The way Mario seems to teleport when turning around in the water seems to say something about the way hitboxes worked in the original DKC1.

Super Kong World

Thanks for the encouragement to just jump in and do stuff, gaming and otherwise.

I’ve found myself having a hard time finding dedicated time to play games (i.e. without worrying about something else “over my shoulder”) and I’ve also found myself seemingly unable to “learn” new genres of games despite my wanting to get into them (so I often end up playing genres I’m already familiar with). I suspect these are related, and I also suspect that just jumping in and doing stuff more spontaneously will probably help improve things.

Yeah, N64/PS1 era was when the industry started pushing 3D games hard, and it really feels like the beginning of the modern era to me too.

I’ve generally found that avoiding the biggest crowds seems to also avoid some (though not all) of the worst behavior. More specialized subreddits, communities, and magazines tend to be more chill, and also more focused on their topics.

It’s arguably so easy to “farm karma” that I accidentally did it for a while. Just kept posting silly puns to reply to stuff people post on the Florida Man subreddit.

Reddit karma ain’t worth much at all.

On one hand downvotes are an expression of negativity, but on the other hand downvotes are an outlet for negativity.

Meanwhile, I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why a bunch of the top comments here got like one downvote each, lol.

Honestly I don’t think an algorithm needs to work very hard to “be mean” like that. Sure, you can purposely put people with clashing views in each other sight on a place where people go to hang out and have fun. But you don’t even need to go do that on purpose. To some extent, people naturally produce more “engagement” with stuff that’s controversial/argumentative.

Imagine if I were to walk past you and say some completely innocent comment. Now imagine I were to walk past you and insult your favorite movie/show/song/game/whatever. You’d be far more likely to respond in the latter case.

So, as people respond, more activity is generated, and that makes the post “hotter”. Simply boost what’s hot, and you have a veritable litany of controversy.

Wait…is this Felix the Cat??

Seconding basically all the (mainline) Metroid games.

A keyboard. Any standard computer keyboard.

This post was originally written as a reply to a comment by @[email protected]. But it got kinda long and it’s basically my answer to the thread topic. So yeah, lemme tell y’all a story.

I started out playing 2D platformers for DOS, where the default – or more like, only – control scheme was arrow keys to move and Ctrl and Alt to do things (commonly Ctrl to jump and Alt to shoot). I also grew up on NES, GB, and SNES games, and a handful of PC games. Notably, though, I never picked up FPS games as a child, and also never really got anything from the 32-bit era and beyond until much later in life.

With emulators being more integrated into Windows (meaning Ctrl and Alt do important things), I shifted the action buttons to the lower left corner of the keyboard. Emulating an SNES gamepad, for example, I generally map the action buttons in a mirror-image fashion to ZXCS (respectively, ABYX). (A friend of mine maps them in a similar fashion, using ZXAS instead.) This then lets me map the L and R buttons to A and D respectively. And I move this whole ensemble of six buttons up a row if I have ghosting issues. (The Sega Genesis gamepad can be mapped similarly easily.)

This works brilliantly well (at least for me) for 2D platformers, top-down action games, JRPGs, and more. Notably, though, this excludes pretty much anything that requires analog controls of some sort, e.g. FPS games, N64 games, etc… But between a lack of hardware capable of playing 3D stuff (whether natively or by emulation), a lack of a familiar control scheme, and a lack of personal interest (due to just not having ever gotten into them), I pretty much just stuck with emulating up through the 16-bit era, with a little PS1 emulation thrown in. It’s not like I ever had a shortage of excellent games.

And curiously, it turns out my control scheme (arrow keys + ZXC(V)ASD(F)) is the favored scheme for a number of Japanese indie developers who made things like action games and RPGs using 2D sidescrolling and top-down views. So I ended up having even more to play! In contrast, it seems western devs often prefer WASD, even for stuff like 2D platformer Flash games (to my chagrin). And I see (English-speaking) PC gamers these days regarding my sort of control scheme as a “left-handed” setup (which is amusing since I’m not left-handed).

