27 may 2018
loathe as I am to admit it, I don't love Celeste. I should love Celeste, I'm supposed to. It's got everything I like in a game, it'a by some of my favorite devs. as a devotee of Super Meat Boy, ESJ, and not the least relevant: towerfall, I still just... don't. I loved the story, absolutely, but I didn't feel a whole lot of compulsion to push past that, into all the B- and apparently C-sides, strawberries, challenges, etc. I think where this game loses me is in the challenges it presents and in the ways it allows itself to be hard. These kinds of games are hard, for damn sure, and all of the things we thought to put on paper are there: precise controls like nobody's business, instant respawn/retry, clearly presented obstacles and goals, but... it strays a bit; foremost of all that frustrates me is the hitboxes in play. I assume it's not the character hitbox, so then it must be the spikes' hitbox. they feel spongy. in the way that the visuals onscreen line up with the collisions that will kill you, they just don't feel good. maybe it's perfect, pixel-tracing around their outlines for collisions, but even if so, the exact corner of what is or isn't a spike isn't totally clear to me. and I'm I think just talking about the random liles of "natural" spikes; the well-ordered ones in the city levels are fine, I think. but anyway. the same thing bugged me about the weird-ass launcher blocks in the lava core stage. too often I would die and think "well that wasn't my fault". I shouldn't just rarely think that, I should never think that. same with the hotel level, too. And the kther thing I'm not interested in are things I never even got to - the golden strawberries. I don't know how you even start attempting those (because it's not getring through a world without dying, I tried) but anyway I understand there are challenges to run through the whole thing without ever once getting hit. and that's fine, maybe, but what a waste of human time to be spent replaying challenges you already know you can beat just to get another shot at not screwing up thr hard part at the end of the world. Checkpoints exist for a reason, and this game has them! until you tell your players to ignore them and destart until they get it all in one. It adds punishment, not difficulty in execution, which makes it "harder" but meaninglessly so. That's all I have for gripes right now; I did like playing this game, but I can't muster any real passion for it, like I had before its release. also the Bit.trip series and Thumper have to have boring music because of their punishment scheme SORRY I'll talk about those some other day, I've got this theory brewing about the modeling of rhythm video games, and the two sides between DDR-alikes (you should hit all of these notes) and the bit.trip games (you may hit these notes, you must hit these notes).cool I guess I'm saying it now; because bit.trip will stop you, force you to restart, and require you to beat a challenge to move on, the music cannot have a strong identity to itself. these soundtracks must be the long, droning, generated stuff instead of a pop song, because playing the thirty seconds after the halfway mark of a pop song on repeat would be torture. (looking at you, iwbtg fangame avoidances). whereas song-based games rarely, if ever fail you halfway through. Project Diva is like Thumper but you have five hundred hitpoints, and every three hit notes restores one. the concepts don't even really carry over, and even guitar hero introduced songs in batches, giving you multiple challenges to choose from instead of just one that you must beat now to move on. (k it did have boss stages) but anyway! nobody (I've met) goes to the itg cab at their local arcade and plays one song three times. it'd be boring. you switch it up, because you're shooting for score, not completion. this is well exemplified in the optional stuff in thumper and runner: you din't have to get these things to win, and you might put yourself in danger for them, so they add really visible score/ranking goals that require you to go for these optional notes - but not to progress. theoretically, these extras can be "pointless", but only if you ignore the literal points systems that count them. in Itg, on the other hand, every note counts, as well as every mine. they all help or hurt your progress towards your goal (survival, ranking, score) but no one of them can completely prevent your success. Unless you're going for combos.
more thoughts later, stomach is yelling at me