Delicious FruitElCochran90's Profile
Send a PMJoined on: Aug 25, 2018
Bio:
About time I updated this bio.
Name: Edgar Cochran
Country: Mexico
Currently living in: Mexico City
-God's servant and one of his blessed sons (John 1:12; John 3:16).
-Lover of the entire animal and plant creation.
-Film lover and reviewer for Letterboxd.com (https://letterboxd.com/elcochran90).
-Adjunct professor and personal tutor of Statistical Inference, Business Forecasting, Marketing Research and Portfolio Theory.
Fangaming experience began in August 2018, so only modest achievements here. However, I'll describe some relevant FAQs here made to me during my stay here since 2018:
Q: Are videogames art?
A: Yes
Q: Are fangames videogames?
A: Yes
Q: Why are your reviews long and unconventional?
A: I am a film reviewer; in a way, I sort of unconsciously dragged my style of film reviewing to the world of fangames. I often involve personal experiences in my writing. Expect that structure; I'm not planning to change it.
Q: How are you rating games? Do you compare fangames as normal games that your ratings are lower than all other people ratings or are you just a critical person?
A: My ratings are not lower than people's ratings all of the time regarding fangames, but they are most of the time. However, this is not my intention. I am rating them as normal games, as in, I don't have a different spectrum for rating "normal", "official" games than fangames. They are in the same scale, because they are all videogames. I don't like to think myself as a critical person; ratings are just subjective numbers. However, I have realized that I rate games more harshly than I rate films/short films, which I do more often.
Q: What are your favorite fangames?
A: I have not played enough fangames to make a comprehensive and representative list, but this can be answered by going to my Favorites list. Anything getting 6.7 or higher will be considered immediately as a favorite.
I've submitted:
378 Ratings!
378 Reviews!
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378 Games
378 Reviews
ElCochran90
For: I wanna run the Terminal!
For: I wanna run the Terminal!
*Cleared on 11/05/2023*
This game and Yassan(21) are pretty much tied in entertainment value even if this one has more gimmick variety, as it also places much emphasis on traps. As the game progresses through the first three stages, you gradually see a change in visual style that separates itself from the generic standard tilesets, so this game is better at creating visual differentiation. All damn bosses are cherries, and you’ll forget about them in a while. Potentially, the most memorable stage is the third one, which places fun gimmick ideas concerning a limited amount of time for infinite jumping, but traps worsen the experience. Some screens are still just common needle with boring traps.
The fourth stage is a tribute to the original IWBTG, but it is very generic territory, and for some reason is the longest as well. Sometimes, when it comes back to the mechanic of pressing buttons for triggering platforms, the room is transformed to something you couldn’t predict before, which is more than welcome. Final boss is annoying since you have to double jump every time to make significant damage, and the blue attack is quite easy to die to. Otherwise, it is not a big threat.
[0] Likes
This game and Yassan(21) are pretty much tied in entertainment value even if this one has more gimmick variety, as it also places much emphasis on traps. As the game progresses through the first three stages, you gradually see a change in visual style that separates itself from the generic standard tilesets, so this game is better at creating visual differentiation. All damn bosses are cherries, and you’ll forget about them in a while. Potentially, the most memorable stage is the third one, which places fun gimmick ideas concerning a limited amount of time for infinite jumping, but traps worsen the experience. Some screens are still just common needle with boring traps.
The fourth stage is a tribute to the original IWBTG, but it is very generic territory, and for some reason is the longest as well. Sometimes, when it comes back to the mechanic of pressing buttons for triggering platforms, the room is transformed to something you couldn’t predict before, which is more than welcome. Final boss is annoying since you have to double jump every time to make significant damage, and the blue attack is quite easy to die to. Otherwise, it is not a big threat.
Rating: 4.1 41
Difficulty: 44 44
Nov 3, 2023
ElCochran90
For: I wanna be the Yassan(21)
For: I wanna be the Yassan(21)
*Cleared on 09/05/2023*
Three-stage adventure fangame that keeps it very simple when it comes to ideas and platforming implementations, including generic traps, save for the black and white stage where difficulty is increased notoriously for no reason, and two of the bosses are interesting to say the most, but visually, it wants to create something different.
The red stage suddenly gets unwatchable, and the invincibility frames of the boss don't help us all involuntary bullet smashers; it is also really easy to choke at the end. The water-and-ice stage looks good for an early fangame and the ice spike sprites eliminate the possibility of standard jumps.
Final boss is the most challenging and yet the most entertaining of them all; however, it is learny. The attacks uses visual effects and projectiles that would be used often in future bosses of other games, but the greatest thing about it is that it doesn't pose a visual challenge.
Recommended for killing a not-so-brief amount time.
[0] Likes
Three-stage adventure fangame that keeps it very simple when it comes to ideas and platforming implementations, including generic traps, save for the black and white stage where difficulty is increased notoriously for no reason, and two of the bosses are interesting to say the most, but visually, it wants to create something different.
The red stage suddenly gets unwatchable, and the invincibility frames of the boss don't help us all involuntary bullet smashers; it is also really easy to choke at the end. The water-and-ice stage looks good for an early fangame and the ice spike sprites eliminate the possibility of standard jumps.
Final boss is the most challenging and yet the most entertaining of them all; however, it is learny. The attacks uses visual effects and projectiles that would be used often in future bosses of other games, but the greatest thing about it is that it doesn't pose a visual challenge.
Recommended for killing a not-so-brief amount time.
Rating: 4.2 42
Difficulty: 50 50
Oct 30, 2023
ElCochran90
For: I Wanna BE the Tempest
For: I Wanna BE the Tempest
*Cleared on 02/05/2023*
Rating includes extra. Difficulty rating does not include extra (which remains unchanged).
100% “Z” clear.
People unfortunately get cancer, but fangames unfortunately get TEMPEST!
This putrid pile of AIDS-infected rhinoceros’ fecal matter is the virus to my corona, the devil to my religion, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to my vintage AVGN, the Meet the Spartans to my Sátántangó, the Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code to my Joyce’s Ulysses, the Brokencyde to my Bach, and the M&M's Shell Shocked to my Ocarina of Time. It sucks harder than a vacuum, can cause PTSD and can be used as a tool for forced conversion therapy to suckness.
Absolutely everything is wrong with this humankind abomination, the one and only fangame that Ebert obviously played to not consider fangames “art”. This has to be.
Device / Diverse guy teams up with this other guy, make their homework separately under LSD influence (which can work wonders [I don’t do drugs; I’m speaking on behalf of specific film auteurs]) and vomit their hallucinations in the form of “stages”. Stage 1 is the obligated, mind-numbingly boring standard tilesets, generic traps and awful platforming. You’ll find anything new, except a woeful backtrack for getting to the first secret which involves a screen transition you must quickly react to, or you’re done.
Traps are unfair, and even when you know they’ll happen, they act at the speed of light. Previous knowledge doesn’t help a bit, especially when a platform rams your body against wall spikes at 225 MPH like a McLaren F1 LM. Some traps are cryptic, like take a route, and you’re wrong; take the other one, and you’re also wrong. The red arrows gimmick is annoying, especially when they are used also as traps having a huge size.
Dr. Mario boss is amusing but the fact it can be third-tried at worst makes it clear there is a huge difference between difficulty of bosses and platforming. Nothing appealing about this boss no matter how creative it wanted to come out.
Second stage is way worse: monochromatic metallic bs associated with the original IWBTG’s Mega-Man stage. Lots of dumb traps and “see if there’s an invisible block here”. Game gets you killed after really long saves and the location of the secret is unspeakably idiotic. Remember those walls of spikes that appear in the very first screen of IWBTG? They appear here, and in this God-forsaken save, you have to SHOOT them to make them disappear. Shoot walls of spikes. Yeah. I lost many minutes looking for fake blocks in that corridor needle and when I shot by mere accident, I was stunned at what I had done. There is also this forced red & black design which has a hellish tone to it and might have been ok-ish to explore it more. That’s a no. It’s a single screen with overtly precise triggers and save points in the middle of a fall. Why???
