Pins/Groups are under My Games and Apps currently. The new dash is in beta at the moment, it's not live for everyone.
Pins is the default group and you can make more. It can be a combination of apps and games. On Xbox series, you go to My Games and Apps, then Groups (third option) and scroll down to bottom to create a new one. Pressing start over a game tile or app gives you a drop down menu where you can add to your groups.
My Pins top row is all apps I use the most then second row is games
Looks more or less what the X1X does. Just without using the words 'pins'. As I've said, I'm not familiar with the Series and Dirty was asking about XBO. So unless they meant Xbox Online for some reason...
I think I just used whatever was default and deleted unused/unwanted apps from it. But if they're definitely going to remove the ability to pin things to a quick menu, then they're really fucking things up for sure. I barely use it, but know it's a bad idea.
Man Wo Long I just feel like I suck? Any of the rapidly attacking enemies just chain beat my shit up and I feel like I can't really do anything in response, parry window is either super tight or I'm just not doing it right at all. I cheesed the last boss with the companion and I feel nothing!
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Yeah, I just gave it a try. Didn't really vibe with it at all. I guess if I spent more time with it I could feel out what it's supposed to be, but as it was I mashed X a bunch of times until I got to one guy whose jumping spear attack also tracks or corrects in midair which just was eh? I picked the stealthing person but there doesn't seem to be an actual option to sneak? I guess it's a skill you have to charge up or something which is just dumb. The ranged weapons also seemed weak. Could be character level or design, idk.
The tutorial didn't really do a good job of explaining the deflection mechanic either and I couldn't be arsed to figure out what timing method they use the cue to press either. UI has too many hints of "co-op" and "play online" too so it'd probably be a pass for me anyway.
To top it off, the game kept throwing the "Something went wrong" error at me and I have no idea what that was about. I may give it another go later but for now I got fun things to play.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Yeah, I just gave it a try. Didn't really vibe with it at all. I guess if I spent more time with it I could feel out what it's supposed to be, but as it was I mashed X a bunch of times until I got to one guy whose jumping spear attack also tracks or corrects in midair which just was eh? I picked the stealthing person but there doesn't seem to be an actual option to sneak? I guess it's a skill you have to charge up or something which is just dumb. The ranged weapons also seemed weak. Could be character level or design, idk.
The tutorial didn't really do a good job of explaining the deflection mechanic either and I couldn't be arsed to figure out what timing method they use the cue to press either. UI has too many hints of "co-op" and "play online" too so it'd probably be a pass for me anyway.
To top it off, the game kept throwing the "Something went wrong" error at me and I have no idea what that was about. I may give it another go later but for now I got fun things to play.
I got that one, and also it kept like shutting off my controller? Including one moment during a boss where the game didn't pause and I died.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Yeah, I just gave it a try. Didn't really vibe with it at all. I guess if I spent more time with it I could feel out what it's supposed to be, but as it was I mashed X a bunch of times until I got to one guy whose jumping spear attack also tracks or corrects in midair which just was eh? I picked the stealthing person but there doesn't seem to be an actual option to sneak? I guess it's a skill you have to charge up or something which is just dumb. The ranged weapons also seemed weak. Could be character level or design, idk.
The tutorial didn't really do a good job of explaining the deflection mechanic either and I couldn't be arsed to figure out what timing method they use the cue to press either. UI has too many hints of "co-op" and "play online" too so it'd probably be a pass for me anyway.
To top it off, the game kept throwing the "Something went wrong" error at me and I have no idea what that was about. I may give it another go later but for now I got fun things to play.
I got that one, and also it kept like shutting off my controller? Including one moment during a boss where the game didn't pause and I died.
yeah, I don't think the game pauses for anything since it's "online" even if you're playing solo.
I guess I should note what I did like: the character creator. The facial options were pretty robust, though not being able to see what we could do with the body sliders was eh.
but failure snowballing is also just something I find to be obnoxious and time wasting. used all my arrows "stealthing" through the area and died and now there's repop but I have no arrows and it's just... ugh. just not my kind of gameplay mechanic.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I went with the Afternoon Collection and am glad I did.
