tdstr
1982
It's fine, I guess, but it's definitely worse than the original.
All the locks and gates clutter the much easier to traverse map, which is made worse with all the different collectible types. You've got multiple kinds of power pellets, keys (which you don't need to collect all of to clear the stage) and another kind of items to collect (usually fruit), and you can probably see where the problem lies. Pac-Man works because of its simplicity, not in spite of it, and this feels like it's just adding more shit just to add it. It's not really bad per se, but it's a clear downgrade from the very tightly designed original.
All the locks and gates clutter the much easier to traverse map, which is made worse with all the different collectible types. You've got multiple kinds of power pellets, keys (which you don't need to collect all of to clear the stage) and another kind of items to collect (usually fruit), and you can probably see where the problem lies. Pac-Man works because of its simplicity, not in spite of it, and this feels like it's just adding more shit just to add it. It's not really bad per se, but it's a clear downgrade from the very tightly designed original.
1980
Pac-Man Museum is leaving Game Pass tomorrow so I guess I'm running through a bunch of Pac-Man games today.
I mean, what do you even say? It's Pac-Man.
Tim Rogers has already completely exhausted anything worth being said about Pac-Man, but it's good. Extremely good, for an 80s arcade game. Earlier this year I played through Atari 50 and finally dipped my toes into actual early arcade games, and even though Pac-Man is a Namco game, you feel its influence, just like you feel Space Invaders' influence, and Donkey Kong's influence. But none of the many clones do Pac-Man as good as Pac-Man. They're slower, or clunkier, or don't employ Nishikado motion, there's always something bringing it down.
In many ways Pac-Man strikes me as very much like Tetris, just the sort of unique game that emerged with the rest of the industry spending the next several years trying to copy its success. But whereas original Tetris is something I've long argued is imperfect and desperately needed the changes the following decades brought it (did you know most early versions of Tetris don't have a hard drop system?), there really isn't anything not in line when it comes to Pac-Man. Everything's working as it should, which is pretty remarkable for a game released as early as 1980.
I mean, what do you even say? It's Pac-Man.
Tim Rogers has already completely exhausted anything worth being said about Pac-Man, but it's good. Extremely good, for an 80s arcade game. Earlier this year I played through Atari 50 and finally dipped my toes into actual early arcade games, and even though Pac-Man is a Namco game, you feel its influence, just like you feel Space Invaders' influence, and Donkey Kong's influence. But none of the many clones do Pac-Man as good as Pac-Man. They're slower, or clunkier, or don't employ Nishikado motion, there's always something bringing it down.
In many ways Pac-Man strikes me as very much like Tetris, just the sort of unique game that emerged with the rest of the industry spending the next several years trying to copy its success. But whereas original Tetris is something I've long argued is imperfect and desperately needed the changes the following decades brought it (did you know most early versions of Tetris don't have a hard drop system?), there really isn't anything not in line when it comes to Pac-Man. Everything's working as it should, which is pretty remarkable for a game released as early as 1980.
It's extremely trivial to complete but it's still kinda neat. Cool presentation, especially for a Flash game. Remember much more fondly playing this (along with all the other Bart Bonte games) when I was very very young, and this does seem like the sort of game that a kid would get more out of, but that doesn't really make it bad per se. Just very easy.
2008
The included song is very nice, and certainly the main appeal here, but you can listen to it outside of the game.
As for the game itself, all you're doing here is moving the mouse roughly in the direction of a bunch of particle effects. Very occasionally you have to avoid a couple red ones. Gets old even before the single short 4 minute long song is done playing.
As for the game itself, all you're doing here is moving the mouse roughly in the direction of a bunch of particle effects. Very occasionally you have to avoid a couple red ones. Gets old even before the single short 4 minute long song is done playing.
2005
Played about 2 hours over the course of a few days, beat the campaign on a bunch of different modes and difficulties.
I think if you handed me this game and told me "two gamedev auteurs collaborated on this" it would probably be, like, the easiest thing in the world to guess it was Sakurai and Mizuguchi, lol.
It's a very solid falling puzzle game, but it's also kinda clear why it didn't really go anywhere. My main issue is that it's built entirely with multiplayer in mind, with most of the singleplayer modes being you vs. the CPU. The problem here is that falling block multiplayer modes aren't really super satisfying, with you just needing to play roughly the same exact way regardless of what your opponent is doing. It's just an endurance until someone tops out, which tends to be short enough for the endurance to not really be satisfying in of itself.
Which, don't get me wrong, is fine, I've played a lot of 1v1 Tetris, so it's still fairly fun. But I was very much yearning for a marathon mode like in Lumines or Tetris Effect which brings you through all of the different levels in a sequence, rather than just an all-star mode-style campaign which throws you up against a random subset of opponents before the same final boss every time. There just isn't that sense of finality, but that's probably just not a goal for this in the first place--there's a very clear lineage between this and other Sakurai games like Kirby Air Ride and, of course, SSB in terms of its progression and unlock system. There's plenty of room for self-directed goals in here, if you're so driven.
