ah yes, the deadly jumbotron

February 19, 2023 9:20 PM

Using only a pixel baseball bat and one (or possibly more) balls, can you fend off an ever-increasing swarm of abstract dots? Find out in the delightful Vampire Survivors-alike Bases Loaded.
posted by cortex (23 comments total)

I’d watch this.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:56 PM on February 19, 2023

Gun & Tape is critical
posted by Going To Maine at 10:56 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hmmm

I entered full screen and it wouldn't let me exit it until I closed Safari. So, no.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 12:57 AM on February 20, 2023

This is pretty good.
posted by Literaryhero at 1:28 AM on February 20, 2023

This genre needs a better name.
posted by Paladin1138 at 4:50 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Got to level 52 before it bogged down too hard and I died from lag.
posted by miguelcervantes at 5:06 AM on February 20, 2023

So is the walk off homer randomish?
posted by Ickster at 5:09 AM on February 20, 2023

Walk-off Homer seems to occur at Level 20?
posted by JHarris at 5:43 AM on February 20, 2023

The comments mention that if you get the ball big enough you can just wait inside it. If you don't do that, the upgrade that lets the ball shoot bullets, and then its rate increases, is pretty important after a certain point.
posted by JHarris at 5:45 AM on February 20, 2023

Much easier with a mouse than a trackpad
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:04 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

As for genre, there's not a lot that's terribly original about Vampire Survivors. It's a really fun game, but every single thing about it has been done before, many times, in some cases for multiple decades. But I can list multiple games that have most of these traits, back into the 90s. Really the passive shooting/lack of aiming is the most distinctive when paired with the rest imo.

It is somewhat original in how all these facets come together. I can't think of any prior game that's a 2D shooter with free-roaming motion over a large field, using lots of level-up/character building features, tons of unlockable content requiring repeated play, and mostly passive shooting/no-aim. All while heavily being derivative of the bullet mechanics of one of gaming's oldest/biggest franchises. There are, after all over 20 Castlevania games since 1986, and the axe/cross/dagger strategy, along with further derivatives is a big part of why VS works so well.

Anyway, I think the ship has already sailed but I'd like it if we could not call every overhead 2D shooter with level progression/powerup a 'Survivors like', it seems deeply ignorant and kind of disrespectful of the hundreds of 2D shooters with interesting powerup chains and pathways.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:09 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

What JHarris said--Gun & Tape plus Softball seems like the Bases Loaded equivalent of, like, the fully-leveled-up Vampire Survivors bible combined with the fully-leveled-up whip--you can just stand in the middle of the thing while everything that comes near you dies.
posted by box at 6:23 AM on February 20, 2023

I think maybe I'm too dumb to realize how this works? Can someone tell me what's supposed to be happening, as the only thing happening for me is that when I click my trackpad the bat swings. No moving, no activity, nothing.

What's supposed to be going on?
posted by griffey at 6:55 AM on February 20, 2023

Umpire Survivor
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:02 AM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think maybe I'm too dumb to realize how this works? Can someone tell me what's supposed to be happening, as the only thing happening for me is that when I click my trackpad the bat swings. No moving, no activity, nothing.

Hit the ball. WASD to move.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:04 AM on February 20, 2023

Anyway, I think the ship has already sailed but I'd like it if we could not call every overhead 2D shooter with level progression/powerup a 'Survivors like'

I get what you mean there, but also I think you're selling short the degree to which Vampire Survivors did achieve something very specific an unique in their synthesis of mechanics: there's reasons it lit a fire under people's asses and sold way above its weight class and has inspired a whole bunch of very mechanically doting clones and riffs. It's absolutely, openly indebted to the bullet hell and twin stick shooters that preceded it, but it's also not any of them and it does its own simple thing very well and with great style. It's not Ikaruga, it's not Smash TV, it's not [litany of other 2D top-down games with bullet hell and power up progression], it's its own thing that people are really loving and other people are chasing the wake of in varyingly creative and cynical ways because has left such a mark out of the blue.

Basically, I think we're seeing people calling lots of games Survivors-alike partly because there's a natural tendency to flock to and extend a genre reference, and to the degree that people are doing that loosely or reflexively in some cases in a way that overextends the meaning I can feel you on whatever frustration there. I've lived through that with the long slow mutation of "roguelike", it's a weird phenomenon!

But we're also seeing people calling lots of games Survivors-alike because those games are very clearly, very directly inspired by the specific synthesis of mechanics in Vampire Survivors. They're making these games to be like Vampire Survivors, specifically, and to chase the magic (or in the cynical cases, particularly with mobile clones, the sales figures) of that particular game with it's particular clever deviation from basically any of the preceding history. "Survivors-alike" is a thing because Vampire Survivors is it's own very specific, very mechanically successful new thing and its set a lot of enthusiastic design in motion.
posted by cortex at 8:43 AM on February 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

I played Magic Survival, one of the games that inspired Vampire Survivors; it's free on Android and iOS, so you can give it a try yourself. And yeah, the template for Vampire Survivors is obvious, but it also doesn't feel like Magic Survival necessarily got robbed or anything; Vampire Survivors does enough unique things that it feels like its own game, even though it didn't event many of the core mechanics.

This is a pretty funny take on the genre, though I found it really easy to screw myself over by having the ball come to a stop far away and having a horde of angry red dots between me and the ball. In that sense, it's a lot more active than Vampire Survivors, where you mostly just have to aim and walk. Though that's actually on trend for upstart games in the genre; they're all a lot more active than VS is.
posted by chrominance at 9:08 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I take your point cortex and I should have acknowledged that there is indeed a specialness of that game and the fact that it engendered a flock of direct derivatives: there is something new and fun about the total combination of play mechanics.

I'm happy to see 2D shooters receive renewed interest and development, I guess I'm just bracing myself to not break my teeth grinding them too hard when I do see some Robotron-looking game called Surivivorslike :)
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:34 AM on February 20, 2023

It's absolutely, openly indebted to the bullet hell and twin stick shooters that preceded it, but it's also not any of them and it does its own simple thing

It's bullet hell but you're the hell
posted by EndsOfInvention at 9:51 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

can you fend off an ever-increasing swarm of abstract dots?

No. Apparently I cannot.

I'm OK with it.
posted by flabdablet at 11:16 AM on February 20, 2023

I'd support 'Inverse Bullet Hell' as genre term, if that's the core trait you want to focus on. And I do agree it's what makes VS stand out.

Kenta Cho has been down this road before, he developed a whole language (BulletML) just to handle his ideas for the barrage of projectiles.

Tumiki Fighters (2004) is a good example of a much older game that has the inverse bullet hell trait, where you can power up to a point where your projectiles fill the screen, and effectively building your character to get to that point is the main way to win.

Idk what he's up to these days, but I'd like to think Mr. Cho is also pleased to see this surge of interest.
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:35 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

I started with the Vampire Survivor philosophy of "the more projectiles, the better." Then I ended up with all the balls clumped in one place, so I just stood inside them and waited for Level 20.

Cute but obviously would need some balancing to continue. (The most straightforward one, other than capping ball size/number of balls, would be to have only *moving* balls damage enemies, meaning that standing inside a giant ball is only as safe as the firing speed.)
posted by Scattercat at 12:34 AM on February 21, 2023

can you fend off an ever-increasing swarm of abstract dots?

No.

Sometimes these things have very simple answers.
posted by Grangousier at 2:27 AM on February 21, 2023 [1 favorite]