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Post by Bumpyroad on Apr 30, 2020 0:02:01 GMT -5
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Post by ommadawnyawn2 on May 4, 2021 8:43:19 GMT -5
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Post by JDarkside on Oct 26, 2021 17:05:14 GMT -5
Some good indies to check out! Bad End Theater is a puzzle VN where the goal is to help the cast of cutsey fantasy characters find a happy ending in a scenario filled with horrible ones. Just released and has been in development for a few years now. store.steampowered.com/app/1764390/BAD_END_THEATER/Sparkles and Gems is a bizarre, absurd puzzle game with a PS1 retro aesthetic mixed with edutainment early 3D models. It's difficult to describe beyond extremely aesthetic. store.steampowered.com/app/1517530/Sparkles__Gems/The Stonks Market is a dumb meme game from the studio that brought you Always Sometimes Monsters. Buy and trade stonks. Free market. There is a gorilla. store.steampowered.com/app/1554080/The_Stonks_Market/Haru to Shura is an adventure game about a young man exploring a mysterious place that may or may not be the afterlife, and things quickly get out of hand. Warning, this game deals heavily with the topic of death, but it's mature about it. Pixel, the developer of Cave Story, assisted on this project since this game's director helped with Kero Blaster. store.steampowered.com/app/1352910/Haru_to_Shura/Alluna & Brie is a Persona-like about two magical girls helping to protect a city in Australia from monster girls pouring over from a magical portal. The catch is your magical girl can only make cheese sandwiches with her powers (nothing but cheese and bread, they have very strict limitations). However, there are ten love interests and nine of them are girls, which is good. Very goofy, fun, and quite jank game set in the DNA Twister/Max's Big Bust universe, more tame than those games, surprising amount of stuff to do and find. store.steampowered.com/app/1003020/Alluna_and_Brie/Cruelty Squad is an immersive sim made by a single artist (I believe finnish or polish) who purposefully broke every rule of art and a lot of expected norms of game design to make one of the best immersive sims possibly ever, a crushing but rewarding game about the hell of late capitalism where you can augment your feet to have big holes gore spews out of so you can double jump. store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/ |
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Post by Woody Alien on Nov 6, 2022 8:17:06 GMT -5
No real point about this post, I just wanted to rant a bit. There's this British devs specialized in making retro-style games with lots of references to old titles and styles. Recently they are showing two titles that are aping arcade titles from the late 80s: RoboCop and Splatterhouse. Here's the trailer for the latter one, called "House of Pain":
They also released an early demo with two stages, and it was a good thing because it comes out that, while they are imitating the style in a good way (even too much at times, the zombie dogs and hanging corpses are basically identical), everything else is either wrong or makes it a chore to play. Sure it's an early stage of development but it does not bode well for the finished product...
- Collision detection is suspect and it seems they gave the MC a life bar instead of life points because our kicks and punches don't connect well with enemy sprites - Buzzsaws don't do any damage (also why are there buzzsaws in the woods?), sure it can be fixed but it doesn't look good, also the little enemies spawned by the end-level bosses don't do anything either - The shotgun sucks, it has lots of bullets compared with the original game but it doesn't do much damage and the loading animation is too long, with the result that we get swarmed by enemies coming from either side - Biggy/Piggy Man was a feared enemy in the original because there were so few of them and they acted essentially like minibosses, here there are tons of them and they just do slightly more damage than basic mooks, so what's the point? - The design of the basic zombie enemies is awfully generic, they could at least have copied the design of the more outlandish creatures if they want to ape the OG game so much - Hanging corpses are not just obstacles this time, they now spit somewhat homing projectiles and it's almost impossible to avoid damage if you only can destroy them by flying kick and there are enemies swarming us from either side of the screen - Traps in the original were another source of stress because they were, well, traps and forced us to proceed carefully, while here they are just nuisances to be avoided and make everything more of a chore than anything - No low/sliding kicks as far as I can see so you can just either punch/use weapons or do a flying kick - Bosses are not fought in a separate screen and are just kind of "there", maybe because they don't really do anything and the real challenge is not to be swarmed by other mooks that constantly run up to us
I know, there's not much point to this post but I'm just surprised that someone wants to make a game that is superficially so similar to the original to the point of plagiarism, but it gets fundamentally everything else wrong to the point it's not fun at all. There's no demo of the RoboCop - sorry, "Robo50" - game for now but I have no doubt that it's going to suck as well.
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Post by Woody Alien on Jan 14, 2023 18:49:23 GMT -5
There's this upcoming ninja action platformer, Shinobi Non Grata, it looks retro but still cool and stylish, the title is hilarious, seems to be well-made but... it's basically just Irem's Ninja Spirit being remade more than 30 years later, only with a bit more occult in it! See for yourself:
Okay, it was an amazing game for its time, and still is, but I was expecting something more different... some areas look pretty much identical!
