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[chrominance]

Oh geez, I just discovered this thread. I'll stick to the last few games I've played:

McPixel. Considering I got this in a Humble Bundle without even realizing it, I guess I can't be all that disappointed. As a joke it's alright--there are amusing bits here and there. But as a game, it's pretty bad.

The premise is you're McPixel, a cross between MacGyver and fart jokes. In each "level," you have twenty seconds to find and defuse a bomb in a scene. You do this by clicking on items and people in the scene to do things. Each round is made up of six levels; if you fail a level, you just move on to the next one until you finally solve them all. The problem is that applying any sort of logic to the game is pointless. It's not always obvious what's clickable and what's not. It's not at all obvious what McPixel will do when you click on an item (pick it up? kick it in the genitals? eat it? piss all over it? random other thing?) And the actual action you need to take to get rid of a bomb is intentionally nonsensical most of the time. So basically you end up just clicking on things at random in the hopes it'll do what you need it to do. Thankfully, this only goes on for an hour or three before you've completed everything in the game, which includes finding all the possible outcomes of every level.

Retro/Grade. At first glance, it looks like a Frequency/Amplitude-style rhythm game with the thin veneer of an arcade shooter played in reverse. In practice, Retro/Grade takes the time reversal stuff a lot further than I thought it would, with even the level and scoring structure given a little reverse-time quirk. The main gameplay also turns out to be a bit more complex; instead of shooting bullets at the right time by hitting notes along tracks at the right moments, you also have to DODGE incoming fire from enemies as well. Once you've finished the campaign, there's a number of challenges to take on that modify the gameplay in certain ways--speeding up or slowing down the music, or requiring you to play through a level perfectly, or turning on disco lighting to make it harder to spot the notes you're supposed to hit. The campaign feels like a warm-up compared to the challenges, as if it was really designed to teach you the ten songs so you can handle the extra workload of the challenges.

It's a neat concept and fun to play. My only significant wish is that there were more songs. Given how successful the game apparently was, there's probably no hope for music DLC, but Retro/Grade is a pretty nifty rhythm game.

Frozen Synapse. I can't decide if this game is just annoying or if I'm missing a vital piece of basic info about how to play this game properly. I'm stuck in the second operation, which seems really incredibly early to me, and playing through the campaign is an exercise in near-constant frustration. The biggest issue I have is my soldiers appear to be complete idiots. The number of times I've seen one of my soldiers lounge around blindly behind cover while the enemy right in front of them shoots their head off is infuriating, even after I finally realized that ducking behind cover means your soldier can't shoot past the cover. I've read the tips that say sightlines and soldier movement affect who wins an encounter, but I literally saw one of my soldiers walking towards a window with an enemy ahead and on the other side of the wall, walking in the same direction. The enemy walked past the window, TURNED AROUND and shot my guy without even an acknowledgement from my now dead soldier.

Add to that the fact that you can't rewind a stage once it's done, and the fact that calculating everyone's moves takes forever and a half, and the fact that you can't seem to dismiss the giant OUTCOME text that covers up half the screen and prevents you from zooming/panning to see what even happened, and you get what feels to me like a game that doesn't want to be played.

 

[Dice]

Guacamelee
Time played: 8 hours
Thoughts: Pretty fun, really beautiful, decent personality. I would prefer your character to have character rather than being a silent hero.

World design (not level design) is not very good for a Metroidvania. Feels too linear and forced rather than having really meaningful pathways of unlocking as you gain new abilities. It's probably difficult to design things in a way that created a feeling of being meaningful, but Metroid and newer Castlevania games do it, so if you are following the genre it is good to live up to its namesake.

As it is, there is the one completely obvious and only sensible way forward, which gives you an ability that created the next one and only sensible way forward. Any memories of other paths you just unlocked only lead to small areas with a gold box or something. That just isn't very compelling or rewarding, so the exploration and payoff factor is minimized. So instead it is more of a brawler platformer in focus, so how do those do?

Both start pretty well, but get bigger than their britches in awkward ways. The platforming in a pure platforming sense is rather simplistic and lacks a sense of skillfulness. Rather than having interesting jumps that utilize precision, the controls are a bit loose and the skill is in handling the dimension flip mechanic with rapid switching. This really doesn't feel skillful to me so much as just annoying. I have also noticed where the flip tries to adjust for itself by calculating your character's position, and sometimes it overshoots this. That might be due to vsync, I haven't tested it.

Combat also introduces challenge in strange ways, eventually requiring you to flip dimensions or use specific moves to make an enemy actually start taking damage. Again, I would describe this way of increasing difficulty as annoying rather than more refined games that have more complex AI and mechanics. Speaking of such mechanics, this game severely lacks input buffering, sensible move priority balance, invincibility frames, cancels, etc. Those things aren't just for fighting games, they are in many brawlers and they exist for a reason. It makes this feel sloppy and sluggish, not what it could have been with the moves provided.

Still, despite these complaints, I wouldn't say they push it into "bad" or even "average" but it still stays a "good" game. I just wouldn't rave about it like some have.

Will I play again?: Well, I haven't finished it, so I will probably do that, but I don't know about ever replaying it.

Spelunky
Time played: 45 minutes
Thoughts: This seems to have legitimately fun platforming exploration, nice style, nice music, nice personality... and then doesn't let me enjoy it because I have to (relative to my natural pace of playing games) run through due to the ghost. I know I don't have to see the whole level or collect things, but for me it is more a matter of stopping to smell the roses. It's not about the goal, it is the journey, and the ghost makes it so you have to skip half the journey and the half you are left with is more risky and less fun.

Spelunky wants to be about the goal rather than the journey, while simply swiping shit on the side. It's clear that the purpose of this is for risk/reward skill play required to get higher scores on leaderboards, something that doesn't appeal to me at all. They could just have a timer-based multiplier on your money score and it would function exactly the same way for "skill" play and leaderboard ranking, but I guess that just makes too much sense in appeal to all kinds of players rather than forcing them to be mirror images of yourself as the developer.

It's a narcissistic design very common in games today and to me it ruins the experience. I won't be returning to try and adjust or understand where they are coming from with their design decisions. I have played games long enough and given enough games very long trials (20 hours with Dark Souls most recently) to know that I won't agree. It's interesting to me that most people who don't like these games get frustrated with the dying, but I am frustrated with all the other ways you are robbed of their enjoyable aspects.

Will I play it again: Depends. I have learned that someone made a mod to remove the ghost from the old version of the game. Maybe that will happen again and this can be a really fun game for me. Otherwise, no.