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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Ultraviolet@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldLegend of Zelda
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    3 months ago

    BotW ruined the series. Open world, despite the promise of freedom, is a crippling set of shackles on world design. No upgrade can meaningfully interact with the world because every area has to be a potential first area. There’s no mystery of “what’s past this obstacle?” because everything has to be passable as soon as you see it. Worst of all, your reward for thoroughly exploring and completing all the optional quests? Butchering the final boss, which at full power is a highlight of the game, into the worst anticlimax of the series by removing multiple entire phases and drastically nerfing the HP of the phases that remain. The only intact phase literally can’t hit you if you just run in circles around it.

    All of this wouldn’t be too bad if it was a one off, but Aonuma confirmed it’s the template for the series going forward. We’ll never see another proper Zelda game.








  • The Celeste mod Strawberry Jam. It’s a lot of fun, but I’d be more than satisfied with just getting through the expert levels, which are already at the point where simply watching gameplay of them would kill a small Victorian child, but I’m at just the right level of masochism that this is a tough but satisfying grind. But I’ve seen what’s next, I’m fully aware of the horrors of the Grandmaster levels, and I know I’ll hit my upper limit well before 100% completion.



  • The difficulty curve in Tetris has a few different possible knobs to adjust as the levels go up, generally involving how much of a delay you have on certain events. The most obvious is gravity, which is how many frames it takes to fall one space (or, to ramp that up further, how many spaces it falls per frame), but the relevant one here is lock delay. This is the amount of time between the piece landing and the player losing control over the piece. Low lock delay like you have on NES tends to make small mistakes a lot more punishing. High lock delay lets you reposition a piece shortly after it falls. Modern Tetris has a small but highly controversial change to the lock delay logic: rotating a piece resets the timer. This means you can spam the rotate button to think about where to place a piece indefinitely, a technique called infinite spin. Presumably this was done with timed and battle modes in mind, where this isn’t really an advantage because it’s always better to play quickly, but in endless it has no meaningful cost. So leaderboards started to get pretty grotesque, with top scoring games dragging on for dozens of hours. Something had to be done about it, and shifting focus entirely to timed and line limited modes was the choice they made for better or worse.