Now, the boss of this horrendous stage surpasses any capacity of my limited proficiency of the English language. You have this cherry in the middle, right? And there’s this gray block in which you have to be constantly on for not falling to your demise, as there’s nothing else in the screen. What to do? Jump on it like water 2 (which is freaking inconsistent for the life of me!!) and shoot it. The cherry also spawns six cherries around in set intervals. Every time you shoot at it, two big cherries go at you, which is fine because you keep moving all the time. All cool, right? No, goddamit, it’s totally not! It’s ten hits in total. Only ten, and sometimes, you can shoot it twice. But when you get to the fifth hit, now eight cherries spawn around, and they way they do so is specifically design to kill the player. The cherries occupy exactly the spot you’re in, and you cannot dodge them that easily because they go diagonally; if you jump ahead of the moving block, you’re still in the angle of the original trajectory, so screw you. If you jump back away from the block and come back to it, you don’t have enough speed to get back to it. Either way it’s game over. This boss took an absurd amount of time and it is so frustrating because it is extremely simple in design and idea, and yet they figured out the most bs way to incorporate it. The hell with this freaking boss!
Third stage, at least this will give us some variety not seen in previous stages and a new song, right? What, did you forget we’re talking about the worst fangame ever made, where Hamster! is a masterpiece compared to this? It’s default tilesets and the Mega-Man 2 theme once again. Now the gimmick is you never stop jumping and have to use your second jumps properly to land and avoid spikes in screens full of traps. You can kiss my banana sprite from Destination’s avoidance.
Then, for no reason, the film transitions to the worst copy of Kill the Guy’s inverted gravity ever, which seems to have a particular obsession with gate jumps. This stage is guaranteed to make you dizzy. The secret’s location is also very cryptic, but anyone familiar with Carnival’s Crimson will get the idea since the way it is obtained is quite uncanny. The boss is an easy first-try Bubble Bobble piece of Dodongo dung where attacks begin to get interesting by the time you kill the little mf dragon.
Fourth stage is the unholy mother of f*ckness and one of the worst experiences of my life. This fourth stage is the main cause of cancer in Japan and unfortunately spread to North America. You begin with a stage that looks like diarrhea with blood. It consists of a simple gimmick: all blocks in the room alternate between normal blocks and death blocks at a given rhythm, with some platforming being the unholiness of f***. The first screen only has spikes, the blocks appear in the second screen. With this logic, be extra careful with the second save of the first screen; it’s located right at the left of a block that begins as a death block when you hit R. This is a softlock, and I’m fairly tagging the game as such. It’s obvious, but also an easy miss if you’re under the stress of finishing the previous save and saving quickly. This is quite deep into the game, so softlocking here would be absolute pain.
Now, after this, you go with the green part of the stage. This is hell. Alighieri never envisioned something like this in all of his Circles of Hell. This green hell, more disturbing than Soylent Green (1973, watch that film) has the worst doable secret of all times: the green-spike-hell brown platform tourist ride. The number of problems with this secret is agonizingly high. Right at the first time you reach the top, the platform does not handle like it normally does in standard engines. Picture this: What do you do if there’s a sea of spikes beneath you and there’s a bunch of brown platforms ahead of you stuck in a ceiling? It’s smashing time, right? The platforms have this peculiar (and amusing) property. Not here, no uh. Here, the platforms can get you stuck in the ceiling, so if you ever think of smashing your character when the platform is at the top, it is literally you signing a contract for getting stuck on the ceiling. The maneuvering this section requires is dumbass. The entire stage, including this secret, has GB-like platforms (meaning that if you land on the platform exactly when it is over a spike in the same pixel, the collision prioritizes the spike instead of the platform). This screws up the entire freaking save. Even if you see a video of it, constructing the memory for knowing exactly at which points of the platform you have to stand for the numerous 16px spaces the platform will make you travel through is more agonizing than studying for a final test of Advanced Microeconomics (I know). Finally, when the platform reaches the end, it doesn’t take you to the 32X32 space where the Green Game Boy is, nooooooooo, it goes the opposite way on the previous block, so you have to stand on the very edge after many intricate jumps while taking care of NOT LANDING ON SPIKES EVEN IF YOU’RE ON THE F*CKING PLATFORM, go to the edge, grab it, come back to the center of the platform, backtrack this lower part of the endurance test, and take a warp rapidly, which makes you fall at the speed of light in an unannounced location of the left drop, forcing you to make a high-speed diagonal.
This secret was more painful than my first breakup!
The pain of the stage continues. You come back to the second half of the second green screen, and there are 5 corridors in total that you must climb with these awful platforms. The fourth one that goes from right to left is a nightmare, as right in the middle there is a demonically possessed jump that resembles a nerfed A-jump (diagonal up and down), except the altitude of the platform makes everything more complicated, and the maneuvering required costed me 4 hours!!! Why???? And you know what caused me the first heart attack? I passed this jump and was more than prepared for the timing of the incredibly fast last platform at the top, but please, please be careful: you will notice that the leftmost block has a ledge you can stand on. Well, for no mf reason, this entire block kills you, even if you bonk at it from below. Why? I have no idea, but you must envision this seemingly harmless block as a death block from the previous blood diarrhea section. I screamed live and hit my desk. F*** this game.
Then you enter a blue area. The makers do not even know their primary colors and tossed away yellow instead; they all look godawful anyway. This screen is smurfs’ vomit. This screen has a bloody serious collision order issue that will screw you up in many unthinkable ways. Take the instance in which you first reach the right wall of the screen. On the second ledge, there’s a block that has a spike facing right exactly above you. If you land on the block, but your 11-pixel-wide hitbox is in contact with the spike, you die. This is Boshy logic and works horrendously. So there’s this part immediately after where you must fall within a 16 pixel gap but without stepping on the spike facing left. Repeat this same stupid bs for the penultimate jump immediately after: you’re on a block with a spike facing left and another one facing down right above you. Beginner-friendly stuff, it would seem, but no, because if you step a wee bit over the spike, you die! You cannot do a strat of standing on the edge of the block without touching the spike because you will touch the spike. A moronic maneuver is required for this, either cancelling, or emulating a 9 jump and get outta there. Finally, you see a small gap and you go, “that’s a 16-pixel gap; I have two frames of opportunity”. You don’t! haven’t you learned a thing? It’s actually 13 pixels wide, so regardless of the align you have, it’s frame perfect. This collision order also caused me a lot of troubles during the second part of the save, especially when you have to reach the lower right corner of the screen to activate a platform hiding in the shadows. The block above the spike on that corner can also be a killer block like the one in the previous screen simply because it has menopause bipolar issues. Who the hell knows? Oh, did I mention there is a jumpscare at the top of the screen?
The boss...................................................................
The boss...................
The following boss is the worst fangame boss I have ever faced, and the most stupidly boring, unfair, random, downright maddening nuthouse creation I ever challenged myself to beat. This boss took me to an extreme I never imagined feeling, very different from Catastrophe’s Gumi: there was a moment in which my lack of enjoyment of the boss transformed into sadness and extreme tedium. I even sweat from the forehead a bit because I really questioned myself: “Even if I’m streaming this with my friends, why in the holy fuckness of fucking fuck am I trying to beat this?” (I tried my hardest not to swear in the whole review; this boss just begged for it though). It was hopeless and monotonous. It was fucking horsehit!!
The boss is a giant cherry bouncing on all sides of the screen and has three phases corresponding to the colors you faced in the stage before (and in the proper order, at least). Each phase has only 5 hits with around 5 seconds of invincibility frames between each hit. Every time you hit it, two things happen: it can change its direction and its speed randomly, and new normal-sized cherries invade the screen: one new for the first phase, 2 for the second phase, and 3 for the third phase. There are platforms you can use to navigate through the screens.