DuckTales (1989) is fucking hard. It's also, in a lot of ways, kind of bad. It's interesting to play, for sure, but mostly for reasons of nostalgia and studying the evolution of games. I'm not sure I ever beat it as a kid. I don't think I could've had the patience. I forgot that the NES era was a time before we all agreed that games should be fair, and before we'd more or less settled on standards for "fun." There are a lot of moments of surprise mechanics.
Hey, check out this mining cart! Remember this cart? Whoops, you didn't duck down into the cart to avoid getting knocked out, and it rolled off, so now you're screwed!
Hey, check out this mining cart! Nice job ducking down so you could roll under the low ceiling. Whoops, the cart unavoidably fell into a pit and you died!
Hey, check out this mining cart! Great work ducking down and then somehow realizing you were supposed to jump out of it to the left at exactly the right moment to avoid falling into the pit! Looks like that Nintendo Power subscription was worth it! Thank grandma when you see her!
We've had a massive, massive resurgence of 2D platformers post-Super Meat Boy, and it's easy to forget just how bad most NES-era third-party platformers felt. The controls are shit, pure shit. The game requires fairly exact timing and precision, but it's neither responsive nor smooth. Tapping jump+up+right makes your character hop awkwardly, not quite the way you intended, as if it's fighting against invisible solid 16x16 tiles and exceeding the number of permitted simultaneous inputs. My hands hurt after an hour from gripping the controller so tightly, trying to force Scrooge to respond to my input. It's bad in a way that the shittiest out-of-the-box platformer tutorial for a game engine today is not bad. It also lacks other things we take for granted now, and I forgot we didn't then, like being able to mute the music separate from the sound effects, and saving between levels---although fortunately the Afternoon Collection has an emulator-style save feature.
This isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. But I leaned hard on the "rewind" function to cheat, with zero remorse. The game doesn't reward coming down to its level; it was just fun as, again, a dip down memory lane and an education in the improvements we've made in game development. Based on reviews I read of DuckTales Remastered, I don't think it adds any cheats like the rewind feature. I wouldn't play it without some cheats.
After rewinding my way through DuckTales, I played through Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, which I enjoyed much more. It has local 2-player co-op, but my wife---who had watched me die-rewind-die-rewind-die-die-die-die in DuckTales---declined to join. The game came out in 1990, and it helpfully borrowed some mechanics from Super Mario Bros 2 (US version): jumping up through platforms, and tapping jump+down to drop back through the platform, picking up crates (so many crates, so unexplained why so many crates), throwing said crates, and powerups. It also has an overworld map vaaaaguely like SMB3's, if you squint and are forgiving. SMB2 is one of my favorite ever games, which is maybe why I enjoyed this so much more than DuckTales. Even so, I again leaned heavily on the rewind feature, and I didn't bother beating all the maps. In part, I wanted to see if it would let me win without beating all the maps; I was surprised that it would. I don't think the gameplay was fun enough by modern standards to bother, though. I had my taste of nostalgia, and I didn't want more.
I then spent a little while in Tale Spin. With Baloo? Whoever that is? He's a big, fat, dumb bear, and he flies a plane. He has no other personality. Okay, he has no personality, period, but I think I'm supposed to love him by corporate fiat. He triggers the same dark impulses I feel toward Mario, Mickey, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and similar mascots painted with an anodyne wholesomeness so vibrant it's obscene.
Yet I will say this about TaleSpin: The primary mechanic? I'm not sure I've seen it in any other game. It's superficially set up as a 2D right-to-left sidescroller, where you control a plane and avoid obstacles as the screen scrolls automatically from right to left:
But that's not it. If you try to play it like that, you'll die a lot, and it's not how the game is meant to be played. Instead, you're supposed to frequently press a button to "flip your plane upside-down" and "fly to the left":
What this does is switch the screen-scroll so it scrolls left-to-right, so you can fly back the direction you came. You don't really use this mechanic to explore, though, you use it to buy more time in the local airspace so you can aerially switchback up and down the screen, making tighter vertical movement than is possible from simply pressing "up" as the screen scrolls in one direction.
