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:
380 Ratings!
380 Reviews!
792 Screenshots!
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380 Games
380 Reviews
ElCochran90
For: I Wanna Be Like Beautiful Starlight
For: I Wanna Be Like Beautiful Starlight
*Cleared on 09/02/2023*
The game Flavi the Flav does not want you to play because he made it is one of the fangames of all times: U.S. soundtrack that no one outside the country will recognize, woeful platforming, repetitive triggers, nasty choke jumps that do not compare to the average difficulty, single-jump gimmick implemented horribly, unspeakable screen transitions in all areas (especially corridor needle), horrendous background choices and a cute, first-try boss (at least in my case). Even if you want to highlight yourself first-trying the boss (you guessed it: a cherry), it will be muted due to copyright. The only swag thing about the game is the Phil Collins wallpaper I guess.
Also, if I might ask, why is the average difficulty above 60?
[0] Likes
The game Flavi the Flav does not want you to play because he made it is one of the fangames of all times: U.S. soundtrack that no one outside the country will recognize, woeful platforming, repetitive triggers, nasty choke jumps that do not compare to the average difficulty, single-jump gimmick implemented horribly, unspeakable screen transitions in all areas (especially corridor needle), horrendous background choices and a cute, first-try boss (at least in my case). Even if you want to highlight yourself first-trying the boss (you guessed it: a cherry), it will be muted due to copyright. The only swag thing about the game is the Phil Collins wallpaper I guess.
Also, if I might ask, why is the average difficulty above 60?
Rating: 1.5 15
Difficulty: 55 55
Oct 18, 2023
ElCochran90
For: I Wanna Develop An Appreciation For Music
For: I Wanna Develop An Appreciation For Music
*Cleared on 02/02/2023*
I owed my fellow Racic a live playthrough since ages, and by the time February came, I never released a review.
Truth to be told, fangame reviews were passed to a lower priority given many changes and events concerning my family’s health, my work, new ways of working at my job with a hybrid Home-Office / In-Presence model, and a recent engagement! My oh my, there will be another wedding in the IWC.
However, I personally established an obligation to review every single fangame I ever play because it’s a personal moral standard: there is a reason for my numbers, my appreciation matters, I share my worldviews with this unique community that still employs memes and humorous language I will never understand for the life of me, and, most importantly, all artists deserve feedback about their work and a review is the least they deserve.
Since day zero, I have always hated trap games. Also, as the community becomes desensitized with a brutally increasing trend of absurdly difficult games that will get today a difficulty rating of 71 even if in the old days they would be floating around a rating of 82, finding fun games of any genre becomes a challenge more today. That is why we, the less skilled ones, are each time more grateful for events like IWT (and there will still be outliers, like Know My Retribution or luck-based Crispy Fries).
This is where Racic and I share a tangency point in our vision:
“As an older, and far far less skilled player of fangames, I had noticed that newer games kept coming out with more complicated gimmicks, and the skill level kept getting higher and higher. One of my goals was to take fangames back to that old-school silly trap, dated references, fun.”
Why has this become rarer today? As a far far less skilled player of fangames myself as well, Racic wore the brave pants of creating a fangame, something I have no idea how to do (let alone having free time today to learn how to), and delivered this charm.
Prepare yourself for a surreal adventure trap game that will culture you with the basics of old-school hip hop, 90s Eurodance, vocaloids and country music (thanks a ton for the latter since it has been unjustly maligned and trashed).
The level of self-awareness is massive, and I think that’s the point of it all. “It is not a game that will change our lives”, but it’s just out there as a homage to the old days of not-frustrating fun. It’s a trap game, but the traps really don’t repeat themselves as much as old-school atrocities inspired by the legendary downloaders of Record My Jumps. The Sudoku-ish aspect of it makes it what it is: low production value goes along with the humor of the game.
I am not the meme-humor type, which pretty much excludes me from 95% of the Gen-Zers and 85% of the millennials (me being one), so the humor is lost on me. Many screens are frustratingly looking, and the traps do fall into generic territory most of the time. There is a punishment room, and it gets too cruel with the number of times intended for you to fall into it. It stops being funny and makes you begin to pray you don’t go there for the 17th time, especially if you have a terrible memory for traps (me).
The spikes sprites are a meme by this point, but why must all of them be poop? It’s kindergarten humor and you’ll have to endure it to the end. Still, what I love about Racic is that the upcoming sequel has “poop spikes addressed”, raising a middle finger to all. What can we do? Legend.
It’s a game that you can flush down the toilet, but it manages to do exactly what it aims to do: culture a little, restore the old Kayin days (who unironically gets trashed today) and makes you laugh. I laugh a couple of times, to which Racic said: “I don’t mind about your final Cochran rating: you’re having a good time and that’s enough for me”.
You have my respect, good sir.
[2] Likes
I owed my fellow Racic a live playthrough since ages, and by the time February came, I never released a review.
Truth to be told, fangame reviews were passed to a lower priority given many changes and events concerning my family’s health, my work, new ways of working at my job with a hybrid Home-Office / In-Presence model, and a recent engagement! My oh my, there will be another wedding in the IWC.
However, I personally established an obligation to review every single fangame I ever play because it’s a personal moral standard: there is a reason for my numbers, my appreciation matters, I share my worldviews with this unique community that still employs memes and humorous language I will never understand for the life of me, and, most importantly, all artists deserve feedback about their work and a review is the least they deserve.