Ok:
-The speed the main big cherry can take is 225 MPH, which is an instagib. It is humanly unreactable, and even if you’re Ao and manage to read it, you might be in the incorrect platform and make a bounce that annihilates you. Only the leftmost and rightmost platforms work.
-The screen gets saturated really fast.
-The big cherry can take a very horizontal path, so it will take forever to get down. Climbing to reach it? That’s a no if the screen gets too crowded.
-If you shoot one of the normal cherries, many things can happen: if it’s a red one, it gets bigger; if it’s a green one, it goes faster; if it’s a blue one, it multiplies by 3. So, at the ending, you’re guaranteed to have at least 30 bouncing cherries everywhere if all your shots were flawless and hit the main target correctly.
-The borders of the screens are death zones. This will kill you more times than you think.
-The fucking ending has a trap: when you kill the boss and grab the item, all cherries respawn exactly where they were left off. This is an instagib and will kill you.
-For the aforementioned point, you have zero to no control over where the cherries might end and the trajectories they maintained, so even if you know what will happen, you can be dead from the exact moment you grab the item. I had, in total, five post-blue phase attempts ruined.
-There is a final insult, for God’s sake: I mentioned that when you kill the main cherry, all cherries freeze, disappear and maintain their current location for being reactivated once you grab the item and hurry to the warp. Well, during this freezing time, they still have hitboxes, so you were also supposed to memorize the location of at least 30 cherries before you beat the boss and ensure you have a clean path to get to the center of the screen where the item is.
Suck my delicious fruits and my giant spike!!
When I progressed, I felt like someone suddenly stopped inserting a cactus up my ass, the great suffering stopped, I threw my chanclas against the closet located in my PC room, and celebrated life, being excited for a new stage coming ahead of me, even if I knew it was shit.
Fifth stage is much more chill and reminiscent of Device (remember Device, Diverse and Tempest are interconnected). It’s a scroller section where you must outrun the limits of the screen. Few traps in this one which has me shocked. Then you get to the ending and the game goes “I Wanna Be the Fangame!” mode with the darkness gimmick of only having a slim area of visibility and you moving within it. If you get past it, it’s death. It goes back and forth as many times as Argentina’s inflation: it is volatile, but keeps getting worse. Add traps for the maker’s amusement, and it’s torture once again. For getting the secret, you need to do a specific set of things so that a particular warp at the ending works.
The visual effect of the gimmick is nauseating even if it’s uncommon: the screen moves rapidly in the direction you’re facing. If you get caught by the limits of the screen, of course you’re dead. It’s a quick secret (with traps lel) that will leave you dizzier than the spinning teacups at your nearest amusement park, if any.
Then Tempest decides to copy paste IWBTG for the nth time, making a Mecha Dragon fight that also puts you in the ordeal of a long intro consisting in jumping across platforms. The boss functions kinda the same without the yellow devil teleportation gimmick, but your own bouncing can kill you and there are instances where the dragon opens its mouth and vomits delicious fruits, some at unreasonable speeds. For my two cents, this cannot be read. RNG can also get so bad that even if you could read it, you might find yourself jumping over a wall and just when you’re at the peak of your jump, the fastest cherry alive obliterates you. The final moments of the dragon also causes many circles of cherries possible to choke to for no rational reason at all.
The sixth stage (famous for K3) is final. This is the only one I can say it has something interesting going on as the first screen is a long vertical scroller... with traps. Visual design is better than all previous stages, but the music choice is so randomly annoying, and with restarting music, you want to punch the screen. There is an obsession with 16 pixel gaps that I cannot understand, and parts where you have to go through the blocks with spikes inside them (logic = 100), so you must figure out, blindly, what the hell you died to.
After passing this section, there is this funny transition to a chaos screen where you must travel upwards as quick as possible while hearing an exaggerated song, but be prepared (or not) for fake blocks preventing you from progress with many hopeless attempts to figure out the correct route of not being stopped.
The next screen is a huge room with ironically a huge portion of unused space and doesn’t have anything that even Maze wouldn’t do much, much better.
So, how to obtain the true ending? Assuming you got all Game Boys, you get warped to the main hub and you have to, very obviously duh (?), shoot all warps that took you to all stages, six in total. You must plan it because the deaths in the hub don’t make sense either (is there something logical about this piece anaconda excrement?). If you touch a spike, everything is reset and counts as a death, but if you fall or touch any of the borders, it doesn’t count as one. Very logical, bro! The final piercing in the d*** is that the warp you shoot last must obligatorily be the one at the top and do the equivalent of an F-jump but without changing direction: passing through the gate with a 5-frame jump is a must for then getting to the top where the final Game Boy appears.
There you go: True “Z” ending clear screen.
The “Z” must definitely stand for “zorra”, which means “b**ch”, which is what you were while the game had you captive.
F*** this game.
[14] Likes
Rating includes extra. Difficulty rating does not include extra (which remains unchanged).
100% “Z” clear.
People unfortunately get cancer, but fangames unfortunately get TEMPEST!
This putrid pile of AIDS-infected rhinoceros’ fecal matter is the virus to my corona, the devil to my religion, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to my vintage AVGN, the Meet the Spartans to my Sátántangó, the Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code to my Joyce’s Ulysses, the Brokencyde to my Bach, and the M&M's Shell Shocked to my Ocarina of Time. It sucks harder than a vacuum, can cause PTSD and can be used as a tool for forced conversion therapy to suckness.
Absolutely everything is wrong with this humankind abomination, the one and only fangame that Ebert obviously played to not consider fangames “art”. This has to be.
Device / Diverse guy teams up with this other guy, make their homework separately under LSD influence (which can work wonders [I don’t do drugs; I’m speaking on behalf of specific film auteurs]) and vomit their hallucinations in the form of “stages”. Stage 1 is the obligated, mind-numbingly boring standard tilesets, generic traps and awful platforming. You’ll find anything new, except a woeful backtrack for getting to the first secret which involves a screen transition you must quickly react to, or you’re done.
Traps are unfair, and even when you know they’ll happen, they act at the speed of light. Previous knowledge doesn’t help a bit, especially when a platform rams your body against wall spikes at 225 MPH like a McLaren F1 LM. Some traps are cryptic, like take a route, and you’re wrong; take the other one, and you’re also wrong. The red arrows gimmick is annoying, especially when they are used also as traps having a huge size.
Dr. Mario boss is amusing but the fact it can be third-tried at worst makes it clear there is a huge difference between difficulty of bosses and platforming. Nothing appealing about this boss no matter how creative it wanted to come out.
Second stage is way worse: monochromatic metallic bs associated with the original IWBTG’s Mega-Man stage. Lots of dumb traps and “see if there’s an invisible block here”. Game gets you killed after really long saves and the location of the secret is unspeakably idiotic. Remember those walls of spikes that appear in the very first screen of IWBTG? They appear here, and in this God-forsaken save, you have to SHOOT them to make them disappear. Shoot walls of spikes. Yeah. I lost many minutes looking for fake blocks in that corridor needle and when I shot by mere accident, I was stunned at what I had done. There is also this forced red & black design which has a hellish tone to it and might have been ok-ish to explore it more. That’s a no. It’s a single screen with overtly precise triggers and save points in the middle of a fall. Why???
Now, the boss of this horrendous stage surpasses any capacity of my limited proficiency of the English language. You have this cherry in the middle, right? And there’s this gray block in which you have to be constantly on for not falling to your demise, as there’s nothing else in the screen. What to do? Jump on it like water 2 (which is freaking inconsistent for the life of me!!) and shoot it. The cherry also spawns six cherries around in set intervals. Every time you shoot at it, two big cherries go at you, which is fine because you keep moving all the time. All cool, right? No, goddamit, it’s totally not! It’s ten hits in total. Only ten, and sometimes, you can shoot it twice. But when you get to the fifth hit, now eight cherries spawn around, and they way they do so is specifically design to kill the player. The cherries occupy exactly the spot you’re in, and you cannot dodge them that easily because they go diagonally; if you jump ahead of the moving block, you’re still in the angle of the original trajectory, so screw you. If you jump back away from the block and come back to it, you don’t have enough speed to get back to it. Either way it’s game over. This boss took an absurd amount of time and it is so frustrating because it is extremely simple in design and idea, and yet they figured out the most bs way to incorporate it. The hell with this freaking boss!
