Hi Carl, thanks. I was indeed forgetting the control key on the trip hazard, ---- wooopse!
As for the box sliding, what the issue was is that my finger speed seemed much faster than the game tracking. In fact now that I've tried and completed the demo mode on all three difficulty settings, I can say the game has an unfortunate floor which makes it too easy.
the sound events in the game, ieg, sliding your box over, and attacking the enemies, take a long time, and the game stil tracks keyboard in put while your hearing them.
this A, made it feel a litle bitty, in that everytime an enemy appeared it seemeed to totally stop all the pipe fitting business, and also made the gam far too easy, sinse you could be pressing buttons while sounds wer playing. A perfect example of this is hammer hitting, where I could basically just hammer my controls as much as poss without caring or counting, and just stop when the game had tracked enough hammer hits, ----- thus making my hammer hitting a bit like a machine gun.
In fact the only time things became hard was on level 6 and 7 of Madrid, --- the hard setting, sinse to compensate for the easy nature of the game the water speed had to be increased exponentially to the point where if I got a pipe which was 6th or 7th in the box, I'd simply drown before I got there however fast I was.
It just became really a game of chance at that stage, ---- ie, whether the fitting pipe was one of the first four or five which i had time to go through.
the cutesy sfx are rather nice, and i'm amused by the enemies and litle intermissions, but all in all I can see this one quickly devolving into a game which i'd blitz through on easy or normal difficulty, and which i'd only complete on hard with the right amount of pure dumb luck.
An interesting point made in one of the retro articals I read recently which was made about some of the old avoidence based platformers on computers like the comador 64 and Amstrad and some of the later Atari systems, ---- games like jet set willy, manic miner and indeed the original Montizuma's revenge, was that the games had! to be unbelieveably hard.
sinse back then those tapes only had a maximum of about 64 K to work with, the devs couldn't include a huge amount of in game content, and so compensated with difficulty to give the game a decent playing life.
I remember myself at the age of 5 or 6 being overcome with joy because I'd got to the 3rd level of Rowland on the ropes on my amstrad, ---- a randomly generating platform game which only had! five levels and only five enemy types, ---- one extra one introduced per level.
Because of all the hard work I'd put in getting there, those litle pink fast moving bats on level 3 were a major reward.
While of course these days audio ambience is mega important, it does strike me that the arcade style games with enemy types could sometimes do with more difficulty in the harder settings, ---- and not just increased random death chance.
this could be faster normal enemies, or in fact extra, harder enemies (with accompanying different sounds of course), which of course would be an enticement to players like me who especially love seeing all that there is to see in a game to play ther harder difficulties.
some games such as Tarzan jr and indeed tom's platformer did this very well, ---- others though such as the pipe games and hunter I'm less convinced of.
The dementor and goblin in Sarah would of course be great example of this sort of thing, ---- but classifying Sarah as an arcade or basic action game would be sort of like calling starwars Darth vader just another man in a black boiler sute, ---- which would probably result in him applying the all powerful Darkside choke!
anyway such are my thoughts. Beware the Grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
