We'll read your stories and play your songs! We just want something substantial about how a piece of music or sound design affected you, contributed to the experience, reinforced the narrative, etc.
No problem Gary, it was fun to do. Hard to break it down to a few and it was strange because I had to wrap my mind around "this isn't songs of the year." :D
It's from a Genesis game! Which just made me think of Sonic the Hedgehog. The music in that game wasn't that memorable, but all the sound effects were! Collecting coins, jumping, busting through things/enemies... for some reasons those sounds make me nostalgic :)
I might have some time to check this out on my phone Gary. Ill be at the Global Game Jam, but may have a bit to watch your tears! Love your Isaac runs.
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I don't write on here as much as I'd like (work/podcasts/class!) but I wanted to pop on and announce a new show that we're doing. If you are interested at all in the game Dark Souls (and you really should be), we have the show for you:
I tried to play it on the computer but the terrible controls made it almost impossible to play. I'm going to give it another try on the ps3 eventually.
We're comfortable with it being a limited run, like seasons of a tv show. If we wanted to go back further, we'd end up in King's Field territory and we're not quite comfortable with that yet.
This is one of my favorite games primarily because it doesn't hold your hand. A lot of games do the whole "GO HERE!" or "FOLLOW THIS GUY!" This game nearly does a full 180 and tells you just the controls, and very little about an area. What info you do get is left by other players. It's a bit refreshing in that regard.
Here goes! I'm trying to come at this from a "how to" or "guide" angle because I feel like my 360 hours of this game should be good for something. Let me know what you think.
Wow Gary that was fantastic, that really helps me understand the depth of the game and some basic strategy that I didn't quite get by "armchairing" Isaac.
Watching this game is hella awesome but I realize how far I have to go to actually beat it in a run as it gets REALLY hard later on. Awesome though, looks fun.
Just made two Isaac runs. Nowhere as beefy as you were by floor 3. That and floor 3 stopped me each time. Used your strats to find the secret rooms and bombs blowing two spaces. Helps quite a bit, way more powerful that I was starting Isaac totally fresh.
That said, I unlocked Magdeline and she seems not as good as Isaac. Recommend?
If you find yourself taking a lot of damage, Maggie can be really helpful until you unlock Cain. Try Maggie a few times. More health, as much damage, yum heart. The only disadvantage is she's slower but speed upgrades are plentiful.
I have noticed speed upgrades are pretty plentiful. I dig Issac because he is Isaac but I find I really do appreciate the speed boost to start. Ill incorporate her more into my play though.
Cain is sort of by the books next steps. Cain is a straight upgrade in every way other than starting with only 2 health, which you can make up quickly. The other Maggie strategy is to liberally make deals with the devil. 4 hearts can make a huge difference there. An early brimstone can make or break your run.
The Link's Awakening discussion made me think of this. World building is one of my all time favorite parts of video games and I wanted to start a series/discussion about concrete, specific moments that contribute to it. It's easy to say, "Oh, I was just totally lost in the world of Ico, it's so ethereal and wonderful!" It's much harder to point to specific moments and assets.
So I want to talk about my 3rd or 4th favorite game of the year, Dishonored. Dishonored creates an incredible world, a "whale punk" setting that I've never seen before. But I want to mention, specifically, food in dishonored. Just like in Bioshock, you can constantly chomp on bits of food to regain a little health. The food itself, however, reflects the world perfectly. You're not running into burgers and fries. In poor areas, you're running into Potted Whale Meat, Prachett Jellied Eels and Brined Hagfish. Give me a moment while I vomit. It's disgusting! But it really shows how the essential economy of this world is shaped by the sea.
In wealthier areas, you find tarts and fruit. Sausage from far away lands. Dishonored has some very heavy themes around class and the food plays into this wonderfully. You spend time in the slums and are disgusted to chomp down some jellied eels, you go to the wealthy district and are relieved to eat a Tyrian Pear.
It's just a tiny example of an essential principle of game design: Everything needs to be there for a reason. Setting needs to serve theme and character.
Those are some really great design choices for the game. I was thinking about world building today actually as I was watching a YouTube video showcasing how to play Dwarf Fortress. It was interesting because part of Dwarf Fortress is starting the game and watching time pass quickly. At some point you stop the world flying by and say "I want to start my game at this point in the worlds history." Trees grow and fall as do mountains and entire cultures. Its a really interesting process.
Its interesting because lately I have been playing Minecraft that has these elements too. Its a world and the story is how the world evolves and how you interact with it. From what I gather Dwarf Fortress logs the history of your world in terms of who is born and what happens to them. Its an interesting concept for a full procedural world.