Third stage, at least this will give us some variety not seen in previous stages and a new song, right? What, did you forget we’re talking about the worst fangame ever made, where Hamster! is a masterpiece compared to this? It’s default tilesets and the Mega-Man 2 theme once again. Now the gimmick is you never stop jumping and have to use your second jumps properly to land and avoid spikes in screens full of traps. You can kiss my banana sprite from Destination’s avoidance.
Then, for no reason, the film transitions to the worst copy of Kill the Guy’s inverted gravity ever, which seems to have a particular obsession with gate jumps. This stage is guaranteed to make you dizzy. The secret’s location is also very cryptic, but anyone familiar with Carnival’s Crimson will get the idea since the way it is obtained is quite uncanny. The boss is an easy first-try Bubble Bobble piece of Dodongo dung where attacks begin to get interesting by the time you kill the little mf dragon.
Fourth stage is the unholy mother of f*ckness and one of the worst experiences of my life. This fourth stage is the main cause of cancer in Japan and unfortunately spread to North America. You begin with a stage that looks like diarrhea with blood. It consists of a simple gimmick: all blocks in the room alternate between normal blocks and death blocks at a given rhythm, with some platforming being the unholiness of f***. The first screen only has spikes, the blocks appear in the second screen. With this logic, be extra careful with the second save of the first screen; it’s located right at the left of a block that begins as a death block when you hit R. This is a softlock, and I’m fairly tagging the game as such. It’s obvious, but also an easy miss if you’re under the stress of finishing the previous save and saving quickly. This is quite deep into the game, so softlocking here would be absolute pain.
Now, after this, you go with the green part of the stage. This is hell. Alighieri never envisioned something like this in all of his Circles of Hell. This green hell, more disturbing than Soylent Green (1973, watch that film) has the worst doable secret of all times: the green-spike-hell brown platform tourist ride. The number of problems with this secret is agonizingly high. Right at the first time you reach the top, the platform does not handle like it normally does in standard engines. Picture this: What do you do if there’s a sea of spikes beneath you and there’s a bunch of brown platforms ahead of you stuck in a ceiling? It’s smashing time, right? The platforms have this peculiar (and amusing) property. Not here, no uh. Here, the platforms can get you stuck in the ceiling, so if you ever think of smashing your character when the platform is at the top, it is literally you signing a contract for getting stuck on the ceiling. The maneuvering this section requires is dumbass. The entire stage, including this secret, has GB-like platforms (meaning that if you land on the platform exactly when it is over a spike in the same pixel, the collision prioritizes the spike instead of the platform). This screws up the entire freaking save. Even if you see a video of it, constructing the memory for knowing exactly at which points of the platform you have to stand for the numerous 16px spaces the platform will make you travel through is more agonizing than studying for a final test of Advanced Microeconomics (I know). Finally, when the platform reaches the end, it doesn’t take you to the 32X32 space where the Green Game Boy is, nooooooooo, it goes the opposite way on the previous block, so you have to stand on the very edge after many intricate jumps while taking care of NOT LANDING ON SPIKES EVEN IF YOU’RE ON THE F*CKING PLATFORM, go to the edge, grab it, come back to the center of the platform, backtrack this lower part of the endurance test, and take a warp rapidly, which makes you fall at the speed of light in an unannounced location of the left drop, forcing you to make a high-speed diagonal.
This secret was more painful than my first breakup!
The pain of the stage continues. You come back to the second half of the second green screen, and there are 5 corridors in total that you must climb with these awful platforms. The fourth one that goes from right to left is a nightmare, as right in the middle there is a demonically possessed jump that resembles a nerfed A-jump (diagonal up and down), except the altitude of the platform makes everything more complicated, and the maneuvering required costed me 4 hours!!! Why???? And you know what caused me the first heart attack? I passed this jump and was more than prepared for the timing of the incredibly fast last platform at the top, but please, please be careful: you will notice that the leftmost block has a ledge you can stand on. Well, for no mf reason, this entire block kills you, even if you bonk at it from below. Why? I have no idea, but you must envision this seemingly harmless block as a death block from the previous blood diarrhea section. I screamed live and hit my desk. F*** this game.
Then you enter a blue area. The makers do not even know their primary colors and tossed away yellow instead; they all look godawful anyway. This screen is smurfs’ vomit. This screen has a bloody serious collision order issue that will screw you up in many unthinkable ways. Take the instance in which you first reach the right wall of the screen. On the second ledge, there’s a block that has a spike facing right exactly above you. If you land on the block, but your 11-pixel-wide hitbox is in contact with the spike, you die. This is Boshy logic and works horrendously. So there’s this part immediately after where you must fall within a 16 pixel gap but without stepping on the spike facing left. Repeat this same stupid bs for the penultimate jump immediately after: you’re on a block with a spike facing left and another one facing down right above you. Beginner-friendly stuff, it would seem, but no, because if you step a wee bit over the spike, you die! You cannot do a strat of standing on the edge of the block without touching the spike because you will touch the spike. A moronic maneuver is required for this, either cancelling, or emulating a 9 jump and get outta there. Finally, you see a small gap and you go, “that’s a 16-pixel gap; I have two frames of opportunity”. You don’t! haven’t you learned a thing? It’s actually 13 pixels wide, so regardless of the align you have, it’s frame perfect. This collision order also caused me a lot of troubles during the second part of the save, especially when you have to reach the lower right corner of the screen to activate a platform hiding in the shadows. The block above the spike on that corner can also be a killer block like the one in the previous screen simply because it has menopause bipolar issues. Who the hell knows? Oh, did I mention there is a jumpscare at the top of the screen?
The boss...................................................................
The boss...................
The following boss is the worst fangame boss I have ever faced, and the most stupidly boring, unfair, random, downright maddening nuthouse creation I ever challenged myself to beat. This boss took me to an extreme I never imagined feeling, very different from Catastrophe’s Gumi: there was a moment in which my lack of enjoyment of the boss transformed into sadness and extreme tedium. I even sweat from the forehead a bit because I really questioned myself: “Even if I’m streaming this with my friends, why in the holy fuckness of fucking fuck am I trying to beat this?” (I tried my hardest not to swear in the whole review; this boss just begged for it though). It was hopeless and monotonous. It was fucking horsehit!!
The boss is a giant cherry bouncing on all sides of the screen and has three phases corresponding to the colors you faced in the stage before (and in the proper order, at least). Each phase has only 5 hits with around 5 seconds of invincibility frames between each hit. Every time you hit it, two things happen: it can change its direction and its speed randomly, and new normal-sized cherries invade the screen: one new for the first phase, 2 for the second phase, and 3 for the third phase. There are platforms you can use to navigate through the screens.
Ok:
-The speed the main big cherry can take is 225 MPH, which is an instagib. It is humanly unreactable, and even if you’re Ao and manage to read it, you might be in the incorrect platform and make a bounce that annihilates you. Only the leftmost and rightmost platforms work.
-The screen gets saturated really fast.
-The big cherry can take a very horizontal path, so it will take forever to get down. Climbing to reach it? That’s a no if the screen gets too crowded.
-If you shoot one of the normal cherries, many things can happen: if it’s a red one, it gets bigger; if it’s a green one, it goes faster; if it’s a blue one, it multiplies by 3. So, at the ending, you’re guaranteed to have at least 30 bouncing cherries everywhere if all your shots were flawless and hit the main target correctly.
-The borders of the screens are death zones. This will kill you more times than you think.
-The fucking ending has a trap: when you kill the boss and grab the item, all cherries respawn exactly where they were left off. This is an instagib and will kill you.
