BrazMogu Games

It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.

Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!

I wonder how much of that was done due to a need (or desire) to increase the game's longevity by making it take more time to be completed (player might need to replay large swathes of it to get to an actual ending) and/or drive sales of strategy guides/hint hotlines; and how much was just a spirit of trolling that seems to pervade the Choose Your Own Adventure genre of fiction as well

Metroidvania where you start out bare-ass naked and all of the mobility upgrades are just regular pieces of clothing. One of the first upgrades you pick up on the developer-intended route is a pair of underwear that lets you vault over certain obstacles without fatally injuring your strikingly pendulous dong.

Best as I can guess, AI data centers might be useful for number crunching intensive science research like, say, astronomy or running theoretical physics experiments, but considering the monetary incentives involved and the amount of money those areas actually have to offer for that hardware, I imagine the best candidate for second hand usage of those would be rendering for the animation/film industry

it is unfortunate that i am extremely lazy while simultaneously wanting to make games that i'd describe as "everything's in it"

JRPG where everybody you meet knows you're the Chosen One, but each community seems to have a completely different idea of what being the Chosen One entails and what your quest actually is, like one town thinks you're out to defeat an evil wizard's zombie army, and the next town over has never heard of the wizard and thinks your mission is to stop a dragon from fucking the Moon.

The game is seemingly made out of a ton of sidequests as you arrive in each town and they have a different version of your prophecy and since you are there and rewards are expected you are inclined to just keep doing them, except at some point it becomes very clear that whatever the main quest you are intended to fulfill does not really exist; the only real good you can do is being each city's version of the Chosen One and maybe somehow this means your main quest is fulfilled in doing that.

"But wouldn't making [thing] missable be unfair to the player" possibly, yes. However, a. the notion that the player must be able to access 100% of a game's content in a single playthrough regardless of their choices is an unreasonable design constraint in many contexts and actively makes games which try to adhere to it worse; and b. achievement-hunter culture is a disease. Glad we cleared that up!

I mean, the real problem of that statement is that the key adjective "unfair" implicates that the player is entitled to the whole of the content, which not always or only, but heavily skews towards a notion of a game having worth by a ratio of money spent to content consumed, which is even worse than achievement-hunting to a healthy gaming ecosystem

Of course Estradiol gives you double jump, why would it not

"Every janky indie EarthBound clone has amazing music" is an illusion. Most of them have average music at best; they just get extra credit for bothering to have a discernible musical identity at all, as opposed to most contemporary big-budget console RPGs' aimless "atmospheric" drone.

yes and this is similar to the problem I have with Elden Ring. why would you ever settle for generic soulslike orchestral/choral drone when there is no AAA game in history that has ever been more clearly in need of power metal

Reblog because I agree on both counts, but also my tumblr-poisoned brain instantly started to autofill that first sentence as "Undertale-Georg, who has a soundtrack of only amazing bangers, is a statistical anomaly and should not have been counted" or something

One day I will coalesce my wanting to form a habit of playing and showcasing indie games, but by the trailer alone I feel like this one is a stroke of genius in art direction. Whatever system is able to render sound cues as onomatopoeia in a way that illustrates the game's concept as a survival horror is just absolute game dev joy.

Open-world 2D platformer which initially appears to exclusively employ lock-and-key gating, but the various key items actually are granting you new movement tech and not telling you about it. The new inputs are unintuitive but not particularly hard to execute, so you're just constantly having "wait, could I always do that?" moments.

The Settings menu does contain a "Tutorial Prompts" option that is suspiciously out of the screen bounds unless you scroll past the "Exit" button, but it's two values are "Disabled" and "Ha, You Wish"

Contemporary retro metroidvanias have brought us Metroid-likes, Castlevania-likes, Galious-likes, and even the odd Zelda II-like, but what I really want out of the genre is a. a Blaster Master clone that actually preserves the side-scrolling-overworld-and-top-down-dungeons conceit, and b. a version of Demon's Crest that doesn't suck.

if you think about it, Blaster Master is just reverse Zelda II

Not so much. While it's true that the former has a side-scrolling overworld and top-down dungeons while the latter has a top-down overworld and side-scrolling dungeons, Zelda II's overworld is way more zoomed out and abstracted than Blaster Master's, to the point of having map icons and random encounters. I'm not actually sure I can picture what side-scrolling platformer gameplay zoomed out to that level of abstraction would look like – though I'd love to find out!

Didn't they remake Master Blaster?