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I would love to play the game but I have a gray area covering most of the playing area except for the very top and bottom and it does not matter what graphics options i have i can not get it to go away
It would be cool wouldn't it. I was planning on a mode where you could just select your own weapons and just have one really long level, but time and budget were against me I'm afraid. Thanks for taking the time to play and comment on the game, cheers.
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Side note: When using the keyboard controls, it is literally impossible to dodge the large bursts of bullets (X/V/C w/e shape) fired by one of the bosses that appears from stage 9 and onwards when it roams around the middle of the screen because the player ship can't move fast enough. It's possible to evade when the boss is farther away, or to use defensive pods and try to punch through, but otherwise its a death-sentence. Evasion is a cinch with the mouse though.
It was always built as a mouse controlled game, I only added keyboard support due to the complaints about the lack of it in the first one. Looking at the stats the vast majority of players are using the mouse, but yes the keyboard controls are slightly week in comparison.
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The graphics have evolved, but the game-play has fallen apart. Yes this game looks great, and I respect the work that went into it, but it feels very disparate. The 3D background gives the game a totally abstracted sense of spatial movement in 3D while the engine fire on the player ship suggests "upward" movement, and then there's the geometric enemy movement. It's like the game can't decide which way to go. Pacing is also all over the place -- quite a few enemies travel faster than player bullets, and so does the player ship (via mouse control). The music is also less "driven", with lighter drums, and softer synth (I replayed DN8 to compare). By comparison, DN8 had abstacted graphics that freed it from spatial cohesion, had faster player bullets, and an overall more intense (thus fun) game experience -- something DN:8 Pulse lacks.
A really excellent review, thank you. - Just to elaborate on my reply, I don't agree with all your points, but this is what a good review should be, it should make the developer think. Reviews help all developers so much, and we all read all of them.
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The additional hardware rendering (which prompts the warning) does not add to the gameplay at all). I noticed the re-used sound effects from Sega's rail-shooter game "Rez." Was that an intentional tip of the hat to that game?
Funny you should mention Rez, we did want that fantastic interactive sound they have, but just ran out of time to do it ( I left it too late thinking it would be easier than it actually is ). But no, we didn't lift any samples directly from it. Thanks for taking the time to comment.
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Now i can play the game too, and can say 3 of 5. The graphics are ok but the 3D enviroment looks a bit undynamic like a background-Movie. Influences of own movements would change this. The music is ,... thankfully i can turn it off. Make better a longer loop. A good music makes 20 % of a game! And good sounds gives another 20 %. If a game is bad, it can still make fun if the musik is great. And a good game can be downgraded by bad music. If you make at least medium music, i would give 4 of 5 or higher.
Thanks for the re-review. I really do understand everyones frustration who couldn't play it before. My attitude wasn't "Tough, you should have a better machine. Like me", it was a case of "Its not going to work well for everyone, and we'd rather you didn't waste your time playing it if its going to suck on your machine". Major lesson learned in explaining that in future.
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@Photonstorm: "Technological ignorance" is not the same as "having not enough money to pay a new computer". Not everyone can afford every 2 Years a new machine just for having the possibility to play games which cost even more money. If you have, be lucky and hope that you have it also in the future. But dont complain about people who feel bothered if they are excluded because they have just not enough money, and never forget, you could maybe in future time also in such a situation.
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If the game won't load because of a version limitation, just DON'T RATE IT. Don't slam him with 1/5 for a version incompatibility.
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I loved the original and this one is just as good. Use of Stage3D keeps it (mostly) smooth as butter and the lovely background visuals intact.
Unfortunately the use of Stage3D also appears to be drawing plenty of comments from technically ignorant blockheads. Such is life.
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by the sound of it i am missing out, kongregate sems to have issues with adobe, even if you have it installed some of the time it will still ask you and the game wont play...anyways judging by the coments its my kind of game so still 5/5
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I played on the harder path and upon unlocking the "5 lives" perk, played the next level with 3 lives. Confused, i turned off the perk and played the next level with 1 life. Did you do this on purpose? Did you explain it somewhere? Did I just miss it?
