Delicious FruitElCochran90'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
ElCochran90
For: I wanna Survive
For: I wanna Survive
Too reliant on its memes and childish offensiveness for its own sake. The game literally insults you and deletes your save file on Savage mode. Memes are high-school stuff, so I mimic Jumpyluff's reaction.
When it isn't playing around, however, it offers nice variety and a remixed soundtrack featuring famous Nintendo music pieces. The highlight is the 81-89 section. However, every 10 rooms, you get a boss, and none of them are funny or memorable. They might be intended to be trollish, but some of them really don't seem like it. So every section, you don't know what to expect: either a troll moment or a serious moment. Sure, that might have "the element of surprise", but it literally destroys the purpose of having bosses because they make you waste your time. So, you're left with the option of focusing on the platforming, which is consistently fun and might pose a serious challenge for beginners, so seek somewhere else.
Speaking of beginners, this is how pieceofcheese87 receives new blood in the community. NOT COOL.
The soundtrack is ace, though, and the final piece in the 91-99 section is the best.
[0] Likes
When it isn't playing around, however, it offers nice variety and a remixed soundtrack featuring famous Nintendo music pieces. The highlight is the 81-89 section. However, every 10 rooms, you get a boss, and none of them are funny or memorable. They might be intended to be trollish, but some of them really don't seem like it. So every section, you don't know what to expect: either a troll moment or a serious moment. Sure, that might have "the element of surprise", but it literally destroys the purpose of having bosses because they make you waste your time. So, you're left with the option of focusing on the platforming, which is consistently fun and might pose a serious challenge for beginners, so seek somewhere else.
Speaking of beginners, this is how pieceofcheese87 receives new blood in the community. NOT COOL.
The soundtrack is ace, though, and the final piece in the 91-99 section is the best.
Rating: 4.4 44
Difficulty: 40 40
Apr 15, 2019
ElCochran90
For: I wanna be the Lucien Needle
For: I wanna be the Lucien Needle
It might only be 25 floors in total, but when I saw the message by Lucien stating that he didn't want to finish this game at all, it broke my heart.
Gorgeous design, cool soundtrack, inventive jumps that do require previous knowledge and experience, everything assembled into 25 screens, the project does feel incomplete with only three designs. This is 25% of the game I wish it was, but unlike Thenewgeezer, at least Lucien didn't swear he would complete this game, making us wait for nothing :(
I wouldn't underrate this in terms of difficulty just because of being shorter than usual. Its short length feels not-so-short when you witness an exponential difficulty curve towards the second half. It even requires a corner jump (which is the easiest thing to do, yes, but wouldn't know if you're barely beginning to play fangames). Nevertheless, it is creative and pleasant.
Recommended for a short, incomplete, yet chill ride.
P.S. Lucien, would you please finish this? Many of us would be so thankful. I wanna increase my rating.
[3] Likes
Gorgeous design, cool soundtrack, inventive jumps that do require previous knowledge and experience, everything assembled into 25 screens, the project does feel incomplete with only three designs. This is 25% of the game I wish it was, but unlike Thenewgeezer, at least Lucien didn't swear he would complete this game, making us wait for nothing :(
I wouldn't underrate this in terms of difficulty just because of being shorter than usual. Its short length feels not-so-short when you witness an exponential difficulty curve towards the second half. It even requires a corner jump (which is the easiest thing to do, yes, but wouldn't know if you're barely beginning to play fangames). Nevertheless, it is creative and pleasant.
Recommended for a short, incomplete, yet chill ride.
P.S. Lucien, would you please finish this? Many of us would be so thankful. I wanna increase my rating.
Rating: 4.9 49
Difficulty: 45 45
Apr 15, 2019
ElCochran90
For: I wanna PP 100
For: I wanna PP 100
I hear a lot of comparisons with Celebrate 100, and I think that's fair. This fangame aims at being a beginner's challenge and draws a lot of inspiration from Mega Man 1, an underrated and brutally challenging NES classic.
The game 'tries' variety but it is frankly a mess, including the bosses. The aesthetics can be bothersome to the eye and there is a sort of candy/rainbow section that has the same looks for the blocks and the spikes, complicating your calculations. The background is entirely colored with Microsoft Paint and changes with eye-piercing colors in shape patterns. It looks attractive for the first 10 seconds but it hurts your eyes later.