Lately I have been playing a bit of Lord of the Rings Online. Its a free to play MMO and its pretty well done. Recently I went into the Barrow Downs and had a quest where I had to talk to Tom Bombadil. It was interesting because when I entered his house he was dancing around the room. Dancing isn't too popular unless its a Just Dance game, but from what I remember of the Hobbit books he was a dancin' guy. I went on a quest at his bequest and after killin a bunch of stuff, I came up to a Boss fight I couldn't win. He came in a zapped it and the quest ended by him telling me to avoid the dark corners of the earth and stay in the light.
Thing is I don't disagree with him, but I wonder how interesting Lord of the Rings Online would be if I avoiding fighting, a major staple of questing.
I enjoy world building a lot, but it seems like there are two ways to do it. One is to present a back story about the environment and what makes it up. This is often too overwrought and makes the whole mythology unbelievable. Games like Dragon Age pour it on very thick through codexes and, even though it helps to flesh out the world, it doesn't seem organic. Then I think of games like Fallout or STALKER where the environment is only presented but I am forced to fill in the gaps. Hints and small stories can be dropped to make it more realistic, but my own imagination often fills in blanks much more interestingly than writing could. I guess I just like being left out of the loop a little bit because I don't know what's going on in THIS world that much either. If I know all the information, it just doesn't seem right.
I think that's a good point Will. I am currently playing Skyrim a bit at at time. They have tons of books all over the game you can read. I think that is pretty cool for some, but I don't really attach to it.
My favorite games end up doing both. They're both optional and likely to be missed by a lot of players but you can choose your poison. The 3d Fallout games are great at this and an entry is forth coming.
For the 5th episode of Watch Out For Fireballs, we did a good example of what would almost become a standard for the show: Deeply Flawed Gems. I'm on the record as saying that the open ended, first person RPG is more or less my favorite genre. You know, Deus Ex, System Shock, Bloodlines...um, almost nothing else? Bioshock and Dishonored sort of scratch this itch but criminy, are there not enough games like this. I feel like each one is a national treasure. I want a Bloodlines related holiday some time in April.
Bloodlines, like all those other games, is about choice. Choice is what separates games from puzzles and pure narratives. Choice is the ESSENTIAL aspect of game. If you aren't making choices, you aren't playing a game. I value games that value this. Bloodlines is ALMOST great at it. For most of the game, you can sneak or negotiate or kill or use powers or what have you. What happens about 3/4 the way through, however, is the Troika effect; the devs ran out of time and/or money and things get rushed and combat heavy. So god help you if you didn't roll a combat viable character.
The game plays drastically differently based on your choice of race in the beginning of the game, which points to the 2nd bit of choice being the essential aspect of game: you need to make choices, they need to matter. If you're a Malkavian, you are batshit insane, can spread your madness, have entirely different dialog the entire game. If you're Nosferatu, you can't allow yourself to be seen by humans without dire consequences. Other races impact your skills, abilities and dialog.
Still though, the story is dark and engaging, the quests are varied, the world is rich and interesting. More and more, I'm finding that almost all of my favorite games have a lot in common with table top gaming. Emulating that experience makes for a very different kind of fun than a mario or a zelda. Play this game when it goes on sale for five bucks on Steam.
Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention The Oceanside Hotel. A haunted house mission where nothing can hurt you, you'd be hard pressed to find a more tense, lovingly crafted horror experience in games. I want an entire game of this, just haunted houses where nothing can hurt you but everything freaks you the fuck out. It's not the best horror experience in gaming (or even the best one we'd done on the podcast so far) but it's top shelf.
I havent played this game but is it similar to something like Fallout 3 or Skyrim? I guess those are the only games I can think of that sort of sound similar to this.
That said, it looks pretty awesome. I like engaging open ended games where the story matters. Seems to be the games I latch on to the strongest.
SMRPG is a game that, in retrospect, I consider to be an interesting failure. There's a lot to recommend it but almost as many sore spots. Let's start with the good:
The Timing System: What is the number one genre staple in JRPGs that is persistently tolerated and rarely improved? The grind. 80% of JRPGs consist of pressing the action button. This is true. Random battles rarely require any sort of deep strategical thinking and can be conquered with basic attacks. This is necessary; it'd be exhausting to think each and every encounter. It'd be like having to figure out the best way to tackle a goomba. So, this gets boring, almost every time. In SMRPG, they introduce this rudimentary timed button press system to keep you engaged throughout. This is a masterstroke innovation.