Any other examples of this mechanic? What separates it from a 2D game where you can roam freely (like Metroid or Castlevania) is that the screen is always autoscrolling, you only get to switch the direction.
My interest is only academic. I hated Baloo, I didn't find the game all that fun, and I never played it as a kid, so I moved on to Darkwing Duck. It's a platformer, again, and the innovations here are that DD shoots a gun with different projectiles, and he can jump and pull himself up onto a platform that's too high to simply jump onto. I haven't gotten too far with it, because it's wicked hard. The movement controls are also still stiff and nonresponsive, and don't seem to have been updated from Chip and Dale. Even so, it's Darkwing Duck, and I'm looking forward to blasting some motherfuckers in between telling them who I am, which I seem to do a lot, "I am Darkwing Duck," either as a reminder to the player that they are, in fact, Darkwing Duck, or as a savvy way to drive the brand name into the brains of children.
I'm looking forward to DuckTales 2. Maybe they'll have updated their platformer engine by 1993?
How did he go from being a bear in the Indian jungle to being a bear Fred Flintstone who has a 9-to-5 flying a plane to support his family?
I mean, that bear you posted. That's alright. That bear has principles. And those principles are wholly antagonistic to the Baloo we find in TaleSpin. In the game, you've swapped the bare necessities for the Man's uniform. You've got to hustle those dollars because your darling wife needs to buy a new dress, the house has a mortgage, and men support their families, don't they, Baloo, don't they get a goddamn job because others are relying on them to provide a little more than the bare necessities? And not just make a living. Part of the mechanics are that you're capturing money bags as you fly around, and you reinvest that money into your primary capital asset, your plane, by buying upgrades at the mechanic's shop, which will allow you to fly better, capture more money, and secure yourself in productive industry until the day you die. Hopefully Baloo bought life insurance. Maybe that's what you win after beating the final boss.
Buying the deluxe pack upgrade for Deathloop was needlessly convoluted. I went to the game page for the Deathloop deluxe edition, and then to the “in this bundle” section. There was the base game, the deluxe pack, and some pre-order stuff. Going to the deluxe pack from there gave me a message that it’s not sold separately. I thought that was unfortunate, but when I went to base game page to install it via game pass and scrolled down to add-ons I found a deluxe pack that I could pre-order.
Weird, but I’m glad I can get it separately since the game is already included with the GP subscription
It made no sense. Don't worry. Just roll with it; half of the 90s is just... "Seemed like a good idea at the time: The cartoon" They're not even toy commercials like all the shit in the 80s was, they're just... A thing.
Don Karnage always packed a scenery sandwich in his lunchbox, though, I tell you what.
+1
BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
edited September 2022
God bless the 90s. Gargoyles, Darkwing Duck, and Tale Spin was the best 90 minutes of my day most days.
BlackDragon480 on
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
My interest is only academic. I hated Baloo, I didn't find the game all that fun, and I never played it as a kid, so I moved on to Darkwing Duck. It's a platformer, again, and the innovations here are that DD shoots a gun with different projectiles, and he can jump and pull himself up onto a platform that's too high to simply jump onto. I haven't gotten too far with it, because it's wicked hard. The movement controls are also still stiff and nonresponsive, and don't seem to have been updated from Chip and Dale. Even so, it's Darkwing Duck, and I'm looking forward to blasting some motherfuckers in between telling them who I am, which I seem to do a lot, "I am Darkwing Duck," either as a reminder to the player that they are, in fact, Darkwing Duck, or as a savvy way to drive the brand name into the brains of children.
Yeah I’m really digging Wo Long although it absolutely has a learning curve to it
And the Xbox build is very unstable although apparently it has a higher framerate then the PS5 version but I have no doubt it will be smoothed out before launch
One tip is understanding you can mix and match your spells from the different elements so you can make a more suitable build for your playstyle
I went with the Afternoon Collection and am glad I did.