Since day zero, I have always hated trap games. Also, as the community becomes desensitized with a brutally increasing trend of absurdly difficult games that will get today a difficulty rating of 71 even if in the old days they would be floating around a rating of 82, finding fun games of any genre becomes a challenge more today. That is why we, the less skilled ones, are each time more grateful for events like IWT (and there will still be outliers, like Know My Retribution or luck-based Crispy Fries).
This is where Racic and I share a tangency point in our vision:
“As an older, and far far less skilled player of fangames, I had noticed that newer games kept coming out with more complicated gimmicks, and the skill level kept getting higher and higher. One of my goals was to take fangames back to that old-school silly trap, dated references, fun.”
Why has this become rarer today? As a far far less skilled player of fangames myself as well, Racic wore the brave pants of creating a fangame, something I have no idea how to do (let alone having free time today to learn how to), and delivered this charm.
Prepare yourself for a surreal adventure trap game that will culture you with the basics of old-school hip hop, 90s Eurodance, vocaloids and country music (thanks a ton for the latter since it has been unjustly maligned and trashed).
The level of self-awareness is massive, and I think that’s the point of it all. “It is not a game that will change our lives”, but it’s just out there as a homage to the old days of not-frustrating fun. It’s a trap game, but the traps really don’t repeat themselves as much as old-school atrocities inspired by the legendary downloaders of Record My Jumps. The Sudoku-ish aspect of it makes it what it is: low production value goes along with the humor of the game.
I am not the meme-humor type, which pretty much excludes me from 95% of the Gen-Zers and 85% of the millennials (me being one), so the humor is lost on me. Many screens are frustratingly looking, and the traps do fall into generic territory most of the time. There is a punishment room, and it gets too cruel with the number of times intended for you to fall into it. It stops being funny and makes you begin to pray you don’t go there for the 17th time, especially if you have a terrible memory for traps (me).
The spikes sprites are a meme by this point, but why must all of them be poop? It’s kindergarten humor and you’ll have to endure it to the end. Still, what I love about Racic is that the upcoming sequel has “poop spikes addressed”, raising a middle finger to all. What can we do? Legend.
It’s a game that you can flush down the toilet, but it manages to do exactly what it aims to do: culture a little, restore the old Kayin days (who unironically gets trashed today) and makes you laugh. I laugh a couple of times, to which Racic said: “I don’t mind about your final Cochran rating: you’re having a good time and that’s enough for me”.
You have my respect, good sir.
Rating: 4.4 44
Difficulty: 45 45
Oct 17, 2023
ElCochran90
For: I Wanna Start A Party
For: I Wanna Start A Party
A work of love, tribute and dedication. The vision brought to this game is an astonishing amalgamation of the Mario Party mechanics, a juxtaposition of the elements that have defined classic original videogame franchises, and also what has defined fangames as an artform derivative from their original videogame sources, bringing along a fantastic, entertaining, utmost enjoyable online multiplayer experience to be grinded solo and then for competing with friends.
Think of the logic old-school Pixar feature films followed: an endearing story, lovable characters, an adventure sense, universal moral angles for everyone to relate, and jokes for all audiences (containing a handful that only adults could get either from indirect innuendo spiciness or more complex societal / political issues, maybe even nostalgic references to past eras before their sons were born). They were films that you didn't have to understand 100% to have an absolute blast after watching Buzz and Woody falling with style to make Andy happy, a bunch of monsters finding the meaning of humanity and how to eliminate unconscious bias barriers, a clown fish going through astonishingly detailed ocean obstacles and dangers to pursue his son and make someone with short-term memory loss loved and cared for in the process, or a dysfunctional family of superheroes working together for a common purpose like never before where love takes its proper place as the core.
I Wanna Start A Party embraces exactly that universality: it's the ultimate, landmark conglomeration if videogames and independently-made fangames (also videogames for my artistic standards of appreciation and evaluation) coming together to celebrate what makes any game lover come to play: have a challenge, have fun, brake barriers with people, celebrate a community and make its members closer to each other and, no less important, invite curious players that might have the stigma or the conscious bias of perceiving IWBTG fangames as inaccessible or niche-exclusive due to their well renowned difficulty (especially considering the games that have become popular since 2007 on the Internet, all the way to the showcases of AGDQ and SGDQ): Boshy, NANG and Kamilia 2 are not particularly accessible. Even if there is an official website, a Discord and a welcome page for Intro, sometimes the first impression is the one that matters.
This project that cascades love for playability needs to be promoted widely: there is no previous fangame knowledge required, even if many fangame references might fly over new people's minds (but, then again, not the original board maps necessarily, from popular ones like Super Mario World and Undertale to lesser known ones like Baba Is You), the learning curve for all that will click the download button will be exactly the same, and the variety of minigames (40 to be exact) and challenges (20 to be exact) will keep anyone hooked.
The board game system is implemented quite fantastically for those of us that grew up before computers at home were a thing, and having a laptop in 1999 was something groundbreaking that only the rich could afford. Rules are self-explanatory, items are varied, and some RNG instances have the capacity to turn the tables entirely upside down. Some games depend entirely on luck, some others on skill, and some others as a mix of both depending on your position each second. For the RNG unfairness complaints, they are understandable; then again, everyone is subject to the same probability of failure.
