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Piscythe

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game	Piscythe's comment
Aug 25 03:21:00		Supreme Tower Racing	This wasn't a bad idea, and I liked your use of multiple paths to open up options for scoring players. My score was 258, and I feel as if I could improve that with practice. Unfortunately, a lot of the skill was learning the jump controls, which I found to be rather unwieldy. While the graphics weren't exceptional, I enjoyed the audio environment presented.
Aug 25 03:28:00	7m 00s	Star Garden	The seeming persistence of the stuff people do is a good solution to the problem of a limited audience. While I see the realism of the spaceship controls, the momentum made it difficult for me to perform "oh that looks cool I'm going to check that out" behavior, which is how I expected to interact with the world.
Aug 25 03:41:00	13m 00s	Phase Shift	I saw this in the blog, but reached it through the rating system. The game did a very good job of creating a constant feeling of danger and I loved the dimension-warping mechanics, but things often felt random - I would get stuck with no time to find a way out.
Aug 25 03:44:00	3m 00s	Third Law	I found this to be simple and fun.
Aug 25 03:48:00	4m 00s	Transforce	I couldn't play because the game detected a controller when I don't even own one. I've messed with simulating controller input, so maybe it was residue from that.
Aug 25 03:52:00	4m 00s	Upside Down	Suicided into a wall around 150 kills. Never saw anything as a threat. Liked the weapon setup.
Aug 25 05:03:00	1h 11m	Rift Walker	I liked most of the mechanics, but the jumping seemed inconsistent. Many unexpected deaths resulted from not being able to see what was on the other world and warping into spikes or a pit, and I found it was quite possible to materialize inside a platform. The level design and graphics were good, though, and the music was quite atmospheric.
Aug 25 05:31:00	28m 00s	Hell On Earth	Solid oldschool shooter you have here. (Says the guy who hasn't played any classic FPS.) Zombies took annoyingly long to kill with the stick and pistol, but that made getting the deathgun really satisfying. The graphics style worked really well and there was a definite sense of danger (especially considering how close I had to get to hit zombies with my stick.) I died twice to batswarm right before the end, and when I got an ending I had to alt+f4 exit. Still the best game I've played so far.
Aug 25 05:35:00	4m 00s	SWARM	I think this might actually have worked better with chunkier pixel graphics - like a retro arcade. The soundscape and gameplay give this game a hectic arcade atmosphere, and I think that's its biggest strength.
Aug 25 05:40:00	5m 00s	Planetary Conformity	I was unable to play the windows download. It first told me that MSVCR110.dll was missing, and when I downloaded a copy and put it in the folder, it gave me an unable to start message (0x00000c7b.)
Aug 25 05:58:00	18m 00s	Processed Goods	I've tried this a bunch of times and never made it past 1 robot. I don't even feel as if I'm improving. I think either I'm missing something, I'm not good enough at time management, or this game is just too hard.
Aug 25 06:10:00	12m 00s	Annex Worlds	I liked the annex/healing mechanics, but I had serious lag issues playing this and my computer isn't exactly bad.
Aug 25 17:20:00	11h 10m	Sandbox Battle	All the boxes stick to the bottom right corner. I tried both links and there wasn't a difference.
Aug 25 17:29:00	9m 00s	Quoduonda	The heavy movement restrictions made it difficult to move around and observe my effects on the environment. The abstract puzzles were an interesting concept, but were usually a variant of "mess with switches until something works." Still, I think this could have been a lot better with more freedom in motion and camera angle.
Aug 25 18:01:00	32m 00s	Boulder Toss	Overall this was good and engaging. As others have said, the lack of hand-holding and general forgiveness worked really well here. The boulder-throwing mechanics were interesting, but it was often hard to navigate the paths once I made them. Most of the puzzles were fun, but the final ascent up the tree was tedious because I kept having to go back down to fetch more boulders. I tried throwing them up into the branches to speed things up and that kinda helped, so props for letting that kind of thinking work. Maybe some kind of telekinetic boulder fetch would help there.
Aug 25 18:17:00	16m 00s	Nemesis	There's something innately satisfying about using a planet as a flail. I'm not sure how the scoring system is supposed to work because, due to the procedural generation, scores from different games aren't necessarily going to be comparable. The particle effects when you slam a huge planet into a sun are so cool though.
Aug 25 18:29:00	12m 00s	Invasion of the Squares from the Fifth Dimension	Wouldn't a 5-dimensional square be a hypertesseract? (10 'sides' each side is a tesseract.) This was a simple, fun shooter. I didn't think that the harder difficulty was actually harder than normal because you got the 5-way shot right from the start, while in normal you had the single shot for the first half, making things harder.