DuckTales (1989) is fucking hard. It's also, in a lot of ways, kind of bad. It's interesting to play, for sure, but mostly for reasons of nostalgia and studying the evolution of games. I'm not sure I ever beat it as a kid. I don't think I could've had the patience. I forgot that the NES era was a time before we all agreed that games should be fair, and before we'd more or less settled on standards for "fun." There are a lot of moments of surprise mechanics.
Hey, check out this mining cart! Remember this cart? Whoops, you didn't duck down into the cart to avoid getting knocked out, and it rolled off, so now you're screwed!
Hey, check out this mining cart! Nice job ducking down so you could roll under the low ceiling. Whoops, the cart unavoidably fell into a pit and you died!
Hey, check out this mining cart! Great work ducking down and then somehow realizing you were supposed to jump out of it to the left at exactly the right moment to avoid falling into the pit! Looks like that Nintendo Power subscription was worth it! Thank grandma when you see her!
We've had a massive, massive resurgence of 2D platformers post-Super Meat Boy, and it's easy to forget just how bad most NES-era third-party platformers felt. The controls are shit, pure shit. The game requires fairly exact timing and precision, but it's neither responsive nor smooth. Tapping jump+up+right makes your character hop awkwardly, not quite the way you intended, as if it's fighting against invisible solid 16x16 tiles and exceeding the number of permitted simultaneous inputs. My hands hurt after an hour from gripping the controller so tightly, trying to force Scrooge to respond to my input. It's bad in a way that the shittiest out-of-the-box platformer tutorial for a game engine today is not bad. It also lacks other things we take for granted now, and I forgot we didn't then, like being able to mute the music separate from the sound effects, and saving between levels---although fortunately the Afternoon Collection has an emulator-style save feature.
This isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. But I leaned hard on the "rewind" function to cheat, with zero remorse. The game doesn't reward coming down to its level; it was just fun as, again, a dip down memory lane and an education in the improvements we've made in game development. Based on reviews I read of DuckTales Remastered, I don't think it adds any cheats like the rewind feature. I wouldn't play it without some cheats.
After rewinding my way through DuckTales, I played through Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, which I enjoyed much more. It has local 2-player co-op, but my wife---who had watched me die-rewind-die-rewind-die-die-die-die in DuckTales---declined to join. The game came out in 1990, and it helpfully borrowed some mechanics from Super Mario Bros 2 (US version): jumping up through platforms, and tapping jump+down to drop back through the platform, picking up crates (so many crates, so unexplained why so many crates), throwing said crates, and powerups. It also has an overworld map vaaaaguely like SMB3's, if you squint and are forgiving. SMB2 is one of my favorite ever games, which is maybe why I enjoyed this so much more than DuckTales. Even so, I again leaned heavily on the rewind feature, and I didn't bother beating all the maps. In part, I wanted to see if it would let me win without beating all the maps; I was surprised that it would. I don't think the gameplay was fun enough by modern standards to bother, though. I had my taste of nostalgia, and I didn't want more.
I then spent a little while in Tale Spin. With Baloo? Whoever that is? He's a big, fat, dumb bear, and he flies a plane. He has no other personality. Okay, he has no personality, period, but I think I'm supposed to love him by corporate fiat. He triggers the same dark impulses I feel toward Mario, Mickey, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and similar mascots painted with an anodyne wholesomeness so vibrant it's obscene.
Yet I will say this about TaleSpin: The primary mechanic? I'm not sure I've seen it in any other game. It's superficially set up as a 2D right-to-left sidescroller, where you control a plane and avoid obstacles as the screen scrolls automatically from right to left:
But that's not it. If you try to play it like that, you'll die a lot, and it's not how the game is meant to be played. Instead, you're supposed to frequently press a button to "flip your plane upside-down" and "fly to the left":
What this does is switch the screen-scroll so it scrolls left-to-right, so you can fly back the direction you came. You don't really use this mechanic to explore, though, you use it to buy more time in the local airspace so you can aerially switchback up and down the screen, making tighter vertical movement than is possible from simply pressing "up" as the screen scrolls in one direction.