Platforming is fine, especially towards the ending, but I find its replay value low. The entire experience is uneven, changing between more "modern" designs and Mega Man 1 again. I would have prefered the bosses to have NES sprites instead of SNES like the levels did. I personally found the second to last boss more difficult than the last boss, even if the latter had instances of unfair RNG.
I wouldn't recommend either for beginners or for veterans it despite the entire game having alternate routes that, half of the times, shorten the route. Celebrate 100 was also a mess, but at least it had an interesting final battle and the good kind of stupid. This game's constant shift of styles, most of them that harm gameplay, is my main complaint.
Also, I would like info on what the 76-85 floors music is. The credits list it as "IWKTHappil2 02 Stage" but I'm sure it does have a source. It really rocks (and doesn't quite fit the section it is used in here either).
[0] Likes
The game 'tries' variety but it is frankly a mess, including the bosses. The aesthetics can be bothersome to the eye and there is a sort of candy/rainbow section that has the same looks for the blocks and the spikes, complicating your calculations. The background is entirely colored with Microsoft Paint and changes with eye-piercing colors in shape patterns. It looks attractive for the first 10 seconds but it hurts your eyes later.
Platforming is fine, especially towards the ending, but I find its replay value low. The entire experience is uneven, changing between more "modern" designs and Mega Man 1 again. I would have prefered the bosses to have NES sprites instead of SNES like the levels did. I personally found the second to last boss more difficult than the last boss, even if the latter had instances of unfair RNG.
I wouldn't recommend either for beginners or for veterans it despite the entire game having alternate routes that, half of the times, shorten the route. Celebrate 100 was also a mess, but at least it had an interesting final battle and the good kind of stupid. This game's constant shift of styles, most of them that harm gameplay, is my main complaint.
Also, I would like info on what the 76-85 floors music is. The credits list it as "IWKTHappil2 02 Stage" but I'm sure it does have a source. It really rocks (and doesn't quite fit the section it is used in here either).
Rating: 3.4 34
Difficulty: 40 40
Apr 15, 2019
ElCochran90
For: I wanna QoQoQo
For: I wanna QoQoQo
So... THIS was the game I was supposed to play. Difficulty now makes sense, since I died 17,000 times less than in Qoqoqo 2, and it only took 105 minutes to clear. There is a world of difference between this and the sequel.
I find it painful that this game does start with empty rooms gradually placing some spikes here and there, making the first 40% of the game very uneventful. After screen 25 there is a troll boss, which made me scratch my head for two things: sunlaoqq is good for making needle designs, and it is a freaking troll boss. After that, every 12-13 screens the theme changes and I didn't find them particularly appealing, but the difficulty curve was enjoyable and well balanced. Soundtrack is forgettable and you can't tell whether if the game is trying to be serious or not.
This was definitely a stepping stone for Qoqoqo 2, a near-masterpiece of needle that frustrated me with a now popular and not amusing experience. That game, however, shines because of its extraordinary level design, something that would be taken to a new extreme of genius with the third part at the expense of having an unplayable difficulty (opinion has it the "easy ver" is less difficult, but I don't know if anything has been butchered, so I don't know if the """easy""" version also provides the complete experience). The last 10 screens of Qoqoqo 1 are a good introduction for the kind of design that you will have in Qoqoqo 2, but that ride is recommended for experienced fangamers. This modest delivery saved the best for last and, in my humble opinion, bosses weren't necessary at all (also shockingly easier compared to the overall needle difficulty and all of them can be cleared in a 1st try).
Recommended very lightly and only for 100F fans and/or needle fans, but there are much better deliveries out there.
[2] Likes
I find it painful that this game does start with empty rooms gradually placing some spikes here and there, making the first 40% of the game very uneventful. After screen 25 there is a troll boss, which made me scratch my head for two things: sunlaoqq is good for making needle designs, and it is a freaking troll boss. After that, every 12-13 screens the theme changes and I didn't find them particularly appealing, but the difficulty curve was enjoyable and well balanced. Soundtrack is forgettable and you can't tell whether if the game is trying to be serious or not.