I only learned to WASD as an adult. At first I even tried to use the mouse with my left hand, and tried putting my left hand on the arrow keys, but eventually I gave in and learned to WASD. I still only use this when I need to use mouse aim though, e.g. Terraria (which I played a lot).

For games that actually require console-style analog controls, though, I nowadays have a wired XB360 gamepad that connects via USB. I’ve tried mapping things like the N64 gamepad to a keyboard before but with no success. But now that I have this, funny thing is this means I’m only recently getting into a number of classics from that era.

I’ve considered getting an 8BitDo SN30 or SN30 Pro(?)…whichever basically looks like an SNES pad with added analog sticks. I specifically want a gamepad without “legs” – the two stubs that seem to be meant as palm grips on each side of the gamepad. That’s because I held my SNES pad from the side so that I could press A, B, and Y at the same time with my right thumb. (This was highly useful when playing Mega Man X.) Controllers with “legs” basically make it way harder for me to do this, as I found out when I tried to play MMX4 on my PS1. It felt so awkward, I just went straight back to emulating it, despite having the disc and hardware.

But, for now, I only pull out my XB360 gamepad for stuff that needs analog stick functionality. Everything else is keyboard. (And mouse, if needed.)

This picture is possibly banned by the church, and I love it.

I wish someone had shown me the ropes to get into WRPGs (and other genres that I have yet to really familiarize myself with) back in the day.

There’s a lot of really neat stuff in the genre that seems hard to get into without taking the time to learn how to make the most of it. Maybe it’s that I’m now an adult and I know a bit too much, but I’ve had problems like sitting down with Neverwinter Nights 2 and then realizing that I should go research character builds before I start playing the game. And then, of course, that just means I forget about playing the game for another year or two.

And this isn’t even anywhere near the most obtuse game to learn. There are very complex games (particularly some sim games) that really seem like they’d be great fun if only I actually knew how to play them, but I don’t.

My friend lent me his copy of FF7 PC, and I tried playing it – albeit after I played earlier FF games.

There were two problems. First, it was…kinda weird compared to earlier games. Sure, the steampunk vibes began in FF6, but we didn’t have Literally An Evil Megacorp and Literally Eco-Terrorists fighting over Something That Feels A Lot Like An Analogy For Nuclear Power. That was a whole nother level. Nothing wrong with this per se, but it just felt like something quite different. Neat, but just not the same FF I was used to.

But, perhaps more importantly, the game just kept crashing. I kept going as far as I could, but the game just wouldn’t progress past the introduction to the Gold Saucer.

The first time played Super Metroid, it was after I played Fusion and Zero Mission, and I was actually rather unimpressed by it, despite it being basically a platinum standard for 2D metroidvanias.

It was only later, after playing various romhacks including randomizers and getting much more accustomed to the game engine and the sheer number of possibilities afforded by various speed tricks and sequence-breaking techniques, that I gradually realized why it’s held in such high regard. The game is…neat, if you simply play through it once. But the more you learn about it the more you can do with it and the more fascinating it becomes. There is a seemingly infinite depth to it, which is not at all obvious on a first playthrough. In fact, some of it appears to be accidental, possibly game design bugs on the programmers’ part, yet somehow such imperfects have made it even more of a masterpiece.

I think there’s something to be said that there’s a certain level of intellectual maturity that’s needed to truly enjoy these games.

I grew up with NES Metroid, and despite having read the manual many times over, as a kid I never made sense of the game. I could play it, I could insert the Justin Bailey code, I could move around and do stuff, but I never truly understood what I was meant to do. I stumbled into Tourian one day and promptly got pwned by metroids, and then I never found my way back until I was an adult.

The second metroidvania game I played was Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. Maybe it’s an easier game – it’s certainly less confusingly open-ended than Metroid 1 – but I absolutely loved the experience. I deeply appreciated the narrative journey of being trapped in this castle, full of weirdness and twisty passages that were slightly off from each other, having the mid-game bombshell dropped on me, and piecing together a mystery until I was able to find out what was going on. I played it all night, and in a story I like to tell people, the morning after I beat it (and finally got the best ending), as the sun came out, I put on the Aloha de Chocobo music from Final Fantasy IX and it was the most glorious feeling. But this depended on me understanding that I was immersed in a maze, and understanding what I needed to do to find my way out of the maze.

