but i also still stand by all my gripes over the direction oddworld seemed to be taking as nnt revealed more about itself and the future of oddworld
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And that's a good thing. |
New 'n' Tasty retrospective
No, NNT is anything but a good thing.
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Nah, just because it isn't perfect doesn't make it bad.
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It never crossed my mind to even consider it close to perfect. My reference point was being good, which I don't find it, at all.
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i like soulstorm more than NNT. in my brain i just can't care about NNT because it's a 1:1 remake of AO. right? i can't remember if there are differences aside from some quality of life changes and areas no longer being broken up into separate screens. i couldn't ever see myself playing it again because i'd just play AO instead. i prefer how AO plays by a long shot even with the grating shit, like only one mudokon being able to follow you at a time.
soulstorm at least feels like a new game even if it's a retelling of AE's story. i also think it's not a good game by any means. also i'm not sure if i'd ever replay it again either. actually idk what my point was |
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NNT is a remake, so of course it's going to take a lot from the original game! The point of judging it on its own merits is not to say "the game is bad because all its good qualities come from AO", it's to say that taken as a complete gaming experience by itself, it's a decent game. It's an engaging 2D puzzle-platformer with interesting level design, simple mechanics that are easy to pick up but difficult to master, and an interesting aesthetic that in places* is gorgeous. Does most of that come from AO? Sure. Does NNT do them better than AO? For the most part, no, but it doesn't do them badly. You seem to think that NNT is worse than AO. I honestly don't disagree! But my point is that you (and many other Oddworld fans) write off NNT as bad because it doesn't meet or surpass AO's bar of quality. That may be dissatisfying, sure, but being worse than AO doesn't mean a game is automatically bad - there's plenty of good games that are worse than AO out there. :
I'm not trying to argue that the game is perfect, because it isn't. I am perfectly aware that the game has issues, and plenty of them stand out to me as things that bring down the experience. I'm not even trying to convince anyone that the game is better than AO. But it's not a terrible game, far from it. You might not like it, you might consider it worse than AO, and to you that probably means it's not worth your time. That's fine. But games shouldn't be judged in black-and-white good-or-bad. NNT is a mixed bag - it does some things well, and some things poorly. But I think it's a mistake to write it off entirely - because as we've seen, things can get so much worse. *I've voiced my criticisms of the game's aesthetic choices before, but I personally think NNT really does the native environments of the game justice. The Scrabanian Temple in particular stands out in my mind as an area that looks straight up better than the original. |
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>Having the camera free-flowing and utilizing perspective and angles adds depth and makes the environments feel more connected. At the cost of many bugs and weird behavior when you're on the "edge" between "screens". >Mapping the throwing mechanic to a controller thumbstick makes aiming rocks and grenades far easier and takes out the guesswork in landing a shot. On the downside the throwables have no weight to them now. And no, there's still as much guesswork. And no, in AO the trajectory of the grenades is always the same and predictable, and if you say that you need to throw them once to know it, it's as much of a guesswork as the NnT/SS throwing lines. >Being able to throw bottle caps to get the attention of sligs and scrabs means you don't have to wait around on enemy patrol cycles as often. This is very bugged (and a really forced feature), they sometimes hardcode sligs to only pretend they're looking and they unnaturally turn towards you (I mean, more than their usual glitchy animation) and insta shoot you. >Including the gamespeak option to talk to multiple mudokons simultaneously removes tedium some of the original puzzles had. Except it didn't really have much tedium to begin with (especially if it's the first time you're playing it), as it had 3 times fewer mudokons, as opposed to the copy pasted 200... Plus sometimes there was sometimes a puzzle reason to do so, e.g. first stockyards escape secret area that required you to do a few routes in a dangerous scrab territory (Which they addressed in NnT by adding electrical gates to further make the level aesthetics worse) >Quicksave! I thought you were listing positives... I hate the concept of quick saving (or saving anywhere) in a game like that with passion. >Adding difficulty options makes the game more accessible to newcomers while still allowing people to have a challenge if they choose to. Oh yeah, I chose hard and the UXBs and meatsaws became completely unpredictable (even though I played it after they patched the saws so they are no longer longer to CPU cycles). Nice "challenge". Not to mention UXBs are no longer synced to the beeps. >The level select system makes going back to replay levels and try for better endings much easier. I personally enjoy loading up the game and playing a level or two, without having to go through the whole game again. I don't really think it's very important to me, but it could be to someone who somehow got the bad ending and wants a good one, I guess. Though if you got a good one and want to get the bad one you need to do the whole game again afaik. :
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I've been meaning to revisit New 'n' Tasty now that I'm able to approach it with more realistic expectations.
I tried it for the first time in 2020 having finished a replay of Oddysee (one of my favourite games of all time) in 2019 and I hated it. Absolutely hated it. I thought they took everything that was good about Oddysee and just bastardised it to be more appealing to the lowest common denominator. But I think with some time to breathe, I'm intrigued to try it just in its own right and without particularly comparing it to Oddysee. I've always considered Oddysee more of a puzzle game than anything else, so if New 'n' Tasty can just be a serviceable platformer instead, that might be fine. |
I beat NnT three times, I think. With a couple-years-long break between the last attempts, and with as open mind as I could have on the last attempt. Sadly, my perception of it didn't change.
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NnT is fine
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Varrok if you thought NnT was shit why on god's sweet earth did you play it three times? I thought it was OK and I haven't even completed it twice. |
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Regardless, I can't convince you that a game you didn't like is Good Actually, but I at least hope that people can give NNT a bit more of a chance than "is it better than AO or completely irredeemable trash". It does a disservice to the game to write it off for its flaws, because I think there's still a lot there to enjoy, and there's a lot that can be learned from NNT about how the series could have progressed. I think one of the saddest things about Soulstorm is that it completely failed to learn from any of the lessons NNT had to teach. |