@Shadowlink

Yes, that is the smart move. Especially since I already own a 360.

But I got those new-console itches, and all the no-NX news is making it worse! Darn it, I thought I had beat this blasted disease!

@J.K. Riki

What other games would you get for the Xbox One?

@DrFinkelstein

Rare Replay is pretty great, ain't it?

@J.K. Riki

The One is a pretty great system, all things considered. Almost worth is for Rare Replay alone.

@Koovaps

Aside from all the damn updates, yes, yes it is! I've dabbled in a bit of Banjo-Tooie this weekend.

pokepal148 said:

Jolly Roger bay has a total of 104 coins in the level, Dire Dire Docks has 106. Both of them also suffer from the N64's limited draw distance. Have fun!

I did have fun! The BK talk put me in a mood for some Mario 64 and...well:

I took Sakurai's advice and decided to pick this up on Xbox One (or rather, a one-month game pass subscription, which is cheaper) and... what do you know, it holds up! I don't know if this and Mario 64 had some weird imprinting effect on my brain chemistry when I was a little kid that has made me like this kind of action platformer more than any other genre, or if they're just still objectively better than all modern games, but whatever the case, I'm hooked. The worlds are tinier than I remember, and they're dense. This is like an adventure game that you navigate through not by clicking on random objects, but by understanding how your moveset works and having the reflexes to wield it. And the music is obviously amazing, and the characters are obviously creative, and the design of the overworld is so creepy and packed with secrets that I just do not want to stop playing.

@Secret_Tunnel

Nice! Yeah, the game is still really good! I remember back when I was playing it again for the first time (I think when I created the thread) I had totally forgotten about Clanker's Cavern. When I finally got to him....I'll admit, I was actually a little scared to go forward, haha! I knew he wasn't a threat, but I dunno. I guess my natural fear of underwater predators got the better of me and I had to hang back until I worked up the nerve to continue!

This song is what stress sounds like.

Spelunky : Roguelikes :: Banjo-Kazooie : Adventure Games

@Secret_Tunnel
Interesting...

Banjo-Kazooie does have a breezy, replayable quality to it. Like The American President!

I'll try to give gooey ol' Tooie another try, now that it's on NSO, but I don't have high hopes. Except for the music. That track above is hilarious.

@Anand

My main motivation for playing games is discovery. Something I've realized in the past few months is that arcade game developers learned that you can maximize throughput of ideas by optimizing for game feel. It's a revolution in truthseeking. Better than research papers!

Nintendo's contribution to the medium is the artistry with which they infuse these little mathematical toys with narrative. That's Donkey Kong, that's The Legend of Zelda. Pikmin 1!

The main things Nintendo goes for are interesting movement and level design. Banjo-Kazooie is less about these types of mechanics and more about aesthetics, worldbuilding, and writing—point and click stuff. As the dreadful Banjo-Tooie shows us, that's a dangerous foundation to build a game on, but BK's style is so good and its arcade immediacy is so on point that it ends up working out to be one of the breeziest, replayable-est games ever made.

@Secret_Tunnel
Yeah, Super Mario 64 is more of a 3D sandbox, for sure. Kazooie is an adventure game. They're not directly comparable to me. That's what was kind of cool about Rareware in the N64 days. Their games were never really straight Nintendo game clones. Just Nintendo-audience adjacent. Some people like Diddy Kong Racing better than Mario Kart 64, but why even compare a single-player focused racing adventure to a multiplayer violence racing game?

I also thought it was inappropriate to compare Mario 64 and Sunshine to those PS2 Sony "platformers". Platforming sandboxes vs. games that mostly focus on other areas for their appeal with characters that aren't intrinsically fun to control.

I think Nintendo spends a LOT of time on that shit. The movement equations are probably huge polynomial monsters. I was just thinking about Outrun the other day. Indies make tons of arcade Racer throwbacks, but none of their core mechanics are as fun as Outrun's. They might have more tracks, multiplayer, etc., but if they don't have the sauce, the best that they can be is mediocre.

Ramble ramble. Most of the larger developers don't even try to make games in the classic Nintendo style - focusing on simple, fun controls and keeping the experience engaging through evolving level design or world interaction. Rather than a series of similar killboxes and set pieces given form and distinction through narrative framing.

Astro Bot PS5 is one of the rare titles that IS made in the Nintendo mold. Specifically, the Galaxy mold, with a dash of Sunshine's hover nozzle. But the core movement is, while precise, even more constrained than Galaxy's. It's a cool game, but it lacks the playful expressiveness of Mario Odyssey.

Ramble. Game feel! Anyway, is all about discovery. And communal playground-style mythology. I really do miss that era.

@Anand

The chapter in "Game Feel" by Steve Swink about the jump equation in Super Mario Bros. was a huge eye-opening moment for me. It's not just gravity + a one-time upward force, it's so multivariate, yet you can really quickly attain muscle memory for it by playing the game. What I've been thinking about a lot lately is that "difficulty" is just the friction you experience through that learning process, and by overcoming it, you end up building an intuition for a really complex dynamic. If we're talking arcade style mechanics-focused games, challenge is gameplay. It's beautiful.

I've been curious about Astro Bot, but had a hunch it wasn't truly as dynamic as Galaxy, let alone Odyssey. The videos I've seen make it seem a little manic and condescending almost, like it's larping as a game for kids so that Sony fanboys have something to point to, but maybe I'm overthinking it...

I also adore playground mysteries. Part of me thinks they're kind of orthogonal to everything we're talking about though, which bugged me in Animal Well. I want to see more games really integrate that continual process of discovery into the true game loop. Spelunky 2's secrets, for instance, all feel like really natural extensions of the gameplay that you uncover by working with the same building blocks you always are. I'm actually not sure too many games have even surpassed the Warp Zones from SMB or candles in Zelda in this regard.