Any other examples of this mechanic? What separates it from a 2D game where you can roam freely (like Metroid or Castlevania) is that the screen is always autoscrolling, you only get to switch the direction.
My interest is only academic. I hated Baloo, I didn't find the game all that fun, and I never played it as a kid, so I moved on to Darkwing Duck. It's a platformer, again, and the innovations here are that DD shoots a gun with different projectiles, and he can jump and pull himself up onto a platform that's too high to simply jump onto. I haven't gotten too far with it, because it's wicked hard. The movement controls are also still stiff and nonresponsive, and don't seem to have been updated from Chip and Dale. Even so, it's Darkwing Duck, and I'm looking forward to blasting some motherfuckers in between telling them who I am, which I seem to do a lot, "I am Darkwing Duck," either as a reminder to the player that they are, in fact, Darkwing Duck, or as a savvy way to drive the brand name into the brains of children.
I'm looking forward to DuckTales 2. Maybe they'll have updated their platformer engine by 1993?
So if you find the controls and gameplay in the original Ducktales to be horrible, the remake is much better - plus it has the voice acting from the show, if nostalgia is your thing. I played the original back when it was new, but only once since I never owned it. However, I bought the remake as soon as it was available and played the hell out of it. I bought the Disney Afternoon collection because I grew up playing Chip n Dale and wanted to try out the other games. I can’t play the original worth a damn because of everything you mention there. If you want to play through the Ducktales game, you’re much better served with the remake for sure.
The remake was done by Way Forward, who know a thing or two about modern 2-D platformers, and you can feel the difference.
Yeah the character creator was robust and I liked how they are also using body type.
I tried it again tonight. There's just no feeling of connection to happens on screen when you press a button, nor did the objects feel like they interacted with each other. Like in some games when you land a big hit the screen shakes, or there's a frame pause for a second or something... this had none of that. Combined with how it felt like things just slid along the ground at the speed of whatever was pushing when hit and eh... demo I guess? IDK...
Also tons of blocking if your morale relative to the opponent is low. Reading around and the deflection window is 8 frames long, which is eh? Either turtle up or learn to deflect I guess?
Stealth gameplay and mechanics felt a few generations behind. RNG drops never gave me another dual sword so I had to use other weapons I had positively no interest in using; this also made "I'm bored" meter grow faster too. Got up to the cave which gave me another red flag as to whether or not this would be a game I would play though if you couldn't turn it off: simulated invasions.
The morale system and gaining morale floors as you progress through the map and reach points was neat. But having to collect resources just to redo a miniboss/boss fight at the same strength level as your first time just ain't it for me...
tastydonuts on
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
+1
BRIAN BLESSEDMaybe you aren't SPEAKING LOUDLY ENOUGHHHRegistered Userregular
The funny thing about that is they don't even have to go hard and make it 1:1, they can just do a theme that uses the blade backgrounds for different pages. It would be easy but I think they're saying nah out of some weird pride for their new dashboard
Darkwing Duck is basically a super fancy Megaman romhack.
To the point that once upon a time, I wanted to do a ROMhack of it that turned it into a Proto Man game. The cape would be his shield, and the rest just falls into place.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
So the trade off is basically having to wait for stuff like Deathloop, and then when we do get it it's on Game Pass instead of 69.99 when it comes out.
Small correction, but the new UI is not in beta, it’s in a partial alpha-skip release, which is basically early alpha.
Xbox release tier system, for reference: alpha-skip-ahead (where it is right now)
alpha
beta
delta
omega
general release
Oh for fuck's sake, people!
Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.
In no other industry would you see release tiers of A, B, D, W.
Our valves use a number and/or letter to designate their size. They were originally released in sizes 1, 2, 3, and 4. Later we added another size between 3 and 4, using the next number in sequence. So now it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 4.