-For the aforementioned point, you have zero to no control over where the cherries might end and the trajectories they maintained, so even if you know what will happen, you can be dead from the exact moment you grab the item. I had, in total, five post-blue phase attempts ruined.
-There is a final insult, for God’s sake: I mentioned that when you kill the main cherry, all cherries freeze, disappear and maintain their current location for being reactivated once you grab the item and hurry to the warp. Well, during this freezing time, they still have hitboxes, so you were also supposed to memorize the location of at least 30 cherries before you beat the boss and ensure you have a clean path to get to the center of the screen where the item is.
Suck my delicious fruits and my giant spike!!
When I progressed, I felt like someone suddenly stopped inserting a cactus up my ass, the great suffering stopped, I threw my chanclas against the closet located in my PC room, and celebrated life, being excited for a new stage coming ahead of me, even if I knew it was shit.
Fifth stage is much more chill and reminiscent of Device (remember Device, Diverse and Tempest are interconnected). It’s a scroller section where you must outrun the limits of the screen. Few traps in this one which has me shocked. Then you get to the ending and the game goes “I Wanna Be the Fangame!” mode with the darkness gimmick of only having a slim area of visibility and you moving within it. If you get past it, it’s death. It goes back and forth as many times as Argentina’s inflation: it is volatile, but keeps getting worse. Add traps for the maker’s amusement, and it’s torture once again. For getting the secret, you need to do a specific set of things so that a particular warp at the ending works.
The visual effect of the gimmick is nauseating even if it’s uncommon: the screen moves rapidly in the direction you’re facing. If you get caught by the limits of the screen, of course you’re dead. It’s a quick secret (with traps lel) that will leave you dizzier than the spinning teacups at your nearest amusement park, if any.
Then Tempest decides to copy paste IWBTG for the nth time, making a Mecha Dragon fight that also puts you in the ordeal of a long intro consisting in jumping across platforms. The boss functions kinda the same without the yellow devil teleportation gimmick, but your own bouncing can kill you and there are instances where the dragon opens its mouth and vomits delicious fruits, some at unreasonable speeds. For my two cents, this cannot be read. RNG can also get so bad that even if you could read it, you might find yourself jumping over a wall and just when you’re at the peak of your jump, the fastest cherry alive obliterates you. The final moments of the dragon also causes many circles of cherries possible to choke to for no rational reason at all.
The sixth stage (famous for K3) is final. This is the only one I can say it has something interesting going on as the first screen is a long vertical scroller... with traps. Visual design is better than all previous stages, but the music choice is so randomly annoying, and with restarting music, you want to punch the screen. There is an obsession with 16 pixel gaps that I cannot understand, and parts where you have to go through the blocks with spikes inside them (logic = 100), so you must figure out, blindly, what the hell you died to.
After passing this section, there is this funny transition to a chaos screen where you must travel upwards as quick as possible while hearing an exaggerated song, but be prepared (or not) for fake blocks preventing you from progress with many hopeless attempts to figure out the correct route of not being stopped.
The next screen is a huge room with ironically a huge portion of unused space and doesn’t have anything that even Maze wouldn’t do much, much better.
So, how to obtain the true ending? Assuming you got all Game Boys, you get warped to the main hub and you have to, very obviously duh (?), shoot all warps that took you to all stages, six in total. You must plan it because the deaths in the hub don’t make sense either (is there something logical about this piece anaconda excrement?). If you touch a spike, everything is reset and counts as a death, but if you fall or touch any of the borders, it doesn’t count as one. Very logical, bro! The final piercing in the d*** is that the warp you shoot last must obligatorily be the one at the top and do the equivalent of an F-jump but without changing direction: passing through the gate with a 5-frame jump is a must for then getting to the top where the final Game Boy appears.
There you go: True “Z” ending clear screen.
The “Z” must definitely stand for “zorra”, which means “b**ch”, which is what you were while the game had you captive.
F*** this game.
Rating: 0.1 1
Difficulty: 87 87
Oct 27, 2023
ElCochran90
For: I wanna be Easy!
For: I wanna be Easy!
*Cleared on 10/04/2023*
Impossible to hate completely! It even has a story, and the opening had me rolling.
The most notorious effort from superstarjonesbros (among only 2), this is a beginner-friendly insane adventure that spits any possible original retro (and some new mobile) videogame reference the maker could possibly think of to you with full passion and parodic self-awareness. The variety packs the game with unpredictability, actually too much: it goes to the extent of having almost every screen being single-themed (if not two or three screens), and then changing the layout entirely along with the soundtrack of a new videogame reference before you could start enjoying it.
The oversaturation might be overwhelming from a negative point of view for many, and maybe the creator felt this would keep the adventure frenetic and unexpected. It does, but also leaves you hungry for what you were just starting to experience. What other fangame gives you Kirby-shaped spikes??
However, it is a work of passion and full of personality: it uses humor without being incomprehensible or too niche-based like many of today’s meme fangames, it has details all over the place and the production value is committed, and the game over screen referencing Gene Wilder’s epic performance in the grandiose “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) is more than welcome. As a trap game, it works competently, since they all work differently within the confines of each game referenced, so you won’t necessarily face the same troll move twice... Well, at least not identically-looking.
The toughest challenge, which makes me rate this in the 20s territory, is the extensive Boshy boss rush, which uses every single boss in the original, including Bomberman of course, as an endurance test. It is quite amusing and entertaining, but will be a notorious difficulty peak for many, and I do question not even adding a checkpoint halfway through. There is also a horrible boss right after the Castlevania screen save: Spoongod. Up to this day, I have no idea how to beat it. He throws garbage from the sky making siren and burp sounds, and briefly teleports to your height so you can shoot him (?). However, he’s below such a small fraction of time that it’s more a guessing game than a reaction one. Even jumping might pose a threat considering the RNG from above.
If only this game allowed you to enjoy every tileset, reference and theme more, it would be much better. However, I am surprised fangames kept looking the same after 2012 for so much time (and some still do today!). I will admit this is a guilty pleasure of mine: the engine does not pose so much trouble and has tremendous replay value.
Recommend this to anyone willing to begin with fangames and show the old-school charm that is lost today.
[2] Likes
Impossible to hate completely! It even has a story, and the opening had me rolling.
The most notorious effort from superstarjonesbros (among only 2), this is a beginner-friendly insane adventure that spits any possible original retro (and some new mobile) videogame reference the maker could possibly think of to you with full passion and parodic self-awareness. The variety packs the game with unpredictability, actually too much: it goes to the extent of having almost every screen being single-themed (if not two or three screens), and then changing the layout entirely along with the soundtrack of a new videogame reference before you could start enjoying it.
The oversaturation might be overwhelming from a negative point of view for many, and maybe the creator felt this would keep the adventure frenetic and unexpected. It does, but also leaves you hungry for what you were just starting to experience. What other fangame gives you Kirby-shaped spikes??
However, it is a work of passion and full of personality: it uses humor without being incomprehensible or too niche-based like many of today’s meme fangames, it has details all over the place and the production value is committed, and the game over screen referencing Gene Wilder’s epic performance in the grandiose “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) is more than welcome. As a trap game, it works competently, since they all work differently within the confines of each game referenced, so you won’t necessarily face the same troll move twice... Well, at least not identically-looking.
The toughest challenge, which makes me rate this in the 20s territory, is the extensive Boshy boss rush, which uses every single boss in the original, including Bomberman of course, as an endurance test. It is quite amusing and entertaining, but will be a notorious difficulty peak for many, and I do question not even adding a checkpoint halfway through. There is also a horrible boss right after the Castlevania screen save: Spoongod. Up to this day, I have no idea how to beat it. He throws garbage from the sky making siren and burp sounds, and briefly teleports to your height so you can shoot him (?). However, he’s below such a small fraction of time that it’s more a guessing game than a reaction one. Even jumping might pose a threat considering the RNG from above.