This was definitely a stepping stone for Qoqoqo 2, a near-masterpiece of needle that frustrated me with a now popular and not amusing experience. That game, however, shines because of its extraordinary level design, something that would be taken to a new extreme of genius with the third part at the expense of having an unplayable difficulty (opinion has it the "easy ver" is less difficult, but I don't know if anything has been butchered, so I don't know if the """easy""" version also provides the complete experience). The last 10 screens of Qoqoqo 1 are a good introduction for the kind of design that you will have in Qoqoqo 2, but that ride is recommended for experienced fangamers. This modest delivery saved the best for last and, in my humble opinion, bosses weren't necessary at all (also shockingly easier compared to the overall needle difficulty and all of them can be cleared in a 1st try).
Recommended very lightly and only for 100F fans and/or needle fans, but there are much better deliveries out there.
Rating: 3.9 39
Difficulty: 55 55
Apr 14, 2019
ElCochran90
For: I wanna qoqoqo 2
For: I wanna qoqoqo 2
[Edit November 2: 2020. Deleted in December, 22nd while making my GBC review. It served no purpose.]
--------------------------------------
Before I go insane...
Hi. I am Edgar Cochran, a novice in fangaming yet, and I have a long story to tell.
I know. You probably don't come here to read long stories. You come here to interact with the community in fun ways and discover new fangames with the aid of quick reviews and average ratings of quality and difficulty. However, this fangame changed my fangame life for all the right and wrong reasons, where the wrong probably overcome the right. But it is probably the other way around. I haven't decided. It did me well, but I suffered a lot in the process.
No, it wasn't the difficulty. Allow me to explain.
As I said, I'm a beginner in fangames whose greatest achievement yet is to finish I Wanna Sunspike in less than 45 minutes and first-trying the final boss like 5 times (and beating her several times now). I can handle my gates and diagonals. I sort-of handle my corners and diamonds. I hesitate with double diamonds and, for some strange psychological reason, I can't do block double diamonds consistently (even if, theoretically, they might be easier). Planes drive me crazy, but Celebrate 100 encouraged me to do my first plane 3 months ago OPTIONALLY and that ability to choose gave me the courage to try one 100 times and nail it. Now I am building strategies for planes.
Ok, so after being (not) famous in this community for making Sunspike my third fangame ever and dying slightly less than 30,000 times, I learned about this site in August of last year (2018) and about an intended way to do things. There is a natural order. A difficulty ladder exists and that is why beginner recommendations exist.
So I do this since summer of last year: I built a queue, exported it to Excel and sorted it by lowest to highest rating. If a new fangame appears in the meantime that catches my interest, I happily add it and insert it in the corresponding row according to its difficulty rating. Currently, I am gaining confidence in the 50-59 difficulty spectrum. After stumbling across Appreciate the Meteor Stream and testing my patience to no end (I have covered around 80% of those glorious 13 minutes), I decided to take a break and make a second investigation for easier fangames again to chill, and then proceed with the difficulty ladder. My genre of choice? X_floor games. I like them.
I searched for Conquer the Blow Game and happily clicked the X-Floor tag I put myself in my review. Then I sorted by lowest to highest difficulty, and chose those that had more than 15 reviews. Two games catch my attention: Qoqoqo Origin and Qoqoqo 200 (aka Qoqoqo 2). I don't know what my brain did, but I queued three games thinking they were two (I don't do drugs). It turned out I queued Qoqoqo 100 also without noticing along the other 12 picks I chose. Given the lack of a release date for Origin, I am led to believe this is the first installment, and Qoqoqo 200 is the sequel "with a difficulty around 57". So I beat Origins and reviewed it in January of this year. I play 200 thinking it was the sequel and I wasn't heard of again...
I promise this gets better.
The first floors surprise me in how intricately designed they are. They require a lot of brainwork to decipher a correct route, and the difficulty felt slightly aggressive, but nothing I couldn't handle after the training provided by Thenader2's well-made neon experiences. I pass the first 25 floors and I feel successful, but my mind was fixated with a "57 difficulty rating", so I think that the difficulty curve must have a low slope.
