Metroid AM2R

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How would you rank the metroid games from greatest to least? (Including AM2R)

It’s really hard for me to rank the metroid games because I played most of them many years ago, with the exception of Super Metroid, Zero Mission, and AM2R. Even among those it’s really hard to rate one above the others.

Super Metroid clearly has the highest absolute depth and most interesting speedruns as a result. There’s a lot of subtle stuff that goes on in it that no other metroid game has. It also has the most interesting world structure and powerups. However Super Metroid is really slow and really easy. Kraid in particular is disappointing. Phantoon stands out however.

Zero Mission is much faster and has a nice structure to its world, is also much harder, but has less going on with its game engine, and is kind of tethered to the powerups that fit Metroid 1. It has great bosses and pretty alright enemies.

AM2R is on-par with Zero Mission in most ways, except it has the speed booster and redesigned controls that make use of modern controller limits, doing a number of things with the controls that no previous metroid game has done. It has the most challenging and best designed enemies in the series as well as some of the best bosses, if not outright the best bosses. Many of the enemies and bosses make very clear use of the different beam and missile modes very intelligently, requiring you to switch at the proper times.

I kind of want to put the original Metroid above Super Metroid, because it’s a harder game with better enemies and bosses in most ways, but that also doesn’t feel totally right.

Worst Metroid is definitely Other M. No contest, easy choice.

The 3d Metroids I also have trouble comparing. I think Metroid Prime 3 is the worst because of its more disconnected and linear guided structure. I didn’t play enough of Metroid Prime 2 to judge it. Metroid Prime 1 I played so long ago that I do not have very clear memories of what the non-speedrun experience is like.

The Line between Complexity and Accessibility

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For a developer, in your eyes, is it a necessary evil to sacrifice the complexity that translate to depth, in order to prevent alienating their target audience? It is a dilemna I struggle with. I want my game to be deep, which comes from complexity, but not if it means people won’t play it.

I think there’s ways of getting both, and I’d cite Smash Bros Melee for this. It was a commercial success, but it’s also tremendously complex and deep. It was able to accomplish this because the majority of people who played the game have no actual fucking idea how to play it, or what most of the functions are. It has a very simple foothold for people getting into the game. You move around like a platformer, you attack in the direction of your opponent and it usually works. Super simple.

Making a game deep but understandable is about connecting with what your audience actually wants and actually can understand. The key is building a low “skill floor”, the minimum level of skill necessary to functionally play the game.

Street Fighter has a very high skill floor in comparison to Smash Bros. To play on a basic level, you need to know a LOT more and be competent at a lot more, otherwise you can’t even make real decisions.

I think this is what holds back a lot of action games, they have these complex move lists and people take one look at that and go, “like fuck I’m gonna remember all that” or they just mash buttons and it usually works, so they call it a button mashing game.

A ton of really complex games are extremely successful, like league of legends, but they do that by making the players’ most basic means of interaction with the game really simple. You can move, you can shoot, you have like 4 abilities. A lot of the other stuff is more advanced and you don’t need to know immediately. You can feel like you actually understand the game well enough to play fairly quickly. Similar deal with Pokemon, which has hundreds of actual pokemon, hundreds of moves, abilities, and weird other shit, but kids don’t need to know all that just to play.

I think the key is layered complexity, and introducing things one at a time, while not holding advanced players back. It’s a fine line to walk.

Understanding Framedata: Combos, Traps, and Turns

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Many beginners to fighting games, including myself, get intimidated by frame data. They look at it like this huge spreadsheet of numbers that they think they have to memorize. I originally didn’t get framedata, but wanted to understand how combos were built, how people discovered them, and thought, “will I just have to memorize all this framedata to get it?” It took me a while for it to click. In reality, yeah people pick up a lot of framedata incidentally, but almost no one seriously memorizes all the framedata. People really only look for a few things, which moves are unsafe, which moves set up combos, which can follow up combos, and whether each move is plus or minus on block. Continue reading →

Ranking Zelda Games

Celia Wagar12 Comments

Tier the Zelda games you’ve played? Which ones did you enjoy at least a little/think are good games?

I think I’d rank Zelda 1 as the best zelda game hands down, but from there it’s a bit harder.

Next best I think is Oracle of Seasons, which was largely built as a remake of Zelda 1, with a similar map structure and all. I haven’t beaten or even played very much of Link’s Awakening, but reputation indicates that it might go here as well.

I’m not totally sure where to put Adventure of Link, it’s hard to compare to the rest, but I think it’s very good overall, except for the enemies that can stab high or low. There’s no animation telegraphing this, so it can come across as rather random. It has nice jumping, nice enemy designs, and nice moves like the down stab, up stab, spells, and others. Continue reading →

Weapon Imba & Breakable Powerups

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What do you think about games where you lose your upgrades when you get hit?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BreakablePowerUp
So we got, Super Mario, Cave Story, Contra, Metal Slug, Zeldas with beam sword, and whatever else is up there.

