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Incentive to get work done early today: buy and play shank.
Co-Op trailer
It’s really fun. I was thinking about getting the new
Multiplayer castlevania, but I want
To play it with a group. Does anyone have it? Is it worth it?
Sam and I both got it. I enjoy it quite a bit, but this is because I’m a HUGE fan of symphony of the night and the similarly styled gameboy advance games. If you get it, you’ll have the two of us to play with. There’s also a shit ton of content, but playing single player is frustrating — all the maps are designed for multiple people and the single player mode is identical to the multiplayer mode but with no one else playing.
So I bought and beat Shank multiplayer with Sam the other night. The boss fights were really the only thing I thought was challenging (and, thusly, Sam hated them) and fun so I mostly got bored of it pretty quickly. Played the first two single player levels and haven’t much desire to go back.
The new Scott Pilgrim game, however, has me racing to finish my work so I can go play it.
Yea the cut scenes play out like a Tarantino film, but come on, it’s a fucking button masher. I’m so tired of these. And FPS games like all those Call of Duties. I need something groundbreaking.
John said:So I bought and beat Shank multiplayer with Sam the other night. The boss fights were really the only thing I thought was challenging (and, thusly, Sam hated them) and fun so I mostly got bored of it pretty quickly. Played the first two single player levels and haven’t much desire to go back.
The new Scott Pilgrim game, however, has me racing to finish my work so I can go play it.
Firstly, my problem with the game is not that it was difficult at one single point, or two, but that the difficulty arose from button presses that weren’t registering because there was a lag due to graphics-rendering overtaxing the processor. I find that sloppy and unacceptable. If you can’t make gameplay flawless due to the graphics, find a fucking workaround or cut the goddamn graphics a little.
As for Scott Pilgrim, I find this highly hypocritical as it too seems more like a button masher than anything actually more inventive. It and Shank are the same creature, minus a very minor faux z-axis aspect that Shank lacks. They’re both button mashers, and Streets of Rage clones, only Shank is 2-D where Scott Pilgrim is 2.5-D. Upgrades? Shank has them to a degree; you get new weapons as you progress. In the SP trailer I saw the same fucking combo over and over, only at certain times the combo-ending uppercut was sometimes fiery and other times not. Big fucking deal.
I’m not arguing in defense of Shank. It’s a very one-dimensional game. My argument is that SO IS SCOTT PILGRIM, minus its novelty value and pop culture tie-in. Yeah, so you can decide to upgrade the uppercut or maybe some rising kick or something the trailer doesn’t show. Not impressed.
In the same vein, Castlevania is a completely one-dimensional game, with possibly less to offer than Shank. When powering on my system, I’m far more inclined to play Shank than Castlevania. I might be more inclined to play the latter if someone were to suggest multiplayer, but as far as single player goes, Shank is superior in my opinion.
The button lag wasn’t from an overtaxed processor. That had nothing to do with it. The button lag was because the game designers focused more on the smooth animations and fluid lines you were bitching about in that other post instead of gameplay. Castle Crashers works because the attack animation is one or two frames. Shank doesn’t because they insisted on animating the character’s jump move or making him finish his running animation before queuing up the next animation. It’s a problem with fluid games that’s existed since Prince of Persia and the original Tekken and most game designers have figured it out by now. Just not the shank guys.
What Scott Pilgrim APPEARS to offer (haven’t played yet) and what Castlevania offers is a challenge and a responsive control system that feels more like playing a game and less like controlling a movie. I didn’t dislike Shank cause it was a button masher. I disliked Shank because it was a poorly done, overly simple button masher that relied far too heavily on gimmick and not enough on actual gameplay. Unlike Paris, I don’t mind playing the same game over and over. I just want it to be fun to play, not just fun to watch. I don’t mean to discredit the joy of watching some of these games. Shank was great fun on the screen. It just failed for other reasons. And I’ll be the first to admit that the look and style of Scott Pilgrim has me excited, but hopefully the gameplay will hold up better than Shank’s.
I played the high-definition “remake” of Street Fighter 2 on Xbox and thought it was interesting how they had to use the same number of frames of animation in order to retain the familiar timing of the comparatively underpowered original. You’d have these beautiful hand-drawn sprites, but they’d be shifting jerkily around the screen.