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 destroy the pluto
Ef, I just got two petitions that were present throughout the entire game. A) I know you have sunlaoqq's design as an influence, with one save per room. Definitely this builds up consistency in the player, and also skills, which is appreciated, but not all screens justified this. Some sections were trivial to do again until reaching the hardest jump of the screen, and these were always placed at the end of each screen. It was frustrating. Each save did feel like "Yes, I did it!" because the experience is cool, but it was also relief not having to go through it again. B) The game is TOO dark. This had been an issue before. You're an inch away of making a neon game and the game doesn't shine (in both terms of the word) simply because the lighting is too low. I couldn't appreciate well the visual aspect of the game, and yes, I stumbled upon some mini-spikes around the borders of the screen that killed me, realizing they were THERE. I'm not blind, so I know this. The Kid has the proper clarity, on the other hand. I felt I was appreciating half of the game I could have. Also, why make the borders a killer zone? Except for the lower border, the other ones were bothersome to some extent. Literally fix these two problems and we would have a game 18%-20% better (think of 6.2 maybe, which is on par with Thenader2's best games in my book).
It is still recommended. I am glad I (temporarily) finished this series with the best entry of them all, and I didn't expect that. Be the Pluto keeps crashing for some reason and Be the Earth lags A LOT. I'll have to wait for a PC upgrade.
For: I wanna be the Neptune
I normally give the rating of the easier difficulty in all of my entries and then specify the difficulty of a harder mode in the review. Nevertheless, that is not the story here. You first walk into the game, and encounter not only astoundingly easy needle (consider a difficulty of 15 until you clear it), but the most bizarre and nonsensical level design ever. There are "skips", but then there are paths that you can take that have absolutely no danger. Why? Why is there a gate in front of me that I can easily jump over it? This is acid.
Then you clear the game with, most probably, 5 deaths or less, and you scratch your head, because it took you 3 minutes.
Well, this is not the game.
Extra is NOT unlocked by making the game on Nonono mode (aka Impossible). It is unlocked by going into the walls of the clear screen, particularly the right wall, climbing up to the text and entering the "G". Surprise! You stumble upon the same screens, but buffed; it turns out the game wasted your time with a prototype of what was actually the true game: TAS jumps, planes, corners, diamonds, diagonals and many 16-pixel gap drops. The most generic way to make a game harder has this fangame as a textbook example. The design still remains bad, although a wee bit more interesting. This is not saying much at all, since the game is bad by essence. Music is ok-ish and doesn't suit the mood at all, the background, although colorful, looks poorly designed and it actually resets(!), the bottom of the screen is black, blocking your view of The Kid's shoes to calculate your align and the tileset design cannot be seen sometimes because of the brightest spots of the animated background. Needle and visual design are a real pain.
Also, in this new section, the curve is such a mess that can barely be described, and save placement is endlessly head-scratching. The most notorious screen is the one I uploaded: no saves. The next screen after that (or two after that, can't recall and I just barely played the game lol) makes you go through to corners in succession. You hit a save. Then you make a diagonal and there's a save. My jaw dropped. What was world thinking?
Not recommended unless you're an incurable completist like me. I have no remedy, but even the fangames I rate this low, I somewhat enjoy playing them. I like fangames in general, so it's all on me.
For: I wanna be the Uranus
For: I wanna be the Saturn
Not recommended. There are better games in this ""series"". Good music tho.
For: I wanna be the Mars
So far, this is my second highest rated game in the Solar System ""series"" for two main reasons: it is consistently inventive with jump choices and the visual design is completely appropriate. Venus did well with the visuals, and so did this game for feeling "in another planet". The game consists in two stages. Stage 1 has the least interesting level design, but it is more pleasant aesthetically and the best tileset and background effects. It also includes an autoscroller "chase" sequence that, imo, should have been included at the end of the game for a better sense of closure; a climax, if you wish.
Stage 2 has horrendous visuals (again, why do people keep grabbing the brown standard ground tileset of IWBTG and make it transparent and of another color?) and a particular obsession with placing platforms beneath horizontal needles to refresh your double-jump ability and placing the hardest jumps right at the end of the screens. However, level design is more interesting despite the platforms obsession. It has unusual jumps, some of them overly precise for comfort, and each next screen is quite unpredictable, just like Stage 1. Again, the last platforming screen of this stage doesn't "feel" like the last one until you realized you just finished the game. The sequence I highlighted above should have been placed for ending this stage.
Corrections? I do have suggestions. First, I know the version 1.1 was buffed, and the Read Me reads "minor level changes". I just watched a YouTube clear of this and the minor buffs make a whole lot of difference, especially in the first screen of Stage 2 (SPECIFICALLY the last jump before the warp), which was hell itself (felt like Needle Satan in terms of cruelty). They were a detriment to the game. But I will accept the possibil... err.. the fact that I do suck at needle. The rest of the corrections are spoiler-related. After finishing Stage 2, the tileset changes to the original one again, but with a more pleasant color and effects. This design for Stage 2 would have been beautiful. Finally, they implemented a low-gravity gimmick towards the ending. "Awesome", I said. "How will Stage 3 be with this? It should be exciting?" It turns out it doesn't exist. It was only a tease.
Music is nice, design is nice, difficulty is brutal at parts and the overall difficulty curve is a post-apocalyptic mess. It feels like several people did their homework separately without knowing who did what and how, and one guy just put everything together in a questionable order.
Despite this, I recommend the game. Be warned that the average difficulty, at least for me, does not fully reflect on the complexity of the jumps. They are well made, but buffs did harm the game when they were evident and overtly repetitive.
34 Favorite Games
369 Cleared Games