YaBoiMarcAntony's Profile
Send a PMJoined on: Apr 26, 2020
Bio:
I used to be here four years ago but I left. I was Guitarsage2k/Parallax5.
These fangames mean a lot to me (attempt at order)
1. I Wanna Kill the Kermit 3
2. I Wanna Walk Out in the Morning Dew
3. I Wanna Be the Volatile Presence: Stagnant Edition
4. Crimson Needle 3
5. I Wanna Kill the Kermit 2
6. I Wanna Figure
7. Phonotransmitter
8. VoVoVo
9. I Wanna Reach the Moon
10. untitled needle game
11. I Wanna Burnmind
12. Domu
13. I Want To Meet Miki
14. I Wanna Go Across the Rainbow
15. Alphazetica
16. I Wanna Stop the Simulation
17. I Wanna Hydrate
18. I Wanna Be the Ocean Princess
19. I Wanna Vibe with the Gods
20. I Wanna Be the Vandal
21. I Wanna Pray to the Platform God
22. I Want
23. I Wanna Pointillism
24. I Wanna Be Far From Home
25. I Wanna Be the RO
I've submitted:
275 Ratings!
236 Reviews!
5 Screenshots!
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275 Games
236 Reviews
For: Everhood Colonel
Everhood Colonel is Watson's second go at the avoidance genre, his first being Destroy the Yeezy. I cannot speak to the quality of that game thanks to it NOT having an easy mode and thus blocking out a plebian like me from enjoying its lovely offerings, thus leading into my first massive compliment to Everhood: an easy mode! As a less-than-great avoidance player, I find myself rather sad to see so many excellent avoidances blocked off from me thanks to my lack of skill. This isn't a design flaw, it's merely the state of affairs for avoidance; most of the truly great avoidances are the ones that are truly difficult (there are exceptions, but they are few and far between to me). Everhood Colonel recognizes this problem and what does it do? It gives us amateurs a mode which makes this brilliant, truly awe-inspiring avoidance accessible to us!
Speaking of this brilliant and awe-inspiring avoidance, I'd like to discuss it at length, as a review would entail.
Everhood Colonel is chock-full of inspiration and evocative attack patterns, all of which synergize perfectly with the chosen song, and what a fantastic song it is! Naturally if you want to like an avoidance, you want to like the song, but there are a fair number of great song avoidances in just okay or even mediocre avoidances - the real difficulty lies in figuring out how to set attacks to these songs that best match the energy and feeling of the song. This is what is most important to me in an avoidance, this facet is what defines whether or not I will enjoy an avoidance, and Watson has shown off that they have an absolute mastery of the concept.
The song feels tailor-made to the avoidance itself, like one could not and SHOULD not exist without the other. Watson has made physical (as physical as something on a computer screen can be) the very essence of his chosen song, something made clear to me within the first few minutes of play. This is what I love most about the avoidance genre, and it's something that I didn't really understand until a few months ago when I started getting more heavily into them. There is nothing like the pure ecstasy of a moment within a genuinely special avoidance, nothing matches the adrenaline-pumping beat to beat flow of a masterful avoidance, nothing at all. The very best are like concentrated hits of dopamine prepped and ready to go in just a second. This is shown in spades through Everhood Colonel, a mere 2 minute romp that felt like a whirlwind of pure energy and catharsis. From attack to attack, the heart will not one return to a resting position - instead, it shall go ever faster until the end at which point you find yourself careening off a precipice because of how quickly it all comes to a screeching halt, leaving you mangled and broken at the bottom of a cavern in pure glee at the impeccable experience you just found yourself apart of.
If this is what Watson's making on his second (released) attempt, then I'm afraid nearly all other avoidance makers will be obsolete before the year is up.
12/9/2021 Edit: Beat it on Standard mode, you can now see how the difficulty rating reflects that.
For: I wanna buy the shungite
For: I wanna be the Udon
Good!
