Alles in allem bin ich sehr froh, dieses Spiel endlich gespielt zu haben … irgendwie eine einfache Aussage, aber das ist die Wahrheit. Ich habe so ziemlich …
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Alles in allem bin ich sehr froh, dieses Spiel endlich gespielt zu haben … irgendwie eine einfache Aussage, aber das ist die Wahrheit. Ich habe so ziemlich …
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well that was shorter than i expected
Yeah this game wasn't exactly praised for its story, but the environments and parkour gameplay save it.
That's it? That's the final boss?!
I remember playing that last room over and over for at least an hour when trying to get the achievement where you don't fire guns.
The "health regen by squatting behind cover", or "wiping the jam off the camera lens" as one Mr Croshaw once put it, is the incredibly common solution modern first and third person generic action shooters love to use, since they can obfuscate actual health and damage numbers and do sneaky damage adjustments, make things more intense when they're not, and lower the difficulty floor for anyone nervous and taking things slowly. As you say, it's not great for immersion if you think about it, but it suits casual immersion more than having an arbitrary health system.
i find absolutely funny that raocow's final input before cutscene mode was literally the DROPKICK
I really never liked the idea of catalyst when it came out because I hated the "open world" buzzwords of the time it was being marketed with, until 2020 when I got it on super sale and midway through the game I realized the map is more similar to a 3d metroidvania map than the common big sprawling empty zone of an open world game. The common open world elements of the time are pretty unobtrusive in this game
The game actually contains some pretty sweet self contained levels! I think it would hold up pretty well within your video format
I found it always silly that you only have to destroy one of the 3 server packs and do that to each group.
Like I totally share the same confusion raocow had on my first play through.
Glad you enjoyed this wonderful janky game 🙂
About Catalyst, it would have been a lot better without the open world. The game ain't bad but it was made by people that only partially understood what made the first game so appealing
Personally I like how after you kill Jacknife, the cops have a real 'are we the baddies' moment and just leave you and your sister to admire the view.
Faith's mission is apparently to clear her sisters name, but you notice she didn't actually do that. She deleted her own criminal record, but her sister's still going to take the fall for Pope.
That's my main issue with the game, it's incredibly ill-defined what the bad guys do that makes them bad. They try to stop Faith, but she's running what look to be satchel charges around town and you absolutely want to stop people from doing that…
And so, Faith is still alive. No, not that Still Alive. Different Still Alive. And still alive, for what it's worth.
There's a mod for the Steam version as well that puts in the DLC (and the PS3 exclusive one), but truth be told it's just abstract time trial maps. Not to say they're bad or anything, but that's basically all it amounts to. Still if you manage to get it working, it'd be a fun in-between like the WarioWare grid for a little bit
I did use a game as a music player, for a very short amount of time. The 3DS version of smash bros, if I remember correctly. It's kind of a special case (portable device, lots of arrangements from different games, etc.).
ngl this playthrough was pretty hair-tearing at points, but I'm glad that overall you enjoyed it and figured out how the game worked eventually. I saw a big improvement in the last couple of levels, just in time for the game to be over. Oh well. It's definitely a game that benefits from learning the levels well so you can speedrun through them looking like a cool acrobatic badass who doesn't get shot thirty times in a row, like Faith is canonically supposed to be. But I understand why you wouldn't want to do that for the purposes of the channel.
Tags: I could go, for an all bag run, but I won't
Glad you enjoyed the game as a whole! I think the game definitely benefits from a repeat playthrough, like you said; you basically fully grasp the combat and flow of the game by the end, and then you can have a smoother experience the second time. I definitely agree that certain aspects feel a bit underdeveloped or wonky just due to the game's kinda rushed nature and its "first game in the series syndrome". It's super fun though, and I feel like it still holds up overall!
Catalyst fixes a lot of the issues while going for a bit of a different approach; it's open world *to a degree*, but I'd actually liken it to a 3D Metroidvania with open world elements rather than a true open world. It definitely still has a story that leads you down specific paths, so if you DO wanna play it for the channel, I feel like it'd still be a pretty streamlined experience, especially because a lot of the open world elements are optional. The game also does have linear, streamlined "event chapters" that operate like this game's chapters; basically all story areas are linear, and the open world is just the vessel to actually GET to these linear chapters. The parkour exploring also feels even better than this game thanks to the added abilities, better Faith vision, and other changes. The movement and fast travel make even traversing the open world elements SUPER fun, I think. I dunno if that helps sell it for you at all, but I feel like you'd like it if you tried it!