I particularly appreciate that the amount of achievements and skins you can unlock is very rewarding, there are nods to the underrated original game that started it all, and the game is under constand updates for revisions, bug-fixing (like the crazy coin chests disappearing and reappearing), and feedback.
For the solo experience, there are minigames you're meant to lose, such as the CN3 moving cherry house gimmick, the hidden host (Super Mario World game where you hide behind a door and all bots look for you), the NAMTG memory challenge of placing objects on their respective pillars, or the DeDeDe memory challenge from Boshy. Have you ever heard about the magical number 7? If someone at home asks you the favor of doing groceries and purchasing 7 items in particular, once the amount passes that threshold, you're in trouble. In a DeDeDe session against 3 bots, I had to memorize 15 movements and create a 16th. Screw you.
For cultural purposes, the game has the courtesy of not only referencing the games of the boards, but also the fangames referenced per skin or theme, just to expand on any player's curiosity, fangamer or not.
Finally, Gab makes a very true statement. This is a breakthrough in fangames. People waited for this for over 10 years (I wouldn't really say just 10) and attempts were made, but none of them truly invested the player to spend hours to grind for ramping up the fun with companions. Remember I Wanna VANILLA? The game asked for a really significant grind, but being a monotonous 100_Floor game with repetitive bosses and having a slow payment system, there was no way. The western community didn't really care about the language barrier and decided to register their scores on the public leaderboard anyway, but it wasn't talked about afterwards. Have you heard people speaking about it?
And so, we have come to 2023, a game that is meant to deservingly claim some special prizes at the next Fangame Awards (better than the Oscars; I freakin' hate the stupid Oscars [it's so easy to surpass the Oscars anyway {f*** them}]), and garnering the true sense of gaming:
-Companionship
-Team building
-Camaraderie
-Healthy competition
-Strategy
-Skill
-Suspense of entirely luck-based events
Bottom line, it is the best attempt of bringing a board game in the history of fangames, amassing almost all ideas that constitute a fun and exciting gaming experience while inviting atypical audiences to witness the variety of ideas and accessibility this community is capable of producing.
Conclusively, as far as I am aware, in the landscape of videogames in general, this is a project much more relevant than I Wanna Be the GBC, because whereas the latter did a lot for the community more than what it did for fangames in general, this is doing for videogames much more important things for international audiences.
Let the party begin!
[5] Likes
Think of the logic old-school Pixar feature films followed: an endearing story, lovable characters, an adventure sense, universal moral angles for everyone to relate, and jokes for all audiences (containing a handful that only adults could get either from indirect innuendo spiciness or more complex societal / political issues, maybe even nostalgic references to past eras before their sons were born). They were films that you didn't have to understand 100% to have an absolute blast after watching Buzz and Woody falling with style to make Andy happy, a bunch of monsters finding the meaning of humanity and how to eliminate unconscious bias barriers, a clown fish going through astonishingly detailed ocean obstacles and dangers to pursue his son and make someone with short-term memory loss loved and cared for in the process, or a dysfunctional family of superheroes working together for a common purpose like never before where love takes its proper place as the core.
I Wanna Start A Party embraces exactly that universality: it's the ultimate, landmark conglomeration if videogames and independently-made fangames (also videogames for my artistic standards of appreciation and evaluation) coming together to celebrate what makes any game lover come to play: have a challenge, have fun, brake barriers with people, celebrate a community and make its members closer to each other and, no less important, invite curious players that might have the stigma or the conscious bias of perceiving IWBTG fangames as inaccessible or niche-exclusive due to their well renowned difficulty (especially considering the games that have become popular since 2007 on the Internet, all the way to the showcases of AGDQ and SGDQ): Boshy, NANG and Kamilia 2 are not particularly accessible. Even if there is an official website, a Discord and a welcome page for Intro, sometimes the first impression is the one that matters.
This project that cascades love for playability needs to be promoted widely: there is no previous fangame knowledge required, even if many fangame references might fly over new people's minds (but, then again, not the original board maps necessarily, from popular ones like Super Mario World and Undertale to lesser known ones like Baba Is You), the learning curve for all that will click the download button will be exactly the same, and the variety of minigames (40 to be exact) and challenges (20 to be exact) will keep anyone hooked.
The board game system is implemented quite fantastically for those of us that grew up before computers at home were a thing, and having a laptop in 1999 was something groundbreaking that only the rich could afford. Rules are self-explanatory, items are varied, and some RNG instances have the capacity to turn the tables entirely upside down. Some games depend entirely on luck, some others on skill, and some others as a mix of both depending on your position each second. For the RNG unfairness complaints, they are understandable; then again, everyone is subject to the same probability of failure.
I particularly appreciate that the amount of achievements and skins you can unlock is very rewarding, there are nods to the underrated original game that started it all, and the game is under constand updates for revisions, bug-fixing (like the crazy coin chests disappearing and reappearing), and feedback.
For the solo experience, there are minigames you're meant to lose, such as the CN3 moving cherry house gimmick, the hidden host (Super Mario World game where you hide behind a door and all bots look for you), the NAMTG memory challenge of placing objects on their respective pillars, or the DeDeDe memory challenge from Boshy. Have you ever heard about the magical number 7? If someone at home asks you the favor of doing groceries and purchasing 7 items in particular, once the amount passes that threshold, you're in trouble. In a DeDeDe session against 3 bots, I had to memorize 15 movements and create a 16th. Screw you.