For: I Wanna Duloxetine
Duloxetine represents all the good in fangames, both in terms of gameplay and in terms of the very creation of a fangame. In essence, I find this to be a celebration of the variety one can find within fangames as each stage is fairly different from the other in terms of design and even within each stage, there's a large variety in what you're doing. I Wanna Save My Boy has this sort of variety though it does not have the soul that Duloxetine has in my eyes, a soul given to the game through the little touches such as the various bits of block art in Abstractions or the snakey fellow in Hollowed Ground. Insofar as screen-to-screen gameplay is concerned, you really don't quite know what you're gonna get thanks to how willing tamano is to just toss an idea in and see how it fits. One might argue this breaks the cohesion of the game, but I find that semi-lack of cohesion adds an atmosphere to the game that it may not otherwise have. Each stage is markedly different from each other, but they all feel like different aspects of the same mind, one that follows a thought to its conclusion and then can jump to something entirely different within the blink of an eye.
The game is obviously personal to tamano (dono) and though what exactly the meaning of most aspects of the game is not quite clear to me, it doesn't make a difference because that personal nature gives the game that soulful touch which separates it from other fangames of this ilk. Tamano states that they're not a particularly capable person in many ways, but that they took what they had and threw it in a blender to try and make this game, something which I find really speaks to me as someone with similar difficulties of expression. While I will not say I've experienced anything close to the life that tamano has (I just don't know what life he's led) and that I've suffered similar issues as him, I will say that expression is a highly difficult thing to undergo just because of how difficult the options are. I may be good at music and writing, but those skills have nothing to do with the creative aspect of those hobbies as it is vastly more difficult to write a song or poem or story or anything that expresses my thoughts and emotions than it is to just play someone else's song or to write some essay for a class or what have you.
Fangames, however, benefit strongly from their ease of creation, something which separates it from most other forms of media. While it does certainly take skill to create a fangame, the barrier for entry is so much lower that really anyone can just head in and make something. Crimson Needle 3 features this concept in mind of just trying out any sort of idea that comes to mind and following those ideas to their natural conclusion, ideas which really took no coding know-how to create. While Crimson Needle 3 is about different emotions and whatnot, that core of exploration remains the same within Duloxetine, the exploration of odd concepts and ideas just to see them through to the end even if it seems silly or abstract. As such, you can really tell tamano's love for fangames within Duloxetine, a love which I feel myself and as such love the game itself more for it.
There may not be anything particularly fancy or shiny within Duloxetine, but it makes up for that with its soul and character as well as its interesting and highly enjoyable gameplay. I Wanna Save My Boy shares very similar ideals to this game and while that is a more well-designed game, I find this one to hit closer to the mark thanks to how comfortable and homely Duloxetine is. This game is honest, an open book that doesn't try to make jokes or cover up its genuine feelings, it is an expression of thought and emotion that I don't think I could find anywhere else but within fangames. Duloxetine is, in short, an expression of love.
For: Crimson Needle 3
I feel as if there is no point in describing the positives and negatives of CN 3 because they're all well known by this point. 31 is no longer a revelation, the highly experimental nature of the game is a well-established fact, the game no longer finds itself in a position of being a surprise. In fact, I wasn't even here during all the hullabaloo surrounding the release of CN 3; I was a late-comer to the party! Of course, I myself am no stranger to fangames - in fact, I was apart of the community near the beginning, if not the beginning altogether (my memories remain fuzzy in this regard). Nonetheless, I left in 2016 and didn't come back until April of 2020, choosing Crimson Needle 3 as I believe the first game to try that released in my absence. I had never been a great fangame player, and four years of rust ain't nothing to sneeze at, so I had a lot of difficulty with even the first 30 screens. I did stick it out, though, despite how difficult it was for me, and so I came to floor 31. As I said before, I wasn't here to experience the controversy/excitement of release week, and so I knew nothing about CN 3 by this point. Imagine, then, showing this game to someone back in 2016, someone that didn't even begin to consider just how far fangames could go. This was more or less the context for my floor 31 experience. To say it was one hell of a ride is a bit of an understatement. For 50 hours, I toiled away at floor 31, all the while being utterly astounded by everything I was experiencing. I spent seven long hours in Wonderful area, lamenting my inability to beat the last two screens but inevitably doing so, as well as spending a similar amount of time in Golden area. Clearing the double diamond secret took me four hours in which I could feel every single passing second, but I did it. I worked so hard to beat floor 31 that just seeing the warp upon getting every letter was a moment of ecstasy in its own right - and then came the 70s.
