[slamo]

in reply to: Second impressions #12231

I kind of have mixed feelings about this one. The control scheme is really clever and opens up the game to some unique situations you normally wouldn’t see in a run ‘n’ gun. The weapons are mostly good, although the starter laser weapon gets outclassed by the enemies fairly quickly. I also enjoyed the powerups, especially the jetpack (the speed bonus was good too but hard to use effectively).

I do agree that the level design, specifically the battle setups, is where the game loses me. At first the game is pretty fair but quickly devolves into spamming as many enemies as possible at you. Some of their projectiles really tear through you quickly and are not reasonably dodge-able. I feel like I had to get lucky or know what’s coming ahead of time to win some encounters, which I’m not a big fan of. One lesson I had to learn was that it’s not always worth trying to kill everything, sometimes the best thing you can do is just run.

While some encounters left me thinking “What do they expect me to do?”, the frequency of save points was enough for me to save scum my way through almost all of the game on Normal difficulty. I’ll admit to some transgressions: on the second to last level I had to lower the difficulty to get through the last part, and I hacked the game to give me more flamethrower (?) ammo for the final boss.

Overall, I’m glad I played it but will probably not recommend it for most people unless you’re a big fan of the run ‘n’ gun genre.

[slamo]

in reply to: Bugs that allow cheating #12038

I actually tried the trick with the roads in the ocean! I bridged a one-tile water gap between islands and it does make a funny little dirt road in the water, but the game doesn’t actually let you use it unfortunately. Upgrading it to rails doesn’t help either.

However, some (useless) glitchy behavior I noticed is that if you put a water transport unit on top of this water road and then try crossing it, the unit enters this weird glitch state where it turns invisible instead of blinking when it’s ready to move. You can still move it from there, it’s just weird that it briefly can’t be seen at all.

[slamo]

in reply to: Tool-assisted speedrun #12022

The final score was 1666, or 33% – better than Simon Bolivar! Just a population of 10,000 though.

On a side note, it turns out it was faster to go into the options and turn off the palace cutscene, I haven’t updated the video but I’ve submitted the new input file to TASVideos.

[slamo]

in reply to: Fury of the Furries (1993) #11985

I played Pac-in-Time back when I was a kid, which is mostly identical to this game except I think with the last world removed. This game is super interesting and has a lot of character to it that keeps it from getting too repetitive, I think this is well worth dedicating a month to.

[slamo]

in reply to: First impressions #11977

That’s how I played through the game as well, I mapped the joystick controls to a gamepad – right stick for movement, shoulder button for fire, and pressing down the right stick to target. Definitely need the left hand free for the numerous keyboard controls. It was obviously not the most graceful way to do it, but it was good enough to get me through the original campaign missions (first 7 battles). The expansion missions, not so much.

[slamo]

in reply to: First impressions #11943

I’ve been enjoying this so far, despite the difficulty. I do agree that some of the training missions are strangely brutal, but it does force you to learn some tough lessons in energy management and prioritizing what targets to focus on. The debriefings after failing do give some solid advice as well. I got stuck somewhere in the third tier of training missions and just decided to start the campaign – it seems like the game more or less teaches you what you need to know within the first two missions of each ship. I got through the first battle and am having a better time now. There is the option to lower the difficulty if needed, but I’m going to stick with Medium for now.