The Nintendo Switch

harmony of dissonance was pretty good, circle of the moon was decent i think

Never got to play any of those Castlevania ones outside of Aria, and yes, that one at least fuckin ruled.

I played Harmony and Circle when they came out and enjoyed them, then thought Aria was a huge step-up, and Portrait an even huger step-up. I watched the trailers for the Switch re-release and decided I didn't wanna do it though... my revisitation of SOTN every few years is enough for me I think

Loving the new Metroid atm!

Metroid looks fun but those levels of Celeste where you get chased make me *so* tense and this basically looks like a whole game of that

are you being stalked in all areas of the game or are there designated areas for the stalker robot thing and others where its normal metroid?

There's designated areas where you get chased by the robots, and also you *can* kill them under very specific circumstances. The tense chase-y bits are so far very well-proportioned to the rest of the game IMO

It seems like about 1/5 to 1/4 of a given level is a discrete Stalker Ranch. You enter the creepy door and everything gets grainy and you are being stalked. You can leave at any time so long as the stalker has not detected you-- if so, you have to outrun the stalker. I've murdered four of them so far and even stalker #4 generated white knuckles and sweat, it's a genuinely thrilling mechanism. Echoes of MGS1 tbh

xp

i got metroid dread even tho i did not want to pay 60 for a 2d game its good the movement is very nice when you jump up to a ledge then roll into a ball it feels great its pretty hard im on the second boss

when you do the counter attack on those lil bat guys then shoot them and receive many health pellets is another very nice interaction

the only thing that could improve it i think is if you could jump on your hat

fuck jumping on a hat

lol

the only maybe mechanical misstep is the weird quasi playable cutscene stuff either you control the guy or you dont is my feeling

getting chased by the emmis is nicely done too imo its rare enough that it adds some novelty to the game and the trying to go fast is just fun on its own also when you die repeatedly the whole process is short enough that it doesnt feel like too much of a chore

and yeah killing them is pretty sick

i bought the super monkey ball rerelease instead of metroid. i never played these the first time around but they're pretty fun if you like games about getting owned by physics repeatedly, one of my favorite genres tbh

one of my favorite genres tbh

same. marble madness, monkey ball, and the irl wooden labyrinth with the marble, and also the cheap plastic sphere you can find in any goodwill for $5 game

i'm definitely gonna pick up monkeyball soon, as a reward for myself, but first i need to do something good

I have arrived at a point in Dread where the boss is so hard, there are so many weird details I'm learning where it's like "oh shit I can't even let that happen?" and I am dying and dying, and I feel like in fact I'm fighting a Contra 3 boss who is 10x harder, but I keep dying and trying again, this is a very bracing experience. How to make an "impossible boss" work where I'm not giving up in frustration but am trying and trying again? This is a wonderful game

i am wondering if i just need to git gud or if I'm having some controller issues but i'm finding the metroid controls frustrating. I'm aiming down instead of crouching, falling off walls instead of jumping. just me?

The game will by the 2/3rd mark expect an enormous familiarity with the controls… I got one particular upgrade that requires “good timing” to execute, and was plunged 20 minutes later into a compulsory boss fight in which mastery of the new upgrade was compulsory to survival.

I am having flashes of some of the hardest 2D games of my childhood… there is one boss sequence that is precisely one of the most difficult sections of Gameboy Battletoads. Unlike Celeste, which felt like work and luck, this feels closer to the Dark Souls nirvana of gitting gudder with every attempt

The game is gracefully transitioning from linear exposition to “ok now that you can go anywhere in this world, what areas do you wish to revisit and explore at your leisure?” sandbox.

I’m also having massive nostalgic moments with the very Metroid-esque “vital item is hidden behind something just obscure enough for you to think you’ve hit a dead end” design. Yesterday I was so certain that the designers had dead-ended me that I attempted to upgrade the software, hoping that there was a mistake that needed to be corrected, but no, I was just supposed to shoot something that I neglected to notice

yeah that happened to me at the beginning of the 3rd level, very NES

I'm not that far in, but it's really good. Most reviews have liked it, but Kotaku said it was all a bit cold and by the book, despite the EMMI stealth aspects. I definitely get classic Metroid vibes from it but the last one I played was on SNES.

Yeah I didn’t feel coldness at all, but I wasn’t a fan of the Prime series really

I think I’ve acquired all the upgrades and now it’s just how much loot I wanna collect before final boss time. The sparkly technique that keeps a lot of that loot locked up is appealingly finicky to execute

looks like disco elysium is out on switch tomorrow

I would be okay with the metroid controls if i could work off the d-pad and not the stick.