Enter the 130s and I perceive and advanced difficulty. I begin to be scared. This is not normal. It is a big difficulty change, but I proceed, visually keeping track of my deaths.
Enter the vine gimmicks at the 140s (hate vines in general) and I learn, the hard way, two things: a) you can actually change the height of vine jumps (I had no idea), and b) this is not the game that was meant to be played YET. However, I have a flaw: I cannot leave things unfinished, be it a movie, book or game (except Appreciate the Meteor Stream; that was made by the devil). So I say: "You have Sunspike in your side: you can handle a Veteran experience. It won't be the first time." So I proceed.
By the time the gray 160s arrive, they punch me in the face with full force and a striking obsession with multiple diagonals. Like, diagonals everywhere. Drop gates too, for good measure, but not as much as those hundreds of diagonals. Therefore, I develop Skillz and handle my multiple diagonals and the unbearable pressure of finishing entire screens without a single intermediate save. You must do screens with one single try each.
Enter the 170s. Enter hell itself: Water gimmicks with frame-perfect jumps and even multiple downward planes in a row with water gravity. My hands hurt; my heart freezes. I come to a point where I say: "I will never replay this brutal game again, so I don't deserve to be a fangamer. However, I will beat this".
And finally, my breaking point came: THE LEGENDARY SCREEN 172. Yeah, it has an underwater corner and multiple diagonals in a row underwater. But that isn't what changed my life, my dear SUNLAOQQ (you reading me sunlaoqq??). What scarred me for life is that I hit the save located at the upper left corner of the screen in a particular frame that actually registered The Kid as being on a non-existent left, black screen. I die, so I hit R. I immediately die again. I hit R again while pressing RIGHT so that I can avoid dying and resave on a better spot. I die. I close the game in fear, re-open it and load my game. I die. Finally, I make sure to hit R and RIGHT at the exact same frame. I inevitably die. If I keep pressing R, The Kid dies 15 deaths per second.
7,087 DEATHS REPRESENTING 9.4667 HOURS OF MY LIFE WASTED!!!!!
I bail on the game for a couple of days and get back to work, because I suffered through screens that I swore I would never suffer through again. However, sunlaoqq stood out for two reasons: his amazing level design and incredible music choices. The variety was pleasing and pleasantly-looking, even if more than the first quarter is just the same, but the amount of thought behind the design of almost every screen, including the 4X4 puzzle of the 130s, was very unusual.
And then I begin to think about what that game actually did for me: improving my needle skills significantly. After much thought, I decide to restart a very intimidating fangame that was out of my league... or so I thought. But, somehow, this sentient game begins to challenge my patience: "traps" appear. Unintended ones. I begin to die in badly programmed ways I hadn't died before: Screens 110, 117 and 124, decide, this time, to kill me in the last jump. It turns out that if you align yourself with the wall of the blocks at both extremes, you can die: you enter into a huge empty room and can spot out how the classic "smoke" sign that takes you to the next screen expanded in size like in Microsoft Paint. Funny, but not funny, especially screen 124. That hurts. The game was definitely resisting. Is the game mocking me for retrying??
I re-enter the 160s reluctantly: brutal, merciless, one-save-per-screen needle with a huge amount of diagonals. I pass the unthinkable 170 and 171 screens, and reach 172, the screen that ruined(?) everything. I save VEEEEEERY CAREFULLY after an army of diagonals on the right side, and proceed with the game. Then I paused and saw if there was a difference between the first and the second playthrough:
2,426 less deaths
4:36:25 quicker
That's a lot for my standards.
Screen 174 particularly shocked me because, towards the end, there is a jump that requires you to go through three minispikes. I pass through what I consider is the toughest part of the entire game (yup, harder than the last section), and enter the infamous, maligned 180s with its gravity gimmick. It was fun and very creative, and with screen 188 I was cheering (it has lots of time skips too), but several people hate it and I can see why. I saw it as very fun and amusing, and a breath of fresh air after what is still, for me, brutal needle.