For cultural purposes, the game has the courtesy of not only referencing the games of the boards, but also the fangames referenced per skin or theme, just to expand on any player's curiosity, fangamer or not.
Finally, Gab makes a very true statement. This is a breakthrough in fangames. People waited for this for over 10 years (I wouldn't really say just 10) and attempts were made, but none of them truly invested the player to spend hours to grind for ramping up the fun with companions. Remember I Wanna VANILLA? The game asked for a really significant grind, but being a monotonous 100_Floor game with repetitive bosses and having a slow payment system, there was no way. The western community didn't really care about the language barrier and decided to register their scores on the public leaderboard anyway, but it wasn't talked about afterwards. Have you heard people speaking about it?
And so, we have come to 2023, a game that is meant to deservingly claim some special prizes at the next Fangame Awards (better than the Oscars; I freakin' hate the stupid Oscars [it's so easy to surpass the Oscars anyway {f*** them}]), and garnering the true sense of gaming:
-Companionship
-Team building
-Camaraderie
-Healthy competition
-Strategy
-Skill
-Suspense of entirely luck-based events
Bottom line, it is the best attempt of bringing a board game in the history of fangames, amassing almost all ideas that constitute a fun and exciting gaming experience while inviting atypical audiences to witness the variety of ideas and accessibility this community is capable of producing.
Conclusively, as far as I am aware, in the landscape of videogames in general, this is a project much more relevant than I Wanna Be the GBC, because whereas the latter did a lot for the community more than what it did for fangames in general, this is doing for videogames much more important things for international audiences.
Let the party begin!
Rating: 8.5 85
Difficulty: N/A
Apr 3, 2023
ElCochran90
For: I Wanna End the Blood Festival
For: I Wanna End the Blood Festival
Rating includes extra. Difficulty rating includes normal game (although extra is less difficult and doesn't affect it).
I am unaware of which game came out first between Device and this, but many fangames used the same formula:
-Begin in a hub from which you can choose 'n' stages in any order (n = 6 this time)
-Every stage has a cryptic secret (not so cryptic in this one, but at least one is not obvious)
-Face a boss at the end of a stage
-Enjoy generic traps from beginning to end, including at the very end of a save
-There is a final boss
-You unlock extra after beating the boss and collecting all secrets, with the extra requiring you to beat an additional stage or many, and having to face all bloody bosses again in steroids
Every stage is blood themed in a way, although there is a stage that was randomly decided to be the typical "forest stage"; I swear the only think missing was the overused Super Mario RPG theme. Screen transitions are quite unfair and mostly don't make sense.
If you're one of the people like me that usually begin with the upper left stage instead of venturing yourself in a random order, beware. Unless you understand perfectly the moving cherries that form a circle in the first screen, this screen is certified to be hell. Even when you're capable of noticing how to do it, you'll realize how precise it is. The very first save of the first screen of the game, which was this one, took me 25 minutes and 150 deaths. The second save of the same screen took me 6 deaths.
Expect an atrocious difficulty balance all over the place, but you will face the reach of this unnevenness right at the start. Don't get discouraged (or, just don't play the game at all).
The Miku is really boring, with a first minute that gets really boring, a second minute that is a cascade of fast attacks you must grind your learning through practice to get them right, and the final minute has two very precise moves which are really precise in strategy as they are position based (the two flower-like attacks that explode from the very center of the screen). The vocaloid is really fun, but the implementation to the avoidance is quite bad and it does have a Lovetrap attack at the end which is most unwelcome and frustrating.
Up to this point, the game is as awful as Explorer: failed gimmick ideas, bad execution, a really bad avoidance with a banger of a song (wasted potential) and
Now, enter the Extra Stage. You remember those old fangames where it was clearly done by two people, as properly credited in this page (say, Tempest or Breaking Out)? You can tell who did what if they have a preceeding reputation, or at least one does. Extra Stage is an oddity like itself. It has entertaining side scrollers, ingenious traps, a menacing terror aura, a dragon boss with robotic autotune, and even a Buy-the-Crayon-like / See-the-Moon-like segment with gravity gimmicks!
What is this? Who made EX? Was it done by the same person? Should I find a way to translate the read me? This is an entirely different, decent game.
The Extra Boss is not only better than the final Miku for any% clear, but also quite cool, more balanced, implements the cool attack nicely, has a cool sprite and a great background for the "blood theme".
I cannot recommend this game solely based on experiencing Extra, since that involves also fighting all bosses buffed, and some stages do not even feel blood-themed at all. It's a strange, very bad game overall.
If you're into the K2 challenge and have a high tolerance for those particularities that old fangames had.... err, sure, try it, but do seek for EX and use a guide for the secrets.
[1] Like
I am unaware of which game came out first between Device and this, but many fangames used the same formula:
-Begin in a hub from which you can choose 'n' stages in any order (n = 6 this time)
-Every stage has a cryptic secret (not so cryptic in this one, but at least one is not obvious)
-Face a boss at the end of a stage
-Enjoy generic traps from beginning to end, including at the very end of a save
-There is a final boss
-You unlock extra after beating the boss and collecting all secrets, with the extra requiring you to beat an additional stage or many, and having to face all bloody bosses again in steroids
Every stage is blood themed in a way, although there is a stage that was randomly decided to be the typical "forest stage"; I swear the only think missing was the overused Super Mario RPG theme. Screen transitions are quite unfair and mostly don't make sense.
