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Cuphead

Started by Moribunderast, September 30, 2017, 11:16:11 AM

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madhair60

It should be annoying, but thinking about the sorts of people who post comments like that, I hope they see it and get really upset.

Barry Admin

Have I sounded at all like that? I don't think I have.

biggytitbo

No i don't think anyone on here has that kind of absurd snobbery about games, i've never noticed it anyway.

Shay Chaise

FIFA is gaming for people who don't like...oh, fuck. Either a paradox or I'm a total bell.

EFB

I'm on to the bee boss. It's not fun. Every other stage in the game has been frustrating, but I've always been frustrated at myself, it's always been my fault that I died. And I've died a LOT in this game. But the bee boss... sometimes, there just aren't any platforms to jump to, and an enemy spawns directly on top of you with no means of escape. If the platforms were in a predictable pattern, this would be ok, but if I don't beat this soon, I'm done with the game.

Shay Chaise

I'm not really getting on with this. I'm still on the first island or what have you and I'm finding it a bit too much trial and error. I'm making some progress but purely attritional. I think it's because the multi-phase boss thing is a little too stark (for me). You die a few things, figure one phase out, die a couple more times til you get it down, then you die at the start of the next phase, rinse and repeat but in a more time consuming way, and then you hit the final phase and the exact same loop takes place again.

I must be pretty shit at it but I find I get the knack for a phase after a few goes, I just find it a bit wearing because the tougher sections inevitably come towards the end and you find yourself replaying the easier opening phases so many times that it becomes a bit boring, for me, anyway.

It's a remarkably presented game and must be a real labour of love but I don't enjoy the boss rush structure of it at all.

biggytitbo

I agree, I wish it'd have been a run and gun platformer all the way through, i'm just not a fan of boss fights in games at all, let alone a game made up almost entirely of them.

Shay Chaise

Same here. I'm much more interested in level design than boss design, as a rule. Even with Dark Souls, with its much lauded bosses, I find the majority stressful rather than enjoyable, whereas I absolutely adore soaking up the worlds and the environmental design, and I much prefer to take on enemies and difficulty spikes at my own pace.

I can't criticise them for making the game they wanted to, and it's been enormously successful already, but I'm personally not enjoying it as much as I'd hoped. I also don't feel it'll get more enjoyable the more time I put in because every encounter so far has been designed to follow a similar pattern of attrition and frustration.

ieXush2i

Didn't this start out as a boss game, but the positive reaction to early footage made them develop some platforming sequences as that's what people expected (as opposed to a gorgeous Contra clone)?

Thursday

Well sort of, but I believe (can't find the quote now) the developers also said that pitching it as a boss rush game initially was scaling down from what they originally would have wanted to do because they didn't think they'd be able to manage both, but the reaction made them reconsider and go for it.

Shay Chaise

Without being too negative, I find the platforming run and gun levels really dull. Part of the thrill of Contra is finding power ups and holding onto them for as long as you can. That side of things is pretty much neutered when you can switch between at will. I also find that the weapons in this have no sense of weight or impact, partly because they have no basis in anything, even within that world. There's no reason for Cuphead to be shooting rapidly out of his finger.

madhair60

Quote from: Barry Admin on October 13, 2017, 04:31:13 PM
Have I sounded at all like that? I don't think I have.

Not even once.

Thursday

Quote from: Shay Chaise on October 14, 2017, 05:37:40 PM
Without being too negative, I find the platforming run and gun levels really dull. Part of the thrill of Contra is finding power ups and holding onto them for as long as you can. That side of things is pretty much neutered when you can switch between at will. I also find that the weapons in this have no sense of weight or impact, partly because they have no basis in anything, even within that world. There's no reason for Cuphead to be shooting rapidly out of his finger.

This is something that's put me off, if you're going to have a character called "Cuphead" shouldn't the game mechanics be based on that in some way? I don't know if there's an in-world explanation for it. But really Forget boss rush or platformer the game design as a whole just doesn't quite seem to match what I'd want from a game with this aesthetic.

brat-sampson

I mean, none of the game makes any sense. One of the first bosses is two frogs that become a slot machine. It's a very deliberate design choice to have the whole thing be zany/whimsical.

biggytitbo

The whole game positively borders on fantasy at times. I don't believe any of it could ever happen.

Thursday

Quote from: brat-sampson on October 15, 2017, 01:36:23 PM
I mean, none of the game makes any sense. One of the first bosses is two frogs that become a slot machine. It's a very deliberate design choice to have the whole thing be zany/whimsical.


Well yeah but that's not what I mean, but I'd probably have to actually play the game to carry on arguing this point.

Shay Chaise

Quote from: brat-sampson on October 15, 2017, 01:36:23 PM
I mean, none of the game makes any sense. One of the first bosses is two frogs that become a slot machine. It's a very deliberate design choice to have the whole thing be zany/whimsical.

Totally understand where you're coming from in terms of the tone but equally, my point is that there's no discernible weight or impact to the shooting because of this zany aesthetic. I like the clicky rimshot sounds for the bullets, it's very cool and immediately appealing, but I wonder how much more it'd click with me from a game play perspective if it sounded like a Tommy gun, and even more so if he was holding a Tommy gun. I know that makes me sound very dull and thick but I'm trying to explain why I think it's unsatisfying as a shooter. It makes me feel like the bosses don't actually have a health bar, and it's just about surviving the various other phases.

