ElCochran90's Profile
Send a PMJoined on: Aug 25, 2018
Bio:
About time I updated this bio.
Name: Edgar Cochran
Country: Mexico
Currently living in: Mexico City
-God's servant and one of his blessed sons (John 1:12; John 3:16).
-Lover of the entire animal and plant creation.
-Film lover and reviewer for Letterboxd.com (https://letterboxd.com/elcochran90).
-Adjunct professor and personal tutor of Statistical Inference, Business Forecasting, Marketing Research and Portfolio Theory.
Fangaming experience began in August 2018, so only modest achievements here. However, I'll describe some relevant FAQs here made to me during my stay here since 2018:
Q: Are videogames art?
A: Yes
Q: Are fangames videogames?
A: Yes
Q: Why are your reviews long and unconventional?
A: I am a film reviewer; in a way, I sort of unconsciously dragged my style of film reviewing to the world of fangames. I often involve personal experiences in my writing. Expect that structure; I'm not planning to change it.
Q: How are you rating games? Do you compare fangames as normal games that your ratings are lower than all other people ratings or are you just a critical person?
A: My ratings are not lower than people's ratings all of the time regarding fangames, but they are most of the time. However, this is not my intention. I am rating them as normal games, as in, I don't have a different spectrum for rating "normal", "official" games than fangames. They are in the same scale, because they are all videogames. I don't like to think myself as a critical person; ratings are just subjective numbers. However, I have realized that I rate games more harshly than I rate films/short films, which I do more often.
Q: What are your favorite fangames?
A: I have not played enough fangames to make a comprehensive and representative list, but this can be answered by going to my Favorites list. Anything getting 6.7 or higher will be considered immediately as a favorite.
I've submitted:
378 Ratings!
378 Reviews!
790 Screenshots!
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378 Games
378 Reviews
For: I Wanna Meet The Gensokyo Remake
Irkara’s second most notorious standalone game after I wanna be the Indefinitely, who is better known for participating in needle collabs. Vanilla needle enthusiasts will particularly enjoy this one. Very few jumps throughout can be called interesting, the visual design of the stages are very poor, needle throughout stages is repetitive, and there comes a point in which it becomes more of a race against yourself for conquering it fast and adding a clear to your list. It’s ok for blind-speedrunning it against friends online; otherwise, it is an unfortunately disposable product.
There are makers who shine more being part of a team or collab projects, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
For: I wanna CQ
Uneventful, and one of aqua’s lowest moments. The fangame again attempts visual variety, ranging from to the standard one, to ok, to awful. Platforming is extremely inconsistent and does not correlate really well with the implemented gimmicks, and the traps worsen the experience. The “I WANNA BE THE GUY” screen in the yellow stage is particularly atrocious since it depends on trial-and-error learning to activate the most illogical and least intuitive triggers to progress, and the triggers are not funny either.
The game has four main stages in total plus a final stage, and the only potentially likable one is the last stage, although that one has also its share of dumb trap moments. Green stage is the runner up with consistency saves and a partially sensical difficulty distribution. I’d be ok with red if the platforming wasn’t so generic, the traps would be less abundant, and the horrible background design didn’t make everything look like computer diarrhea.
For this game, the most interesting things to discover are the bosses and, again, the final boss is the least bad of them all.
Avoid.
For: I Wanna Be the White Cherry
From ホネ。(Explorer, End the Blood Festival, Buy the Crayon), this is perhaps the most accessible game from the maker in terms of difficulty, and it experiments with many audiovisual ideas to convey the sense of variety, one of them being horror (and the most interesting concept for that). It does stay away mostly from generic visual designs and that creates a sense of curiosity in the player regarding what gimmick and type of platforming will be implemented in the next area, exactly like in Buy the Crayon.
Like many products of its time, it’s a hit-and-miss game that requires secrets with a cryptic location (I’m looking at you, Stage 4) in order to access the final boss. Each stage is labeled with a difficulty level to give you an idea of the intended order, and said numbers are completely arbitrary. Stage 3 is a no-save area, and how do you make it cool? Add traps! Have fun. At least this area was done better in Be The Flower. Stage 4 in particular, which name is “SpikeZone Very Devil”, is a disgrace: for the average difficulty it employs, it puts stupid jumps like single-jump diamonds, double corners, TAS jumps, frame-perfect landings, and that first jump of the second screen which is a mutated and uglier version of the 9 jump. The secret of this stage in particular requires an infamous jump (again, for its average difficulty standards) followed by a little army of no-chokey gates. Also, the stage has a horrendous soundtrack that is used as a psychological torture method for you to finish the stage fast, or else your ears will suffer.
