Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we return to our series on Pikmin. We talk about returning to the game after a break, the macro structure and persistence of the levels, and other topics. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Sections played: Several more hours

Issues covered: Defeating Games for Charity, relearning the controls, figuring out what you were trying to accomplish, naming buttons, persistent units and worlds, exploratory sandboxes, reinforcing replay, Nintendo creating something new, things that are hard to classify into genres, the order of operations, plate-spinning and de-stressing, gameplay paradigms, not knowing when you have the right tools, the ticking timers, limited knowledge to find, the puzzly boss, learning how well you can recover, gentle fail states, not telling you everything you might want to know, the un-Nintendo timers, day/night cycles, hitting enemies out of the air, loss aversion, Olimar salting the wounds, leading plant people, delightful music, finding where you can review our podcast, settings in games, trying to preserve an experience, console hardware revs, different forms of remake, ideal versions of settings, not opening up the settings, prerendered cutscenes, motivated choices due to hardware, remembering your audience.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Video Game History Foundation, Dwarf Fortress, Project Octavia, Hollow Knight, KyleAndError, Unreal, Homeworld, Starcraft, Warcraft, Splatoon, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Incredible Machine, WarioWare, UFO 50, Metroid, Majora's Mask, Outer Wilds, Apocalypse Now, Hajime Wakai, Benimanjaro, mysterydip, Silent Hill 2, Rogue, Resident Evil, Halo, Saber Interactive, Hitman, Final Fantasy (series), PS1, Chrono Trigger, Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft, Tomb Raider, Quake, Minecraft, Ed Fries, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.

Next time: Finish Pikmin!

Links! Defeating Games for Charity

Twitch: timlongojr and twinsunscorp YouTube Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com