Cuphead (2017)

My first ever digital drawing! I just recently got a tablet and a pen and the first thing I doodled was Cuphead, for some reason. It's not even him, it's more like... Bowlboy or something. Posting this here so I can one day look back at how far I've come if I ever learn how to draw, like, Dixit cards or something.

I never beat this game when it came out because the fight against the dragon with the clouds destroyed my soul and made me unable to feel happiness ever again. But I think now that I’ve recently beaten similar stuff like Alien Soldier, and seen the below impressive video, I am actually wanting to give it another shot soon… It was preeeeeetty amazing.

I’m 75% through the game and have exclusively been playing co-op with my 9-year-old son. He’s so much better at video games than me. He easily holds his own and often has to revive me multiple times during a fight. We often have to take breaks and talk about how losing makes us feel. And getting a Knockout! feels all the better with a buddy.

Oh, and the game is great too.

Welp, appears I'm once again remaining in the "this isn't as good as you all say it is" seat when it comes to the Cuphead DLC. While it's more of the same - and I already A ranked all the bosses aside from the final, and more on that in a second because it's important to my overall point - it's impressive the commitment to flawed design choices they insisted on keeping even while spending 5 years making additional content for the game.

The original game, despite definitely loving it, has a serious series of issues that plague it so badly that I refuse to consider it one of the best games of all time, as so many others seem comfortable doing, and those issues continue through this, especially in the final boss, which is outright impossible to visually comprehend. Cuphead has always had a problem with having simply too many moving pieces at any given time on certain bosses, and this is the worst offender of them all when it comes to that. And while it was a problem in the base game that could, more or less, be overcome (I did get A rank on everything and beat it on Expert after all), here it's actually detrimental to the game proper.

I don't know how else to say it, so I'll put it bluntly. When fighting the final boss, there's so much visual clutter and unnecessary movement that I actually legitimately cannot see MYSELF on the screen, let alone pay attention to anything else. Normally I'd be bummed about thusly never beating it and, thusly, being locked off from the remaining achievements as a result, but the thing is, I've already proven to myself via my Expert A rank run that I'm not the problem. The game is the problem. They STILL refuse to accept that there's no way a human being that isn't somehow spliced with a spider and thus has eight eyes can follow all that movement at once. The problem is on Cuphead, not me.

And this isn't the same as struggling against something hard like, say, The Devil, for instance. Yes the Devil is challenging, but it's the same as most of the game. Patterns. There's not too much going on on the screen there, and once you know the patterns and are quick enough, it's a breeze really. This is just outright bullshittery that takes away something that would otherwise be considered remotely "challenging" and replaces it with something more akin to "outright unfair and impossible to visually comprehend."

So yeah, the DLC is as good as the base game, and all the new bosses, guns and whatnot are great. But the problems that keep it from being a truly great game still mar it, and it seems like the developers will never even recognize it, sad to say.

...all that being said, I kinda wanna splice myself with a spider now and have eight eyes. That sounds cool as shit.