"We got to the point where Metroidvanias were "Ah yes, I got the GREEN COLORED DASH, which will break GREEN BLOCKS, and I can find all the spots I missed by checking my map. It's an ATTACK and a MOVEMENT OPTION--" and like idk at that point the genre was cooked for like a decade."

As usual, with these posts, I start by going off on twitter(Don't worry about this though, I'm just gonna rehash all of it here), this time about Metroidvania, and as usual it's time to salvage a messy thread from a dying platform.

Animal Well is apparently good(It's Sylvie Lime, but for normies.) and with that, comes the think pieces and opinions on what the nebulous and poorly named genre of Metroidvanias is and how they should be, mechanically.

My friend Mirai has been doing her first play through of Demon's Souls and, bless my heart, she's been playing on the PS3. Mirai and I talk a lot about art stuff, so I couldn't help but to throw random screenshots from the Remake at her so we could have a giggle. Surely this wouldn't devolve into hours of screenshot comparing, and grumbling, and... well(It always ends up as an article, I swear to fucking god Mirai).

... I thought I was over this, but here I am, accidentally scratching open old wounds.

To be clear up front, I hate the art direction of Demon's Souls Remake. I mean hate hate it. If you like it, that's cool, no shade, we all have our own priorities. We care about different things, and tolerate different things differently and it's fine IT'S FINE YOU'RE FINE~

I think it's deeply important for a remake to have it's own identity. I think it's impossible to make a perfect remake without having your own opinion. Even if you slavishly upscaled everything exactly to match the original designs, changing the fidelity of the content changes the context. You get the repeating grass field in the ps3 Shadow of the Colossus(Don't ask Neolucky, the BEP cutscene artist about Bluepoint's SoTC remake, she might be a bigger hater than me) remaster. Stuff just doesn't work the same way when you scale it up(so stop upscaling and smoothing out vagrant story you fucking animals oh my fucking god).

You gotta make decisions and they made decisions, as they should have! But I swear to god, somehow, as far as my tastes are concerned, and despite all odds...

Every single one of them was bad.

So Lies of P had patch that adjusted difficulty and I haven't played it, but I have played though AC6 who had the same thing happen and the discourse seems to be... about the same and it really just got to me how poor the nuance around difficulty discussion can be. Maybe it's more accurate when talking about Lies of P, maybe it's the same crud, but whatever.

Now, I'm very much on record saying the AC6 patch stuff is massively overblown. Only one thing really seems like a significant nerf and...

Note: This is old and mostly unnecessary. Besides the ability to overlay Oolacile, the features of this viewer are well eclipsed by noclip.website. I don’t plan to support this project at this point and it is only left here for archival purposes. Feel free to use it still if you really want to, but at this point it is provided very much ‘as is’.

I’d like to introduce the Dark Souls Map Explorer. The Dark Souls Map Explorer is a simple tool made by me, in Unity, using Vlad001’s data files....

The Dark Souls Map Viewer is one of those wonderful things that most people in the Dark Souls community don’t know about. Part of this is because there is no obvious public place talking about it, and because the update made by a 3rd party which added the DLC content was on a website that was infested with spyware.

Dark Souls Map Viewer is a program made by vlad001 on the xentax forums, who released the program open sourced. Ispohr on the Dark Souls Reddit re-released the map viewer,...