spadgy

@romanista That is honestly such an interesting point. Like, I've spent years devoted to playing shmups in arcades/on arcade hardware. There I very much resist credit feeding. a one credit only type here! With as many credits as I want, I find I improve much slower; there's no consequence for failure, and less direct motivation to be disciplined and improve.

So perhaps the same logic applies with Angel at Dusk's approach to lives. I guess it does make you interact with it's systems to earn the lives, linking the learning/strategic play/life delivery. And in a game with some intention to welcome less experienced players, I think that's great. More experienced players, meanwhile, should delight in beating the game with as few lives as possible, but perhaps the game could be more explicit and generous in how it motivates and rewards 'low life use' play. Hmmm... I will keep thinking on this.

@Blister Thanks mate. I won't be too hard on myself! Just had a moment mid review process where I thought 'I must check Flipgrip compatibility', did so, and then dived back into the critique and got too into that. I am but human. And glad you brought it up here in the comments, so we can confirm it for all!

@ear_wig Ah - thanks so much for the kid words. I hope you enjoy it!

@Blister Hey - I wrote the above, tested it with Flipgrip... and no joy. With hindsight I'm just gutted I didn't mention that in the review! facepalm

@JohnnyMind Oh dear! Thanks mate. Pointing this out to the team, as I can't access the back end on this one!

@mechayakuza Hey - I wrote the review above. My sense is they put a tremendous effort into pulling together old archive materials, putting together the included animated audio interview, translating that 80-page book on the background story etc. That, of course, might only appeal to a smaller percentage of people who see value in that. But I wonder if that took considerable extra budget/time/headcount.

Perhaps one day we'll see such modernising ports sold with and without extras.

@JaxonH Well - thanks again! I guess it also depends on the developer. Mr Tsukuda was an enthusiastic, fun and thoughtful chap, which helped a great deal.

@Lnsx Another great point re the audio. I know in the best racing games they actually put different car models on a rolling road and stuff microphones up in the wheel arches, under the hood etc... as well as recording them at distance etc. Lends a real tangibility and physicality to the games. I guess that approach would be harder with mechs (though I think for an FPS – maybe a battlefield – they actually built physical dummies of the game levels to record gunfire sounds in the exact 3D space. Maybe they need to start building dummy models of these mechs! ).

@Nincompoop Hey. I wrote the above. Accidentally typed 'Doraemon' about a half-a-dozen times when writing it up! Final spell check I did was for any rogue Doraemons. I'll feel especially silly after admitting that if anybody spots any that got through!

@JaxonH Thanks for the kind words about my interview questions! There's often a 'game design process' focus in my interview questions, and I admit I sometimes fear I'm being misguided with that approach, and that I should be asking more about specific features of a game, rather than the creative process that lead to such features (put another way 'what the game is' questions, rather than my 'how the game is conceived' questions). For a few years I was editor of Develop, a magazine and website that was written for a games developer readership (so a 'trade' title); there I was always interviewing and writing about creative process, so that became second nature to me.

And then writing for a 'specialist' site like Nintendo Life or a 'consumer' publication like a newspaper, I worry my question style is a bit too 'pretentious game design chin stroking'... so I'm glad to hear that it's gone down well with you! I do at least feel that increasingly more of us want to know about the process of a game's creation, and not just the final result. When I was writing ten years ago you'd only really get a chance to cover that side of things in industry-facing publications. So big up to Nintendo Life for being part of a change there!

Of course, I asked some straightforward questions too, like asking about the narrative. Always gotta remember to cover the fundamentals too!

I do also feel there's one true advantage to asking this style of questions. When an interviewee has been in back-to-back interviews for a day or two at an event like Gamescom, it's understandable that they might zone out while giving answers they've given a dozen times that day already. If any of us were to answer the same question 12 times in a day, by the eighth time we'd be giving a slightly over-rehearsed response. The best interviews are the ones that play out on the day like natural conversations, rather than like a rigid Q&A session. So coming in with an atypical questioning angle can be refreshing to the interviewee, and bring them back to life for a nice conversation, rather than just push them to restate things they've said enough times. I'm not confident enough to believe my questions are entirely original in these situations... but when an interviewee says 'it's so nice to talk about something different' I feel I've hit what I hoped with an interview.

But actually, the translator at my face-to-face interview with Mr Tsukuda for this piece deserves as much credit as any questions I asked. So often with translation with this style of interview I and others do, when you get the answer back you realise something got lost in the translation. Not here! The translator seemed to brilliantly capture the spirit of my waffly, convoluted, pretentious questions!

@Lnsx Hey - I wrote the above. You make really interesting point. Mechs in video games in many cases perhaps should be excessively physically present and heavy, methodical in their movement and maybe even lumbering... but how to make that into rewarding gameplay and movement that doesn't feel like poor interaction? I wish I knew! Perhaps that style of mech is best reserved for non-interactive mediums like film, or NPC mechs?

I often ponder something similar about WWI games, where weapons and plane/tank controls might need to be a little slower and more laborious in their responsiveness and behaviour; which might deliver interactions contrary to what's presently deemed good game and interactive design.

Back on mechs, the original Steel Battalion at least succeeded to some extent in this regard. I was daft enough to buy that absurd controller when it came out, and the game made it feel like you were really wrestling with machinery, rather than zipping about as if made from light and air. Still, I do like a light-footed mech game also! But I'd love to see more that explore the interactive style you describe.

@Cobalt Maybe I'll at least hope it can strike that balance. I reserve the right to be wrong, of course!

@Cobalt My hope is that Tsukuda's time working on the best of Armored Core means he can strike the tricky balance of making it authentic to the genre and welcoming to more players. I have faith, and would love to see mech games get more popular.

@HobbitGamer I'm glad you enjoyed the interview I did here! Thanks for the kind words.

I too long for more Macross. Even the Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross arcade cabinet in the Eastenders cafe has been out of order for months now (yep; there really has been a Macross arcade cabinet in Eastenders for years. Somehow it even reappeared after the cafe burned down!)

@Sakura7 Thanks for the kind words about my interview here! All credit to Tsukuda for being a thoughtful, fascinating and enthusiastic interviewee. Like you I really enjoyed Armored Core in the PS2 era, and I cannot wait to play this in depth. I trust Tsukuda's previous experience with Armored Core to mean he can make something both authentic to the genre and welcoming to a wider audience. Fingers crossed!