There Was a Cave Man

 

There is a video series done by Egoraptor in which he talks about the transition from original property to sequel, and what it means in game design, and so on. Although I've read egoraptor is a bit of a loon, I agree with almost everything he says, and the one episode talks about the tutorial level for Megaman X, and how it is amazingly well done. How it explains the body of the game's mechanics in a fluid, easy to adapt to manner.

One of the things that stands out when you play 'hard indie' games is the design process seems to really fail to grasp previously demonstrated good game design. Megaman X came out like, twenty two years ago, but you still rarely see good tutorial levels even to this day. Game design constantly struggles to articulate to the player how the game works, and the most mind-blowing thing is the predilection toward killing the player.

I mean, I get it. You heard you want to make the game hard, so the game is hard by killing the player. Checkbox, little animated check going in it. Grats. The problem is, man oh man, getting killed in the tutorial while you're trying to figure out the damn controls is just so obnoxious. If you're dying, shockingly, you're not really learning. You're re-loading.

There Was a Cave Man has such a tutorial level. The controls and scheme aren't bad - actually, I really like them - but getting down the rhythm of the dash and double jump takes more than the 0.13 seconds the game gives you before it starts trying to murder you. I really don't get the appeal of this sort of thing.

I mean as I write this, Fallout 4 just came out, and 1.2 million people on steam were playing it last night. Does Fallout 4 give you, I don't know, more than ten seconds to get a handle on things? Sure, Fallout 4 has no doubt a host of problems and I doubt I'm buying it til, I don't know, 2018 or something. But there's something for a product being immensely more complicated and yet far more willing to be approachable. Game difficulty was built around artificially extending the longevity of a product, not necessarily enjoyment in and of itself.

I am so bad at this: King of Fighters XIII Steam Edition

No seriously. I don't just mean I am bad at the game, I am bad at playing the game. My left thumb starts to ache up bad from playing. Doing the charged special moves - which have some ridiculous name I can't even remember- starts to cause me pain pretty quickly. I feel like I'm wrestling a porcupine and I'm pretty certain I'm not winning the fight.

And yet man, I really love King of Fighters.

I really don't know a great deal about advanced fighter mechanics; I don't enjoy watching people play fighters, I don't really know much about EVO or salt or being salty or any of those things. I watched a little saltybet, which exemplified the actual Best Of Twitch chat in a weird role reversal of the natural order, but I've never installed Mugen, I haven't played a street fighter game in a decade and I know very little of Capcom's fighters. Divekick makes vague sense to me.

I am the person who is reviewing a fightmans game in the sense of not really knowing a great deal about the art of the fightmans. When I was a kid, I found doing a fireball in SF2 kinda difficult. I was not good at fightmans, and I did not like fightmans. So if you like fightmans, I'm going to sound like a blithering idiot, but if you're a casual like me, this is a review for you.