If only this game allowed you to enjoy every tileset, reference and theme more, it would be much better. However, I am surprised fangames kept looking the same after 2012 for so much time (and some still do today!). I will admit this is a guilty pleasure of mine: the engine does not pose so much trouble and has tremendous replay value.
Recommend this to anyone willing to begin with fangames and show the old-school charm that is lost today.
Rating: 6.8 68
Difficulty: 25 25
Oct 25, 2023
ElCochran90
For: I wanna be the Barrage
For: I wanna be the Barrage
*Cleared on 20/03/2023*
Barrage is a splendid innovation, game-changer classic, and comes from the vision of one of the most divisive and still well-known classic fangame makers: Cyber. 2010 was exactly the year where the concept of barrage, a term coined for high-density bullet-hell avoidances, was applied to fangames. The 3.0 version of Black in May implemented the first Colonel (aka Taisa [aka Schwarlitz Longhener {aka First TIS}]) boss, documented as the first barrage boss. This would take Cyber to keep thinking on the concept of the infamous boss fight and adapt it into a fangame throughout. The game saw the light of day on November 2nd, 2010.
The structure of the game is flawless, period.
The most important aspect of the game is that it introduced for the very first time, as I’m aware of, a different hitbox for the kid, unlike “Be the Dotkid!”, where your 2X2 square is literally your hitbox. Here, you have a cross in the middle of 3 vertical pixels and 3 horizontal pixels creating a cross. It sort of is a hitbox of 3X3, instead it isn’t because the pixels at each corner are blank.
.
...
.
It seems that the Kid has gone Christian; otherwise, how could he beat the almighty Colonel Schwarlitz Longhener?
The game makes fully scaled use of this reduced hitbox gimmick, which is very easy to get used to, accounting that it remains visible the whole time. In this sense, it works like any famous vertical bullet-hell franchise where the center is what matters. Challenges are done considering the nature of the hitbox, which would be otherwise impossible with the normal 11X21 hitbox.
-You first face four stages, where the subsequent stage can only be unlocked if one conquers the 7 challenges of the stage, each one properly numbered to signal the intended order, with the format: [Stage]-[Trial]. You can replay them as many times as desired. Trials within a stage are also unlocked if the previous ones are taken down. All trials have a time bar to understand when they finish.
-Stage 1 has two main purposes: analyzing one’s position (position-based attacks) and identifying patterns and their timing. 1-7 is a conglomeration of all previous lessons learned with a dynamic sprite and implementing the gimmick of slow-motion for the first time. The slow-mo gimmick perfectly respects jump heights considering our inputs, but everything happens slower. You’re pretty much a Quicksilver Kid in these instances, except the game decides when you can do this. Enjoy the orange.
-Stage 2 trains you in dominating density in narrow spaces, using the gimmick of infinite jump to greater effect than the last stage. 2-3 in particular is I think one of the most influential concepts in the world of fangames as a sphere circles you and you must maneuver inside that confined space. 2-4 is great visually, but also is a foreshadowing of the madness to come. 2-6 is also quite creative, since you reap what you saw: all big orbs at the beginning don’t kill you, but will spread barrage garbage at the end of the trial, only those that you touched. The boss of the stage, 2-7, teaches you that unreadable barrage sometimes consists in identifying blind spots. This might be a downer for many; I see it as a trade-off: it can be a boring trial-and-error exercise, but considering the length of the avoidances, tediousness is diminished. Enjoy the green.
-Stage 3 is for understanding circular patterns, or more clearly, how attacks are done in circular patterns (either from the center sprite or with orbs circling around the screen creatin projectiles) and you must find the correct time to make your character circle around the center of the screen conveniently. 3-5 is visually genius, but also an infamous difficulty peak as the circular pattern is not intuitive and will often find you in really tight spots; it’s more an endurance test rather than a trial-and-error challenge given the frenetic nature of the challenge. It might be frustrating to have this as Stage 3. 3-6 is just a friendly reminder that the most famous corner we’re used to exploit for avoiding might not always be the best one, but there might be another alternative. The boss at 3-7 is just fabulous and has, hands down, the best implementation of the slow-mo gimmick in the entire game: intuitive, responsive and exciting, right at the climax. However, this boss is the reason I am tagging this game with “jumpscare” because Jesus Christ... It gets you exactly where you’re most concentrated. Enjoy the sky blue.
-Stage 4 is very problematic for me since its difficulty partially comes from a visual challenge: the background is light gray and there are orbs of light colors, or even orbs that have only a white outline, but the interior’s color match the color of the background. Considering the substantial amount of reading you must do, it’s really bothersome (4-2 is the worst of the cases). Here’s where the creator showcases his ability to create visual shows more clearly, which you cannot see unless you record yourself because you’re focused on your character. 4-3 is the most interesting, I’d argue, as it plays with a Touhou concept where the subsequent waves of attack depend on your previous movements and their timing: either you open or close your own path to victory. Understanding it takes time, but it doesn’t take long to realize it behaves like you want it to behave. 4-5 is well done since it introduces the concept of fast barrage and avoiding, which creators today have exploited to stupid levels, but that only lasts half of the challenge; the second half makes you read and create a strat for a combination of RNG with pattern, where the most common one consists taking advantage of the space that exists between the left and right borders of the screen. 4-6 shouldn’t exist: the blind spots are pattern, but quite unspeakable and dumb considering that it’s a repetition from a previous stage, but with the corners unavailable for standing on them. The boss of 4-7 is just meh: it has no relation to the previous challenges, but works more as just an additional challenge and is certainly not the most difficult.
-After the four “official” stages are cleared, the game takes the original “Warning: Do Not Go” joke of Black to the extreme; it gives a hilarious warning that roughly translates to the following: Congratulations on clearing 4 phases! The barrage from here forward is different than the one from before. I don’t care what they look like at all; it’s just made to kill the player. However, in terms of the game, it is clear here! From here on, it is an extra production. If you are going to do it, please be prepared and do it. Note: Since you cannot come back if you proceed, it is recommended to back up saved data.
-Proceeding this supposed warning screen, you face individual challenges.
--5-1: Curving! Good luck with fast reading of curved bullets. Orange is back (pro tip: blind spot)
--5-2: Circular density barrage spins around the enemy’s sprite, and you must time your entry into said circles. It reverses the rules, as now being closer to the enemy’s sprite is the safer spot! I think this is quite revolutionary for the time.
--5-3: A heart-pumping challenge that will behave exactly like you tell it to, with increasing density of many times: horizontal and vertical projectiles that appear from the borders of where you are, then circular orbs coming at you from the two upper corners, then two more from the bottom corners, then a huge orb that will go at you at increasing speeds, culminated with an almost unavoidable barrier that the enemy throws at you. It gets really crowded at the ending, and you must remember the proper time in which the barrier begins, but it’s rewarding to clear.
--5-4: This trash is my nightmare. First half is ok and easy; the tricky part is to calculate the height of your jumps for getting across the red and blue projectiles. But for the love of everything that is holy, the second half is 95% stupid. There are two main strats to use: either go to the roof and then fall down, dodging everything (which is dumb hard), or (pro tip) stay in the lower-right corner reacting (if you can) to all the garbage around you. It is not intuitive at all, and even if the latter is the safest strat, RNG seldom can get unreactable. The timing you must do at the end is also very stupid. The hell with this garbage.
--5-5: Even if this can be second-tried at worst (I had the luck to first-try it), I think it’s the most fun of the challenges. The tilesets around you look like a Sudoku collage of all previous ones, indicating that you will face the main bosses of the game. Indeed, each one appears by turns, but cumulatively, to unleash their attacks against a pitch black background, which Cyber and Carnival adored so much. It’s a proper way to test a great deal of the stuff that has been learned, like that type of exam that doesn’t ask you for all possible questions, but those that the professor considered the most relevant ones.