I think if you handed me this game and told me "two gamedev auteurs collaborated on this" it would probably be, like, the easiest thing in the world to guess it was Sakurai and Mizuguchi, lol.
It's a very solid falling puzzle game, but it's also kinda clear why it didn't really go anywhere. My main issue is that it's built entirely with multiplayer in mind, with most of the singleplayer modes being you vs. the CPU. The problem here is that falling block multiplayer modes aren't really super satisfying, with you just needing to play roughly the same exact way regardless of what your opponent is doing. It's just an endurance until someone tops out, which tends to be short enough for the endurance to not really be satisfying in of itself.
Which, don't get me wrong, is fine, I've played a lot of 1v1 Tetris, so it's still fairly fun. But I was very much yearning for a marathon mode like in Lumines or Tetris Effect which brings you through all of the different levels in a sequence, rather than just an all-star mode-style campaign which throws you up against a random subset of opponents before the same final boss every time. There just isn't that sense of finality, but that's probably just not a goal for this in the first place--there's a very clear lineage between this and other Sakurai games like Kirby Air Ride and, of course, SSB in terms of its progression and unlock system. There's plenty of room for self-directed goals in here, if you're so driven.
2012
Neat clicker game with a cool aesthetic, fun enough to chip away over the course of about an hour at to hold my interest. It's pretty repetitive, but that's par for the course for a clicker game, and it does its concept well enough
2009
kinda funny that they didnt learn a single lesson from re4 other than "do this again" lol.
pretty damn solid co-op game, but just like RE4 it gets worse and worse as it morphs more and more into a generic military shooter. but this time it:
- has co-op (pretty fun and clearly the highlight here by far, although i hear it's really boring/borderline unplayable in singleplayer, so this might be something you only bother with if you've got a friend who also has it)
- turns into call of gears of war way earlier than re4 does--whereas the island section of re4 (also unanimously the worst section) set the mood for the next 6 or 7 years of shooters, re5 takes inspiration from everything taking inspiration from re4 but still in the intentionally clunky tank control framework, that works perfectly for the early sections and works less and less as the game goes on
- has a worse inventory system
- has even worse & bullet spongy boss fights. we had to just rocket launcher like 3 of them to get past em lol
- is buggier than even kane & lynch 2 on PC (it was mostly fine, just really really clunky UI, but our last 2 sessions bugged out a ton and the final one crashed to desktop several times in multiple different spots)
- is also really, really, racist, to a point where its almost kinda mindboggling how something this racist got pushed to production lol. like i'm talking minstrelsy, 1930s mickey mouse levels of racist, at points. much ink has been spilled about this, but yeah, it is very racist (do they ever even say where they're supposed to be any more specific than just "Africa", a giant continent with like a third of the entire world's population living in it???)
there's a lot of things to complain about here, but in all honesty, most of this, gameplay-wise, is quite literally just "re4 but co-op and slightly worse in a bunch of aspects. and also racist". on co-op the gameplay is still fun to execute for the vast majority of its time, and really only starts to get bad enough to consider bad in a few particularly egregious sections in the last couple of chapters. can imagine this is absolutely dogshit with an AI partner though, lol
(played with @JunKami)
pretty damn solid co-op game, but just like RE4 it gets worse and worse as it morphs more and more into a generic military shooter. but this time it:
- has co-op (pretty fun and clearly the highlight here by far, although i hear it's really boring/borderline unplayable in singleplayer, so this might be something you only bother with if you've got a friend who also has it)
- turns into call of gears of war way earlier than re4 does--whereas the island section of re4 (also unanimously the worst section) set the mood for the next 6 or 7 years of shooters, re5 takes inspiration from everything taking inspiration from re4 but still in the intentionally clunky tank control framework, that works perfectly for the early sections and works less and less as the game goes on
- has a worse inventory system
- has even worse & bullet spongy boss fights. we had to just rocket launcher like 3 of them to get past em lol
- is buggier than even kane & lynch 2 on PC (it was mostly fine, just really really clunky UI, but our last 2 sessions bugged out a ton and the final one crashed to desktop several times in multiple different spots)
- is also really, really, racist, to a point where its almost kinda mindboggling how something this racist got pushed to production lol. like i'm talking minstrelsy, 1930s mickey mouse levels of racist, at points. much ink has been spilled about this, but yeah, it is very racist (do they ever even say where they're supposed to be any more specific than just "Africa", a giant continent with like a third of the entire world's population living in it???)
there's a lot of things to complain about here, but in all honesty, most of this, gameplay-wise, is quite literally just "re4 but co-op and slightly worse in a bunch of aspects. and also racist". on co-op the gameplay is still fun to execute for the vast majority of its time, and really only starts to get bad enough to consider bad in a few particularly egregious sections in the last couple of chapters. can imagine this is absolutely dogshit with an AI partner though, lol
(played with @JunKami)
2011
Fun little platformer that honestly kinda does Achievement Unlocked better than the original. Once you get down to the last 5 or 10% of achievements you're just going to have to look up what they are anyways, so it's nice to be able to have a built in hint system here. Short and mostly succinct, despite the intentionally exaggerated number of achievements.