The Tone: Most JRPGs are bleak stuff (Earthbound aside). The tone here is goofy, light and fun, a real rarity at the time.
Then, we run into a bunch of stuff that's passable in the middle. The character advancement, as it were, the level designs, the music. It's all *fine* without being remarkable (at least to me). On to demerits:
The Characters: I might be in the minority here but I didn't like many of the new characters introduced. When you have a powerful license like Mario, why populate your game with uncharismatic new comers? A lot of the designs just seemed dumb and amateurish to me.
The Villains: This ties into the last point but this game has a serious case of an unforeseen bad guy coming up out of nowhere at the end. Now, Final Fantasy 4 does this as well but much more successfully. The ultimate antagonist of SMRPG is just an evil weapon maker with no back story. At least in FF4 he was an Azathothian cosmic horror.
In the end, worth playing but I didn't love it. Check out the episode for a more in depth discussion:
Aww. This was one of the first games I ever beat all the way. Geno is still one of my favorite characters of all time. I love the marionette. I still consider this to be one of the best games of all time. I love the culex battle as a throwback to early final fantasy games. It also was the precursor to the long running and much beloved paper mario games. The minecart mini game was also really fun. As was the music note tadpoles. Thanks for taking the time to write something up on such and old classic though. It's rarely mentioned nowadays.
I didn't have history with it, is one thing. Coming at games as an adult is tougher than as a kid sometimes. I don't think it's a bad game by any means. It's an experiential thing, right? The important thing is how you felt playing. That's what the podcast is about and also this site, I think.
Ya I don't fault you for disliking it or anything. You made valid points about it. Just giving my own opinions on a game from my childhood. I've gone back and finished it again about 3years ago replaying some games to see if it was all nostalgia.
There are some games I definitely give a lot of affection to due to nostalgia. I loved SNES RPGs but this is a weird blind spot for me as a young'n. If I had stumbled across it at that age, I would have ate it the fuck up. Instead, I wasted time on Paladin's Quest.
paladins quest...OH! I remember why that sounds familiar. It's also called Lennus. I just recently finished Lennus 2 a month or so ago. It was a great game.
I missed Super Mario RPG too. My cousin played it and loved it, but I didn't have it. By the time it came around I was moving on to being in a band and I skipped this entirely.
I came back to try it later and the faux 3D sort of didn't resonate with me. It seems to garner high praise from people that love it though. The fighting didn't stick with me and the story wasn't memorable, for the small bit I did play.
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I love the world of Call of Cthulhu as it relates to games. I have a post I want to write at some point about the table top game but what it comes down to is what I like to call a "disempowerment fantasy." We spend so much time as badass spacemarines and sparkflash embermages that it's refreshing to play a game where we're just a regular dude. This lends itself well to the horror genre but a lot of survival horror eschews this idea. Though you may start out relatively powerless in Resident Evil or Silent Hill, before long you're blasting and/or bashing in skulls and even in the early game, you are more than a match for a few zombies. There are exceptions, of course, like the Penumbra games, Amnesia, Haunting Ground or Clocktower.
This game straddles the line. For the first half, you are entirely defenseless and moreover, it plays like an adventure game. You're solving puzzles and soaking in atmosphere. The game is bifurcated by one of my all time favorite sequences in a video game (I'll talk about that a moment), and afterwards you have weapons. But your aim sucks and it's hard to hit enemies. If you run into a couple of guys, you're more or less fucked. I'm not going to say it's realistic but it's more so. You're not a badass. You're a bookish detective. It's very rarely a good idea to just charge into a situation with guns blazing. You use splits to heal broken legs and bandages to heal cuts. Super neat.
Further, the game does a great job at being unnerving without resorting to jump scares. The citizens of the town you're explore are subtly off and refer to terrible things in off handed ways. They're not openly malevolent, until they are and christ, it's amazing. This game is based on a couple of books by HP Lovecraft, the primary one being The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The climax of that book is an escape from an inn and this game replicates it perfectly. I'm going to say that it's the best translation of a specific scene from a book to a game EVER. If you've played it, you know what I mean. Thrilling, terrifying. I fucking love it. This game is must play up to that point.
Yes, it loses some shine, yes it has some rough edges. We talk about those a lot in the episode. But there are things this game does better than any other game I've played, specifically the idea of pursuit as a game mechanic.
I apologize for the touch of madness that caused this to be so disorganized. Underrated gem.