At least, the first four levels.
I spent a decent amount of time grinding out 73, that being the first real challenge, and I did eventually clear it, I did! 74 was a great challenge for me as well, but then something awful happened, something truly horrendous - I factory reset my computer. Now, something I didn't know at the time was that games made in Studio store their saves in the AppData folder, something that was wiped in that factory reset. So, I found myself with a lost save and a broken heart. I could have just asked Plasma for a new save, but I decided to do something far more difficult and time-consuming, I decided to do it all over again!
My second playthrough through floors 1-31 was a much smoother experience, but it was just as incredible as the first. This is the sort of game you could play over and over again and come to love it more and more every single time through - even with the loss of that first playthrough experience, you find yourself introduced to this new, even greater love, that of familiarity and experience. You may develop a great sense of love for someone you've only just met, but that love is multiplied tenfold as your relationship with them grows deeper. As you come to know their various secrets and quirks, you realize much more clearly what it is about them that makes you love them so fiercely. This is what my replay of CN 3's first half taught me.
All told, it took around 20 something hours to reach my previous best in CN 3, that of floor 74, thus beginning the final grind, that grind towards the end. Truth be told, it was not hugely eventful, though it was no less exciting for me. While the excitement of floor 31 was over and done with, there was a new source of joy to draw from in going from floor to floor, each one vastly different from the other, so on and so forth until I found myself at the bad end screen. Though it was an ending of sorts, it felt strangely empty. I was happy with all that I had done, but it was naturally not the ending that I wanted - I needed to see this out to the end.
91-99 feel vastly different from everything before. Though they hold the same design philosophies and general aesthetic, they feel so much more magnificent than what came before, holding the weight of their finality. In my time playing these floors, I was so happy to be coming to the end, but each successful screen was one step closer to just that - an ending.
I've become rather familiar with endings in the past year or so. My life has gone through so many changes, and so much of what made me happy before is gone. The chapter of my life in which I lamented so much while missing all the ecstasies which crowded around was done with and I wanted nothing more but to go back and re-live those times forever. The loss of my mother of course fuels this want even more, but I miss the times when I would ride to school with my best friend and we would share music with each other, or when we would go to church and sing to each other on the way there. I miss the bus rides to a band competition and just shooting the shit with my friends, lost in the happiness of relationships. I miss being in political science and just never really caring about anything because I was around people that I loved, or performing stupid church songs while I listened with more love in my heart than I've ever felt to my best friend singing those saccharine songs. Most of all though, I do miss coming home and telling my mom how my day went. All things, however, come to an end, whether or not you want them to. I will never get those times back, I will never again experience any of these things, and that's okay. Though these times may have come to an end, they will never be forgotten - and in that sense, they go on forever.
I waited a long time to actually sit down and beat the final floor of Crimson Needle 3. It was intimidating, to be sure, but more importantly I just didn't want it to be over. This was something that I had been experiencing more or less for over a year, so to say goodbye to something like that was difficult for me. But, all things must come to an end, and we can only hope that immutable ending is as fantastic as that which came before it. And of course, that is the case for Crimson Needle 3.
Beating Crimson Needle 3 is the hardest thing I've ever done. It was a journey which took me through more than any other game, and it was all created by just a few people. I am so thankful for this experience, and though I mourn the ending, I shall always celebrate this journey of mine.
9 Games
Game | Difficulty | Average Rating | # of Ratings |
---|---|---|---|
A Sky Blue Denouement | 89.8 | 8.2 | 5 |
April is the Cruelest Month | 85.0 | 8.8 | 16 |
I Wanna Flying Disc | 91.5 | 9.3 | 4 |
Frankie Teardrop | 2.2 | 6.0 | 10 |
I Don't Wanna Dwell | 69.2 | 7.3 | 14 |
Nebulous Thoughts | 80.3 | 9.1 | 30 |
Strewn Detritus | 69.0 | 7.3 | 14 |
The Sunken Cathedral | 70.0 | 8.2 | 25 |
I Wanna be the Ziggomatic Drukqs | 70.5 | 7.3 | 9 |
48 Favorite Games
256 Cleared Games