I have, like, 100 keys on my keyboard. Why on earth do people write games where the user interface degenerates into typing codes with the arrow keys? This is not a console game. There is no reason I should have to remember that up-up-down-right escapes from some monster or whatever. If I wanted to show off my skill at remembering codes, I'd play a memory game, not an action game.
@dogboy But you *do* die! It's just that it has no effect other than removing your power-ups. Why bother introducing death into the game at all? Either have a game where you don't die or a game where you do; having a game where you kind-of die but it doesn't really matter makes no sense.
This is a beautiful game and the music suits it very well. My problem is that, in trying to be non-competitive and non-threatening, you've also removed any sense of achievement in the player. It's just a case of flying around, collecting stuff and, if you die, the game says "Yeah, whatever" and leaves you to carry on. So the only feedback you get is that, every now and again, you get some random reward. Except, there is a threatening aspect to the gameplay. er was I, happily collecting stuff and suddenly, an unexplained red thing comes along and kills me. What's with that? That just makes the player angry -- why didn't you tell me that red things would kill me? Why don't you tell me what the power-up things are?
If you got 30,000 points and killed the king quickly, just wait for the badge of the day. It might take a while -- I went for a shower and the badge was there when I got back.
Oh. If you complete every castle in whatever number of shots (which usually isn't very hard), you get a new weapon that lets you destroy almost any castle in a single shot. So then you can go back and get golds on everything you missed first time around. That's a bit disappointing, really.
I seem to be in a minority here but I found this game to be a huge disappointment. It's billed as this amazing thing where you can choose your own path through your tentacular, monstrous life but, in reality, you have one choice to make, three times: a human comes; you either help it in the only way you're allowed to or you drown it. It's completely linear. You can't do anything the programmer hasn't explicitly let you do: you can't even give balloons to the humans; you can't interact with the plane; you can't reach the random stuff on the beach. A particular disappointment is that, after playing through the game several times to try to get all five endings is that two of them are essentially the same (spoiler written backwards: seodeprot yb dna senim yb dellik gnieb). I'm amazed that, not only does Wikipedia have an in-depth page about this game but also that it says that Kongregate paid the author "several thousand dollars" for this. *boggle*
"Meatboy is hard". No it's not. It just has truly awful controls and physics that leave the game unplayable. Beating Garry Kasparov at chess is hard but this game is like trying to beat a five-year-old at chess while wearing boxing gloves: it's perfectly obvious what you need to do but physically impossible to do it.
There's something very wrong with the difficulty curve, here. On my first play of the game, I got through the first three levels without a single enemy reaching any base. The game was so easy I was getting bored of it. And then level four wiped me out completely. What's with that?
You know what sucks the hardest? When you demolish a whole castle and there's one guy lying in the wreckage, supporting literally half of the weight of the castle on his body but somehow he doesn't die.
Nice game but the upgrade system could maybe use a little work. After five or six levels, the $100 bonus for completing the level becomes really puny. Level 17 only netted me about $1000, but, by the time I was there, none of my available upgrades cost less than $1200.
OK, so I'veo nly done the first three levels so far. But wy, oh why, do I have to double-jump to get up anything but the tiniest little ledge? It seems that double-jumping is necessary almost every time you need to jump onto something. WHY?!?
I hit Print Screen as close as I could to the moment I died and pasted the screen shot into an image editor. Examining the RGB values of the individual pixels, I plotted the exact line where the teacher's vision ended. It was 25 pixels away from the edge of my blue circle and the blue circle is only 20 pixels across. There is no way the teacher was moving quickly enough to cross that 25 pixel gap between me pressing Print Screen and me dying. Conclusion: you die even when you're not in the green region. Epic, epic fail.
Given how much of this game is just sitting around watching the AI do its stuff, it would be nice if that AI wasn't quite so monumentally, execrably stupid. It's really annoying when a penguin decides to target a turtle on the other side of a wall and just sits there getting shot to death because it's too dumb to walk around said wall or to decide to target turtles that walk right past it.
I find this rather dull -- sorry. As a driving game, there's not enough going on to keep me interested. The speedometer says I'm driving at 60mph and the car looks red but it feels more like O. J. Simpson in a white Bronco.
Just a minute. If it doesn't matter how many asteroids hit the planet, why build an anti-asteroid gun? The only thing it's protecting is itself -- if it wasn't there, it wouldn't be needed! :-P
The game's author assures me that, although some upgrades have so little effect and cost so much that they make you take longer to win the game, this is not a bug caused by a rushed coding cycle leading to inadequate playtesting. Oh, no. It's a deliberate design decision. Riiiiiiiiiight.
Here's the thing: it might be fun to write a game in 72 hours but the result probably won't be much fun to play. The upgrade system here has not been thought out properly and has huge problems. Here's an example. At one point, I spent about 400 stars on upgrades and I went from earning about 100 stars a night to 130 stars a night. That means that it would take about 13 nights for my upgrades to show a profit, when it only takes ten nights to earn the required 1000 stars at 100 a night! But it's worse than that. I already had 400 stars so it would only have taken six nights to win the game if I didn't buy the upgrades. But, because I bought them, it took eight more days to win (1000/130 = 7.7). The so-called "upgrades" actually downgraded my position! (OK, I'm an idiot for not just buying more time but it hadn't occurred to me that the game would offer upgrades that would slow me down.)
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Thanks for the feedback. Have you try to buy some Top Speed ugprades ? Actually, the game become more fast and dynamic after a few garages.