Gradually_Adjusting
@Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world
- Comment on No words 9 hours ago:
Is that how it works for you? The Thriller album is still a bop for me but I’d never call it an uncomplicated enjoyment. Just an example.
- Comment on The old ways are best 11 hours ago:
I can’t spoil shit, haven’t even beat the first major boss yet.
The fun of this game for me is a lot like back before GPS and ride share apps, how you might be lost at night and walking home, broke after a satisfying night out. You don’t know where you are exactly, but you feel a creeping recognition as you make your way through unfamiliar areas. Then you get a moment of pure elation as your mental map puzzles it all out. Your world feels bigger, you feel safe again, and you’re ready to return home with a true sense of satisfaction.
Then there’s the way this game trains you to fight like the main character. You can’t make too many mistakes because HP is limited and healing is often a high stakes moment, so you quickly learn a way to use the moveset - and when it clicks, it looks good.
You learn how to fight like Hornet, and the way she fights speaks to her story. Being the royal progeny of a spider and something eldritch, her style of combat is graceful yet intense, smooth as silk and totally merciless.
The surface elements (the storybook aesthetic, the gobbledygook bug-talk from amusingly forlorn characters) keep it all from becoming too grounded. If Team Cherry ever tried to make their work seem grounded in realism, I never noticed it. They use real things (like the “needle” you use as a weapon) as only small reminders that this is a story about bugs. These bugs are fully capable of metallurgy and heavy engineering, so anything that refers to the human world only exists to keep the sense of scale in focus.
To add to what you’re saying, the game changes on you so much. From the start it’s no Hollow Knight, but as you gain new abilities and ways to arrange those abilities, the game changes almost as fast as you can get good at it. I can’t wait to get into the second act.
- Comment on just made coatimundi 12 hours ago:
Tubular
- Comment on No words 12 hours ago:
Can’t express my relief that he’s a good guy. Having a complicated relationship with The Princess Bride would break me tbh
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
Sorry for @ing you, I’m on mobile and not checking my shit as well.
I cope with humour too, which is why I’m trying to help OP. I want them to be good at it, for health reasons.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
It’s not that there’s no potential here, it’s mainly imo that you didn’t bother to write a joke. Merely posting a photo of someone bad getting hurt isn’t funny on its own, you have to add your own spin on it.
- Comment on do you consider joking about dying and killing oneself a sign that the person saying it is troubled? 3 days ago:
It’s not simple. The only real way I have to know if it’s a problem is to react based on whether the jokes are funny or not.
Example: When my life is being literally ruined, I don’t joke about suicide, I joke about how much fun I’m having. When I get a loose eyelash stuck under my eyelid though it’s right to “Jesus fuck just kill me please”.
- Comment on hmmm 3 days ago:
I think the phrase is “talk shit, get hit”
- Comment on Holocaust Museum LA deletes post saying 'never again' applies to all people 4 days ago:
Feels like the point is to be overt. It is dominance theatre, an effort to demonstrate to protestors that nothing can stop them.
It would be a shame to let them have their way.
- Comment on choice 5 days ago:
Then the Copromancer saved the world and never went on a vindictive pooing spree driven mad by his own unstoppable power, The End
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
When you’re a kid with no understanding of game design, no internet, and no subscription to magazines that explain it, all those dirty tricks that we now rightly put to much rubbish did have the power to make you think “I suck at this”. They didn’t have to be clever back then to give us this insane need to be punished by game designers just the right amount so that we can finally just try really hard, get really annoyed, stick with it way too long, and eventually get to say “yes, fuck you, I win!” For a certain kind of kid from that generation, that’s almost a healing fantasy.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
Time will tell. These games all have so much talk about how certain builds are “cheese” or how the ashes make the game too easy or whatever - that’s all just dumb. The game itself is the difficulty settings, sometimes.
It seems too early to say how Silksong will be remembered, and Team Cherry still only had two games under its belt so it’s arguably too early to judge them. Will their next game be totally different and a massive risk, or do we have a Vivaldi on our hands, doing masterful variations on a theme?
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
I hate to answer a rhetorical question directly, so please forgive that; my satisfaction would have been much greater, if I was able to achieve those things. I have a realistic sense of what I was able to do given the challenge that I faced and the skill I was able to muster, and although more success would have been sweeter, I am able to be content because I have a shared context with other people who faced the exact same challenge.
I know many have been unhappy with what they are able to accomplish in games with no difficulty settings, and I see it as a choice by the creator to set people apart. It’s a harsh choice that seems most appropriate in grim and harsh stories.
