#collectathon

[kidnichols]

Spooky Katamari Sticker Sheet 🌎✨

[bison2winquote]

- Hunter the Cheetah, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage (Insomniac Games, Inc) (reupload)

[arconinternet]

Tytus, Romek I A' Tomek aka Monkey's Adventures (Windows, ~2005)

You can download this game based on a classic Polish comic book here. (Tip: run as Administrator.)

[luacomputa]

CHECK OUT MY DAMN VIDEO GAME‼️

Fuck with games like Yumme Nikki and LSD dream emulator but wish they had more to their gameplay? Check it out!!!

[molegato]

Frogun was launched a year ago! 🐸💙

It's been a wild ride, and working on the coming sequel is been a whole different adventure so far. Thank you all players, and if you haven't tried it yet, I hope you do and have fun!

[bryastar]

word salad #4

happy twilight Thursday!

today is a work day and something I'm thinking about right now is, yes just because this may be a daily blog doesn't necessarily mean I need to go into full detail about how every part of my days go. otherwise I'd be ranting about work for a vast majority of these entires.

so instead I wanna talk about... retro 3D platformers

a while back I came across a game called Cavern of Dreams. it claims itself to be inspired by retro 3D platformers. it features low poly graphics and textures with simple lighting effects, reminiscent of late N64 games. the gameplay feels very much like if Conker's Bad fur day was lighthearted and wholesome. what's also neat is camera controls are more reminiscent of later games, Mario sunshine and Zelda wind waker immediately come to mind for me. I've gotten through the first part of the game and really loving it so far, and the controls are probably the best I've seen in a long time.

but while thinking about this, I sorta made a bit of a realization... growing up, games like this were referred to as adventure games instead of 3d platformers. heck, I don't think I've seen the term "platformer" until around the mid 2000s. even Mario games I think we're more well known as action adventure games, or Zelda games being a puzzle adventure. PC adventure games tend to be point and click games, which is vastly different than what consoles typically offered. I personally think that NSMB for the DS may be in part why we now make this distinction as the 2D Mario games play vastly different than their 3D games, notably being easier to pick up and play.

but while on this thought train, I sorta began to wonder what sort of similarities that 3D platformers from this era had vs a point and click adventure game. what I ended up deciding on was: exploration. point and click games, you topically make progress by exploring the world around you and finding clues and solving puzzles by exploring the environment and talking to npcs. 3d platformers is... actually kinda the same, while typically focusing on item collecting, many similar elements show up such as exploring worlds and finding ways to progress by interacting with the levels and different characters.

while on that thought about collecting items...

a lot of late 90s and early 2000s platformers would feature collecting a long list of items. one prominent example is donkey Kong 64, which tends to be known as the game that killed collectathons. I have some thoughts on but I'll save for another entry, but I guess I will say that calling such games a collectathon very much misses the point of what the game is actually about. is it a game where you are sent out into a level and made to collect all the random items scattered on the ground, or is it a game where you're friends have been captured and your hoard of bananas have been stolen and you must rescue your friends and recover your bananas in order to progress while learning new moves and meeting interesting creatures who either help you or try to intervene. I dunno about most, but I like the latter premise better. (or maybe I out much more weight on a storyline for a game as opposed to the gameplay)

I hope this entry wasn't too hard or confusing to read, I guess I'm mostly rambling and jotting down bits and pieces of what's in my mind when I get a couple minutes of free time.

uhm..

pineapples (I need a better way to end these aa)

[kastelo-games]

My first game has just launched on STEAM at 40% Off. I hope everyone enjoys it! https://www.kastelogames.com/news/bricking-bots-40-off-on-steam

[jacoblw4321]

I don't usually post here, but there's this really obscure indie game I wanted to help bring attention to: A Happy Place. It's an N64 style collect-a-thon platformer with a twist. It's made by Ziggity, the guy behind Super Mario Dolor. The game has been out for almost a year and has gotten almost no coverage. You can find it on Gamejolt. I highly recommend it.

[thecuddlymuffintop]

Tonight, at 7 pm CDT, I will be continuing Spyro Reignited Trilogy over on Twitch.