If you're one of the people like me that usually begin with the upper left stage instead of venturing yourself in a random order, beware. Unless you understand perfectly the moving cherries that form a circle in the first screen, this screen is certified to be hell. Even when you're capable of noticing how to do it, you'll realize how precise it is. The very first save of the first screen of the game, which was this one, took me 25 minutes and 150 deaths. The second save of the same screen took me 6 deaths.
Expect an atrocious difficulty balance all over the place, but you will face the reach of this unnevenness right at the start. Don't get discouraged (or, just don't play the game at all).
The Miku is really boring, with a first minute that gets really boring, a second minute that is a cascade of fast attacks you must grind your learning through practice to get them right, and the final minute has two very precise moves which are really precise in strategy as they are position based (the two flower-like attacks that explode from the very center of the screen). The vocaloid is really fun, but the implementation to the avoidance is quite bad and it does have a Lovetrap attack at the end which is most unwelcome and frustrating.
Up to this point, the game is as awful as Explorer: failed gimmick ideas, bad execution, a really bad avoidance with a banger of a song (wasted potential) and
Now, enter the Extra Stage. You remember those old fangames where it was clearly done by two people, as properly credited in this page (say, Tempest or Breaking Out)? You can tell who did what if they have a preceeding reputation, or at least one does. Extra Stage is an oddity like itself. It has entertaining side scrollers, ingenious traps, a menacing terror aura, a dragon boss with robotic autotune, and even a Buy-the-Crayon-like / See-the-Moon-like segment with gravity gimmicks!
What is this? Who made EX? Was it done by the same person? Should I find a way to translate the read me? This is an entirely different, decent game.
The Extra Boss is not only better than the final Miku for any% clear, but also quite cool, more balanced, implements the cool attack nicely, has a cool sprite and a great background for the "blood theme".
I cannot recommend this game solely based on experiencing Extra, since that involves also fighting all bosses buffed, and some stages do not even feel blood-themed at all. It's a strange, very bad game overall.
If you're into the K2 challenge and have a high tolerance for those particularities that old fangames had.... err, sure, try it, but do seek for EX and use a guide for the secrets.
Rating: 3.5 35
Difficulty: 75 75
Mar 27, 2023
ElCochran90
For: I Wanna Be the Sadist
For: I Wanna Be the Sadist
This is---- legendary. That is a fact, indeed. Unfortunately it's a fact.
The hardest pending fangame I had for the K2 Challenge, which is probably the only reason why one would care about this game (Edit: Catastrophe doesn't count because it is Cochranly_Impossible).
Let's be objective (having as a given that both ratings for quality and difficulty are subjective). The game is not an entire putrid steaming pile of goat shit (my, the good old days of AVGN came to me all of a sudden). Old fangames had the tradition of putting the absolute worst and simultaneously most generic stage as the very first stage: common tilesets, guy rock, needle and delicious fruits. It's there. It's ugly and stupid. Two screens of the first stage look like you already know how they look, and the third one looks like the bottom screens of LoveTrap if you decide to go down in the original LoveTrap from the very first screen: also default tilesets with a pitch dark orange background. Is this a tribute? Maybe.
The problem with this stage? The presentation is horrible, it has very annoying traps (have fun with the 16 pixels madness here and with the first save of the third screen which has delicious fruits bouncing from wall to wall ridiculously fast while you jump over spikes). The first two screens are not riddled, they are infested with traps with every move you make, and to top it all, the spikes move at the speed of light. You have two frames at the most to react because they really aim at getting to the moon with that speed.
The first boss is an amusingly cheap and basic one: it has a child version of Len ""driving"" a steamroller towards you while spikes from the ground appear from right to left. Also, as a good LoveTrap boss would do, each time you make damage, that's a free cherry on screen for you, except it is position-based. So, it is impossible to spam the boss with bullets. It is hilariously cute to an unbearable degree, because you need 15 tons of imagination to really understand what's going on. There is an eye-piercing yellow background, so you cannot know both of you are moving. Everything is static. But he's riding this steamroller, you see? It's funny, because the intended IMAGINATION is that you picture he's actually driving towards you and you are "escaping" from him because the floor is a conveyor belt that pushes you to the left, towards Len. The conveyor belt is what drives people insane in this boss, because, besides pushing you to the left really fast, it also has the unwelcome gimmick of only making you able to make second-jump heights, as if you were in water. So, the jump calculations will fail you until you get used to the second-jump height and movement. Add some RNG of raining spikes and a huge bar of HP, and you will you have a lot of fun.
To be honest, this boss is one of patience. It is so ugly, you want to get rid of him fast, but it's there. It exists. The more patient and calculating you are, the biggest the odds of success are. It's not difficult; it's frustratingly slow and annoying to control. Don't be afraid of it. Do mind, however, that a successful attempt will take time.
So, everything is like 0.3/10 material at the moment.