Sexton Brackets Drugbust

Quote from: Shay Chaise on October 15, 2017, 03:24:16 PM
Totally understand where you're coming from in terms of the tone but equally, my point is that there's no discernible weight or impact to the shooting because of this zany aesthetic. I like the clicky rimshot sounds for the bullets, it's very cool and immediately appealing, but I wonder how much more it'd click with me from a game play perspective if it sounded like a Tommy gun, and even more so if he was holding a Tommy gun. I know that makes me sound very dull and thick but I'm trying to explain why I think it's unsatisfying as a shooter. It makes me feel like the bosses don't actually have a health bar, and it's just about surviving the various other phases.

Is it because the bosses don't visibly react to your attacks up until their defeat, whereas players are typically shown some sort of signifier - whether it be an animation, the character model flashing, or some kind of impact marks - that their attacks are achieving some form of effect?

Rev

Beautiful, beautiful, everything's spot-on about the design (not the animation, that's not quite there) and the sound, all of it's spot on.  Spot on.  Everything about it is pitch-perfect.

But it's such a fucking tedious and uninspired game in an appealing wrapper, inspired by the very worst elements of Isaac and Dark Souls.  A joyless grind of boss battle after boss battle, with nothing to offer other than seeing what the next one looks like.  it's stupidly difficult because they weren't able to come up with a way of making it challenging without being daft about it.

They had all of the ducks in a row here, it could have been a good game, but it's so monumentally dull.  How did they manage to make such a pretty game so dull?

9/10

Rev

Quote from: Sexton Brackets Drugbust on October 15, 2017, 10:01:38 PM
Is it because the bosses don't visibly react to your attacks up until their defeat, whereas players are typically shown some sort of signifier - whether it be an animation, the character model flashing, or some kind of impact marks - that their attacks are achieving some form of effect?

Lack of feedback is a big part of it the problem - although the characters do flash when you hit them, that simply means that you hit them, whether it's with the tiniest attack or the deadliest.  You can't really tell what kind of damage you've done until you die, at which point you're given an indication of how close you were to winning.  There's a very weak connection between the game and the player.

What makes that connection even weaker is that there's nothing to learn or improve at in terms of the game as a whole.  Each boss is a case of remembering a pattern, as is usual, but each one is pretty much a hard reset, with nothing you've done before being of any help.  It's fucking Rick Dangerous is what it is, and I don't throw that obscenity around lightly.

Bence Fekete

Basically your tolerance for failure is the protagonist, he's also the enemy too.  And the plot is your imminent death no matter which page you open, or how well you intend to play.

EFB

I beat the bee boss! It took me a while to do that robot one though, but was incredibly satisfying when I did. Powered through the rest of isle three, and now on to King Dice.

Having fun!

Bence Fekete

Any game containing overt references to Psilocybe Semilanceata is worthy of your attention:


Brundle-Fly

Finally streamed this on my new X Box. Way too hard for me. One of those games that devours too much into my ever decreasing lifespan with little reward. It's a shame because like everybody has said it looks and sounds amazing.
My cup does not runneth over with this.

biggytitbo

Some new DLC coming too



St_Eddie

I completed this a couple of months ago.  This sort of thing doesn't usually appeal to me but I was sold on the incredible art style and animation.  I'm very glad that I gave it a chance because I ended up loving it.  It was certainly a challenge but not unfairly so.  Took me around a week to complete it.  Superb soundtrack too, it must be said (even now, two months down the line, I can still hear the tunes in my head).

I would have liked a few more run 'n' gun levels to break things up a little bit further and I encountered a couple of glitches (one causing me to have to alt-tab out of the game mid-boss (the boss got stuck in an animation loop and all of the controller buttons stopped responding).  Aside from those nitpicks, it's a fantastic game.  I hope that they do a sequel (gawd only knows how long it would take to develop though, given the art and animation requirements).

9/10

Quote from: biggytitbo on June 13, 2018, 08:49:22 PM
Some new DLC coming too

Oooohh!  I hadn't heard about this.  Lovely stuff.

Looks like they'll be a 3-player co-op mode.  Not that it matters to me, as I don't have any real-life mates who play videogames.  I played Cuphead all by my lonesome, which is fine by me, as I prefer playing games by myself anyway.

Bump for Switch release.

I already got further on this in a couple of hours than I ever did on the Xbox version. Absolutely spectacular port, by the way. It's identical to the One X version, save a few extra seconds of loading time.

Reading the thread back is interesting. Seems there's a reasonable amount of criticism for the boss rush structure and non-transferability of skills. It is a pure memorisation and execution thing but maybe the months of battering shmups have helped me get into and appreciate that mindset. I'm really enjoying figuring each one out and getting a little further each time.

If I could make one recommendation for anyone picking this up, get the Chaser weapon as your first purchase. It's a homing weapon which means you can just focus on the dodging for the most part, rather than aiming your bullets at some occasionally very precise hit boxes. You can then switch to a more powerful weapon whenever you can get some easy damage in and then switch back when it gets a bit dodgy.

Barry Admin

I should really get back into this, I love playing it on my fighting stick!

Consignia

Blimey, it's great fun this isn't it? Just done first couple of bosses, and it's nowhere near as difficult as I was fearing. More rewarding for being able to get along with the patterns. I imagine I'm going to struggle later on, but I'm at least going to get fast the first world.

And it still looks bloody gorgeous.

Twed

Oh yeah, I should give this a shot. I love hard platformers/bullet hells/whatever it is.