This is an area where developers really have to accept the cards they've been dealt in terms of technological progression. You're not going to recreate a Mew-style mystery in the age of decompilers. But Nintendo's super-secret playtest that has no tutorials and you get DMCA'd for talking about—that's how you make something mysterious in 2024!

@Secret_Tunnel
Yeah, it's kind of a bummer that everyone can't experience it. Also, I despise that data-mining shit. What an efficient way to suck the surprise and joy out of gaming. I never watch trailers for movies that I actually want to see, either. They just ruin the whole thing. The mystery, the setup, the funny moments... The most interesting kind of trailer would be an intentionally misleading one that actually increases the element of surprise.

That's an interesting point about Animal Well. To me, it's kind of like symbolism, whether intentional or inferred by academics, in a book. Another layer that you don't really need to engage with to enjoy the reading experience. One that may actually hinder the pure reading experience. I was happy enough to finish the first layer of Animal Well. There was enough mystery for me in the core mechanics and movement techs, even without the rabbit holes.

My nephew and I play The Binding of Isaac together all the time. It was SO exciting when we didn't know any of the secrets and just stumbled across them organically. One night, he wanted to know more and watched a bunch of spoiler videos. From then on, it was like, "Oh, you need to do this and this to do this and unlock that." Just, like, min-maxing through the game. In the modern era, I'm sure that the vast majority of people play games that way. Like a checklist that they need to complete to "achieve" something and complete the game. But playing that way is so much less fun, at least for me.

But, really... for everybody.

Astro Bot is solid, with some genuinely cool moments. I don't want to color anybody's opinion of it before they play it. But I do feel that it received possibly too much praise just for... playing like a Nintendo game. Like the only goldfish in a pond full of koi.

@Anand

Progression systems make it so difficult to opt out of the achievement addiction. Knowing that the devs are trying to manipulate you means that you get to experience all the anxiety of designing the game yourself. The devs of Tears of the Kingdom put in a counter showing how many caves you've found—did they do that because they believe that the meta-game of building contraptions to explore the full map as efficiently as possible is a fun challenge, or did they do that because they cynically felt beholden to progression-motivated players who rage when a game doesn't quantify their progress? Even Spelunky 2 is guilty of this; my enjoyment of that game is diminished by the notebook being laid out in such a way that lets you map the contours of what you haven't discovered yet. I have to see everything! Why would the devs have put that explicit system in their game if it wasn't to enrich my experience? Surely it's not to exploit my desire to cross items off to-do lists...

@Secret_Tunnel
I mean, there are people who won't buy games without achievements, or buy only on one system to maximize achievements. There are people who will never buy a game with a strict timer or no permanent progression. Even if devs want to go hardcore roguelike, it might not be financially feasible to cut those people out. Some games have a 'casual mode' with progression and a 'hardcore mode' without. A bit impure, but a decent solution.

When I was a kid, we used the Warp Zones in Super Mario Bros. EVERY TIME, since we were so focused on 'beating the game'. We just took skipping half of the game for granted. Similarly, some people played Yoshi's Story, got the first 30 pieces of fruit they saw in each level, didn't see many alternate path levels, and proclaimed that it was a stupid game for babies. When it's actually a weird, fascinating game for babies!

@Anand

That's a reasonable way of looking at it. But the more Jonathan Blow I listen to, the less reasonable I get! The dude had six different "you solved the puzzle" chimes in Braid for different difficulties of puzzles because he finds the one in Zelda to be condescending and manipulative by giving the player an outsized reward.

...and now his studio is broke and the future of their third game is uncertain.

So I get it. It's important to evaluate art both in and out of a business context. It's a miracle that a game as bold as Tears of the Kingdom was able to be twisted into a mass-market product. Part of that is thanks to the government subsidizing their brand via violent IP law enforcement, part of it is from injection of dark pattern induced dopamine hits, and somehow a beautiful product still comes out the other end.

This is yet another reason to ask: if future technology does bring the cost of art production radically downward, how couldn't artists be excited by what that enables them to do? You get to make more art that appeals to fewer people without compromising your principles!

@Secret_Tunnel
That sounds like a description for indie gaming. Anyway, by future technology, do you mean AI assistance? There are a lot of positive and negative repercussions of machine learning. But using it to quickly prototype ideas could be useful.

And it could be cool to have an open-world game like Skyrim (or even just a small town simulator), where each character has a random or modeled personality, and their interactions with each other and with you are all procedurally generated with language and behavior models. And there's some sort of persistent karma level with the world and each character in it. Like a GTA-style game where you cut somebody off in traffic and then they get road rage and try to run you off the road. Or you kill an NPC in front of their spouse and they subsequently hire a hitman to kill you or round up a posse to take you down. Or, even more radically, you just talk to and interact with people. Procedural Animal Crossing. That's kind of going back to the traditional notion of AI in games, but with procedural generation.

I think that crowd-sourced patronage is actually a cool alternative to traditional funding methods for honest, uncompromising (or less compromising) art. Particularly music and journalism. It's such a clean, pure connection between creators and consumers.

I'm not sure how feasible it is without prior audience, though. And it might not work for video games, unless you could regularly deliver a small game jam, or a continuously updated demo, or something.

I've never played Braid, but I did grab the Anniversary Edition on Switch. Metagame! Blow is an interesting guy, but you can only be so absolution before people stop inviting you to their parties. I still need to watch Indie Game - The Movie, too. It seems like a fascinating time capsule.