Uhhhh. I don’t really know. It’s an additional punishment for getting hit. It makes a slippery slope where players who get hit are more likely to get hit again, since they can’t defend themselves as well. Apart from that, I don’t really have anything. It doesn’t really introduce an interesting decision, because players are already trying to not get hit. I guess it can be a way to limit damage boosting, but how many games are intentionally constructed around damage boosting, or are susceptible to undesirable unintentional damage boosting to the extent that they’d want to introduce a punishment for it rather than just reconfiguring their levels? Continue reading →

Feeling of Speed

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What makes for a good “feeling of speed” in racing games? that’s one of those terms reviewers use a lot but I’ve never really understood exactly what it consists of

That’s okay, they don’t understand what it consists of either.

I haven’t done much study on this, but I’d say it relates most heavily to the scale of the camera, it’s position relative to the vehicle (how close or far it is), the scale of the vehicle relative to its surroundings, the scale of detail in those surroundings, and particle effects. Continue reading →

Gitting Gud with Scrub Tier Characters

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Can’t a person get good enough with a mid-to-low tier character in a fighting game and compete on par with those who excel with higher tiered characters? Like how you say Fox is the most demanding and powerful character in Melee but we see people like Gimpyfish with Bowser or AMSA with Yoshi?

It depends. Gimpyfish can’t compete on a national or international level because bowser honestly sucks. Amsa can because yoshi has potential beyond his tiering.

The thing with mid and low tiers is they thrive on people not knowing the matchup. A person can become really good with those characters and maybe take higher level players by surprise with them, but this advantage fades as they come into contact more. Leffen was originally a yoshi main, but moved to fox not because there was a deliberate tier advantage, but because he wanted to prove he was the best without any sort of gimmick. He wanted to hit people honestly and fairly with the character everyone has the most experience fighting. Amsa had a good run against the gods initially, then fell off as everyone got used to the matchup and his style of play, but he recovered as he genuinely improved more, but hasn’t reached the heights he originally did since. Continue reading →

High Tier Abuse

Celia Wagar4 Comments

Do you have a main in Guilty Gear?

Not really. I don’t play the game as much as I’d like. I sort of faff around with Sol, Ky, Slayer, Bridget, and Ramlethal. Ramlethal was nerfed bad and I don’t play her anymore. I hope Bridget returns because I actually played him unlike a lot of memers. I tried developing a Leo briefly but never played anyone with him.

I play multiple characters in every fighting game except Melee and SFV, where I only play Marth and Cammy. I just can’t make any other character work for me in those games.

You admitted that you only play one character in Melee and SFV because you can’t win otherwise. Could it be that your support of imbalance and only playing one character is self-serving rationalization?

I don’t support imbalance. I just think small viable casts are okay, as long as that cast is fairly balanced amongst themselves. Also, I sometimes play Bowser in Melee and beat them. I once beat someone’s Jigglypuff in bracket with Bowser. That’s a 10-0 matchup. I also narrowly won a small round robin Melee tournament, then beat the two next best players with Bowser as they played Fox. I’m no stranger to playing low tiers for fun, and being moderately successful at it. Continue reading →

Twilight Princess Boss Review

Celia Wagar1 Comment

What do you think of the boss fights of Twilight Princess?

They suck.

Diababa. Use the dungeon item in a very clearly telegraphed way. Then do it when you have a moving target that you snap onto and mash on the boss’s weak point for a while. Occasionally does easily avoided attacks.

Fyrus, shoot boss’s head. Press A near interaction point then equip dungeon item. Unequip dungeon item and mash on weak point. Do this 3 times.

Morpheel, midna gives you a hint to use the dungeon item. Auto-target grab boss’s weak point. Slash it a little, repeat. Occasionally fish get sent at you, these explode after being hit. Second phase it starts swimming around, so you do too. It doesn’t damage you on contact. Auto-target grab the weak point when you’re close, then mash. Continue reading →

Critiquing Control Schemes

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What do you think is the best method to critiquing controls?

That’s complicated. I think criticizing controls sits somewhere between User Experience and Game Feel. Also controls can mean a number of things. It can mean the actual buttons that each action is bound to, and it can mean the way the game responds to input. It’s a matter of figuring out what feels good in terms of how the animation responds tightly to your input (like nero’s shuffle or calibur). And it’s a matter of figuring out how to make it easy and understandable to input the actions the player is trying to input.

Here’s something recent for binds: Nero’s controls in DMC4 are just fucked. There’s 3 buttons you want to be holding like, all the time, Lock-on, Gun, and Devil Buster. Holding onto an enemy with Devil Buster is optional, it’s not the most useful feature in the world, but the other two you want to be doing rather frequently. In the default control scheme, charging the gun is ridiculous. Everyone I know rebinds the gun to a trigger. Even with the gun bound to a trigger, it’s a pain in the ass to hold the trigger and also pump the shoulder button to get EX-ACT. Maybe a better configuration might be having the exceed bound to the button gun used to be on, but devil buster is just completely fucked. It gets worse when you want to juggle an enemy, summon swords or stay in the air longer by shooting the gun repeatedly. That’s difficult on a trigger. Continue reading →