Those who say it is passé argue so very convincingly, but I can’t hide that it appeals to me. It speaks to something primitive, perhaps anhedonic. I was wondering if it’s a generational preference more prevalent among people who grew up during the era of “Nintendo hard”, and if single-difficulty games will fade away in time completely. Maybe this game should have been called Swansong, if so.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
There might also be a generational divide taking shape. People my age grew up with “Nintendo hard” and the industry was all about making games seem longer by making them extremely difficult to beat. Our options were to get better, cheat, or give up.
These days the industry is all about mass appeal, and all the problems that we see with games having massive budgets and having to make sure as many people can like them as possible. Indie games have different incentives, and so when a game comes along that was made with priorities that aren’t in step with what we’re used to, it tends to ruffle feathers.
I know my kid doesn’t have any sense that games should be difficult, or that a challenging game can be satisfying. Even FromSoft games are trending towards less difficulty, despite having the fans who famously chant “git gud”. Bigger studios might know something my generation doesn’t get about younger gamers - maybe games like Silksong are having their swansong, so to speak. I hope not, but it’s hard not to notice once it’s been pointed out.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
The thing is, I can’t personally think of an accessibility setting that would serve the intended function without removing the sense of having finally met the challenge. I struggle with difficult games too, and I don’t always complete them. That struggle and uncertainty is part of the journey though to me and if there was a difficulty tweak available as soon as I got frustrated the first time, it would erase those stakes (for me).
I mentioned Celeste as a positive example. I did feel a satisfaction with completing that game, but if not for the highly emotional personal journey of the narrative potion of that game I don’t think it would have been as satisfying. At every point I knew there was an easy way out, and staying frustrated and gradually getting better was a conscious choice without any real stakes attached to it other than my own self-satisfaction. The was never any worry that I’d fail to complete the game. Those stakes do make eventually winning feel real.
So I just can’t think of any suggestions for this. It’s elitist or ableist I realise, and I’m not happy with that. The creator certainly was aware of games like Celeste, and they had plenty of time to consider those options. Before casting any judgment or making suggestions on their behalf, I’d be really interested to hear what they have to say about the choice. Do they think the struggle has to be as firmly set as it is for the triumph to feel as elating? I can’t read their minds, so if there’s an interview where they address that I’d be all ears.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
It’s undeniable that the challenge is part of the mystique for some games. I note with great respect the fact that Celeste offers accessible difficulty tweaks. I beat that game and it was a great experience.
Both choices can be good, when made with intention and care, and when motivated by specific goals as a creator.
With dark souls, at least the ones I’ve played, the difficulty can be tweaked by engaging with the world, learning the progression system and the character options that suit you. For example I didn’t beat DSI until I tried playing a magic user, because I’m slightly bad at those games. DSIII was easy enough by comparison to beat as a straight up STR build, but that’s beside the point. Difficulty is a design choice, and the conversation around it is tiresome when it ignores the aims of the creators.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
Every time a hard game gets made, we have to have this debate? Maybe the real easy mode is just not trying to please everyone.
- Comment on Someone else will retire me when the time comes. 6 days ago:
Venture capital
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Brexit succeeded - just not in the way he told you it would
- Comment on All I Want for Christmas Is You 1 week ago:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE4shVkwqIk
For anyone who wants to see big ass cartoon question marks floating over other people’s heads
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 1 week ago:
The one man I know who loves video games the most - he loves the history, he knows the names in the industry, he reads critiques, he has an entire room where he keeps his game library (and will talk at length about preservation and physical media) - is not actually good at playing them. He is helplessly enamored with games as art, despite that he can’t really beat anyone at his favourite games. It might be plain distractibility or some form of dyspraxia, but it has not lessened his pleasure. I used to smirk when we were young, but I think he has sense on his side.
- Comment on UK Cops 'Ashamed and Sick' of Enforcing Ban on Anti-Genocide Group Palestine Action 1 week ago:
Resign, pigs.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 1 week ago:
We all have our thing. I love From Soft games even though I suck at them. I do alright in platformers though.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 1 week ago:
How many people are you gonna ask?
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 1 week ago:
Can you believe how compact the download is? They spent that long building in the age of incredibly bloated games, and it would fit on a game disc from back when my voice hadn’t cracked yet.
And despite being a mere handful of gigs, it still broke every major platform on release.
Fuck, what a great day.
- Comment on Choose wisely lemmings 1 week ago:
It’s not good!
- Comment on Choose wisely lemmings 1 week ago:
They asked for unhinged; I happen to be a connoisseur.
- Comment on Choose wisely lemmings 1 week ago:
You asked 😙
- Comment on Choose wisely lemmings 1 week ago:
- Comment on Hypothetically, if you have memory problems and need to write down events, is there a system which you can verify that its not tampered with? (Like a digital checksum, but for a journal) 2 weeks ago:
It doesn’t prevent any changes to the content, but that’s what pen is for.