Final area and final boss are fun, but for the life of me, final boss killed me in the exact same way HeavenTrap 1 did many years ago: last attack begins and lasts after the boss has been beaten, so be extra careful with that.
For: I Wanna Be Like Beautiful Starlight
The game Flavi the Flav does not want you to play because he made it is one of the fangames of all times: U.S. soundtrack that no one outside the country will recognize, woeful platforming, repetitive triggers, nasty choke jumps that do not compare to the average difficulty, single-jump gimmick implemented horribly, unspeakable screen transitions in all areas (especially corridor needle), horrendous background choices and a cute, first-try boss (at least in my case). Even if you want to highlight yourself first-trying the boss (you guessed it: a cherry), it will be muted due to copyright. The only swag thing about the game is the Phil Collins wallpaper I guess.
Also, if I might ask, why is the average difficulty above 60?
For: I Wanna Develop An Appreciation For Music
I owed my fellow Racic a live playthrough since ages, and by the time February came, I never released a review.
Truth to be told, fangame reviews were passed to a lower priority given many changes and events concerning my family’s health, my work, new ways of working at my job with a hybrid Home-Office / In-Presence model, and a recent engagement! My oh my, there will be another wedding in the IWC.
However, I personally established an obligation to review every single fangame I ever play because it’s a personal moral standard: there is a reason for my numbers, my appreciation matters, I share my worldviews with this unique community that still employs memes and humorous language I will never understand for the life of me, and, most importantly, all artists deserve feedback about their work and a review is the least they deserve.
Since day zero, I have always hated trap games. Also, as the community becomes desensitized with a brutally increasing trend of absurdly difficult games that will get today a difficulty rating of 71 even if in the old days they would be floating around a rating of 82, finding fun games of any genre becomes a challenge more today. That is why we, the less skilled ones, are each time more grateful for events like IWT (and there will still be outliers, like Know My Retribution or luck-based Crispy Fries).
This is where Racic and I share a tangency point in our vision:
“As an older, and far far less skilled player of fangames, I had noticed that newer games kept coming out with more complicated gimmicks, and the skill level kept getting higher and higher. One of my goals was to take fangames back to that old-school silly trap, dated references, fun.”
Why has this become rarer today? As a far far less skilled player of fangames myself as well, Racic wore the brave pants of creating a fangame, something I have no idea how to do (let alone having free time today to learn how to), and delivered this charm.
Prepare yourself for a surreal adventure trap game that will culture you with the basics of old-school hip hop, 90s Eurodance, vocaloids and country music (thanks a ton for the latter since it has been unjustly maligned and trashed).
The level of self-awareness is massive, and I think that’s the point of it all. “It is not a game that will change our lives”, but it’s just out there as a homage to the old days of not-frustrating fun. It’s a trap game, but the traps really don’t repeat themselves as much as old-school atrocities inspired by the legendary downloaders of Record My Jumps. The Sudoku-ish aspect of it makes it what it is: low production value goes along with the humor of the game.
I am not the meme-humor type, which pretty much excludes me from 95% of the Gen-Zers and 85% of the millennials (me being one), so the humor is lost on me. Many screens are frustratingly looking, and the traps do fall into generic territory most of the time. There is a punishment room, and it gets too cruel with the number of times intended for you to fall into it. It stops being funny and makes you begin to pray you don’t go there for the 17th time, especially if you have a terrible memory for traps (me).
The spikes sprites are a meme by this point, but why must all of them be poop? It’s kindergarten humor and you’ll have to endure it to the end. Still, what I love about Racic is that the upcoming sequel has “poop spikes addressed”, raising a middle finger to all. What can we do? Legend.
It’s a game that you can flush down the toilet, but it manages to do exactly what it aims to do: culture a little, restore the old Kayin days (who unironically gets trashed today) and makes you laugh. I laugh a couple of times, to which Racic said: “I don’t mind about your final Cochran rating: you’re having a good time and that’s enough for me”.
You have my respect, good sir.
34 Favorite Games
369 Cleared Games