Then we expanded the product range to larger sizes, so created a 6 and 7 sizes. So 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 6, 7. Except there was a design issue with the #7, so it was replaced with the "Q". So now it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 6, 7, Q.
Later on we realized that the 4" size of the Q wasn't sufficient, so increased the inlet to a 6". So now it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 6, 7, 4-Q, 6-Q.
Then the market wanted bigger valves, so we added the "R" size. And we came up with a modified version with even a larger orifice we called the "RR". So now it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 6, 7, 4-Q, 6-Q, R, RR.
Ran through Turnip Boy last night. Fun little experience that left me looking forward to Robs a Bank. A little too much back tracking for my tastes but it's such a short experience that it wasn't too big of a problem. Last two achievements are bugged for me though and getting the last heart plant crashes the game. Hopefully the sequel is a little tighter technically.
This is absolutely a much bigger thing in the Sinophone world (the The Legend of Sword and Fairy, or more shortly called Chinese Paladin franchise has been around since first half of the 1990s), but it makes me very happy that the most recent entry, which was "mainstream" enough to get an English translation, is also coming to Xbox.
Graphically, it's running Unreal Engine from what I remember (the demo on Steam is still available, but unlike the final game, I don't think it was in available in English), but the setting stands out somewhat from that year's run of JRPGs at least.
The only fairy RPG that's not for children I know of offhand is Faery: Legends of Avalon, and the only Chinese/Taiwanese RPG that I'm aware of on Xbox One/Series is Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament. Though I don't know how popular the latter game really was, though afaik it's the only English release.
Both games are on my stack
tastydonuts on
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Posts
Xbox release tier system, for reference:
alpha-skip-ahead (where it is right now)
alpha
beta
delta
omega
general release
Looks more or less what the X1X does. Just without using the words 'pins'. As I've said, I'm not familiar with the Series and Dirty was asking about XBO. So unless they meant Xbox Online for some reason...
pleasepaypreacher.net
You get a companion? Can you customize them too?
I don't think so, you have to burn a resource to summon them, but they can be picked up when they get knocked down. You summon them at flags
pleasepaypreacher.net
The tutorial didn't really do a good job of explaining the deflection mechanic either and I couldn't be arsed to figure out what timing method they use the cue to press either. UI has too many hints of "co-op" and "play online" too so it'd probably be a pass for me anyway.
To top it off, the game kept throwing the "Something went wrong" error at me and I have no idea what that was about. I may give it another go later but for now I got fun things to play.
I got that one, and also it kept like shutting off my controller? Including one moment during a boss where the game didn't pause and I died.
pleasepaypreacher.net
yeah, I don't think the game pauses for anything since it's "online" even if you're playing solo.
I guess I should note what I did like: the character creator. The facial options were pretty robust, though not being able to see what we could do with the body sliders was eh.
but failure snowballing is also just something I find to be obnoxious and time wasting. used all my arrows "stealthing" through the area and died and now there's repop but I have no arrows and it's just... ugh. just not my kind of gameplay mechanic.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I went with the Afternoon Collection and am glad I did.
DuckTales (1989) is fucking hard. It's also, in a lot of ways, kind of bad. It's interesting to play, for sure, but mostly for reasons of nostalgia and studying the evolution of games. I'm not sure I ever beat it as a kid. I don't think I could've had the patience. I forgot that the NES era was a time before we all agreed that games should be fair, and before we'd more or less settled on standards for "fun." There are a lot of moments of surprise mechanics.
We've had a massive, massive resurgence of 2D platformers post-Super Meat Boy, and it's easy to forget just how bad most NES-era third-party platformers felt. The controls are shit, pure shit. The game requires fairly exact timing and precision, but it's neither responsive nor smooth. Tapping jump+up+right makes your character hop awkwardly, not quite the way you intended, as if it's fighting against invisible solid 16x16 tiles and exceeding the number of permitted simultaneous inputs. My hands hurt after an hour from gripping the controller so tightly, trying to force Scrooge to respond to my input. It's bad in a way that the shittiest out-of-the-box platformer tutorial for a game engine today is not bad. It also lacks other things we take for granted now, and I forgot we didn't then, like being able to mute the music separate from the sound effects, and saving between levels---although fortunately the Afternoon Collection has an emulator-style save feature.
This isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. But I leaned hard on the "rewind" function to cheat, with zero remorse. The game doesn't reward coming down to its level; it was just fun as, again, a dip down memory lane and an education in the improvements we've made in game development. Based on reviews I read of DuckTales Remastered, I don't think it adds any cheats like the rewind feature. I wouldn't play it without some cheats.
After rewinding my way through DuckTales, I played through Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, which I enjoyed much more. It has local 2-player co-op, but my wife---who had watched me die-rewind-die-rewind-die-die-die-die in DuckTales---declined to join. The game came out in 1990, and it helpfully borrowed some mechanics from Super Mario Bros 2 (US version): jumping up through platforms, and tapping jump+down to drop back through the platform, picking up crates (so many crates, so unexplained why so many crates), throwing said crates, and powerups. It also has an overworld map vaaaaguely like SMB3's, if you squint and are forgiving. SMB2 is one of my favorite ever games, which is maybe why I enjoyed this so much more than DuckTales. Even so, I again leaned heavily on the rewind feature, and I didn't bother beating all the maps. In part, I wanted to see if it would let me win without beating all the maps; I was surprised that it would. I don't think the gameplay was fun enough by modern standards to bother, though. I had my taste of nostalgia, and I didn't want more.
I then spent a little while in Tale Spin. With Baloo? Whoever that is? He's a big, fat, dumb bear, and he flies a plane. He has no other personality. Okay, he has no personality, period, but I think I'm supposed to love him by corporate fiat. He triggers the same dark impulses I feel toward Mario, Mickey, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and similar mascots painted with an anodyne wholesomeness so vibrant it's obscene.
Yet I will say this about TaleSpin: The primary mechanic? I'm not sure I've seen it in any other game. It's superficially set up as a 2D right-to-left sidescroller, where you control a plane and avoid obstacles as the screen scrolls automatically from right to left:
But that's not it. If you try to play it like that, you'll die a lot, and it's not how the game is meant to be played. Instead, you're supposed to frequently press a button to "flip your plane upside-down" and "fly to the left":
What this does is switch the screen-scroll so it scrolls left-to-right, so you can fly back the direction you came. You don't really use this mechanic to explore, though, you use it to buy more time in the local airspace so you can aerially switchback up and down the screen, making tighter vertical movement than is possible from simply pressing "up" as the screen scrolls in one direction.
Any other examples of this mechanic? What separates it from a 2D game where you can roam freely (like Metroid or Castlevania) is that the screen is always autoscrolling, you only get to switch the direction.
My interest is only academic. I hated Baloo, I didn't find the game all that fun, and I never played it as a kid, so I moved on to Darkwing Duck. It's a platformer, again, and the innovations here are that DD shoots a gun with different projectiles, and he can jump and pull himself up onto a platform that's too high to simply jump onto. I haven't gotten too far with it, because it's wicked hard. The movement controls are also still stiff and nonresponsive, and don't seem to have been updated from Chip and Dale. Even so, it's Darkwing Duck, and I'm looking forward to blasting some motherfuckers in between telling them who I am, which I seem to do a lot, "I am Darkwing Duck," either as a reminder to the player that they are, in fact, Darkwing Duck, or as a savvy way to drive the brand name into the brains of children.
I'm looking forward to DuckTales 2. Maybe they'll have updated their platformer engine by 1993?
He's a chill dude.
How did he go from being a bear in the Indian jungle to being a bear Fred Flintstone who has a 9-to-5 flying a plane to support his family?
