way the paths radiate out from the ruins caves, because there aren't very many branches within the spokes. You even get 'you've been here before' hints when you come across a metroid shell but then the room after it is empty, because that means you've already killed the metroid.
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Feb 4, 2024 06:58
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metroid 1 is a much different situation yeah I was mostly just trying to push back on same post; "The game is annoying because it sucks to do <thing that you don't have to do and makes the game worse>" is a goofy post and I was hoping to share my experience playing metroid 2 maplessly and having a lot of fun doing it. I honestly think a lot of people just sort of boot it up, get a bit lost for a bit, and then just assume it's a bullshit old game and turn to an online map without really trying. If you give it a try maplessly I think you'll have a lot more fun than you will repeatedly checking an external resource!
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Feb 7, 2024 00:16
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as far as I can tell, OG metroid just wants you to suffer. The entire design seems to point to this
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Feb 7, 2024 01:45
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I've heard at least one person say they figured that one out on their own because apparently the breakable blocks are in the same place in rooms that are clones of each other, and there's a general pattern of which tiles are ever breakable. Can't imagine many people got it though
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Feb 7, 2024 01:57
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The real secret is you quit in frustration over starting at 30 health long before reaching norfsir
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Feb 7, 2024 02:21
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I think there's a bit of a tendency to just assume that old games are just bullshit and that they just don't work quite right, either because of technical limitations or lack of design experience; when in reality, there's a lot of clever design in the classics that is just different than modern games, and it's a tragedy to just instantly assume it's worse because it's not something we do anymore. Like, I hear Castlevania 3 described as 'bullshit' constantly, when I think in reality it's designed as a pseudo-puzzle game where you're supposed to figure out which of your tools gets you through a sticky situation over multiple attempts. It's not sightreadable like a modern action game, so by the rules of modern design, it's kinda bullshit, but it's not even trying to play by those rules; it's playing by a whole different set of rules. And if you walk into the game just assuming it's old and bad and designers of the era just didn't know any better, you'll confirmation bias your way into missing something special and cool. This isn't really about 'git gud' (though Bleck was just insultingly posting git gud), but more about 'give it a shot; I'm assuring you from personal experience the game is less inscrutable than you might expect.' And on another note, the idea that maps are just an automatic inclusion and the only reason someone might not include one is technical limitations or simply not thinking of it is not really true. Like, on the subject of maps specifically, the Souls series was mapless up until Elden Ring, and even then, ER only has a world map, not dungeon maps. This is definitely not a technical issue; they could have easily put in maps if they wanted to. In conclusion, I encourage anyone playing Metroid 2 for the first time to try it without a map.
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Feb 12, 2024 02:32
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chiasaur11 posted:I mean, nine times out of ten, we stopped doing things because they were worse, or at least more difficult to make work. My go-to here is the original Armored Core control scheme. Brilliant, but made mostly obsolete by the progression of technology. well, metroid 1 is not a good game imo; this is about metroid 2. And it's less that it's some genius masterstroke, and more that, in this case, they made it work. I think it's a disservice to old games to just sort of assume they didn't know what they were doing. As you put it, a lot of these shorthands are more about making it easier to design good games, rather than about making good games possible. And if you go into it with a preconception, you'll miss the games that do make it work. I think that in general, including a map in an exploration game will make it easier to produce a non-frustrating game. It neither guarantees a lack of frustration, nor does the absence of a map guarantee it will be frustrating. In terms of the mood they evoke, both have advantages and disadvantages. For Metroid 2 in particular, I think the elements of the game which are oft-derided (the lack of the map, the way the camera zooms way in on Samus) combine to create a strong mood of delving deep into a hostile, uncharted world where you're never really sure what's coming up next. And notably, I think both of the remakes completely whiff on this mood. In generally, I encourage people playing retro games--especially classics--to give them a chance to prove themselves as the times that made it work. These games are usually beloved for a reason!
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Feb 12, 2024 05:35
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CharlestheHammer posted:They are beloved for nostalgia which is a reason but not exactly what you were going for This kind of attitude is exactly what I was talking about. If you go into an old game assuming it must be kinda poo poo and that people only care because of nostalgia, you're mentally preparing yourself to miss what makes it good
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Feb 12, 2024 18:58
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I feel the same way about time limits. There's a segment of the population who just get anxious over even the lightest time pressure and are unable to enjoy any video game where you can't go at as leisurely a pace you want. So if your goal as a game dev is to have a broad appeal, you'll never put them in. But I like time limits! I think they're fun! And I'm sad when they get removed, even if I fully understand the reasonable thought process that led to the removal.
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Feb 12, 2024 19:41
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and again, if you go in assuming it'll be bad, you'll usually be able to convince yourself that's right
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Feb 12, 2024 21:17
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if it makes some people go "oh that's cool" and some people go "oh that sucks", that doesn't mean it's bad design. The end result of that type of thinking is a perfectly frictionless and utterly boring experience.
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Feb 12, 2024 22:32
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I guess I don't know what to say other than: it was cool to me, and the game would be less cool without it. It evoked a feeling of "oh, I have to give up this charm slot now--but some day, I'll be confident enough in the world that I can forego this and get the slot back". And by the end of the game, I did! And it was a good feeling to have the confidence to reclaim that slot. It's very similar to the way that basic HUD elements are equippable and unequippable in nier automata, which got universally praised as far as I can tell. It's always a downer when people try to say that something you liked is objectively bad from pure principles. If that stance means there's no such thing as objective bad design, so be it.
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Feb 12, 2024 23:05
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Zero Mission was kinda overbearing yeah. Would have preferred if the map markers were more opt-in.
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Feb 13, 2024 00:45
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that's a great example of it being hard: having to press left and right a little bit to pick up all the money is something that has an effect on the game, and changes the feeling of playing it, and not entirely for the worse. What you call tedium, I call a brief interlude of purely lighthearted gameplay. Instead of the adrenaline of combat or the uncertainty of exploring a new area, it's just a moment of happiness as you forget the stress and friction of the game and just pick up some cash like a person in one of those money-blowing machines. Games spend a lot of effort putting lighter interludes to pace out heavy gameplay (think the platforming sections in modern doom), and this can do that without even feeling like a break from the normal game, because it's entirely emergent from the core systems of the game, rather than being tacked on. Were the developers thinking about this? Maybe, maybe not. I suspect they were, because the money explodes in so many directions and it'd be just as easy to have it all drop in a single spot. Is it load-bearing? No, not really; it's a pretty minor thing. But I think it's really easy to conclude something is pure tedium and should be automated by the system when it does have an actual knock-on impact that may be desirable. e: as for the charm in particular, I have no strong feelings about it. I never pick up those kinds of upgrades but they keep appearing in game after game so they presumably have an audience
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Feb 13, 2024 09:14
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It also has a knockon consequence of making exploration and finding powerups less meaningful. In something like Metroid Dread, beating a boss with every E tank available to you up to that point isn't that much easier than beating it with just the easy-to-find ones. The bosses just wreck you if you don't know how to dodge them, and once you understand a boss well enough to barely win, you're probably only a few attempts away from getting a clean victory.
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Mar 23, 2024 21:55
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CharlestheHammer posted:Yeah it’s nice bosses are better designed then when they were originally released as nothing but dudes that soaked up e tanks Personally I think that if finding powerups is going to be a huge chunk of the game, it ought to matter
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Mar 23, 2024 23:22
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 09:06 |
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I was mostly thinking of raven beak to be fair. That's the epitome of the kind of boss where having an extra hit or two doesn't matter much because either way you're not winning until you've thoroughly learned it
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Mar 23, 2024 23:34
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