Aug 25 18:58:00	29m 00s	EBDA	Delightful. The graphics were good and the planet-hopping was really fun once I got the hang of it. The regular enemies were cool, though I found myself wishing I could just hold down the fire button. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to approach the bosses though - strafing didn't seem to be working all that well for me. I liked how the shooting/movement mechanics added chaos to navigation - you never know exactly where you'll end up when a fight is over. I'd love to see this expanded. I can just imagine trying to fend a swarm of space bats away from a planetoid or something.
Aug 25 21:07:00	2h 09m	Spirit Aerie	That was an interesting experience, once I got the hang of it. I liked the puzzle mechanics, and I don't think a lose state was necessary for this particular game, but I never really got a handle of the exact interaction between my actions and the game world. I noticed tiles getting dropped, and saw the tractors removing tiles, but I didn't understand how my animal nurturing translated into new green tiles. I did play it through to the end, and I was surprised at the tension near the end. "Will I get that last tile THIS time?" I liked the cyclic tension/relaxation dynamic.
Aug 26 01:32:00	4h 25m	OlymPlanets	The minigames were mostly fun, and the slug race had me grinning. I won all four on the first go. My main complaint is that the competition didn't seem quite as grand as I'd expect from an interplanetary Olympics. More visual and audio presence from the crowd could have helped with that, but would have been difficult to do in the time allotted. Still, it was entertaining and visually appealing, so high marks in those categories.
Aug 26 05:00:00	3h 28m	TwitForce	I thought the main mechanic was interesting, if a bit of a stretch with the theme (connect the worlds of the game and twitter or somesuch.) I wasn't able to test the implementation because I don't have a twitter. As for what mechanics I did see, it seemed solid until I realized I was in no actual danger. Enemies shooting at the player would fix that.
Aug 28 20:31:00	63h 31m	bats: fish invasion	I like the mechanics and concept here, but figuring out how to play was tricky even with instruction. It was annoying having to click the portal to switch between sending wimpies to be burned and sending grunts over to the fish world. There were sometimes collision bugs with enemy units flying straight past mine, but in the absence of such I found that if a single wimpy reaches your base, it can totally lock you down - even grunts don't seem able to stop it.
Aug 28 20:59:00	28m 00s	Fiscally Judicious	Being a stereotypical evil corporate overlord is apparently harder than I expected. I spent most of the game scrambling to stay alive as the people died and rebelled all around my company. The 1-action-per-turn limitation only made it harder to avert disaster, and I was itching for a way to deselect all commands. The take on corporate themes presented was quite refreshing, and I think that was this game's biggest strength.
Aug 29 00:47:00	3h 48m	Humanoid	This game doesn't give you the tools to effectively avoid the enemies presented, and once the enemies were exhausted I didn't find the platforming enjoyable either. The music and sound were good, but hearing the same two voice clips over and over for no apparent reason got tiring.
Aug 29 01:06:00	19m 00s	Connection Lost	The grid crafting is cool, though it could do with stacking and item movement/removal. The core top-down gameplay was fine for the most part, but the fight with the green enemy was rather confusing. Also, only mentioning the recipes in one dialogue each was not enough for me to memorize them - I'd recommend giving the player a reference sheet for recipes they've found. Still, not bad at all, and it has the potential for interesting expansion later if you can find ways to make it unique.
Aug 29 03:16:00	2h 10m	Just an Otter Game	I'm impressed you made this in 48 hours! I've seen a full game with a similar interaction between retro worlds, (Mega Mash by Nitrome,) but that game had very distinct borders between worlds. Here, the worlds rip and tear at eachother, creating a very neat effect and causing some tricky and interesting gameplay. Unfortunately, I did encounter a bug here, where I fell from Otter Mario's world into an Otter Zelda lake and got stuck, but most such cases result in player death. However, I had to use the level skip cheat to get past levels 3 through 6. This had nothing to do with Otter Zelda or Otter Space Thing, both of which had fine gameplay and tight controls. The problem was Otter Mario, who controls like an otter coated in lubricant, slipping and sliding around the stage, off platforms, and into instakill pits. This was the character I had to use for star sections, where I'd need to travel a certain distance before the star wore off. The sharply limited time I had for this meant that I had to hurry, and I'd either slip once and thus not have enough time, or slide into a pit and have to start the level over. While at least the game is forgiving enough to give more stars, I still found that the timing requirement was beyond my capabilities. Still, there were plenty of fun little polish elements, such as the coin meter changing form depending on the nature of the game it's in, but it needs some tuning.