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Post by windfisch on Jan 14, 2023 23:00:51 GMT -5
There's this upcoming ninja action platformer, Shinobi Non Grata, it looks retro but still cool and stylish, the title is hilarious, seems to be well-made but... it's basically just Irem's Ninja Spirit being remade more than 30 years later, only with a bit more occult in it! See for yourself: ...
Okay, it was an amazing game for its time, and still is, but I was expecting something more different... some areas look pretty much identical!
This is pretty shameless, which I'm always fine with  To my knowledge Ninja Spirit hasn't been copied much, if ever. So that's a plus. Personally I'm a bit tired of the faux NES palettes in indie games. Only a few games like Shovel Knight utilize that style really well. The same goes for real NES games, most of the time I wished the hardware would allow for just a few colours more. And since Ninja Spirit does feature gorgeous 16 bit graphics, this looks like a downgrade. But had they used a larger colour palette, it might've looked too identical to Irem's classic, I guess. |
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Post by Woody Alien on Jan 15, 2023 6:41:14 GMT -5
This is pretty shameless, which I'm always fine with To my knowledge Ninja Spirit hasn't been copied much, if ever. So that's a plus. Personally I'm a bit tired of the faux NES palettes in indie games. Only a few games like Shovel Knight utilize that style really well. The same goes for real NES games, most of the time I wished the hardware would allow for just a few colours more. And since Ninja Spirit does feature gorgeous 16 bit graphics, this looks like a downgrade. But had they used a larger colour palette, it might've looked too identical to Irem's classic, I guess. Yeah I always wondered why the Ninja Spirit formula hasn't been replicated, since I think it's one of the coolest games ever... but if you scroll a bit up in this topic you can see what my opinion is about new retro games that are TOO similar to the games they are homaging/copying. About the palette, I somewhat agree with you, but I always found that one of Ninja Spirit's problems (other than the big difficulty, but that's IREM for ya) was that it had a very muted palette of colors making it look similar to R-Type and others of their titles, so I like this "new" style. Now it looks kind of similar to Samurai Ghost, you know, that weird Namco game.
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Post by spanky on Jan 15, 2023 7:18:23 GMT -5
Yeah the only game I can think of off the top of my head that copies Ninja Spirit's gimmick is...Ninja Gaiden 2 which came out around the same time.
The "Complete Rip Off of a 30 Year Old Game" genre in the indie scene feels pretty common to me, though this Shinobi game is one of the more blatant ones. I actually like how it looks.
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Post by Woody Alien on Feb 9, 2023 6:56:31 GMT -5
I played this short parody (sort of) visual novel called REFLEXIA, though the description states that it becomes from a parody to a psychological drama, and it is somewhat true, I did not like the overly serious final part too much... but I enjoyed a lot how it mercilessly skewers all aspects of these kinds of "sexy" VN (the actual game does not have actual smut content), like the illusion of choices, the "waifus" being just fap fodder and nothing more, the inherent absurdity of someone who exists only to please you, cheap feeling manipulation and much more. Plus, even if these self-aware game characters are starting to become common, the writing and the ideas are still clever enough to be enjoyable, and there's several programming tricks that add to the fun (or "fun"). Also, it's the first time that I've seen the achievement pop-ups used in a way that they are either punchlines or made as to seem like the character (or the game itself) is talking directly to you the player. And there's a lot of useless achievements too so not even that part of the game has been spared. If you like this sort of thing I suggest to download and try it on Steam, it's free and it takes about a hour to see it to the end.    |
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Post by Woody Alien 2 on Oct 18, 2024 8:08:38 GMT -5
Yeah Xydonia kicks ass, I backed it too and I'm amazed at how closely it emulates 90s shmups from every system and era. I saw Milanoir and other indie games at the Lucca Comics event the other week but there were too many people so the only one I could play was Death Party, nice and all but ultimately just a Nanaca Crash / Toss the Turtle clone (for those who remember them). Other titles of note were Indomitus Games' 5 Minutes Rage, a 2.75-D (so they say) multiplayer arena title and a demo of the long-awaited Riot: Civil Unrest. So it's now 2024, the world is going to hell once again, I'm not going to Lucca Comics again and Xydonia will never come out in any form. These guys took the money and run, so screw them on behalf of all the people that gave money for the Kickstarter including myself. I'm disappointed also because this isn't going to help Italy's reputation, not that all Italian devs are scammers, just that it's part of the perception of the country, since there's several projects that were just fronts or shitty titles paid with state money. |
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Post by dsparil on Oct 18, 2024 13:34:22 GMT -5
Did something specifically happen or is it just the lack of updates since 2020? I mean four years of development for a horizontal shooter already seems a little suspect as is four years of radio silence.
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To my knowledge Ninja Spirit hasn't been copied much, if ever. So that's a plus. Personally I'm a bit tired of the faux NES palettes in indie games. Only a few games like Shovel Knight utilize that style really well. The same goes for real NES games, most of the time I wished the hardware would allow for just a few colours more. And since Ninja Spirit does feature gorgeous 16 bit graphics, this looks like a downgrade. But had they used a larger colour palette, it might've looked too identical to Irem's classic, I guess. 
