Fell in love with it the first time I saw it. Will support for sure. It's nice to hear there are going to be platforming levels ala Contra. They can take their sweet time to get it right as long as they don't break their bank - and sink
They have been for yearsIsn't MS funding the game now?
I cant believe all the love for boss fights in this tread. Seriously boss fights have always been the icing on the cake at the end of the lvl, but only eating icing make me sick to my stomach.
They have been for years
Maybe. But honestly, I have higher hopes after seeing how they managed to remix Guardian Heroes into being an even better game for the XBLA re-release. That is impressive.
I cant believe all the love for boss fights in this tread. Seriously boss fights have always been the icing on the cake at the end of the lvl, but only eating icing make me sick to my stomach.
What this thread is teaching me is way more people need to play Alien Soldier
It depends on how they're made. A boss battle can feel like the icing on a single cake, or like every desert in bakery, finely made by a master patisserie.
For example, I always felt like the boss battles in Megaman were the reward of a solid stage run. The stage is a way to gather resources, the boss is a way to spend them.
Compare that to something like Seven Force, or the Dice Palace in Gunstar Heroes. Because the bosses are the centerpieces, they get to go much deeper, per boss character, than the robot masters in a Megaman game. In many of Gunstar's boss battles, you could get new weapon power-ups or health between waves or forms. The resource gathering was RIGHT THERE in the battle, and I don't think it made the fights any worse because of it. And it surely didn't make the games less memorable.
I don't particularly find Robo Master boss rush in Megaman fun, because the bosses are defined by the stages beforehand, and the resource collection. Without this, they're very basic: they're made to have patterns that basically never change once you memorize them, and with the right weapon, many of them are basically cannon fodder.
But in Gunstar, the bosses can be used in a variety of roles, from Single screen momentary distractions, to huge muti-tiered set pieces that tell a story all on their own.
Cuphead here looks as if it aimed to use a "Boss Rush" in this style. A boss could range from a master and all his varied minions, 2 twins that work together, or one massive creature with enough power to challenge you alone. It's less like getting "Just icing", and more like getting a wide variety of cakes, pies, and ingredients, all mixed in different ways. Some upside down, some with the fruit cooked into the crust, some with outside icing, some with layers, and some with filling.
I appreciate how many people love all the stage-filled platformers that have come out in the past decade or so (N+, Super Meatboy, Dust Force, etc), but I find it kind of surprising such a style of gaming wouldn't also make people look forward to a game that focuses it's majority on boss battles. I feel like the amount of people that REALLY try to learn, replicate, and innovate on classic game boss design are much less than those who constantly show off their understanding of stage design.
Bosses used to be the graphical showpieces of games. They received the best animation, the only voicework, the largest color ranges... they were treated like kings.
Now many in 2D are animated in the poorest ways possible. Anything that fills a screen get's animated with cheaply animated bone animation. Anything smaller might just be a big version of a normal mook with an accessory. They often feel like a traditional standby, rather than a proud centerpiece. As much an afterthought as a high score board, or limited lives.
I just find it really hard to fathom that people can look at bosses made with the love-and-care of 1990's arcade masterpieces, and not see the difference in the attention to detail and quality. A 2D game with the love for these epic battles seen only in modern games like Shadow of the Colossus or the best of Metal Gear sounds great to me.
I can't get into anything regarding specifics but Cuphead is owned and basically self funded by Studio MDHR.
You should see the mortgages!
I cant believe all the love for boss fights in this tread. Seriously boss fights have always been the icing on the cake at the end of the lvl, but only eating icing make me sick to my stomach.
Sounds like you pretty much got the gist of it. Could've just googled it tbh.
What this thread is teaching me is way more people need to play Alien Soldier
If the OP is wrong, shouldn't the title be changed?
Well.... During Paris Games Week i tried Cuphead and was really disappointed.
I don't have anything against boss rush as i love Treasure which tends to do that (as mentionned by a lot of people) but those boss really bored me. They were difficult, yes, but have very few attack pattern, nothing seemed to change about them and they appear as the most annoying bullet sponge i have seen in a long while.
I think i managed to beat one but i didn't even felt particulary happy about that. I'm sure it's highly difficult to make a game with such visual and a lot of different attack (this is why having stuff like arms or leg made of different line of ball was highly efficient for Treasure on the Megadrive) but as it was the demo really worked against you.... Well, in my opinion of course. I hope it will get better.
I never feel like anyone feels this way, sadly. I thought XBLA GH was fantastic, and really was an evolution towards making the game fresh and even better thought-out than it was before. The amount of tools they gave to let you customize the VS should be praised, and I think they went above and beyond the call for barely anything ported from the Saturn. But it doesn't get much talk anymore... which is a shame, to be sure.
That's weird, because the ones I played at Gamescom had a lot of attack patterns and they changed in appareance as well, like the frogs turning into a slot machine for example.
And did you know about the machanical intricacies mentioned by the dev, like the EX meter and parries and such? It's a very clever game, but an expo is probably not the best way to experience it.
