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Penny Arcade - Comic - The Hollow Ones
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - The Hollow Ones
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Yes, I'm familiar with this. And Jerry had already told Mike about that back when they did the First 15.
But I just have never had much interest in playing CotN, even with its superb soundtrack. The world and creature design always seemed a bit bland.
This is a big improvement, in that you're not slotted into the "can't dance class", and can explore all the classes in this mode. At least, that's what I'm getting out of this.
In both modes they are the exact same game, with the exact same mechanics, and the exact same logic and the exact same means of interaction with things in the world.
The only difference is "Do you want the game to play out in real time or not?" and "Your window for inputting the next command is limited to a specific window."
Naturally someone who can play the game perfectly in Fixed Beat Mode is also capable of playing it perfectly without fixed beat mode, it's just a matter of how able you are to make decisions quickly vs taking as much, or more importantly, as little time as you want. The window for inputting a command "on beat" is actually more loose than you'd think, and I think the intent is that a player eventually will know the 100% predictable logic of every enemy that being able to succeed in "real beat time" is still very manageable.
But I have a question, and I don't know the answer...
Can fixed beat mode be played FASTER than beat mode?
If you've mastered the logic of every threat in the game, does waiting for the next beat become more of a boring wait gimmick for the sake of the musical aesthetic?
The game often gives you screens full of enemies that, given their 100% predictable logic, the screen can be "solved" before you make the first move (The game doesn't start the movement until you make the first move even in Beat Mode for this reason)
You could look at every bad guy on screen, write down a solution like your programming a robot, and see how fast you can clear the screen in mininal steps (another point of data measured on speed run leaderboards), and in fixed beat mode, that would be undoubtedly faster than in beat mode.
I'm going to test this. I don't think it'll be faster than Doubletime mode though.
As someone who went and beat Necrodancer only after Cadence was announced, I agree, but the time it took me to beat Necrodancer was mostly spent learning how to play against each zone and all the tricks each new zone brings in.
It was like 10 hours for me to beat Necromancer the first time, but I could immediately after that beat the game again in 1 hour because of the mastery I earned in those 10 hours.
That mastery also carried over to Cadence of Hyrule, and as I was still well practiced with the previous game fresh in my mind, the game only mildly challenged me only a handful of times, and it took me 5 hours only because of the scale of the world and the exploration.
I can't tell if Cadence of Hyrule is "Easier" or "Exactly as Hard as the first one, I'm just better at it now."
The penalty for death and mechanics like keeping weapons after death is certainly easier though.
I hope they add more granular difficulty options because right now the options are too harsh between "too easy" and "too hard."
Make me drop all weapons aside from dagger/Short Sword on death would be a good start.
Also, how is the couch co-op? That'd be another distinguisher that might make it worth buying.
There might be a bit of being better at it, but CotN kinda kicks my ass and I kicked CoH's ass, so I'd say Cadence of Hyrule is much easier, if only for the heart pieces, the potions/fairies and the fact that you keep a lot of your stuff on death.
I think I should try Fixed Beat + Permadeath and see if that difficulty is right for me. But I like the rhythm part of the game...
"You shall seal the blinding songs that plague the game. You are the Vessel. You are the Hollow One."
For the most challenging mode, choose fixed permadeath.
You die and it uninstalls from your machine.
Both Necrodancer and LTTP had really active speedrun/race communities!
I think the Necrodancer record is something like max speed not missing a single beat for the entire game? Something the dev's didn't think was possible.
Well I guess that sorta kills the speedrunning aspect. Though from what I gather, having the human world record be the fastest possible time makes speedrunners pretty happy, so I guess it's a good problem to have.