Don’t forget his other alt:

https://lemmy.world/u/UnderpantsWeevil

I think UBI would give us a lot more artists.

More than that. He accidentally replied with another account once: https://lemmy.world/u/UnderpantsWeevil

(He has also used that meme as a reply from his other Beep account, so that’s definitely him.)

My Minecraft survival world is awesome, but I think in this context “productive” is usually referring to, you know, farming and stuff.

This is a great joke. It’s absurd, unexpected, and relatable.

Personally I think Ass World is overrated. Don’t

Because the rest of us respect people who create things.

Do you steal artists’ work on your main account too, or is this just a gimmick account?

The worst part is that the unattributed versions are out there now to be shared. He’s creating hundreds of images that will continue to spread, ensuring that the artists never get credit for their work. It’s a real piece of shit move. This guy needs to be banned.

Grinding can be fun. Grinding with a combat system as archaic as FF1 is unfun. There’s not enough there to enter a flow state. Art is subjective, but that grind is as close to objectively boring as possible.

This discussion always makes me think of Super Meat Boy, which is a perfect case study for how punishing difficulty can be incorporated without poisoning the experience for the player. SMB is hard as fuck and demands impossible precision from the player, but there’s no punishment for failure. You die, you try again immediately. It makes the two second door animation in Mega Man feel like an eternity.

And when it came out, it felt strangely innovative. Like, it’s obvious in hindsight, but just reducing the punishment to 0 turns it from an exercise in frustration into a game that trains the player to perfection without holding their hand.

I did get it! Also most of the other UFO 50 merch on that site, like the t-shirt and the pins. Great t-shirt. Better fit than the Tunic one I got from there.

I was slightly disappointed that the guide didn’t reveal another layer of the meta-narrative like I’d hoped, but it’s still a neat object and very well made.

I agree with your critiques of modern games, especially the part about floaty anticipation-based gameplay.

But I gotta disagree about Final Fantasy 1 being harder. It’s not hard; it’s just tedious. There’s no beating it without grinding, and the grind is the same thing, over and over, with no variance. If tedium is your thing, great, but the biggest barrier to beating Final Fantasy 1 is boredom, and I don’t think that’s good game design in any decade.

So just to be clear, I’m not talking about difficulty in a fair game. Bubble Bobble is possibly my favorite NES game of all time, because even though it’s stupid hard, the controls are so tight that every death is your own fault.

I also have nostalgia for these old games. I’d just never try to argue that they were better from a design standpoint. The industry has come a long way. Standards are higher, and the artform has grown.

Yeah I don’t have any idea what you’re referring to. There are still a huge amount of new and innovative games every year. It’s possible you’re just not playing them.

The bad games aren’t pushing out the good games. More games means more good games.

Even if we’re judging proportionally, you can’t count games that no one is playing. If I give my toddler a harmonica, does that make music worse? Only if I force you to listen to it.

That top 100 list kind of proves my point, because a lot of those games are excruciating to play nowadays. I loved Final Fantasy 1 when that was the only RPG I owned, but it would be unplayable by today’s standards. Because today’s standards are much, much higher.

In terms of games that are worth revisiting because of their historical or artistic significance? There are plenty in that list. But in terms of games that would be good by today’s standards? I don’t think 1/3 of it makes the cut.

That’s fair. There were good things about being able to design games at that scale. One of the reasons UFO 50 works so well is because the number of games means that each game could be its own discrete thing. They could include small, arcade-style games like Ninpek and Magic Garden, that focus on a core concept instead of trying to add value.

But I also think the refutation in UFO 50 is more like a silent correction.

Barbuta starts with an immediate moment of unfairness as a joke, and then it provides a game that’s much more fair than the games it’s inspired by. It simulates the jank but doesn’t expect you to put up with it for the whole game.

Ninpek is another example. Can you imagine getting through that game with just three lives? That’s how it would have been designed in the 1980s, and that’s the game they present to you at first. But as you get better at playing the game, it reveals that you’re actually going to get a lot more lives than that. In a brilliant bit of sleight of hand, those two things happen at the same time, making it feel like you’re just mastering a difficult game.

Porgy is the same way, but more directly. It kicks your ass in the first thirty seconds, then immediately backs off the difficulty. That first impression makes it feel like it’s more punishing than it actually is.

Most of the collection is like this to some extent, and I think that’s for the best.

Barbuta scratched an itch I hadn’t felt since I was a kid. Piecing it together in the dark was one of my best gaming moments last year. I love how almost everyone who beat it came to the same solution and got out a pen and paper to draw their own maps.

Game design is better today than it’s ever been. For most of us I think it’s just nostalgia for our childhoods and for living in simpler times that makes us think otherwise.

I mean have you ever gone back and played a classic game that you didn’t grow up with? It’s rough. I’ve plumbed the depths of the NES virtual console and found that all the best games just happen to be the ones I’ve already played. That’s probably not a coincidence.

Even when the game is genuinely great, there’s still a mountain of bullshit and bad game design to get through, which is just unnecessary today.

With that said, everyone in this comment section needs to check out UFO 50. It’s a collection of 50 “retro” games by a group of indie games designers, and it’s absolutely brilliant.

It’s a loving recreation of playing games how they used to be played, except it’s cleverly laced with subtle, modern design features that make the retro goodness so much better. It’s like combing through old ROMs trying to find a diamond in the rough, except there’s more diamond than rough.

Speaking of Easter eggs, UFO 50 also has a hidden meta-narrative buried deep in the collection, detailing the dark history of the fictional company that made them.

Stop editing other people’s comics.

And don’t forget to try the Big Arch, the new burger from McDonald’s.

In some cases he has used AI to remove watermarks. It changed other details of the comic. Pretty gross.