You're always welcome to either watch here or join me and the other Chubby Checkers with the above link.

[starthistleparadise]

Lack of variety, but that’s okay! September 27th, 2024

[chaselocalyanderefan]

Cover Box hypothetical 2:

Jester’s (Extremely Stupid) Journey

[horses-who-smile]

people say this is like conkers bad fur day + a hat in time but it really reminds me of a more obscure game

wiplash for the ps2 and x box

[n64retro]

Spiral Mountain Banjo-Tooie (Rareware, Nintendo, 2000)

[valereth2]

IT. IS. DONE. My Jak and Daxter review is finally finished. Holy crap. I should have had this done months ago but I am happy with how the final video turned out. Give it a watch and let me know what you think

[snyatcher-official]

There seems to be cat themed objects popping up all over these days.

[goombasa]

Banjo-Tooie and The Problem with "Bigger = Better"

I love Banjo-Kazooie.

At least, I love the first one. I wouldn't just call it one of my favorite Nintendo 64 games of all time, I would call it one of my favorite games of all time, full stop. To me, Banjo-Kazooie took the layout of the 3D collect-a-thon platformer that Super Mario 64 pioneered, and perfected it. It is not a perfect game (there is no such thing) but any negatives that I see in the game are so minor when compared to the litany of positives that they barely register to me, and it is one of those games that I know front to back and up to down.

And when Banjo-Tooie was announced, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.

And then I played it. And I really, really liked it.

But I didn't love it.

Don't get me wrong, I did think that Banjo-Tooie was a good game, and to this day, I maintain that opinion. It's a good collect-a-thon, but even when it was brand new, something felt off about it compared to the original. It wasn't the tone, though the game's somewhat darker storyline and character interpretation compared to the whimsical, fairy-tale like excuse plot of the first game was a bit of a change-up. No, it was more in the gameplay. And a few years afterwards, I realized what it was, at least for me.

The game was just too damn big.

Look, Banjo Tooie was released pretty late into the N64's life span and it really pushed the system to its limits. I'm not going to pretend that it is not super impressive what they managed to shove onto a tiny, tiny cartridge. But you can tell they were running up against issues just by the fact that the game does not run great on original hardware, even when there's not a huge amount of stuff happening. But it still runs well enough to be played, and of course if you're playing the Xbox remaster, it runs perfectly fine, and that's how I'd recommend it be played. But when you get down to it, in terms of its design, the game is just way too big for its own good.

Banjo-Kazooie, even when its words were on the larger side, were not terribly big by comparison. They were very carefully broken down into manageable chunks that made navigating them really easy. You always knew where you were in relation to everything else in the world. Even more wide open worlds like, say Mad Monster Mansion, each area of the mansion and the grounds stands on its own so well that navigating around and getting from place to place is really easy to do.

Banjo-Kazooie doesn't really have that. Don't get me wrong, its maps are peppered with recognizable landmarks and most of them are also broken up into chunks. I think Witchy World gets the closest out of all of its worlds to the design of the first game, as its basically designed as a compass with a distinct area of the theme park at each of the cardinal directions, and the big top in the center. Of course, each of these cardinal areas have several sub areas inside of them, but the point is, its design is very easy to follow and navigate. But it's one of the few worlds that are designed like this. Most of the worlds in Tooie are made up of massive areas that don't really flow into one another. There's not as distinct a break between one area as there is another. There are landmarks everywhere, and yet they don't help you navigate nearly as well as you would think.

This is made worse by the fact that, especially in later worlds, navigating is just… just such a chore. There's a reason they had to add warp pads in the second game so that you can more easily navigate from one part of the world to the other, but that doesn't help at all when the game deliberately limits your movement options, which feels pretty horrible, especially your first time through. The absolute nadir of this particular problem is definitely Grunty Industries, which makes getting around its multi-floor factory an absolute nightmare, and considering how many of the puzzles require you to jump from floor to floor, sometimes in multiple forms (with each form needing to utilize a different means of getting around the different floors, and having to UNLOCK those means beforehand), you spend a LOT of time wandering around not doing anything because you can't figure out where anything is.