Either way, thanks for playing! Both games are some of my favorite games ever, so I was super happy to see that you picked and enjoyed it!! 😀
Thank you for disillusioning me with this game, I hadn't played it in like 10 years and forgot how many meh parts there were. I did remember the poor combat and story but I just forgot how much of it there was. Makes it even more weird Catalyst's reception revolved around not living up to the first game, even if the story is even worse.
So one thing I never played are the platforming trials (talking about this 2008 game, not catalyst) where you basically just speedrun short sections of abstract brightly coloured platforms in the void. I've heard people actually liked those. Sounds rather boring, though, since the best parts had awesome architecture, the feeling of being behind the curtains and a bit of getting lost before finding how to proceed (but not too lost). I'd say Mirror's Edge levels were never really these "tightly designed levels" in that sense. They're very mildly tight.
Thus ends Faith's kick delivery service: https://youtu.be/BFx7J5jj0ks
(a jumpkick/crotch kick compilation)
I definitely feel like they had a great concept here, with some issues with parts of the game being underdeveloped.
I looked into Catalyst and it's…not actually a sequel, apparently? It's billed as a "reimagining" of Mirror's Edge, and so apparently disregards the entire plot of this one.
I guess I'd be interested to see if the story was stronger there. I was pretty okay with the story here, but it wasn't exactly gripping, and felt like it kind of lost its grounding a bit towards the end. Mostly, though, I think the impression I'm left with is that it feels like someone's side story to a larger narrative that doesn't exist, and consequently it feels like a number of elements just kind of don't lead anywhere. Like, it felt like Project Icarus was supposed to be built up to this major point of importance in the story, but then peters out into being more or less just an excuse to have Celeste 'turn bad', because nothing really happens with them – you have like two encounters with an 'evil runner' and that's about it. There's a fair bit of build-up over the 'bigger powers' in the city and then you never actually encounter any of them. And if this was just like act 1 in a bigger game, or an actual side story to a larger series, then I could excuse that, but whether by design or by happenstance, it didn't end up being that, so it kind of feels like you've just read someone's gaiden story without having the context that helps make everything fit in. i.e. not BAD, per se, but missing something.
I wonder if people can still play Brad Borne's Mirror's Edge 2D? Did it get rescued by Flashpoint, or since IIRC it was an advertising thing, it's been vanished into the aether? I remember it doing the parkour pretty well.
9:02 Well, he's dead. "Why does all my mission control have to get shot."
22:04 Makes me wonder how you would have approached Sonic Frontier had All the Sonics continued.
To be fair; you probably would have gotten comfortable with the combat sooner but you spend the first 2/3rds of the game trying to avoid it at all costs. Totally understandable of course, it is least interesting thing in the game and not super fun to engage with.
Ain't nothing wrong with ending up at the same opinion as most of the folks who played the game. The concept was never really explored before, and it was given this ridiculous story to facilitate it, and in doing so, gave all of us a weird thing we never knew we might have wanted. The flow, and by flow, I mean the like, fluid-like state of the movement through the levels captured something so like, ethereal, at the time, that kinda hasn't really been done again by any other games I have seen in a while. The Dying Light games are probably the closest to this, but they don't really capture what this game had. The sound track was also just full of real nice backing tracks, and hearing them here just brings me back to those sort of serene states of mind that you can get when you are just going, ya know? Either way, super glad to have watched your journey through this game and super glad you at least enjoyed it
(15:26) Big Al's evaluation of Jacknife's skydive: "………. ………. SPLAT!!"
The second best game with an ending title theme titled "Still Alive" (Almost the same year too, though that other one was first)
You completed the game! Special move unlocked! To perform an Aerial Faith Divekick as Faith, press [Jump] + Left into Quarter Circle Forward + [LP Review]!
It's ironic that the LP I followed and reviewed after Super Sami Roll is Mirror's Edge, as it's quite thematically the mirror opposite of it, in many design ways. Super Sami Roll was a game that attempted to redo and blend many known videogame 'things' into a game, and try and improve and iterate on them, whileas Mirror's Edge is a game that attempts to focus on one New Videogame Thing almost to the detriment of everything and tries to make it work.