Oh wait, this season's ending in a couple hours? Okay, so I'm usually pretty defensive of Fortnite, it's probably the best live service game out there right now (although you wouldn't expect that to be a very hard bar to clear). But this season kinda sucked, guys.
Still not a fan of the Chapter 5 map, with the only new stuff here mostly being relegated to the corners (and a lot of the locations still feeling like empty repeats of one another), and the lack of reliable weapon upgrade spots made games feel like a lot more of a gamble than they already are. The mythology-based items are all mostly bad, with the only stuff really worth going for being the coins, which are often too hard to bother with in solo and fairly inconsequential in squads. The new shotgun was pretty good for a bit but it got nerfed into the ground really quickly, same goes with the wings.
It's live service so there's a chance that this secretly got a lot better in its back half, but it says something that this is the first Fortnite season in, like, 2 years that I've completely tapped out of halfway through, not even bothering to make back the vbucks on my battle pass. Really hoping for some big sweeping changes next season, as chapters have definitely been saved before even when their base map(s) showed very little promise.
Still not a fan of the Chapter 5 map, with the only new stuff here mostly being relegated to the corners (and a lot of the locations still feeling like empty repeats of one another), and the lack of reliable weapon upgrade spots made games feel like a lot more of a gamble than they already are. The mythology-based items are all mostly bad, with the only stuff really worth going for being the coins, which are often too hard to bother with in solo and fairly inconsequential in squads. The new shotgun was pretty good for a bit but it got nerfed into the ground really quickly, same goes with the wings.
It's live service so there's a chance that this secretly got a lot better in its back half, but it says something that this is the first Fortnite season in, like, 2 years that I've completely tapped out of halfway through, not even bothering to make back the vbucks on my battle pass. Really hoping for some big sweeping changes next season, as chapters have definitely been saved before even when their base map(s) showed very little promise.
1991
Very bizarre Arkanoid clone. Honestly kinda resembles a shmup a lot of the time, especially once you use your special ability, which splits one of the balls into probably like 20. You really don't have to use it much to trivialize it though, and the game is very very easy, even on a single credit. Still does quite a lot to really make a brick breaking game feel like a true action game, though, and it's fun enough to be worth a look if you're interested in these kinds of games.
That soundtrack though, lol. https://twitter.com/FLOOR_BABA/status/1396325087360454657
That soundtrack though, lol. https://twitter.com/FLOOR_BABA/status/1396325087360454657
2008
There was once a time when this was one of the best 3D platformers you could play online...
...but nowadays, it's mostly just exhausting. Just hasn't aged well. So many of the levels are borderline identical, and there are 50 here. It's mostly okay, but once the difficulty gets really ramped up in the last dozen levels, pushing through it felt like a task that really only exists to be bragged about on a playground, and which was otherwise pretty much pointless. Feel like I liked Run 2 more as a kid anyways.
...but nowadays, it's mostly just exhausting. Just hasn't aged well. So many of the levels are borderline identical, and there are 50 here. It's mostly okay, but once the difficulty gets really ramped up in the last dozen levels, pushing through it felt like a task that really only exists to be bragged about on a playground, and which was otherwise pretty much pointless. Feel like I liked Run 2 more as a kid anyways.
2024
Ok 20 hours deep and no signs of stopping, really just some of the best gameplay of all time ever I'm thinking. Definitely at least one of the best album listening games ever.
Beaten it several times on several difficulties and several decks, it's just not getting old at all. I am just now starting to try out stuff like pair decks and it's really fun to figure out how exactly I need to build my run to be able to clear blinds. Very difficult to express just how good this feels to play through only words, but for what it's worth it's easily my favorite rougelike/lite in a very very long time, possibly ever. One of the best examples I have ever seen of "easy to learn, hard to master."
Beaten it several times on several difficulties and several decks, it's just not getting old at all. I am just now starting to try out stuff like pair decks and it's really fun to figure out how exactly I need to build my run to be able to clear blinds. Very difficult to express just how good this feels to play through only words, but for what it's worth it's easily my favorite rougelike/lite in a very very long time, possibly ever. One of the best examples I have ever seen of "easy to learn, hard to master."
Four small snapshots of Americana. Love the background art in this one, and paired with the music it's very evocative of a specific kinda atmosphere. Worth trying if you have it through an itch bundle, it's very short.
2020
Doesn't do anything The Stanley Parable didn't already do better a decade ago, but it still got a couple strong exhales out of me. Perfectly fine way to spend 20 minutes.
1995
by all reasonable metrics, D is a very, very bad game. it's maybe the single most sluggish adventure game i've ever played, very little happens for most of it, and the gameplay really really sucks. but I can't help but see something here--it's got such a strong vibe and atmosphere that blows so much from the time period out of the water. such a weird thing and really nothing like it. even if you do spend a good third of the game just spinning one wheel and turning around over and over again.