It sounds like a bug to be honest, when the perk unlocks you should get 5 lives ( Well +2 more than what you've got at that moment ). Thanks for flagging that up, I'll look into it.
< Edit, fixed in 1.1, thanks again for mentioning it >
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I hate it, if someone tells me, that my computer is to slow and just prevents loading. So i give also a 1 of 5. By the way, flashgames with far better graphics are running on my computer perfectly and lag free. Maybe you should work more often on increasing perormance. The newer computers make programmers lazy. Even crappy games get more and more computing intensive.
*sigh* It's not a question of performance, my code or the "slowness" of your computer. stage3D is only compatible with certain graphics cards, it either works or it doesn't depending on your GPU. If it doesn't work then Flash enables running the game in software mode, which is where the CPU has to act like the GPU. This is really slow in comparison, and would make the game pretty much unplayable. So my options are to do what I've done, bring up a message explaining it won't work, or bring up a message saying the game is going to play really badly, and let you play it ( Even though it would perform worse than a normal Flash game ). It's not a case of laziness, messing with textures, bump mapping, light sources etc. takes a lot longer than a normal Flash game. We wanted to use stage3D as it enabled us to do new things, we also knew we were going to get a lot of 1/5's because of it. Hopefully this explains things a little better.
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GamingYourWay, I rate games the same way. If there is something that prevents them from being playable to me, I rate them as such. I don't need to consider anyone else's gaming experience but my own. Your target market may not be able to experience this game the way it ought thanks to your chosen medium, and as a result, sorry that you'll be missing out on the cash that I'm sure you were gunning for.
No, we just want it judged fairly. If you play the game and think it sucks, then fair enough, it's not going to make everyone happy. But judging a game without playing it, that seems kinda off to me. Yeah I know it sucks loading a game only to be told you can't actually play it, and we chose to use stage3D knowing that it was going to cause issues for some players and we expect a backlash because of that, but it still doesn't mean I don't have the right to reply to glib comments that don't really benefit anyone.
So I guess it didn't work on your computer ? So you didn't actually get to play it ? So the 1/5 rating is just a way of showing your disappointment that you wasted your time loading it, rather than a review of the actual game. That seems fair...
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I'm getting the same error as some others. The game sounds very awesome, but I can't give a game I can't play a very high rating. I'm already feeling generous for giving this game 3 stars.
Sorry mate, there really is nothing I can do about it. I'm hoping that as more stage3D games come out portals will start highlighting them as such so no one wastes their time if their machines can't run them.
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Exellent. Love the auto-slowmo instead of paus, really genious! The glowing effect on the bad guys bullets are perfect; easy to distinguish them from your own, dodge etc.
The hitbox is great, it would have been easier if it where at the front part of the ship, but hey now I have to think :P
Would like to see a couple of more upgrades or perks, though :) (I'm a sucker for upgrades)
Cheers mate :) We could have added more upgrades / perks, but to be honest with you we weren't sure how well a game which uses stage3D would go down, it's a bit of an unknown, and we could have invested way more time in it only for lots of people not to be able to play it, which would have been a huge waste. I'm already expecting a huge backlash of 1/5 votes from players whose GPU isn't supported by Flash.
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"defaulted to software rendering-this game does not support this due to poor performance"
If i would have the money for a good PC, i would not play Flashgames. F** U!!!!
"F** U!!!" ? Really ? Good job you've not gone too over the top about not being able to play a free game, otherwise you could have made yourself look really petty. Phew, that was close.
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"defaulted to software rendering-this game does not support this due to poor performance" Really? Ive play so many other games on here, many with very high quality graphics with no issues. But this games graphics are so good the require better?
No, the game uses stage3D ( GPU acceleration ). If your graphics card doesn't support it then Flash will fall back to using a software renderer, which will perform so badly that the game won't be worth playing. We felt it was better to put that message up and not to let anyone play a really awful version of the game.
I can only apologise, it's out of our hands, but the next version of Flash will support more graphics cards.