Aug 29 03:43:00	27m 00s	Card Split Wars	This game was difficult to get into at first, but it's very inventive.
Aug 29 04:14:00	31m 00s	Monster+Connect!	Not shown: the vast majority of the human and monster populations that died long before finding their soulmates, at least if the difficulty of this game was any indication. The story and graphics were good, but it was disconcerting having to restart three times because I didn't do everything just right. I understand the desperation aspect, but I think the time limit was too strict.
Aug 29 04:22:00	8m 00s	Tesseract	Unable to run game: game window opens and then immediately closes. I'm on Windows 7 with Java build 1.7.0_67-b01.
Aug 29 05:16:00	54m 00s	A Hole New World	This game accomplished exactly what it set out to do. I'm not experienced at all with NES-classic games, but this certainly communicated an atmosphere. While restarting at the beginning was a pain to some extent, it's worth it to persevere. I found that solving challenges and even just defeating enemies in efficient ways was very satisfying. The hole mechanics were mostly good, though they did flicker around a bit. (I glitched through the floor on two separate occasions.) An important part of the gameplay was memorizing meat locations, as well as memorizing both sides of an area so you'd know what to expect warping over. Otherwise, it was easy to dive across worlds into a swarm of ghosts - but that's 80s hard for you. My favorite part though was the end. Just as I was (for the second time) silently screaming "Where's the boss already?" it appeared. A really fun, cool, and satisfying boss fight is a rare thing to find in an LD game, but this one delivered. Thanks to that final battle, you've earned 5/5 Fun and Mood from me.
Aug 29 16:40:00	11h 24m	I Think I Broke Something	I liked the graphical style, and the gameplay had a good structure, but I found that survival often came down to a coin flip of whether the portal that opened was the one you were near. I also found myself wishing for a diagonal shot.
Aug 29 17:01:00	21m 00s	Prim	I like the idea, it would be interesting to see a post-compo version with a greatly expanded world, more workable controls, and perhaps some special box types with different effects.
Aug 29 18:02:00	1h 01m	Badland Quest	One of the best games I've played so far. I'm impressed by the sheer amount of content you were able to create within the time given. I count 9 weapons/tools (hammer, shovel, sword, machinegun, shotgun, ray gun, grenade launcher, medkit, map) plus the bike - and you gave me at least 8 distinct enemies to use them on. I liked the bike/foot dynamic - I often found myself switching modes of transportation depending on how I wanted to approach an enemy. Fighting the bandits without a gun, I got three of them bunched together and tried to stream their attacks on foot, but switched to bike charges when I realized that without the bike's speed I was going to get shot to pieces before I could get close enough. I often found myself worried about resources, with the often limited availability of health and ammo. I usually used melee for that reason - at least until I got the ray gun. I'd sometimes get lost in the wasteland, even without a bike once, but the clever limitations on world size meant I never got too far off the path. My main gameplay complaint was a lack of quest feedback. After I cleared out the bandits, the rogue's dialogue did not seem to change, and after I found the dead guy, I couldn't tell his friend what had happened. I also think I would have used a greater variety of weapons and tools if I'd been allowed to carry more. As it was, I found myself ferrying items around from location to location because I couldn't hang on to everything. Still a very enjoyable game, and one I'll remember.
Aug 29 19:39:00	1h 37m	Gargantuan	The graphics and sound were good. Since the boss patterns were mostly streaming, I found myself in much more danger from the boss flailing around than anything else.
Sep 2 01:12:00	77h 33m	City Hero	Interesting idea. I liked the mechanic of trying to avoid collateral damage, though after what you said about civilians getting angry if you shot too many I was expecting more of a consequence than just losing the civilians (I tried just murdering all the survivors to see what happened.) The game is a nice challenge, and I won with only 1 survivor on my second attempt. Still, I felt really restrained by the lack of movement and options.
Sep 2 01:20:00	8m 00s	Flicker	I love the audiovisual environment here, and I think this concept works much better as a turn-based game than in real time.
Sep 2 01:25:00	5m 00s	Light and Dark	This is one of the more polished incarnations of this idea I've seen, but it doesn't look as if you had time to make puzzles that really took advantage of the mechanic. Last level I accidentally moved one of the blocks inside a box and thus couldn't solve it.
Sep 2 02:27:00	1h 02m	A Pong Story	That was the most intense pong I've ever played. When I first started, I had the brilliant idea to set the thing to hard. I lost 0-11, tried again and lost 1-11. Then I turned it down to normal and it seems I was just way the heck out of practice with pong because it took me 4 failed attempts before I won decisively. The second two game modes were fun, though I found the third game a bit easy compared to the previous two. Loved the music!