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I don’t think I will ever not be up for another sub-$2 Vampire Survivors expansion. What a wonderful world.
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It’s actually already out on mobile, too. No huge delay this time.
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I really like what they are doing with their updates - every few months dropping something that will fully occupy my lizard brain for a weekend. For $2! I was able to get back up to 100% completion in a few days and barely started seeing gems being pulled to the center whenever I close my eyes!
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Last week I got to spend some time playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. It made me happy that the last one I own is the Wii game. 8 seems to have too much stuff going on. Aside from a huge cast of characters, there’s mixing/matching/customizing three parts of your kart or motorcycle and the super windy roads that occasionally let you go into the walls and ceiling. It’s just a lot. I love the series because of its mix of simplicity and chaos. This one is mess and chaos – and they even update older race stages to be messier.
Long way to say the game isn’t for me.
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That’s kind of how I felt about Mario Kart on the Wii! There was too much going on. I missed the simplicity and tight level design of Mario Kart 64 (especially the battle arena). And in Mario Kart 64 I missed the jump feather item from the SNES Mario Kart. I’m not this conservative in most things! Just Mario Kart. And Goldeneye 007/ Perfect Dark. That’s where my FPS skill peaked.
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Post-GoldenEye FPS games are also post-GospelX FPS games. Closest I get are the Metroid Prime games.
I can see the Wii game being a bit much in comparison to the N64 games, but that’s cake compared to how busy the new version is. But peak Mario Kart for me is Double Dash!! Perfect in so many ways that they haven’t dared to repeat it.
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I missed out on pretty much all of the Gamecube games, sadly, unless it was also released on the Wii, like Twilight Princess. It seems like I missed out on a lot of great stuff.
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I can tell you that if you play a newer FPS, they let you customize the controls. Despite playing so much Perfect Dark, I never really want to go back to one in which you can’t. Also, Megaman 8-bit Deathmatch has been going for 13 years and is still getting new updates.
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That looks pretty cool! 13 years is a lot of time to hone one’s skills at a game. I imagine that competition is fierce. Still, I will keep that bookmarked if I’m looking to get back into some retro FPS battle arena gaming. I think that would suit me better than, say, Fortnite and the like.
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Megaman 8-Bit Deathmatch came to mind for me as a very Mario Kart style FPS. There are power-ups (the Robot Master weapons and utilities) sprinkled throughout levels, some of which might give a great advantage or just generally cause some amusement. There are also a few different modes so its not all just, “be the best,” such as a zombie mode inspired by the plot from 10. Even if you don’t play multiplayer, there’s a single player campaign.
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Anyone else try out the Street Fighter 6 demo? The weird training mode isn’t something I’m interested in spending much time on, but the new control scheme is interesting. Three strength buttons and another one for special moves. I want to see how that works out for all characters, since even with Ryu his moves don’t map nicely to the for 4 positions available. (Neutral, forward, back, air.) And characters with really strong and complicated special moves, like a spinning piledriver, might walk through the competition if the moves are mapped to a single button – or the moves are made inaccessible otherwise.
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Haven’t, but it sounds similar to Tatsunoko vs. Capcom/Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Three attack strengths and a special button with simple directions is also how Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid handles it, despite being built by people most known for MvC2, and I’m heavily in favor of that approach. Balance is, as always, a tricky thing, but the spinning pile driver probably wasn’t designed with the expectation that nobody could execute it. Older games in the series have had shortcuts for it, and Snake Eyez might have surprised some people at EVO a decade ago by using a DualShock controller to walk forward with one analog stick and motion with the other, but he still had to do the work to get Zangief in range.
ETA: Now, if you need to press the Start button to switch between punches and kicks like in Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition when you used a stock Genesis controller… Why did they just put that game out on Nintendo Online expansion pack when they don’t offer a six button replica controller outside Japan?
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I immediately thought Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, but I don’t think the weak → medium → strong string works as a combo. Banging one button thrice seems to, but maybe I need to play around with it more. Eventually. There are only two characters. I’m not interested in going back to Ryu and Luke anytime soon.
I just learned that they have released the old Playstation 2 fireworks game Fantavision for the PC. I was going to come here and complain about what a waste it was to release it without a VR mode.
But it has a VR mode!
It’s also launching at 40% off through May 4. I will report back if it is good!
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God dammit. Waypoint’s podcasts are the ones that I look forward to the most each week. I really hope that the people involved decide to carry their subscribers over to Patreon or something.
Fuck capitalism and go home indeed
Snagged Switchback VR. Thought it might be a mistake, potentially being too scary for the relaxation I wanted, but it’s not. I think a lot of that is simply due to the genre. It’s a light gun game on rails. You know things are going to come from front in an arc, and they’re vulnerable to guns. You can just kind of let the weirdness wash over you and be “WTF?” while playing. There are certainly jump scares and some “oh crap, rats, how much Uzi ammo do I have left?”, but no real fear.
I’m only a few levels in ,so this may change.
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So, Redfall is awful. I’ve only played a couple of hours and I will not be going back. It’s not a good looter shooter, it’s not an immersive sim, and it’s not a good open world. Everything has been really rote, really boring and, oh my god, the writing is terrible!
It’s upsetting for a couple of reasons.
One, I normally love Arkane games, even the ones that are not exactly what I want, like Deathloop. That was still a tightly designed and well imagined game. This is just a mess and I’m not sure that it’s fixable because it’s not performance issues or any kind of technical thing. It’s just a bad design.
Two, the whole point of Bethesda ending up under Microsoft was that they would no longer have the economic pressures on them that resulted in their games coming out with often entertaining jank. I assumed that would also mean that they would have the support to spend as much time as they needed in pre-production and during development to get the design and the story right, not just the technical aspects.
While development on Redfall started before they were acquired, there have been years since during which they could have realized this wasn’t working and either scrapped it or revisited it. Instead, I assume because of game pass, they’re just pushing it out so there will be new content there.
Honestly makes me think that maybe the best way to kill off Call of Duty is to let Microsoft buy it.
Edited to translate from voice dictation to English
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If you want some fun, dread filled, rhythm rail shooting can I recommend Thumper? I don’t know if it’s out on PSVR 2 yet or not, but it will be I’m sure.
Basically you are a scarab riding on a rail through some kind of null space destroying eldrick horrors to the beat of pretty intense music. I find it weirdly relaxing, others find it anxiety inducing.
I think it is. I’m generally not a fan of rhythm games, so I’ve mostly ignored it. I’ll take a look at it.
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