Then the next stages come. They have interesting ideas and fun moments. I won't lie. When you arrive to the "Final Fantasy Remix Theme" stage, the needle is OK. It still has traps at the speed of light, but it's not atrocious. It's bad, but not atrocious, and I found the pathing of the first save of the first screen to be fun. From there, the second screen is really annoying because it implements the conveyor belt once again, that which makes you jump only with your second jump mechanics, and a brown platform logic that you won't understand until you try it many times. Too bad the save is difficult to learn and grind for you to have many attempts. The joke of the save is also that the conveyor pushes you to the left so hard that, if you don't do anything, it makes you be stuck on the wall to the left.
But hey... that block in which you get stuck on has different jumping mechanics, because there is a couple of frames in which you're not governed by the converyor belt's physics.... right?
What if.... I.... Wait.
And then, this led me to discover a skip that, as far as a I know, no one in the fangame community had ever discovered. I decided to exploit this oversight, leading me to mock at the game to my most sincere pleasure, and I had to share it with everyone (save spoilers):
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1701172363
The part in which I flaunt endlessly is obviously me joking, but I did feel powerful.
From there, as a reward, you get one of the most infamous screen transitions, one that involves making a leap of faith into a horizontal gate immediately after you screen-transition. Godawful in every way.
The Mario and Kirby stages are fine. For the Mario stage, I was shocked to see a side-scrolling section for such a maligned fangame, and it wouldn't be a total waste if it wasn't because of the 16-pixel fixation of the first save, making it the hardest. The rest has a laughable visual design, but at least none of it is default tileset design.
The boss is infamous for making you wasting your time. It's not bad. It has a bizarre pathing that can go through blocks with a del-fruit annoying you, but nothing too bad. It's OK, it's a fast victory..... Except it isn't, because when you beat it, you fall into a trap while walking to the warp. Oh know. It's maze time! Now you have to embrace the terrible revelation that, unless you see a video or guide, you will die several times to find the correct path (and warp!) to clear the bloody stage.
The Kirby stage has the toughest needle, and the precious Nekoron engine, so have fun making unintended full jumps when making the half diamonds! Third screen shows its teeth with really precise saves and traps at the end: extremely fair. The boss is a joke. Second-try because I had to determine the correct safe spot during the thunder attack.
Last stage leading to the final boss is fun. It's a vertical-scrolling section and a race against time before the acid.. er.. "soda cream melon" according to the Japanese text, reaches you and makes you explode, as it would logically happen in real life. It's Donkey-Kong-Country 2 themed with Zingers all over the place, some of them of course moving incredibly fast (this is Be The Sadist, have you forgotten?). The difficulty balance is all over the place, and it is strongly recommended that, after getting to a save, you do take your time to know the next save even if the "soda cream melon" reaches you because, when you hit R for retrying, the "acid" appears at a default location and is way too close to you! You will wish you had used your opportunity better!
FINAL BOSS
This boss deserves a review of its own. There is no need to make it long; a list of its problems suffices.
-What you have to do: Shoot brown rocks at it to damage it
The end.
Characteristics and facts:
-The soda cream melon "acid" is pattern. It will behave in the exact same way everytime.
-The brown rocks depend on a timer. They will come out exactly after every X frames.
-The gray boulders are RNG and will come out of 13 different holes.
-Just like the brown rocks, little bees will spawn exactly after every X frames, and from the same locations. An additional bee will spawn every time you inflict damage on Zanto, the final boss.
Problems:
-The music sucks. It's a 4.5 second loop of the same exact tune except for the intro.
-The gray boulders are RNG.
-The more damage you inflict on the boss, the faster the gray boulders rain over you.
-The boss has a huge, unwelcome amount of HP. There's a moment in which you will go "WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE?!" The amount of hits it has is exactly 25 hits by brown rocks.
-If you hit the boss with your bullets, it will bounce them back at you, no questions asked.
-If you hit any gray boulder by accident, it doesn't only block your bullets: it bounces them back at you! Why on Earth?? (It starts to get worse from here)
-If you shoot a gray boulder from the right side, it goes THROUGH it. How come they were programmed in such a specific way?
-If you shoot the boss or a gray boulder, and the bullet bounces back at a little bee, IT FREAKING GOES THROUGH IT, KILLING YOU? What the f*** is the logic in that? At least I would expect some courtesy from bad aiming, but no, a bounced bullet from the boss can go through a gray boulder and through a bee until it reaches you and kills you!! What in the holy f*%/&!
-There is a point in which the "acid" reaches all the way to the top, so high, that you cannot react to the RNG of the boulders. You are expected to do this between 4 and 5 times depending on the RNG the boss gives you. That amounts for a total of 18 possible boulders PRAYING that they don't hit you.
-With the acid thing, it is only optimal to be at a single height of the screen, so the rest of the platforms are basically there just for decoration.
-The bees move at your speed. Miss a bullet, and it will either hit something that bounces it back at you, or the bee does the work. Every bullet counts.
-The main bee boss is programmed in such a way that it only moves slowly up and down, but it moves so high at one point that the brown rocks that damage it will go UNDER IT. WHy????
-Samewise, the boss will go down so much that there is a slim chance that the brown rock goes above it.
-If the song loops, there is a small probability that the game freezes half a second.
-Given the RNG of the gray boulders and the set pattern of the brown rocks, you will have several of your shoots being blocked by the gray boulders to count.
-Finally, there will be more instances than you can imagine, as unlikely as it might sound, that the sprite of the little bees (which are circa the Kid's size) occupy the space of a gray boulder, making a perfect eclipse. You will then shoot the bee thinking you will kill it, but since the bee's hitbox is extremely inconsistent (sometimes, the bullet will go through the bee, and it never hits the wings or the feet), the gray boulder hitbox predominates over the bee's, and you're dead, because of the bouncing deal.
