Enter the Gungeon is a dungeon crawler with a gun-theme, hence the name. The game follows four misfit characters as they battle through procedurally-generated dungeons while fighting enemies and obtaining new guns, with the end goal being to find the ultimate legendary treasure – the gun that can kill their p
Even people who passed on gaming in their youth are able to experience that same magic in their adulthood with more mainstream successes like Wii Sports . In fact, this demographic, a group who likely passed on the gaming world as kids, are now realizing a fresh new perspective. They get to see different elements of game design that they might have ignored back then, making the evolution of the medium and the broadening of the market a much more appealing prospect. Specifically, that big moment where a “virgin” gamer (regardless of age) is finally able to have fun when playing a game is a sense of purity and epiphany. It’s all about having fun. As we get more involved in the medium, we begin to take sides. We begin to favor consoles or developers. We begin to look at games with the minds of cynical and judgmental critics. Even as kids, we’d argue at the lunch table as to whether Sega or Nintendo is better, but if you rewind just a few years before that, you didn’t even care who made the console. Perhaps it was the catchy level themes that you remember the most or maybe it’s some iconic environmental hazard that sticks in your mind. Maybe it was similar to my case where it was just the character’s expressive personality that encouraged me to pick up a controller and actually control the character. The moments of realization and involvement vary for everyone, but as fresh faces in the gaming community, we’re never forced to pick a side. We are clean slates for series to enthrall and characters to enlist, and our focus was precisely on the game itself and those subtle moments of appeal.
Over the past few weeks I’ve spent a frankly irresponsible amount of time on my 3DS, a great deal of it with A Link Between Worlds . But when I wasn’t busy rescuing princesses from other princesses (or, uh, doing actual work for the site) I was delving into Bravely Default . Not just the full game, but the demo. Most of us have, at one point or another, obsessively played a demo for a game that had us hyped, but what may surprise you is that I’ve sunk over 10 hours into a single playthrough of this one. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of content for free software. Well, I say “any way,” but it comes pre-sliced, vertically.
On the plus side, once you’re in the minecraft strategy world the sense of scale is truly fantastic. Everything seems bigger somehow, more immediate and solid. A pit in a cave that would be little more than a hazard to plop a staircase onto is all of a sudden an ominous presence waiting to see you fall into its depths. Hills are more imposing, cliffs shoot dangerously into the sky and canyons are massive rifts in the earth, and the oceans go down forever. Even the standard block has a sense of mass, with its one meter cube transformed into a substantial chunk of scenery. Another side effect of the new sense of scale is that combat has become a little easier because the strike distance is so obvious. The move to VR has done a great job of freshening up an experience I’ve been done with for several years now, which is an impressive feat. While I’m still not completely sold on the viewing solution, it’s something that works for now until a better idea is implemented.
Remember in the beginning of the 32-bit days when controllers simply weren’t designed for 3D cameras? You’d have games that mapped up and down viewing to the triggers, and the only way to rotate the camera was to turn your character in the right direction and manually recenter things with a button press. There were a lot of experiments, some better than others, but none held a candle to the introduction of twin-stick controllers. VR FPS is in the same state right now, and while there’s a lot of interest in getting to the twin-stick equivalent of whatever the solution ends up being, it’s not there yet. Minecraft deals with the motion sickness problem by breaking the immersion during rotation, but as long-term solutions go it feels like sticking the up/down view on the shoulder buttons. It may be graceless and awkward, but at least it gets the job done. Creating a workable free-roaming FPS viewpoint in VR is still an ongoing task, though, so until a better solution is found this will do
From a gameplay standpoint, Death’s Door plays a lot like a traditional ARPG mixed with a Metroidvania. Although players won’t have as much depth concerning skills and abilities, there is still a lot of fun to be had with the fast-paced (and punishing) combat sys
VR Control mode has a number of options available for it, but the default is that turning is done by a series of instant changes, like teleporting in place but facing a different angle. Turn slowly and the jumps are tiny, turn fast and you get a much larger angle of change. Additionally, when you look while walking your “body” automatically changes direction to face the same way without the need to manually adjust it. The trick is to eliminate as much as possible anything that might cause dizziness, and although these changes wouldn’t work on a game like Doom they’re fine for something slower-paced like Minecraft. It may be weird and a little jarring but also surprisingly effective.