I played Mirror's Edge when it came out. At the time DICE was a developer that, aside some occasional deviations into titles like Midtown Madness, had pretty much ONE big flagship title it was known for in Battlefield. EA did its EA thing, back when they were pretty much the only AAA company doing the big 'buy IP to make us money' acquisition strategy, and DICE was regarded pretty high and relatively praised as a competent innovative studio, and EA had been pretty much left in the bench as two of its most generalist competitions, Valve and Ubisoft, had found great success in titles that explored the environmental interaction limits of a 3D adventure, in Portal, and the nascent Assassin's Creed series. So, EA and DICE had a sit down, and EA commissioned its studio to come up with something fresh and, presumably, interactive, in that vein.
DICE's answer was this. Mirror's Edge was ahead of its time, in that it would pre-empt the modern trait of adventure games to expect the player to interact with all of their environment in a constructive and creative way (Nintendo only fully got the memo into the Switch era, but even they have been adamant about the direction of 'give the player a toolbox and let THEM solve their world traversal), allowing relatively open level passages where each solution catered to a player's preferred path. It also made the environment a living thing, encouraging the player to look around and truly visualize the world as a series of elements that can or cannot be interacted with in your favour, an aspect pretty much inspired in its entirety from the approach Portal (and previous valve games) has to level design. Faithvision became a necessity, naturally, as the game's visually complex and disperse enough to compel the developers to give you a subtle hand without outright guiding you.
It's hard to quite contextualize how innovative this game aimed to be. The era of the open-world had not been upon us, this game was still running in dear old Unreal Engine 3, we were decades away from the kind of free-form plug-and-play engine interactions that other games would follow with, and even the initial Assassin's Creed series was quite tame in what it allowed you or not to get away with. I'm always a bit more lenient in criticizing developers when they try NEW things, because it's always much harder to assess what a game experience can and can't jive with, when you're the first attempting something as radical as a context-based parkour game with very little of the way of traditional adventures in the past.
That being said, and as fondly as I remember this game, it's aged poorly. rao's qualm with the combat is nearly universal with anyone that's played the game; it gets substantially better on a replay, so does most of the game, but that SHOULDN'T be how your game works, you shouldn't have to force the player into understanding that your system is flawed and is asking for minimal interaction with it to give a sense of satisfaction, which is what Mirror's Edge combat is: an open invitation to do as LEAST of it as possible, because it's not at all the fun part of the game, just a necessary chore to get to the fun runny or puzzly parts.
Which leads us to the visceral issue with ME: DICE simply could not find a way to address 'difficulty'. Having a parkour game that makes you take in the world and use it to traverse seemingly impossible paths at 'speed', quotation marks relevant, is fun, but as was touched on, could potentially get kind of dull. So, you have to introduce obstacles that aren't just… 'how do I get to point B from point A', and here's where DICE completely botched the landing roll: They defaulted. They went straight to what they knew well. Shooty enemies in a cover environment, and rewarding you for positional play and taking them out. The problem is that it's completely anathema to the rest of the game.
Faith is a RUNNER. A mover, someone who solves problems by staying in flow, and getting the heck out of dodge. As soon as you force her to stop to address the world, you already failed to understand the basis of the design you had to begin with, and it shows a lack of confidence on your idea that betrays your uncertainty on what the game should be. At several times in the LP, we saw raocow attempt to creatively dodge and run past enemy encounters only to be 'punished' because he 'played the level wrong', with enemies shooting him down the exit route. That feels SUPREMELY unsatisfying, as if the game is saying 'no, you gotta serve your gun-game timeout in the corner before continuing'. Several games suffer with this idea that certain difficulty-based solutions must be in the game, to give the player a sense of progression, but they really don't, and in this game, it sours what could, on the general, be a pretty satisfying experience.
Watching a speedrun of this game, you can see what DICE INTENDED for the flow of the game to be, and it almost runs kind of smooth, but it's a reminder that you can't and won't always hit your game experiences out of the park running on your first try. DICE looked at their inspiration games, and had some great ideas, but unlike the team responsible for Portal 1, weren't confident enough that their game would stand on their own, and proceeded to overlay a second game on top of it that is, as was said, quite mediocre. As a term of comparison, Portal 2 instead iterated their confidence that yes, they didn't need that many turrets, or that many shooty things to make puzzles challenging, and that the game could be challenging on its own just with puzzle-platforming, and absolutely stuck the landing, 10/10. There's no guarantee that DICE could or would have found a good alternative for their difficulty issue on their own, but it's a bit disheartening to see them throw their line so far, only to reel it in too soon. I
In summation: Don't be afraid to go for broke. It might not work, always, but it's better to try and make the game you want, and think people might find fun, than the game people have already played and don't find so motivating. (Unless you're Jonathan Blow or Edmund McMillan, then by all means LISTEN TO YOUR STAFF and stop thinking you're the second coming of Christ).