And then, a legendary moment comes, a moment I consider one of the most memorable in fangame history: 191-199. It is a miracle, as miraculous as the 100% version of Go Across the Rainbow that Cultured grabbed in the Stage Rush section. It's like if the game was saying: "I'm sorry for everything!". sunlaoqq provided a map in the download folder, but my best recommendation is this: When you reach it, close the game and continue it another day. Make sure 191-199 is a one-day experience and be very attentive to everything you do. Be very observant and remember what you have done and the saves you have hit. It won't be as difficult as it sounds because the entire huge section is never repetitive. That is amazing. I wasn't attentive two times and had to repeat entire sections two times. No harm done, because it was never boring. To top it all, this section features the fantastic song "Weekend" by Dick Reichardt, featured in the film Kokowääh 2 (2013). Yeah, I know my cinema.
During my second playthrough, I appreciated at an even larger extent the genius of the level design. I will not exaggerate with this statement: I think it is on par with Majora's Mask Stone Tower Temple. I am not even kidding. sunlaoqq should be taken seriously as a smart and original level designer, with some flaws. Did I already mention an obsession with diagonals? Fix that.
If some flaws were fixed, this would be, in my book, a masterpiece of needle. I agree that my lack of fangame experience interfered with how I reacted to the game destroying more than 9 hours of personal effort, but it is a fatal flaw that should be fixed. SCREEN 172, upper-left save. Don't save too much on the left. Remember that. Also, fix screens 110, 117 and 124. Rating has been greatly affected because of those "tiny" flaws that can be fatal.
FINAL ADJUSTED RESULTS:
17,795 deaths
21.7333 hours
ONE LAST NOTE: I came to a point where the final jump of the 191-199 section is visible. I saved the game there, and I noticed what could probably be a major skip. It is a tough horizontal-gate/corner jump difficult to describe, followed by a very precise second jump to reach the "smoke" to reach the final clear screen of the game. Was it my time to take revenge? It sure seemed. I took it, and with my basic pixel-align knowledge, I calculated the best align for the corner, made a tiny jump, went through it and BOOM! I beat the game. Justice was sort-of done. I became very enthusiastic about that major skip and went to YouTube to see if anyone had found it. It turns out one of our earthly gods, the good Paragus, had already done it (and of course made it in much less time than me). Well, you can't be the discoverer of anything, but I am proud I saw it and attempted it by myself, being able to make the most difficult, unintended, beat-the-game jump I have ever done.
So, sunlaoqq, we cool, but you sure owe me a cookie. I didn't bail on your game. If you send me an MP3 file of the song at the 140s vine section, which I can't find anywhere even by name, we will be friends again :)
THANKS FOR READING!!
Update for March 2020: I already found the song. It is "Inner Twilight" from the OST of Sen no Kiseki II. You never replied. We are OK still, but not replying was kind of poopy. You still owe me that cookie.
[15] Likes
--------------------------------------
Before I go insane...
Hi. I am Edgar Cochran, a novice in fangaming yet, and I have a long story to tell.
I know. You probably don't come here to read long stories. You come here to interact with the community in fun ways and discover new fangames with the aid of quick reviews and average ratings of quality and difficulty. However, this fangame changed my fangame life for all the right and wrong reasons, where the wrong probably overcome the right. But it is probably the other way around. I haven't decided. It did me well, but I suffered a lot in the process.
No, it wasn't the difficulty. Allow me to explain.
As I said, I'm a beginner in fangames whose greatest achievement yet is to finish I Wanna Sunspike in less than 45 minutes and first-trying the final boss like 5 times (and beating her several times now). I can handle my gates and diagonals. I sort-of handle my corners and diamonds. I hesitate with double diamonds and, for some strange psychological reason, I can't do block double diamonds consistently (even if, theoretically, they might be easier). Planes drive me crazy, but Celebrate 100 encouraged me to do my first plane 3 months ago OPTIONALLY and that ability to choose gave me the courage to try one 100 times and nail it. Now I am building strategies for planes.
Ok, so after being (not) famous in this community for making Sunspike my third fangame ever and dying slightly less than 30,000 times, I learned about this site in August of last year (2018) and about an intended way to do things. There is a natural order. A difficulty ladder exists and that is why beginner recommendations exist.
