Worked in reverse, too: it's one of many games where a mid-boss lowers its difficulty if you lose & continue against him.
Good arcade games were always walking a tightrope of profitability while also making the player feel like they were getting value and a reason to come back, all at a steady clip
Obvious "pay up or get off the machine" design at play there. But where some people view that as a "dirty" monetization scheme, you can just as easily view it as a way to either make the game more interesting for the seasoned player OR as a way to force him off the cab so that someone else can play.
Last time I was in EVO's arcade free play section I noticed how many late '90s versus games had really obvious adaptive difficulty and rubberbanding.
Finally ran out of human opponents on a Virtual On winstreak and then noticed that the stage 1 CPU was basically running at stage 8 difficulty.
I think this dovetails with how pay-to-play arcade game design also isn't really respected by people who didn't grow up with it.
Having to spend another quarter as a literal price for failure just short-circuits some people's brains in a way that other forms of "punishment" does not.
It's basically the exact opposite of how tutorialization should work. Instead of training players to engage more with your game, you're doing the opposite for the sake of content tourism.
I read a long time ago how one of the design principles for God of War was "it should always be *possible* for the player to overcome the most difficult adversaries with just the basic attack, even if it's tedious" and thinking to myself how that's just training players to have a miserable time.
Having to master a toolset and a sequence of challenges is engaging. Replaying earlier levels doesn't even have to feel like a punishment; in a satisfying game, it's not only an opportunity to amass resources for challenging parts, but also just an opportunity to hang out and destress on its own.
Not the exact same thing, but this gets at the heart of why "savestate platformers" (IWBTG and its modern indie derivatives) are pure torture to me.
I will take a difficult '80s game with bona fide failure states and peaks-and-valleys of difficulty over smashing my head against a wall on repeat.
Telling to me that the most cited impact this game had on this sample set of replies is a trailer that I don't remember at all.
I remember that, during Gears of War's time, people talked about the game as if it would cement itself among 3D third-person shooters the same way that Contra did for 2D run-n-guns.
I never played it. How true did this end up being?
Seeing today's news about "Copilot for Xbox" and am thinking about this more broadly.
Do kids these days even see advancement in tech as a positive thing at all?
It’s been about 39 years and I’m seriously starting to wonder if this DLC is ever coming out.
Every once in a while I'll share a funny battle anecdote disaster of one kind or another in the FTL subreddit and get at least one response that "helpfully" offers build or tactical advice.
I'm 4000+ hours deep into this game and have memorized at least 99% of the event outcomes at this point.
Narratively having Ever Given getting stuck in 2021 to set up Hormuz in 2026 is great foreshadowing. You want your audience to understand the basics of international shipping in a lower stakes context so you drop the real plot without a lot of saggy exposition about the minutiae of cargo logistics.
"Problematic" is one of the worst weasel words of the social media age.
Either show your work and lay out why it's actually a problem, or stop trying to embellish something so that you have an excuse to rip on a designated target.
"Problematic" is among the worst weasel words of the social media age.
Graphical fidelity stopped mattering at some point around Shenmue, and technical fidelity stopped mattering when online connectivity became standard.
Do younger generations even associate the passage of time with a meaningful advancement of tech anymore?
lot of people on this site soaking themselves stupid making posts like "stop saying gross shit is ok" when people are very clearly saying "you are allowed to think something is absolutely vile but trusting the government/companies/paypros w the morality barometer is HISTORICALLY really dumb"
Last time I was in Vegas I watched as somebody played a video slots game where you'd bet $1 or so per play and could have several outcomes where you'd "win" 50 cents or so, complete with various sensory overload fanfare of one kind or another.
Yes, it's incredibly stupid, but it seems to work.
There are bigger issues when it comes to the poor health of the modern game industry: too-long dev cycles, rampant employee turnover, increasingly manipulative monetization, etc.
But there's nothing else I can think of that really underscores how the tech guys are just completely out of ideas.
My formative years were the '90s, a decade bookended by the NES and the Dreamcast, bolstered by the technological peak of the arcade, the advent of accelerated PC gfx cards, proliferation of network play, and the rise of 3D consumer graphics.
Selling raytracing as a "big thing" is just so pathetic.
i said it about "nfts will let you take your items from game to game!" and it continues to be true: the way tech grifters talk about games shows that they don't undersrand what a game is or why they are played.
it handily doubles as proof that games and games design are art, not tech.
Happy MAR10
Oak's little speech at the end is absurd because there's nothing to indicate that the rival has treated his crew any worse than the player's.
Especially considering that his in-battle team doesn't have a lot of turnover throughout (to the point where his first-capture Pidgey is never removed).
Definitely from the same brain trust that gave us Google Stadia.
Yeah I can totally see the people who brought you Google Stadia also thinking that this is worth showcasing.
So did Wacky Worlds actually save your work to the cart or did the instruction manual just lie?
I used to own a copy and I'm *pretty sure* I opened it up at one point to reveal no save battery or save RAM. I know it for sure never saved.
Got crushed by Cookie's Bustle.
There are enough clues to figure out what led him from helming the Mewtwo project to becoming the caretaker of Pokemon Tower, and why he feels obliged to interfere with Team Rocket. He's seen some shit.
I also thought it was cool that he left a note behind on Emerald's Mew island event.