And I’ve been enjoying this genre since.

I’m usually playing older games of some sort. There’s retro games, like those from the 32-bit era and before, but I also play…old-ish games, ones that were released within the last decade or two. Just last year I began playing Tokyo Xanadu eX+, which was released in 2017 (albeit as the definitive version of a 2015 game).

I think a number of the indie games I play are generally newer. Though, given my tastes, many of them tend to be games designed to evoke some sort of similarity to those older styles of games. So I guess it’s an interesting question whether they count as “retro” or not.

That said, given that I pretty much only use store-bought laptops (and not of the “gaming” variety), my hardware means that I’m much better off playing older games anyway. “Newer old” games can probably still run, depending on the game, but some may be choppy and I can probably wait on those.

I knew of the stellar reputation the old Thief games have, so I bought them a while back, but have yet to play them. And I have yet to play basically any of the modern games shown. However, this video make a surprising lot of sense.

For instance, I’ve had experiences in games where I can tell that the game is visually pretty but I’m just not paying attention to it – and ironically missing out on some neat visual features – because it’s just not important to the gameplay. This may be more appropriate when I’m revisiting game areas I’ve already been to, but it can be a problem when I’m missing the awe of my surroundings because I’m too focused on making my way through the obvious walkable area and clearing out generic mooks.

Maps in games are an interesting thing. I play a lot of so-called “metroidvania” games and their ilk (heck, most of my gaming is 2D), and I don’t really like it if I’m frequently consulting my map to find my way from place to place. The best level designs in such games, in my opinion, are the cases where I end up learning to navigate the world without (or with minimal) consultation of my map. I think this generally means having sufficiently varied level design that there are memorable visual cues for where I am. A “maze of twisty passages, all alike” can be appropriate in some situations, but I find that it’s often more “organic” – especially when it comes to things like the interiors of buildings – to have recognizable details differentiating things like different hallways that would otherwise look similar. While the game might still effectively be a bunch of corridors to run through, anything from more varied theming (even just different paint colors and lighting on walls in similar parts of the same area) to architectural details that directly affect gameplay (a broken stairwell that must be jumped across vs. an intact stairwell that can just be walked up). People in real life design buildings to be easily navigable (usually) and leave environmental markers in natural spaces because this makes navigation smoother in real life.

And yes, there’s so much to be said about the value of integrating story into gameplay. In general, I feel that there’s something to be said about how videogames shouldn’t (in general) aim to be “cinematic”. A film is a medium of passive experience, but a game is a medium of active experience. Cutscenes aren’t bad per se, and even cinematic cutscenes aren’t bad per se, but care should be taken in their use. Sometimes, a fight scene rendered in-engine – even if this means 2D pixel art sprites beating each other up – can be much more immersive than a high-quality video with panning shots of the characters as they’re throwing punches and wrestling. The latter takes the player’s consciousness out of the game world, reminding them that they are merely the audience, while the former can be presented seamlessly without changing the player’s perspective (as surely the player has already gotten used to mentally processing the game world in a way that feels comfortable to them).

Thanks for sharing this video! I boosted it over on Mastodon too.

For whatever reason, I’m scratching my brain and can only come up with three urban fantasy games plus a franchise I’m not too personally familiar with. The three games are Underrail (an indie game from some years back, which I bought back when it wasn’t even fully released yet, but still have yet to play), Operation Abyss (a dungeon crawler with modern-ish graphics but gameplay that definitely takes after old Wizardry games; the theming leans somewhat more on the science-fantasy side), and Tokyo Xanadu eX+ (an action JRPG that’s something of a cross between Trails of Cold Steel and modern Ys games). The franchise is the Persona series, none of which I’ve played, and which Tokyo Xanadu gets compared to despite not being all that similar under the hood.

I don’t think any of these are what you’re looking for, but I hope they may help you on your search.

Oh, I actually meant “real” saves, done from in-game. It’s like Lemuroid had some chance of not updating the save file. I never figured out why this might happen. (Maybe it has something to do with not properly generating a new state on exit and having old states wipe newer saves?)