I mean, that bear you posted. That's alright. That bear has principles. And those principles are wholly antagonistic to the Baloo we find in TaleSpin. In the game, you've swapped the bare necessities for the Man's uniform. You've got to hustle those dollars because your darling wife needs to buy a new dress, the house has a mortgage, and men support their families, don't they, Baloo, don't they get a goddamn job because others are relying on them to provide a little more than the bare necessities? And not just make a living. Part of the mechanics are that you're capturing money bags as you fly around, and you reinvest that money into your primary capital asset, your plane, by buying upgrades at the mechanic's shop, which will allow you to fly better, capture more money, and secure yourself in productive industry until the day you die. Hopefully Baloo bought life insurance. Maybe that's what you win after beating the final boss.
Weird, but I’m glad I can get it separately since the game is already included with the GP subscription
By spinning the setting and characters of the Jungle Book into a kind of Casablanca for kids oddball scenario. Ooeeoo.
Don Karnage always packed a scenery sandwich in his lunchbox, though, I tell you what.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Presumably, that's all he says because they probably couldn't fit in all the text for everything else that goes with it.
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And the Xbox build is very unstable although apparently it has a higher framerate then the PS5 version but I have no doubt it will be smoothed out before launch
One tip is understanding you can mix and match your spells from the different elements so you can make a more suitable build for your playstyle
So if you find the controls and gameplay in the original Ducktales to be horrible, the remake is much better - plus it has the voice acting from the show, if nostalgia is your thing. I played the original back when it was new, but only once since I never owned it. However, I bought the remake as soon as it was available and played the hell out of it. I bought the Disney Afternoon collection because I grew up playing Chip n Dale and wanted to try out the other games. I can’t play the original worth a damn because of everything you mention there. If you want to play through the Ducktales game, you’re much better served with the remake for sure.
The remake was done by Way Forward, who know a thing or two about modern 2-D platformers, and you can feel the difference.
I tried it again tonight. There's just no feeling of connection to happens on screen when you press a button, nor did the objects feel like they interacted with each other. Like in some games when you land a big hit the screen shakes, or there's a frame pause for a second or something... this had none of that. Combined with how it felt like things just slid along the ground at the speed of whatever was pushing when hit and eh... demo I guess? IDK...
Also tons of blocking if your morale relative to the opponent is low. Reading around and the deflection window is 8 frames long, which is eh? Either turtle up or learn to deflect I guess?
Stealth gameplay and mechanics felt a few generations behind. RNG drops never gave me another dual sword so I had to use other weapons I had positively no interest in using; this also made "I'm bored" meter grow faster too. Got up to the cave which gave me another red flag as to whether or not this would be a game I would play though if you couldn't turn it off: simulated invasions.
The morale system and gaining morale floors as you progress through the map and reach points was neat. But having to collect resources just to redo a miniboss/boss fight at the same strength level as your first time just ain't it for me...
The dream is dead, long live the dream
Oh for fuck's sake, people!
Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.
In no other industry would you see release tiers of A, B, D, W.
To the point that once upon a time, I wanted to do a ROMhack of it that turned it into a Proto Man game. The cape would be his shield, and the rest just falls into place.
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So the trade off is basically having to wait for stuff like Deathloop, and then when we do get it it's on Game Pass instead of 69.99 when it comes out.
I'll take that.
Our valves use a number and/or letter to designate their size. They were originally released in sizes 1, 2, 3, and 4. Later we added another size between 3 and 4, using the next number in sequence. So now it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 4.
Then we expanded the product range to larger sizes, so created a 6 and 7 sizes. So 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 6, 7. Except there was a design issue with the #7, so it was replaced with the "Q". So now it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 6, 7, Q.
Later on we realized that the 4" size of the Q wasn't sufficient, so increased the inlet to a 6". So now it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 6, 7, 4-Q, 6-Q.
Then the market wanted bigger valves, so we added the "R" size. And we came up with a modified version with even a larger orifice we called the "RR". So now it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 6, 7, 4-Q, 6-Q, R, RR.
We're currently developing the "T" size.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Graphically, it's running Unreal Engine from what I remember (the demo on Steam is still available, but unlike the final game, I don't think it was in available in English), but the setting stands out somewhat from that year's run of JRPGs at least.
Both games are on my stack