Cuphead is owned and basically self funded by Studio MDHR.
I'm a bit sad to hear that Cuphead is no longer primarily a boss rush game, along with the Fleischer-style it was my main source of hype for it.
Will be interesting to see how Cuphead approach the platformer sections - the only run'n'guns I've played that I thought did platform sections really well was the Turrican games and maybe Gunlord, which went for kinda more of a metroidish vibe.
Man that sounds soul destroying - no wonder devs end up making games more accessible if most of their time showing off a game is with them having to bite their tongues while smiling with their heads slightly bowed...Ha, that's mostly because none of the footage from any people playing at expos or from game journalists ever shows them using the abilities.
It's a little maddening to watch people never use EX shots or Supers on bosses and then complain that the bosses have too much health.
Ditto for never using dashes or air dashes and saying that some stuff is hard to avoid.
Or calling the game "bullet hell" when there's rarely more than 3 bullets on screen at any time, and you can parry those bullets, absorbing their power into your Super bar, allowing you to fight back harder. Or using the parry bounce to maneuver around the screen more nimbly.
Or when they never switch weapons mid fight to capitalize on the different strengths and weaknesses depending on the situation the boss is putting you in.
Or ignoring all of the above and saying the game is incredibly simplistic while simultaneously being too hard. The simplicity I can kind of understand to a degree; it's designed to be immediately pick up and play. But when you design the ability set that we have in player movement, you have to have bosses that reward using that variance to the player's advantage. As such, not using those abilities makes the game feel relatively thin and much much harder than it is.
But all of that, I think, comes from what I call "Expo Exposure". People stand in line, get a 30 second tutorial on how to play and then 10 minutes to play. They are told about all the abilities, but when a boss starts leaning into you, you forget all about what someone told you you could do and just freeze up or jump into a bullet three times and die.
I think levels will help a lot with this; reiterating advantages to player abilities, repeating challenges while consistently ratcheting up the difficulty, and creating combinations of those encounters to allow the player expression in overcoming them. It's something that's easier to do in levels than in bosses. With bosses, the progression is all things that happen TO the player, whereas in a level, the player controls the pace of encounters, which allows them to learn and experiment more easily. With early levels, we can create very specific challenges that require knowledge and use of the abilities in a less stressful environment. Hopefully that will encourage them to use that knowledge to their advantage on the bosses.
There is still hope for a PS4 version
Probably not
Is there like
ever gonna be a release date on this shit
I know its just two dudes but they've been working on it since 2010 >_>
+1What this thread is teaching me is way more people need to play Alien Soldier
A round of applause for this post.
In my case I didn't have a 360 until I could get one for $99 that wouldn't red ring so I didn't have a chance to play GH HD until then. If they had released it on any other platform I would have played it a lot sooner.
Yeah, I love the idea that this game was (initially) a boss-rush game. How many games do we get like that anymore? It's disappointing to see so many people constantly complaining about the game, wanting it to be something it is not. Assuming it's a small dev group, this seems like a case where having to put in stuff for those who weren't really interested in the game to begin with will take away resources from the originally designed focus/content of the game, unlike larger studios where that might not happen.
The dev posted what he felt like right in here! Gotta love that about GAF. I love that they're sticking to their guns overall, and every interview or forum post sounds like they *get* it well, and aren't being manipulated too much.Still excited about it and will be picking it up for sure, but threads like these that keep popping up are so frustrating to me. I can only imagine what the devs feel like. Hopefully it isn't too demotivating for them, because a lot of people really appreciate the original design goal.
Man that sounds soul destroying - no wonder devs end up making games more accessible if most of their time showing off a game is with them having to bite their tongues while smiling with their heads slightly bowed...
Is there like
ever gonna be a release date on this shit
I know its just two dudes but they've been working on it since 2010 >_>
I got to have a good long play on this at EGX last year.
Game is trash.
Looks amazing, plays awful.
Yeah, I love the idea that this game was (initially) a boss-rush game. How many games do we get like that anymore? It's disappointing to see so many people constantly complaining about the game, wanting it to be something it is not. Assuming it's a small dev group, this seems like a case where having to put in stuff for those who weren't really interested in the game to begin with will take away resources from the originally designed focus/content of the game, unlike larger studios where that might not happen.
Still excited about it and will be picking it up for sure, but threads like these that keep popping up are so frustrating to me. I can only imagine what the devs feel like. Hopefully it isn't too demotivating for them, because a lot of people really appreciate the original design goal.
I got to have a good long play on this at EGX last year.
Game is trash.
Looks amazing, plays awful.
The question is what the ratio will be between bosses and actual platforming.
I guess the issue is that they planned it as a 90% bosses kinda thing and then saw that people wanted more of a Metal Slug / Contra, so they started to accommodate.
Whatever it is, I'll be there Day1. Love the style and animations and just want to see it all
Not wasted by being used in an action game, wasted by being used in what is reportedly an exceptionally difficult game.
If the OP is wrong, shouldn't the title be changed?