5-6: Taiko Drum
W(H)ellcome to the toughest challenge of the game, which makes this deserve a rating of 80: Taiko Drum. This boss gives tons to talk about. First, you can really call this an extra (which isn’t), as it feels so detached from the rest of the game, but still maintains the barrage vibe. This is the spot where you realize it was all practice. The screen is divided by eye-piercing red and blue colors, while orange and blue Taiko projectiles with a massive size go against you.
Cyber is no stranger for using tense soundtracks for the final challenges to drive you nuts, but this is no ordinary soundtrack: just like in Black, the Dodonpachi series plays a huge role. At the hyperactive beat of Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu Black Label’s “Mercilessness”, you must do the first true music-synced avoidance of the game, and also the longest so far. Cyber is arguably the reason why barrage was born in fangames and fangames use soundtracks from Dodonpachi.
The avoidance is very fun, except when it isn’t. It is a sin when you don’t account for how feasible it is to include combinations of limited blind spots and RNG: you can get walled. Taiko Drum constantly throws waves at you during the chorus, and they are pattern: the blind spots never change. However, this makes you pray that there isn’t a huge orb occupying that spot. Many moments in this avoidance are objectively luck, and the last instagib is unforgivable; even knowing when and how it happens, the space to maneuver is so narrow and, if the RNG is not proper, you will watch yourself die many times milliseconds before the very ending.
5-7: Taisa
If we could consider the possibility of a Cyberverse occurring, pretty much like with Carnival (whose stories where intentionally interconnected, introducing the prototype concept of “medley” even before Kamilia 1 was a thing), Taisa is back from Black (sad state of affairs I cannot phrase that as “Back in Black”), but in a weaker form. However, he has still three phases, each one increasing in difficulty.
Long story short, this boss is brilliant. The first phase can drag for many, but if you take some time to appreciate the patterns Cyber programmed, you’ll realize barrage is also visually satisfying. A whole attack in the middle is standing still in two very precise blind spots of two frames of opportunity each, and you can literally go to the kitchen to fetch some water and come back in time to move to the second location. What I did was to behold and wonder: “How do you even do that, especially in 2010?”. Green orbs attack is very unfair since you never know when they stop spinning and choose a linear trajectory outside of Taisa, and the last attack is just choke material that can be easily avoided.
The famous second red phase is an exercise of timing and precision: the second attack vibes to a weird tune that seems to be unknown even today, and again, it’s just visual pixelated art. Occasionally it pulls off a wall that can find you in the most inappropriate spot killing you, as the beginning of that chain of tiny orbs has no space between orbs, so you better calculate in midair where it might start and read the rest afterwards: it is extremely fair and readable, and with the implementation of infinite jump, it is no less than fun. The final attack still makes everyone go: “OMG that’s 3D brooo!” and for my two cents, it is an amazing visual effect. Taisa creates a cylinder that becomes each time less dense because he uses many of these orbs to aim at you. This attack is debatably the hardest only if you’re good at reading the previous barrage attack, as the line he creates has little space to go through and the best strat is to move suddenly quick so that the space becomes bigger. It is still tough.
And then... it’s all over, right? Lol.
Face final phase, and it follows the philosophy of Silent Night, Deadly Night 2: “GARBAGE DAY!” At the beat and hype of Vanessa, Taisa conglomerates all powers from all previous stages (including Taiko Drum!) to give you a fun time. Just like Black’s final attack, density increases as time goes by, which makes you see the top of the screen to see how much time rema... “Where the hell is the time bar? Where is it?” Indeed, the game pulls your pants down and then the rug under your feet as the time bar that all challenges had disappears. Unless you know the song, you’re in full uncertainty and can only infer by how the song is sounding. Whoever credits ㅇyㅇ for creating the first boss ever to assemble the powers of previous bosses, a revision is required: Solgryn, Influka and Cyber did it first at the least.
The game ends with Zelda’s Lullaby and a reminder of all cutie Touhou sprites that were used (also used in Maze) and allows you to replay any challenge you wish if you enjoyed any, and the probability of you enjoying zero stages is close to 0.
Influential and revolutionary, even if flawed and not a masterpiece, set many rules for future avoidance making. As maligned as Cyber might be, he deserves all credit for this unique release considered today to be a timeline event (which should also include Maze, for Christ’s sake!). An immediate old-school favorite and fully recommended if you can get past beyond the unfair and luck-based segments.
[3] Likes
Barrage is a splendid innovation, game-changer classic, and comes from the vision of one of the most divisive and still well-known classic fangame makers: Cyber. 2010 was exactly the year where the concept of barrage, a term coined for high-density bullet-hell avoidances, was applied to fangames. The 3.0 version of Black in May implemented the first Colonel (aka Taisa [aka Schwarlitz Longhener {aka First TIS}]) boss, documented as the first barrage boss. This would take Cyber to keep thinking on the concept of the infamous boss fight and adapt it into a fangame throughout. The game saw the light of day on November 2nd, 2010.
The structure of the game is flawless, period.
The most important aspect of the game is that it introduced for the very first time, as I’m aware of, a different hitbox for the kid, unlike “Be the Dotkid!”, where your 2X2 square is literally your hitbox. Here, you have a cross in the middle of 3 vertical pixels and 3 horizontal pixels creating a cross. It sort of is a hitbox of 3X3, instead it isn’t because the pixels at each corner are blank.
.
...
.
It seems that the Kid has gone Christian; otherwise, how could he beat the almighty Colonel Schwarlitz Longhener?
The game makes fully scaled use of this reduced hitbox gimmick, which is very easy to get used to, accounting that it remains visible the whole time. In this sense, it works like any famous vertical bullet-hell franchise where the center is what matters. Challenges are done considering the nature of the hitbox, which would be otherwise impossible with the normal 11X21 hitbox.
-You first face four stages, where the subsequent stage can only be unlocked if one conquers the 7 challenges of the stage, each one properly numbered to signal the intended order, with the format: [Stage]-[Trial]. You can replay them as many times as desired. Trials within a stage are also unlocked if the previous ones are taken down. All trials have a time bar to understand when they finish.
-Stage 1 has two main purposes: analyzing one’s position (position-based attacks) and identifying patterns and their timing. 1-7 is a conglomeration of all previous lessons learned with a dynamic sprite and implementing the gimmick of slow-motion for the first time. The slow-mo gimmick perfectly respects jump heights considering our inputs, but everything happens slower. You’re pretty much a Quicksilver Kid in these instances, except the game decides when you can do this. Enjoy the orange.
-Stage 2 trains you in dominating density in narrow spaces, using the gimmick of infinite jump to greater effect than the last stage. 2-3 in particular is I think one of the most influential concepts in the world of fangames as a sphere circles you and you must maneuver inside that confined space. 2-4 is great visually, but also is a foreshadowing of the madness to come. 2-6 is also quite creative, since you reap what you saw: all big orbs at the beginning don’t kill you, but will spread barrage garbage at the end of the trial, only those that you touched. The boss of the stage, 2-7, teaches you that unreadable barrage sometimes consists in identifying blind spots. This might be a downer for many; I see it as a trade-off: it can be a boring trial-and-error exercise, but considering the length of the avoidances, tediousness is diminished. Enjoy the green.
-Stage 3 is for understanding circular patterns, or more clearly, how attacks are done in circular patterns (either from the center sprite or with orbs circling around the screen creatin projectiles) and you must find the correct time to make your character circle around the center of the screen conveniently. 3-5 is visually genius, but also an infamous difficulty peak as the circular pattern is not intuitive and will often find you in really tight spots; it’s more an endurance test rather than a trial-and-error challenge given the frenetic nature of the challenge. It might be frustrating to have this as Stage 3. 3-6 is just a friendly reminder that the most famous corner we’re used to exploit for avoiding might not always be the best one, but there might be another alternative. The boss at 3-7 is just fabulous and has, hands down, the best implementation of the slow-mo gimmick in the entire game: intuitive, responsive and exciting, right at the climax. However, this boss is the reason I am tagging this game with “jumpscare” because Jesus Christ... It gets you exactly where you’re most concentrated. Enjoy the sky blue.