Even the hub world is more tedious to traverse. The first game had the cramped tunnels and chambers of Gruntilda's lair as its main hub, and it was mostly a linear ride from one area to the next, with some offshoots for extra stuff or to solve puzzles to go deeper into the lair or find secrets here and there, but it was purposefully built to lead the player around in a quick and easy manner. In Tooie, since you're wandering around an entire island, every new section of the island is like a miniature level to explore, chock full of things to look over and figure out, and it can get overwhelming. And again, warp points were introduced to make traveling the thing more palatable.

It's not just the level design that feels too big or bloated. The game kind of assumes you've already played the previous game, and as such, it feels like it's designed to pick up right after that. You already have your full moveset from the last game. Now, the last game stopped teaching you new moves a little ways past the halfway point. But the sequel has you learn at least one new move in every single level, or at least upgrading some sort of aspect about your characters, such as giving you a ton of new egg types to use like fire, ice, and grenades.

But most of the new moves that you get kind of feel… unnecessary? There are some good ones in there. The ability to split Banjo and Kazooie up and use them both independently of one another, but most of the new moves are either highly situational, like Kazooie's hatch ability or the beak bayonette attack, straight upgrades to pre-existing abilities, like the drill pound or the first-person egg aiming, and then first person aiming in the air or underwater, all of which are considered separate moves by the by, or so incredibly situational that it feels like they were added in at the last minute and they couldn't figure out a lot of interesting ways to use them, like most of Banjo's backpack abilities.

Not saying that some of the moves in the original weren't situational as well, but it felt like they were used a lot more often than some of the moves in Tooie, and since you stop getting new moves after like world six or so, you have time to get a bit more use out of each move you've learned, rather than only using a move for one or two specific uses during the last couple of worlds… or in the case of the beak bayonette, using it for one challenge. In the second world. Right next to the room you learn it in, and then never again.

I don't want to sound like this ruined the game for me though. The wide, large, sprawling maps do lend themselves to a lot of interesting puzzles, many of them spanning multiple worlds, and all those worlds are often, in some way, interconnected with one another. I like these ideas on paper, but in practice it leads to a lot more busy-work, a lot more backtracking, and a lot of dead air between all the different challenges. There was a single instance in Banjo Kazooie where backtracking for a challenge was mandatory, but in Tooie, every world except for the final one requires you to backtrack to complete at least one challenge. On the plus side, since the backtracking is designed into the framework of the game, it doesn't feel as out of place as it did in the first game.

This does lead into a very interesting feeling. When you do finally complete one of these very long-running challenges, there's no doubt that it does feel good, like you've triumphed over a major obstacle, but at times in between, it really feels like you're spinning your wheels. I really just feel like this game might have been a bit better if they had just taken what already existed and just refined it, and then walked back some of the ‘more’ that they were putting into the game. There are plenty of ways they could have substituted the duo's existing moveset for things that you learn in the second game, and the fact that it insists on you learning the duo's basic attack moves when they're separated as their own individual moves (even forcing you to not be able to learn them unless you're playing as only the necessary character when you find the molehill) does bother me. It really feels like padding meant to make it feel like you're finding new moves with every place.

Again, I find the game fun to play, but it's a game that feels so, so draining to play for long periods of time, because it takes so long to feel like you're accomplishing anything. I just can't marathon this game like I can with the first. The positive feedback and the progress in the original Banjo Kazooie feels constant, it's invigorating. With Tooie, that feeling takes longer, the time between triumphs is much, much slower, and I've had whole sessions with the game where I didn't do much of anything because I was just wandering around, trying to figure things out, and yet I never managed to get to the point where I'm moving towards the goals that I've set for myself.

This is a bit of a running theme with other collect-a-thons, even with Rare. The amount of collectibles or the distance between them is just superfluously large. The gameplay is solid, it's sound, but the game just had to get bigger. And if all of these massive, open worlds in games these days are any indication, bigger isn't always better, especially when it hinders an otherwise very well designed game.