^ yes. I never used stick on either Hades or Dead Cells, always D-pad, it's more precise

I allowed myself 30 minutes of Metroid over lunch and it turned into 60 minutes of trying and failing to get "that one nearly impossible shinespark missile in Ferenia". I guess it's only a series of nine precisely executed commands (boost run, jump, wall jump, slide, bomb, unslide, press-down-to-charge, return and slide, execute shinespark, eat your lunch) but I couldn't get it. I have a headache

looks like disco elysium is out on switch tomorrow

I relented and bought it a while back for the PS4 but haven't played yet. I heard that a lot of it is text driven so doesn't really benefit portable mode. Plus, even the PS4 apparently had lots of issues at first, and I figured the Switch is even more prone to that sort of stuff when it comes to ports. Curious how it's received, though.

Tell me about Disco Elysium. If I’m not into dialogue-only games like Kentucky route zero, is this a bad idea? It Looks like the gameplay is a bit more varied.

Yeah, I'm super intrigued. I've heard so many good things about it for so long, from the start, that I've mostly kept myself in the dark and bought it blind. The only thing I've heard is that there's a lot of text involved, but I don't think it's a text driven game, not as I understand it. (It also has its own thread iirc.)

i dont think it has gameplay other than point+click and choosing text options? theres no combat if thats what you're looking for

i finished metroid dread today. it's a fear-based game, and i learned that at the end of the day, the greatest fear of all is "how far is this game going to send me back after this 'game over' screen?"

incredible game. highly recommended even if you're not a huge metroid fan.

ive not finished it but i would agree that it is a very good and serious game

Yeah Dread rules and I'm trying to not just blow threw it.

Not that this guy is consequential, but I came across this and lol what a dumbass.

https://www.denofgeek.com/games/metroid-dread-david-jaffe-difficulty-rant-controversy-reactions/

I've found the puzzle/exploration in this to be fairly straightforward and well designed so far. I remember getting stuck in Super Metroid for hours at a time.

Dread's difficulty is very finely tuned wrt boss fights. My first (and only) win was maybe my 20th attempt at the fight, and I'd gone from "dying within the first twenty seconds" to "progressing through to the final stage of the battle without taking damage" very quickly

What is stunningly difficult in Dread is the shinespark stuff. I'm about seven collectibles away from 100% completion, but those seven collectibles are Herculean feats of timing and precision... the last such flagship title that I grudgingly abandoned before 100% because it was just too hard for me was Yoshi's Island

Also, what David Jaffe is citing as "bad design" is a long-standing feature of Metroid's style.

I mean...

https://www.nintendocastle.com/images/guides/metroid-nes_brinstar_energy-tank01.png

There is also a big pop-up on the bottom of the screen early on that literally says "if you come to a dead end, try shooting your surroundings"

Obv a David Jaffe problem and not a game design problem.

It's odd because as much as Metroid has come to mean "big unlockable map and upgrades," the series is absolutely also infamous for impenetrable secrets and such. A la:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQA0vgKF_A

yeah i did not read the piece but i have some sympathy for the idea that weird randomly hidden stuff is "bad design" but its also a metroid trademark at this point which is cool

It was obviously the straw that broke the camels back regarding is frustration for current game design, so much so that he couldn’t see that this specific example was not as good as he thought it was to make that point.

His*

Secrets are essentially marked on the maps in this one too! Plus that ability later that scans the area for breakable blocks.

I think this has a well tuned level of difficulty so far. Occasionally challenging but hardly anything approaching maddening, unless you’re going for one of the more involved (totally optional) secrets. I haven’t gotten that one skill mentioned above though.

it's important to not take jaffe seriously, he aspires to be the ben shapiro of games

idk the 'bomb every unmarked wall randomly to figure out how to progress' design in older metroid games is pretty obnoxious. i played through fusion for the first time recently & it was pretty terrible about it. dread tones it down significantly, there's usually decent contextual clues & it happens nowhere near as much. i still had to look up which wall to shoot once or twice though but it was more "why didn't i think to check there" than the "why would i ever expect i would need to check there" of fusion.

Still wish Fusion/Zero Mission were actually playable somewhere! Skipped those on release.

loved zero mission back in the day, basically another super metroid in style and quality. fusion was fine but i never finished it

I went back and 100%’d it. Oddly enough I figured out two much-easier ways to shine spark two of those last assets than any video demos describe! Had a “maybe I’ll start a Twitch channel” moment but that passed

It's odd because as much as Metroid has come to mean "big unlockable map and upgrades," the series is absolutely also infamous for impenetrable secrets and such. A la:

📹

Sorry I have to post his resident evil review. I haven’t laughed this hard in a while

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GduwxBZAxs4

*taps the 'do not encourage dunkey' sign*

Oh he has a bad rep?