-Stage 4 is very problematic for me since its difficulty partially comes from a visual challenge: the background is light gray and there are orbs of light colors, or even orbs that have only a white outline, but the interior’s color match the color of the background. Considering the substantial amount of reading you must do, it’s really bothersome (4-2 is the worst of the cases). Here’s where the creator showcases his ability to create visual shows more clearly, which you cannot see unless you record yourself because you’re focused on your character. 4-3 is the most interesting, I’d argue, as it plays with a Touhou concept where the subsequent waves of attack depend on your previous movements and their timing: either you open or close your own path to victory. Understanding it takes time, but it doesn’t take long to realize it behaves like you want it to behave. 4-5 is well done since it introduces the concept of fast barrage and avoiding, which creators today have exploited to stupid levels, but that only lasts half of the challenge; the second half makes you read and create a strat for a combination of RNG with pattern, where the most common one consists taking advantage of the space that exists between the left and right borders of the screen. 4-6 shouldn’t exist: the blind spots are pattern, but quite unspeakable and dumb considering that it’s a repetition from a previous stage, but with the corners unavailable for standing on them. The boss of 4-7 is just meh: it has no relation to the previous challenges, but works more as just an additional challenge and is certainly not the most difficult.
-After the four “official” stages are cleared, the game takes the original “Warning: Do Not Go” joke of Black to the extreme; it gives a hilarious warning that roughly translates to the following: Congratulations on clearing 4 phases! The barrage from here forward is different than the one from before. I don’t care what they look like at all; it’s just made to kill the player. However, in terms of the game, it is clear here! From here on, it is an extra production. If you are going to do it, please be prepared and do it. Note: Since you cannot come back if you proceed, it is recommended to back up saved data.
-Proceeding this supposed warning screen, you face individual challenges.
--5-1: Curving! Good luck with fast reading of curved bullets. Orange is back (pro tip: blind spot)
--5-2: Circular density barrage spins around the enemy’s sprite, and you must time your entry into said circles. It reverses the rules, as now being closer to the enemy’s sprite is the safer spot! I think this is quite revolutionary for the time.
--5-3: A heart-pumping challenge that will behave exactly like you tell it to, with increasing density of many times: horizontal and vertical projectiles that appear from the borders of where you are, then circular orbs coming at you from the two upper corners, then two more from the bottom corners, then a huge orb that will go at you at increasing speeds, culminated with an almost unavoidable barrier that the enemy throws at you. It gets really crowded at the ending, and you must remember the proper time in which the barrier begins, but it’s rewarding to clear.
--5-4: This trash is my nightmare. First half is ok and easy; the tricky part is to calculate the height of your jumps for getting across the red and blue projectiles. But for the love of everything that is holy, the second half is 95% stupid. There are two main strats to use: either go to the roof and then fall down, dodging everything (which is dumb hard), or (pro tip) stay in the lower-right corner reacting (if you can) to all the garbage around you. It is not intuitive at all, and even if the latter is the safest strat, RNG seldom can get unreactable. The timing you must do at the end is also very stupid. The hell with this garbage.
--5-5: Even if this can be second-tried at worst (I had the luck to first-try it), I think it’s the most fun of the challenges. The tilesets around you look like a Sudoku collage of all previous ones, indicating that you will face the main bosses of the game. Indeed, each one appears by turns, but cumulatively, to unleash their attacks against a pitch black background, which Cyber and Carnival adored so much. It’s a proper way to test a great deal of the stuff that has been learned, like that type of exam that doesn’t ask you for all possible questions, but those that the professor considered the most relevant ones.
5-6: Taiko Drum
W(H)ellcome to the toughest challenge of the game, which makes this deserve a rating of 80: Taiko Drum. This boss gives tons to talk about. First, you can really call this an extra (which isn’t), as it feels so detached from the rest of the game, but still maintains the barrage vibe. This is the spot where you realize it was all practice. The screen is divided by eye-piercing red and blue colors, while orange and blue Taiko projectiles with a massive size go against you.
Cyber is no stranger for using tense soundtracks for the final challenges to drive you nuts, but this is no ordinary soundtrack: just like in Black, the Dodonpachi series plays a huge role. At the hyperactive beat of Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu Black Label’s “Mercilessness”, you must do the first true music-synced avoidance of the game, and also the longest so far. Cyber is arguably the reason why barrage was born in fangames and fangames use soundtracks from Dodonpachi.
The avoidance is very fun, except when it isn’t. It is a sin when you don’t account for how feasible it is to include combinations of limited blind spots and RNG: you can get walled. Taiko Drum constantly throws waves at you during the chorus, and they are pattern: the blind spots never change. However, this makes you pray that there isn’t a huge orb occupying that spot. Many moments in this avoidance are objectively luck, and the last instagib is unforgivable; even knowing when and how it happens, the space to maneuver is so narrow and, if the RNG is not proper, you will watch yourself die many times milliseconds before the very ending.
5-7: Taisa
If we could consider the possibility of a Cyberverse occurring, pretty much like with Carnival (whose stories where intentionally interconnected, introducing the prototype concept of “medley” even before Kamilia 1 was a thing), Taisa is back from Black (sad state of affairs I cannot phrase that as “Back in Black”), but in a weaker form. However, he has still three phases, each one increasing in difficulty.
Long story short, this boss is brilliant. The first phase can drag for many, but if you take some time to appreciate the patterns Cyber programmed, you’ll realize barrage is also visually satisfying. A whole attack in the middle is standing still in two very precise blind spots of two frames of opportunity each, and you can literally go to the kitchen to fetch some water and come back in time to move to the second location. What I did was to behold and wonder: “How do you even do that, especially in 2010?”. Green orbs attack is very unfair since you never know when they stop spinning and choose a linear trajectory outside of Taisa, and the last attack is just choke material that can be easily avoided.
The famous second red phase is an exercise of timing and precision: the second attack vibes to a weird tune that seems to be unknown even today, and again, it’s just visual pixelated art. Occasionally it pulls off a wall that can find you in the most inappropriate spot killing you, as the beginning of that chain of tiny orbs has no space between orbs, so you better calculate in midair where it might start and read the rest afterwards: it is extremely fair and readable, and with the implementation of infinite jump, it is no less than fun. The final attack still makes everyone go: “OMG that’s 3D brooo!” and for my two cents, it is an amazing visual effect. Taisa creates a cylinder that becomes each time less dense because he uses many of these orbs to aim at you. This attack is debatably the hardest only if you’re good at reading the previous barrage attack, as the line he creates has little space to go through and the best strat is to move suddenly quick so that the space becomes bigger. It is still tough.
And then... it’s all over, right? Lol.
Face final phase, and it follows the philosophy of Silent Night, Deadly Night 2: “GARBAGE DAY!” At the beat and hype of Vanessa, Taisa conglomerates all powers from all previous stages (including Taiko Drum!) to give you a fun time. Just like Black’s final attack, density increases as time goes by, which makes you see the top of the screen to see how much time rema... “Where the hell is the time bar? Where is it?” Indeed, the game pulls your pants down and then the rug under your feet as the time bar that all challenges had disappears. Unless you know the song, you’re in full uncertainty and can only infer by how the song is sounding. Whoever credits ㅇyㅇ for creating the first boss ever to assemble the powers of previous bosses, a revision is required: Solgryn, Influka and Cyber did it first at the least.
The game ends with Zelda’s Lullaby and a reminder of all cutie Touhou sprites that were used (also used in Maze) and allows you to replay any challenge you wish if you enjoyed any, and the probability of you enjoying zero stages is close to 0.
Influential and revolutionary, even if flawed and not a masterpiece, set many rules for future avoidance making. As maligned as Cyber might be, he deserves all credit for this unique release considered today to be a timeline event (which should also include Maze, for Christ’s sake!). An immediate old-school favorite and fully recommended if you can get past beyond the unfair and luck-based segments.
Rating: 7.0 70
Difficulty: 80 80
Oct 24, 2023
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