Now half way through Splosion Man, think I might like it better than NSMB on DS.
Bought Splosion Man a few days ago. Hot damn, it’s hard in places! But the core dynamic such a blast (ho ho) that I keep trying time and time again to get past difficult sections long past the point I’d have thrown the controller against the wall with most other games. Now, back to the quest of catching Jon Danger’s score…
http://www.xbox360achievements.org/news/news-3218-Microsoft--Buy-All-The-Summer-of-Arcade-Titles--Get-800-Points-Back--US-Only-.html
Buy all the games and get 800 points added to your account. I was planning on getting 3 or the 5, this will make me give more thought to the other two.
Man. Every time I quite 'Splosion Man, it’s because I hate the game so much I want to scream.
But that’s also because I can’t make myself quit the rest of the time.
Strangely Splosion Man doesn’t aggravate me, even when I die a lot. Now compare that to something like Mirrors Edge, oh how I HATED that game at times. Even the Mario games ticked me off more.
The game only aggravates me when it feels unfair. Sometimes you will just be a millisecond off of a jump and it just gets me angry. The game can be brutally unforgiving.
There definitely are a few parts where they should have added a bit more leeway in there. The speed sections with rising water are particularly bad in that regard.
But once you’ve figured out the optimal way of doing those speed sections, you rarely fail on them ever again - that’s one thing I like about it, believing something to be impossible causes you to experiment and discover another nuance or technique.
What drives me crazy are sections where I know exactly what I need to do (because I’ve learned it by dying a few times), so I do it and there’s no checkpoint, so I get another section that I have to learn by dying a few times (which means re-doing the first part), and no checkpoint, so another section… etc. And any small mis-time along these long sequences means I have to play the whole part over. My latest quit was during a level with those flying laser robots (which seem to move semi-randomly). It’s mostly frustrating and tedious, and I don’t feel like I’m getting better at the game doing this stuff over and over.
You know you can splode those flying laser robots, and use them to launch yourself higher? They seem to regenerate so it’s only a temporary fix, but it’s often enough to get past some jumps that are otherwise very frustrating.
Did anyone else get Rocket Riot? Did we talk about it already? It’s awesome. It’s like “Geometry Worms.” Zipping around in faux-pixel destructible landscapes, like a worm with a jetpack, but firing in all directions with the right stick like Geometry Wars (or whatever we call that genre). Lots of different game modes, but fun for just deathmatching too. I don’t have any people around to try it out, but it looks like it might be a fun party game too since you can do multiplayer locally.
I grabbed Rocket Riot,it’s a good game to zone out with.
Almost done with Splosion Man, about half way done with world 3. I think for the most part the checkpoints are really well placed. There’s a few sections that could have used an extra one though.
krayzkrok and I played a bit of multiplayer Splosion Man yesterday – it’s pretty fun. Lots of stuff that requires cooperation, timing, etc.
They add a new control for multi-- the left trigger puts a big 3-2-1-boom countdown timer on screen to make it easier to synchronize actions. Which is especially helpful when the other guy doesn’t have a headset :)
I was buying four of the five already. Don’t know what Trials HD is, though.
I found my headset! We should try that again. I couldn’t figure out why sploding together caused me to fly seemingly randomly left or right, though - I don’t know if it was a lag issue, because it needs to be predictable.
I’m on 3-18 now, the final boss. Sheesh, I hate boss fights. But the rest of “world” 3 were easily my favourite Splosion Man levels, just awesome fun. I’ll always hate “world” 2 because of 2-9 and 2-11. Grrr. Definitely my favourite platformer since Braid though.
Trials is the worst best game ever. I think there’s a demo on Steam, called Trials 2. I bought the full version, and most productivity stopped at work for about a week while everyone played and tried to get best scores/futhest in levels.
Finally beat Splosion Man yesterday. The final boss was an absolute bitch, but it was worth it to see the absolutely bonkers end credits.
If you haven’t, make sure you go into options and configure your controls. a) you’ll chuckle, and b) you’ll get an achievement :)
Trials HD is out, and it’s amazing.
I had played Trials 2:SE a bit before on PC and enjoyed it, but in my mind this is a type of game really well suited to consoles. As good as it was on PC, playing a well-polished, feature-rich version of Trials on the big screen while sitting on a couch blows it out of the water.
In my opinion the best thing about Trials HD is the wonderful leaderboard integration. It’s very much like Geometry Wars 2 in that you find yourself chasing the next highest score on your friends list. It’s almost better though, as the game updates you on how you’re well you’re doing against them in real time, just like a good racing game should. There’s a reason I still get addicted to Geo Wars 2 from time to time, and it looks like this could easily incite the same high-score fever.
The game also comes with a fantastic level editor. I’ve played around with it a bit, and it’s surprisingly powerful and full-featured. The multiple layers of depth for obstacles and various special properties that can be applied to items give plenty of room for creativity.
Add a ton of polish and plenty of fantastic pre-made levels, and you’ve got a winner.
Brakara
1800
What Vincent said. I’ve never actually played Trials before, and only done the beginner and easy levels, but so far it’s really good. I did take a sneak peak at a few of the levels at medium and hard, and some of them look just crazy. Like one of the hard levels, where a guy on my friends list got 254 faults and spent 24 minutes before finishing it.
There’s also skill levels, which are fun. And the leaderboards integration is even more visual here. E.g., like in the level where you balance on top of a rolling ball and you can see the names of your friends where they fell off.