Given that this is objectively a luck boss, under the assumption that you don't face any of the aforementioned BS problems in an entirely successful run, considering that a boulder has a chance of 1/13 of appearing exactly above where you are when the acid forces you to be at the very top, right under the boulders, the P(Not Getting Hit | x = 1/13) equals to (1-[1/13])^18 = 23.7% < 25%. This is less than 1 out of every 4 times. The grind required is insane, and it doesn't depend on you.
With all things considered, the final boss of GR has been topped, making this the worst final boss of a fangame in history, dismissing impossible bosses, the most unfair and the most frustrating. Luck-based bosses are always an extremely bad idea.
Up to the final boss, the game is around a 68 in difficulty and a 3.0 at best if you're tolerant to old fangame tropes and their common ups and downs and varying quality. However, I do rate a fangame only and only if I have beaten it completely, without considering extra (only exceptions so far are LoveTrap, and White & Black).
If you are curious, you could try the normal stages. When you see the infamous final boss, delete the game forever.
Here you have, hence, the final results.
[10] Likes
The hardest pending fangame I had for the K2 Challenge, which is probably the only reason why one would care about this game (Edit: Catastrophe doesn't count because it is Cochranly_Impossible).
Let's be objective (having as a given that both ratings for quality and difficulty are subjective). The game is not an entire putrid steaming pile of goat shit (my, the good old days of AVGN came to me all of a sudden). Old fangames had the tradition of putting the absolute worst and simultaneously most generic stage as the very first stage: common tilesets, guy rock, needle and delicious fruits. It's there. It's ugly and stupid. Two screens of the first stage look like you already know how they look, and the third one looks like the bottom screens of LoveTrap if you decide to go down in the original LoveTrap from the very first screen: also default tilesets with a pitch dark orange background. Is this a tribute? Maybe.
The problem with this stage? The presentation is horrible, it has very annoying traps (have fun with the 16 pixels madness here and with the first save of the third screen which has delicious fruits bouncing from wall to wall ridiculously fast while you jump over spikes). The first two screens are not riddled, they are infested with traps with every move you make, and to top it all, the spikes move at the speed of light. You have two frames at the most to react because they really aim at getting to the moon with that speed.
The first boss is an amusingly cheap and basic one: it has a child version of Len ""driving"" a steamroller towards you while spikes from the ground appear from right to left. Also, as a good LoveTrap boss would do, each time you make damage, that's a free cherry on screen for you, except it is position-based. So, it is impossible to spam the boss with bullets. It is hilariously cute to an unbearable degree, because you need 15 tons of imagination to really understand what's going on. There is an eye-piercing yellow background, so you cannot know both of you are moving. Everything is static. But he's riding this steamroller, you see? It's funny, because the intended IMAGINATION is that you picture he's actually driving towards you and you are "escaping" from him because the floor is a conveyor belt that pushes you to the left, towards Len. The conveyor belt is what drives people insane in this boss, because, besides pushing you to the left really fast, it also has the unwelcome gimmick of only making you able to make second-jump heights, as if you were in water. So, the jump calculations will fail you until you get used to the second-jump height and movement. Add some RNG of raining spikes and a huge bar of HP, and you will you have a lot of fun.
To be honest, this boss is one of patience. It is so ugly, you want to get rid of him fast, but it's there. It exists. The more patient and calculating you are, the biggest the odds of success are. It's not difficult; it's frustratingly slow and annoying to control. Don't be afraid of it. Do mind, however, that a successful attempt will take time.
So, everything is like 0.3/10 material at the moment.
Then the next stages come. They have interesting ideas and fun moments. I won't lie. When you arrive to the "Final Fantasy Remix Theme" stage, the needle is OK. It still has traps at the speed of light, but it's not atrocious. It's bad, but not atrocious, and I found the pathing of the first save of the first screen to be fun. From there, the second screen is really annoying because it implements the conveyor belt once again, that which makes you jump only with your second jump mechanics, and a brown platform logic that you won't understand until you try it many times. Too bad the save is difficult to learn and grind for you to have many attempts. The joke of the save is also that the conveyor pushes you to the left so hard that, if you don't do anything, it makes you be stuck on the wall to the left.
But hey... that block in which you get stuck on has different jumping mechanics, because there is a couple of frames in which you're not governed by the converyor belt's physics.... right?
What if.... I.... Wait.
And then, this led me to discover a skip that, as far as a I know, no one in the fangame community had ever discovered. I decided to exploit this oversight, leading me to mock at the game to my most sincere pleasure, and I had to share it with everyone (save spoilers):
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1701172363
The part in which I flaunt endlessly is obviously me joking, but I did feel powerful.
From there, as a reward, you get one of the most infamous screen transitions, one that involves making a leap of faith into a horizontal gate immediately after you screen-transition. Godawful in every way.
The Mario and Kirby stages are fine. For the Mario stage, I was shocked to see a side-scrolling section for such a maligned fangame, and it wouldn't be a total waste if it wasn't because of the 16-pixel fixation of the first save, making it the hardest. The rest has a laughable visual design, but at least none of it is default tileset design.