So I do this since summer of last year: I built a queue, exported it to Excel and sorted it by lowest to highest rating. If a new fangame appears in the meantime that catches my interest, I happily add it and insert it in the corresponding row according to its difficulty rating. Currently, I am gaining confidence in the 50-59 difficulty spectrum. After stumbling across Appreciate the Meteor Stream and testing my patience to no end (I have covered around 80% of those glorious 13 minutes), I decided to take a break and make a second investigation for easier fangames again to chill, and then proceed with the difficulty ladder. My genre of choice? X_floor games. I like them.
I searched for Conquer the Blow Game and happily clicked the X-Floor tag I put myself in my review. Then I sorted by lowest to highest difficulty, and chose those that had more than 15 reviews. Two games catch my attention: Qoqoqo Origin and Qoqoqo 200 (aka Qoqoqo 2). I don't know what my brain did, but I queued three games thinking they were two (I don't do drugs). It turned out I queued Qoqoqo 100 also without noticing along the other 12 picks I chose. Given the lack of a release date for Origin, I am led to believe this is the first installment, and Qoqoqo 200 is the sequel "with a difficulty around 57". So I beat Origins and reviewed it in January of this year. I play 200 thinking it was the sequel and I wasn't heard of again...
I promise this gets better.
The first floors surprise me in how intricately designed they are. They require a lot of brainwork to decipher a correct route, and the difficulty felt slightly aggressive, but nothing I couldn't handle after the training provided by Thenader2's well-made neon experiences. I pass the first 25 floors and I feel successful, but my mind was fixated with a "57 difficulty rating", so I think that the difficulty curve must have a low slope.
Enter the 130s and I perceive and advanced difficulty. I begin to be scared. This is not normal. It is a big difficulty change, but I proceed, visually keeping track of my deaths.
Enter the vine gimmicks at the 140s (hate vines in general) and I learn, the hard way, two things: a) you can actually change the height of vine jumps (I had no idea), and b) this is not the game that was meant to be played YET. However, I have a flaw: I cannot leave things unfinished, be it a movie, book or game (except Appreciate the Meteor Stream; that was made by the devil). So I say: "You have Sunspike in your side: you can handle a Veteran experience. It won't be the first time." So I proceed.
By the time the gray 160s arrive, they punch me in the face with full force and a striking obsession with multiple diagonals. Like, diagonals everywhere. Drop gates too, for good measure, but not as much as those hundreds of diagonals. Therefore, I develop Skillz and handle my multiple diagonals and the unbearable pressure of finishing entire screens without a single intermediate save. You must do screens with one single try each.
Enter the 170s. Enter hell itself: Water gimmicks with frame-perfect jumps and even multiple downward planes in a row with water gravity. My hands hurt; my heart freezes. I come to a point where I say: "I will never replay this brutal game again, so I don't deserve to be a fangamer. However, I will beat this".
And finally, my breaking point came: THE LEGENDARY SCREEN 172. Yeah, it has an underwater corner and multiple diagonals in a row underwater. But that isn't what changed my life, my dear SUNLAOQQ (you reading me sunlaoqq??). What scarred me for life is that I hit the save located at the upper left corner of the screen in a particular frame that actually registered The Kid as being on a non-existent left, black screen. I die, so I hit R. I immediately die again. I hit R again while pressing RIGHT so that I can avoid dying and resave on a better spot. I die. I close the game in fear, re-open it and load my game. I die. Finally, I make sure to hit R and RIGHT at the exact same frame. I inevitably die. If I keep pressing R, The Kid dies 15 deaths per second.
7,087 DEATHS REPRESENTING 9.4667 HOURS OF MY LIFE WASTED!!!!!
I bail on the game for a couple of days and get back to work, because I suffered through screens that I swore I would never suffer through again. However, sunlaoqq stood out for two reasons: his amazing level design and incredible music choices. The variety was pleasing and pleasantly-looking, even if more than the first quarter is just the same, but the amount of thought behind the design of almost every screen, including the 4X4 puzzle of the 130s, was very unusual.