I'm going to try! I recorded a half hour yesterday but it didn't encode right. If I can get it to work, I will upload it. If not, I'm going to do a bevy of halloween NES games.
I'm not very tech savvy. I do LP with a custom program my buddy wrote. It's set up for the NES emulator I use and using it with anything else requires some setting-monkeying that I may not be up to.
Further, rendering the video takes a long time so it's not easy to test a bunch of settings. CoC is worth it on your own, however, even if I don't get around to the LP. You're talking about FF2 or FF4?
FF6 is a close second to 4 for certain. I think the Moon and Dwarf underground in the cavern parts sent it over the edge. FF6 has more re playablility and its end game can take you pretty far.
In the first Watch Out For Fireballs, we did a show about the evolution of a series. For the second, we went with something closer to a revolution. Adventure games simplified their parser through the years, starting with straight up text (Use lamp on torch) to a verb based system (like Monkey Island) and eventually moved to this entirely contextual, one click interface. How did this change the game?
Myst is a product of this entirely. The puzzles deal with mechanics, literally, because when you only have one possible interaction with something, "operate" makes the most sense. The nouns you interact with in Myst generally are just switches, buttons and levers: perfect for this sort of set up. This could lead to a purely puzzle based experience but the game deals out narrative in an interesting way: entirely through background text and images. Indirect, like Half Life 2. You don't know exactly what happened, just that something has, and you piece together the story slowly and methodically. You do so by exploring these deserted environments and the feeling of isolation is powerful.
That said, there's a huge divorce between play and story. The hardest part to get used to is that it feels a little like story bits are separated by puzzles. The puzzles are sort of flood gates between bits of narrative. In other adventure games, the puzzles and solutions are often tied directly to what you're trying to do (fool a guard, get a trinket out of a sewer). In Myst, you're often just trying to get somewhere or get past a literal gate. This is jarring if you're not expecting it.
There are some BS puzzles and I mostly favor adventure games a little closer to the narrative side of the axis but this is a must play and available on just about everything.
Myst was a game, like you mention, that focused on story and the world than most did at the time. It was also one of th first to take advantage of the new CD medium in computers to deliver some amazing graphics.
I remember not being able to play this for a while because we didn't have a PC capable of running it.
Th game seemed like setting from the future with 3D rendered graphics and in game video.
I had a friend that had it and he loved it! I'll admit some of the puzzling elements confused my mind a bit. My friend persisted and he beat it eventually. I think he even did it by himself, which is cool.
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There's a joy to be had in perfection through simplicity. The kind of perfection that comes without dizzying highs. Revolution over evolution, etc. That's what I think of when I think of Mega Man X.
Mega Man 2 was my first NES game (along with SMB and, puke, Operation Wolf) and my imagination was ignited by the setting and concept. There's something elemental to the idea of killing an enemy to get his power. It's why ancient tribes ate the hearts of their enemies. This game allows you eat metallic heart after metallic heart until you have the power of a dozen tribes. Mega Man X perfected what Mega Man 2 started and that's why we chose it for the first episode of Watch Out For Fireballs.
Every aspect of the earlier Mega Man games is improved here. The levels are more complex now that the wall climb allows verticality and, in a move few games have replicated, the order you tackle the stages greatly changes their content. The way this blew my mind as a child....
This game not only rewards reflexes but also exploration. By searching out of the way places and applying your myriad powers in creative ways, you can get a host of upgrades that, in turn, unlock further exploration. This metroidvania touch works wonders, elevating the game from an arcade platformer to something more.
Since you're going to be spending so much time dissecting these levels, it's a good thing they're varied and interesting and it's a good thing the music is top notch. One of the top 5 SNES games, I'd say, and one of the greatest platformers ever.
Like you Gary, I started with Mega Man 2 as well. Kind of glad I did because Mega Man 1 was pretty hard. That said, I could go on and on about Mega Man 2 and how much I love it so much.
Mega Man X is a really good game. I like you, dug the little things too. For me, the ability to have a cool ability from the start was pretty awesome. I didn't do much until the shot was fully charged up myself. Wall jumping was a nice addition because I felt like Mega Man jumps were pretty hard as is, now if you don't make it by just a bit you can wall jump to safety.
The music and graphics were good and the game came with more of a story than the others.
My only real negative on this game is the speed Mega Man travels. I would have sped him up a bit because he just felt... too slow? Its a minor gripe for such a good game though.
That slow movement thing might be something I missed in my last playthrough. I do think it looks a little like he runs in place as he moves, which might contribute to that.
