A recent Maximilian Dood video on the topic of “friction” in games came across my feed the other day and really concisely laid out (on accident) the mess of concepts that friction has come to embody. To explain the issue of “absence of friction” in Monster Hunter Wilds, he pulls up a separate clip of fellow YouTuber Shroud talking about the lack of friction in extraction shooters post-Escape from Tarkov. Here’s one example he gives:

Although often inaccurately compared to Link’s Awakening,¹ Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (officially translatd as The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls), resembles something more like Freshly Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, where cartoony dust-cloud autobattles replace the hack-and-slash and the adventure elements lampoon the genre. It’s less built around “setup-punchline” humor or anything truly absurd, and instead it leans into a light-hearted atmosphere where no one seems to take anything of consequence particularly seriously. You and your rival’s army of soldiers turn into frogs, guards for the evil empire chit-chat about anything mundane that comes to mind, and an entire town of miners loafs about drunk for lack of work. In the funniest segment, the Prince of Sablé, your avatar, sails to the headquarters of “Nantendo” to visit their R&D department. To gain access, you have to curry favor with the lead scientist by ordering the same sushi meal as him in the cafeteria; if you do so and then say that it’s tasty when he asks, he’ll berate you for your undistinguished palate. If you think this seems a little weak for a “best joke,” I’ll level with you and admit that I didn’t find the game game so much “funny” as “mildly amusing,” which begins ringing some alarm bells with how slight the rest of the game is.

This is me playing the Golgo 13 arcade game from Raizing. Thanks to Heather for the picture!

DoodleDud asks:

Would you be interested in writing about players taking notes in games?

I’ll link DoodleDud’s other thread on this as well for context. It gets into this excellent, raw point about physical notes – that they can be completely wrong – when compared in-game systems, that will point players towards the right outcome or filter out extraneous info. In modern implementations this seems absolutely right; admittedly I haven’t played many games that would probably fall into this category, but it did instantly bring to mind this review from chump about Return of the Obra Dinn. I’ll let their words speak for me here:

Mizuguchi’s work incorporates musical elements without tethering it to rhythmic execution challenges. The player becomes an equal contributor to the creative tapestry of the soundscape rather than reciting canned phrases or demanding precision. As you move, rotate, place, and destroy blocks throughout Lumines, your actions directly accent the soundtrack and create new polyrhythmic layers over top of it, leading to a temporally fluid pacing that ebbs and flows with the eye-catching, psychedelic backdrops. The effect is subtle; auspiciously off-beat inputs will not result in any added sounds, and with enough play this absence becomes noticeable. You unconsciously begin to follow the tempo and create your own grooves through your play, and in this way the game manages to gently synchronize your input timing with a moving cursor that removes your grouped blocks. This cursor slides along in perfect sync with the backing track. Your button presses, twitches, and excited exhalations form their own accompaniment to the game, and Lumines codifies these subliminal impulses to alter the player’s behavior without letting them know explicitly.

Also known as Scary Dreams¹, Buster’s Bad Dream has slipped under the radar thanks to its incredibly delayed release stateside, its outdated cartoon license, and its overall limited presentation. If anything, the game has had more discussion as a prototype of sorts for Astro Boy: Omega Factor, both of which were programmed by Yaiman (Mitsuru Yaida, best known for leading Gunstar Heroes and the Bangai-O games). However, where Omega Factor and many of Treasure’s other titles focus heavily on setpieces, Buster’s Bad Dream’s restraint helps it stand out for those more interested in pure combat. The single-plane beat ’em up engine compares less to Treasure’s 16-bit days and more to Fill-in-Cafe games like Mad Stalker and Panzer Bandit, with deep toolkits that draw from contemporary fighting games more than belt scroller classics.

One distinguishing factor of vehicle games that tends to get lost in genres tied to humanoid avatars is that turning around can be rather difficult. When you’re driving a car, you have the option of either doing a 180° turn, subject to all of the dynamics that a tight turn involves at speed, or stopping to shift into reverse. Banishing Racer applies a rudimentary version of this on the 2D plane, where the main car refuses to ignore inertia and going backwards requires overcoming the forward force. It’s not realistic by any means – the other main movement mechanic is a forward dash that can also be done after jumping – but it helps differentiate the game from peers that had moved away from this handling model by the early ’90s.

My recent onslaught of Crazy Taxi posting has caused a lot of my friends to revisit the game and attempt to play for score. Unfortunately, the game can be rather sparse with detail on how its own systems work, and the customer routing element of the game is completely opaque. As I’ve researched this game’s mechanics, both on my own and from watching high-level play, I’ve also noticed that many of the FAQs and guides from around the time of the game’s release have misconceptions or insufficient detail, making them occasionally a hindrance to succeeding rather than a boon. Although I’d like to put together a more complete customer guide in the future, I’ve compiled together enough information here to get you from starter level to the Crazy License rank on the Arcade map without having to memorize sheets of customer information.

In the era of Metroidvanias before Super Metroid, a dense world would still take the form of traditional single-directional platformer levels, just interconnected with ability-driven progression. Metroid II looks much the same as you descend down into SR388, wading through pitch-black caverns on your mission to eradicate every remaining Metroid on the planet. At most you’ll walk over a bridge or slide through a gap in the floor, but nothing lets you know the game’s true scope until you obtain the Spider Ball. With Samus now able to roll up walls, the player can start crawling up the outside of the ruins where they obtained the upgrade, revealing a far more vast, coherent structure than the truncated view from the entrance allowed. Probing in the ceiling and the high walls reveals new entrances, with new rooms segregated from the main halls and tunnels through rooms you’ve been through before. The NES forerunners of the Metroidvania pushed up against that system’s rigid scrolling system and tight screen buffer, whereas R&D1 squeezes a much more formidable world out of the Game Boy’s more sophisticated renderer.

Sega’s mission statement for the ’90s in a three-track package. Where Ridge Racer points to energetic hard dance and concrete urban environments¹, Sega zagged and descended into full kitsch. Daytona splatters mismatched grotesque fonts all over the interface, drills three-reel slots into a rock overpass on the one course even vaguely related to the NASCAR tracks that inspired the game, and lets cars go lazily flying after head-on collisions only to bounce gently back onto all four wheels. Mitsuyoshi’s soundtrack anchors itself against auxiliary percussion-heavy rhythms relying on dense syncopation reminiscent of batucada, flavoring them with squelchy bass and urgent ninths on retro keys. To build out the sound, Mitsuyoshi liberally samples himself, with the limited clip length giving his voice a robotic tremolo on sustains. And above it all: the blue sky, the brilliant lighting, all against cleanly textured cars deforming like cardboard models. It’s the same look and feel that Sega would carry all the way through the Dreamcast era; no matter how tacky or garish, it’s the essence of their gonzo arcade philosophy.

The era of character action games (CAGs) is over. If Devil May Cry 5 was their final hurrah, Nier: Automata had set the framework for the post-CAG¹ era two years prior. The language of CAGs – launchers, stingers, devil trigger, combos and links – has transformed from a mantra to summon action fundamentals – positioning, tempo, resource management, and crowd control – to the mere suggestion of such. Their aesthetic trappings present the fantasy of excellence without a struggle for competency put forward by their mechanics. Juggles come for free, elaborate animations hide downtime, and enemies sit idle without challenging the player. The scene has finally morphed into shrouded action RPGs.