And then I begin to think about what that game actually did for me: improving my needle skills significantly. After much thought, I decide to restart a very intimidating fangame that was out of my league... or so I thought. But, somehow, this sentient game begins to challenge my patience: "traps" appear. Unintended ones. I begin to die in badly programmed ways I hadn't died before: Screens 110, 117 and 124, decide, this time, to kill me in the last jump. It turns out that if you align yourself with the wall of the blocks at both extremes, you can die: you enter into a huge empty room and can spot out how the classic "smoke" sign that takes you to the next screen expanded in size like in Microsoft Paint. Funny, but not funny, especially screen 124. That hurts. The game was definitely resisting. Is the game mocking me for retrying??
I re-enter the 160s reluctantly: brutal, merciless, one-save-per-screen needle with a huge amount of diagonals. I pass the unthinkable 170 and 171 screens, and reach 172, the screen that ruined(?) everything. I save VEEEEEERY CAREFULLY after an army of diagonals on the right side, and proceed with the game. Then I paused and saw if there was a difference between the first and the second playthrough:
2,426 less deaths
4:36:25 quicker
That's a lot for my standards.
Screen 174 particularly shocked me because, towards the end, there is a jump that requires you to go through three minispikes. I pass through what I consider is the toughest part of the entire game (yup, harder than the last section), and enter the infamous, maligned 180s with its gravity gimmick. It was fun and very creative, and with screen 188 I was cheering (it has lots of time skips too), but several people hate it and I can see why. I saw it as very fun and amusing, and a breath of fresh air after what is still, for me, brutal needle.
And then, a legendary moment comes, a moment I consider one of the most memorable in fangame history: 191-199. It is a miracle, as miraculous as the 100% version of Go Across the Rainbow that Cultured grabbed in the Stage Rush section. It's like if the game was saying: "I'm sorry for everything!". sunlaoqq provided a map in the download folder, but my best recommendation is this: When you reach it, close the game and continue it another day. Make sure 191-199 is a one-day experience and be very attentive to everything you do. Be very observant and remember what you have done and the saves you have hit. It won't be as difficult as it sounds because the entire huge section is never repetitive. That is amazing. I wasn't attentive two times and had to repeat entire sections two times. No harm done, because it was never boring. To top it all, this section features the fantastic song "Weekend" by Dick Reichardt, featured in the film Kokowääh 2 (2013). Yeah, I know my cinema.
During my second playthrough, I appreciated at an even larger extent the genius of the level design. I will not exaggerate with this statement: I think it is on par with Majora's Mask Stone Tower Temple. I am not even kidding. sunlaoqq should be taken seriously as a smart and original level designer, with some flaws. Did I already mention an obsession with diagonals? Fix that.
If some flaws were fixed, this would be, in my book, a masterpiece of needle. I agree that my lack of fangame experience interfered with how I reacted to the game destroying more than 9 hours of personal effort, but it is a fatal flaw that should be fixed. SCREEN 172, upper-left save. Don't save too much on the left. Remember that. Also, fix screens 110, 117 and 124. Rating has been greatly affected because of those "tiny" flaws that can be fatal.
FINAL ADJUSTED RESULTS:
17,795 deaths
21.7333 hours
ONE LAST NOTE: I came to a point where the final jump of the 191-199 section is visible. I saved the game there, and I noticed what could probably be a major skip. It is a tough horizontal-gate/corner jump difficult to describe, followed by a very precise second jump to reach the "smoke" to reach the final clear screen of the game. Was it my time to take revenge? It sure seemed. I took it, and with my basic pixel-align knowledge, I calculated the best align for the corner, made a tiny jump, went through it and BOOM! I beat the game. Justice was sort-of done. I became very enthusiastic about that major skip and went to YouTube to see if anyone had found it. It turns out one of our earthly gods, the good Paragus, had already done it (and of course made it in much less time than me). Well, you can't be the discoverer of anything, but I am proud I saw it and attempted it by myself, being able to make the most difficult, unintended, beat-the-game jump I have ever done.
So, sunlaoqq, we cool, but you sure owe me a cookie. I didn't bail on your game. If you send me an MP3 file of the song at the 140s vine section, which I can't find anywhere even by name, we will be friends again :)
THANKS FOR READING!!
Update for March 2020: I already found the song. It is "Inner Twilight" from the OST of Sen no Kiseki II. You never replied. We are OK still, but not replying was kind of poopy. You still owe me that cookie.
Rating: 5.6 56
Difficulty: 80 80
Apr 14, 2019
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