The boss is infamous for making you wasting your time. It's not bad. It has a bizarre pathing that can go through blocks with a del-fruit annoying you, but nothing too bad. It's OK, it's a fast victory..... Except it isn't, because when you beat it, you fall into a trap while walking to the warp. Oh know. It's maze time! Now you have to embrace the terrible revelation that, unless you see a video or guide, you will die several times to find the correct path (and warp!) to clear the bloody stage.
The Kirby stage has the toughest needle, and the precious Nekoron engine, so have fun making unintended full jumps when making the half diamonds! Third screen shows its teeth with really precise saves and traps at the end: extremely fair. The boss is a joke. Second-try because I had to determine the correct safe spot during the thunder attack.
Last stage leading to the final boss is fun. It's a vertical-scrolling section and a race against time before the acid.. er.. "soda cream melon" according to the Japanese text, reaches you and makes you explode, as it would logically happen in real life. It's Donkey-Kong-Country 2 themed with Zingers all over the place, some of them of course moving incredibly fast (this is Be The Sadist, have you forgotten?). The difficulty balance is all over the place, and it is strongly recommended that, after getting to a save, you do take your time to know the next save even if the "soda cream melon" reaches you because, when you hit R for retrying, the "acid" appears at a default location and is way too close to you! You will wish you had used your opportunity better!
FINAL BOSS
This boss deserves a review of its own. There is no need to make it long; a list of its problems suffices.
-What you have to do: Shoot brown rocks at it to damage it
The end.
Characteristics and facts:
-The soda cream melon "acid" is pattern. It will behave in the exact same way everytime.
-The brown rocks depend on a timer. They will come out exactly after every X frames.
-The gray boulders are RNG and will come out of 13 different holes.
-Just like the brown rocks, little bees will spawn exactly after every X frames, and from the same locations. An additional bee will spawn every time you inflict damage on Zanto, the final boss.
Problems:
-The music sucks. It's a 4.5 second loop of the same exact tune except for the intro.
-The gray boulders are RNG.
-The more damage you inflict on the boss, the faster the gray boulders rain over you.
-The boss has a huge, unwelcome amount of HP. There's a moment in which you will go "WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE?!" The amount of hits it has is exactly 25 hits by brown rocks.
-If you hit the boss with your bullets, it will bounce them back at you, no questions asked.
-If you hit any gray boulder by accident, it doesn't only block your bullets: it bounces them back at you! Why on Earth?? (It starts to get worse from here)
-If you shoot a gray boulder from the right side, it goes THROUGH it. How come they were programmed in such a specific way?
-If you shoot the boss or a gray boulder, and the bullet bounces back at a little bee, IT FREAKING GOES THROUGH IT, KILLING YOU? What the f*** is the logic in that? At least I would expect some courtesy from bad aiming, but no, a bounced bullet from the boss can go through a gray boulder and through a bee until it reaches you and kills you!! What in the holy f*%/&!
-There is a point in which the "acid" reaches all the way to the top, so high, that you cannot react to the RNG of the boulders. You are expected to do this between 4 and 5 times depending on the RNG the boss gives you. That amounts for a total of 18 possible boulders PRAYING that they don't hit you.
-With the acid thing, it is only optimal to be at a single height of the screen, so the rest of the platforms are basically there just for decoration.
-The bees move at your speed. Miss a bullet, and it will either hit something that bounces it back at you, or the bee does the work. Every bullet counts.
-The main bee boss is programmed in such a way that it only moves slowly up and down, but it moves so high at one point that the brown rocks that damage it will go UNDER IT. WHy????
-Samewise, the boss will go down so much that there is a slim chance that the brown rock goes above it.
-If the song loops, there is a small probability that the game freezes half a second.
-Given the RNG of the gray boulders and the set pattern of the brown rocks, you will have several of your shoots being blocked by the gray boulders to count.
-Finally, there will be more instances than you can imagine, as unlikely as it might sound, that the sprite of the little bees (which are circa the Kid's size) occupy the space of a gray boulder, making a perfect eclipse. You will then shoot the bee thinking you will kill it, but since the bee's hitbox is extremely inconsistent (sometimes, the bullet will go through the bee, and it never hits the wings or the feet), the gray boulder hitbox predominates over the bee's, and you're dead, because of the bouncing deal.
Given that this is objectively a luck boss, under the assumption that you don't face any of the aforementioned BS problems in an entirely successful run, considering that a boulder has a chance of 1/13 of appearing exactly above where you are when the acid forces you to be at the very top, right under the boulders, the P(Not Getting Hit | x = 1/13) equals to (1-[1/13])^18 = 23.7% < 25%. This is less than 1 out of every 4 times. The grind required is insane, and it doesn't depend on you.
With all things considered, the final boss of GR has been topped, making this the worst final boss of a fangame in history, dismissing impossible bosses, the most unfair and the most frustrating. Luck-based bosses are always an extremely bad idea.
Up to the final boss, the game is around a 68 in difficulty and a 3.0 at best if you're tolerant to old fangame tropes and their common ups and downs and varying quality. However, I do rate a fangame only and only if I have beaten it completely, without considering extra (only exceptions so far are LoveTrap, and White & Black).
If you are curious, you could try the normal stages. When you see the infamous final boss, delete the game forever.
Here you have, hence, the final results.
Rating: 0.7 7
Difficulty: 81 81
Jan 28, 2023
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