P.S. The groin kick is pretty funny.
…Wait. The Line ain't a super/megatall skyscraper!
YOU BROKE YOUR TITLE RULES 😛
I loved this playthrough! I've only ever seen playthroughs – never played it myself – but I do still love this game very much.
The FPS elements and general gunplay in this game definitely feel like a detraction from the rest of the story.
I think a lot of that probably felt obligatory on part of the developers. EVERY game was a FPS in 2008, and if I recall right DICE is the company that does all the battlefield games.
Would be really interested to see a this type game done today. I feel like the developers would have a lot of fun with it.
Either way, you kicked all the ass at that sniper segment so well done!
I am happy you enjoyed the game!
I think the developers here had a lot of faith in the players' intrinsic motivation to experiment with combat moves and therefore discover more effective means of fighting, which is why the encounter difficulty curve looks as it does.
There are essentially two approaches to encounters here. The first is finding a way through it while avoiding combat, which was both tutorialized more extensively and makes thematic sense with Faith being a runner, while the second is to actually engage the enemies. Note how the tutorial covers some rather advanced platforming moves, like wall run into turn into jump, that mainly become relevant lategame, while only covering the basics of combat, that being disarming and punching. Each approach, if used purely, would have their own difficulty curve, and depending on how the player mixes the approaches, they form and overall difficulty curve.
The possibility of players wanting to avoid combat throughout the entire game seems to have been considered by the developers, given how there's an achievement for it, but that achievement also reveals how it's not the main approach they intended, which I guess is why they allowed that approach's difficulty curve to eventually become extremely steep.
Purely choosing combat isn't really possible, since the game has some encounters you have to run from early on, but for the ones you are supposed to get through, there's a smooth progression from no armor and small guns to more armor and bigger guns.
Then, with a mixed approach from the start as well as combat experimentation, which I think is what the developers intended, the player gets a smooth platforming curve in getting to the first enemy along with a smooth combat curve. The more intuitive approach, however, is to focus on avoidant platforming, going for the exit rather than the easiest enemy, which has a smooth but steep platforming difficulty curve at first, which eventually becomes unreasonable, at which point the player, like rao, tries to switch over to a mixed approach, only to face a difficulty cliff at the combat side since the difficulty has already progressed quite a bit there, making for a very rough experience.
I suspect this is the root cause of both the impression that the combat and especially the gunplay is bad, as well as the feeling that the game would play better on a second run. The second run feeling better is probably true, but I think the first run feeling bad is a game design failure that a lot of games fall victim to, especially ones that emphasize speed.
I'm not sure how these problems could be solved, though. I suppose they could make avoidance more reasonable lategame, or, more drastically, remove (aspects of) combat entirely, but I think that would leave a gameplay gap that makes the game feel hollow and unvaried, and I suspect more of the same type of platforming wouldn't be able to fill that gap. They could tutorialize combat more or more aggressively coax players to engage in combat early, but I think that would damage the ever-important sense of autonomy while playing the game. I guess they could make combat easier, while making simple approaches like punching slow while advanced approaches like slide kicks are faster, but letting the player get away with punching their way through the game might only reinforce the impression that the combat in this game is bad and slow. Hm… The best approach probably involves reworking combat to make getting better at it more intuitive, like … maybe forcing the player to finish enemies with a kick (or a shot), which very explicitly either needs momentum or the enemy to be stunned by a punch combo.
I'm so glad you played this since it really stretches the "point" of this channel in a hilarious "/shrug looks like a platformer to me!" way. I tried the sequel when you started this project and ended up uninstalling it after a few days. I do not recommend for reasons that would directly annoy you specifically.
Looking forward to your next PS3-era game, Red Dead Redemption! Which has a jump button AND horses to abandon into chasms!
Are the time trial levels not unique, and just parts of the main levels? I only played the first 2
Wish that faith has a tranquilizer gun instead. She looks like a runner than a fighter.