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!
790 Screenshots!
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378 Games
378 Reviews
ElCochran90
For: I wanna be the Guy:Gaiden(本家2)
For: I wanna be the Guy:Gaiden(本家2)
Kayin, Kayin... I'm one of the few that actually still holds your original game in a personal Top 5 after more than 200 fangames. The reason why I delayed playing your game so much was because I knew it was short and unfinished. That's the same reason why I delayed playing Make a Sandwich, 8bit and Kill The Guy for so long. The sole idea puts me off greatly. But I knew this was a different case compared to Kill the Guy; that game got released with half a chapter missing, bugged secrets, a whole boss chopped off and the ending missing. Here, more than half the game got released. I assumed, wrongly, that this beta version of your game would lack inspiration given that it lacked inspiration to even be finished.
How wrong I was. From the moment one opens your game, a cascade of old-school classics references rain all over, just like in the original, with a fantastic sense of humor. You open the freaking menu screen and there is a wonderful style without overdoing it. You enter Stage 1-1 and visuals are exceptional, with an addicting gameplay. So many things, just like in the original, are planned out so well, reading our innocent minds. You even want to hunt down the secrets for discovering their texts! The first death was so unexpected and you get a freaking award for falling for it. This is the Kayin I remember, a brave independent videogame maker that raised the difficulty bar with this entry.
Did I mention the story? It was so freaking good.
All three stages not only have overwhelming creativity and trolls, but exceptional design. How ironic is that the hundreds of generic visual copies your original game spawned used the same graphics/tilesets/etc. as a sign of respect (and sometimes laziness), but your direct sequel didn't. The graphics are more comparable to GOOD fangames from 2015 onwards. Not only that: each stage is different to the other despite being 1-1, 1-2 and 1-3. We being in Stage 1 was no excuse for making single-styled levels. There was a sense of progression and variety. You weren't afraid of heading towards more modern directions visually and gameplay-wise, featuring a somewhat faulty Bionic-Commando-like gimmick that you get used to almost near what is the ending of this game.
And then, featuring a wonderful cutscene promising an ace adventure in the most faithful NES/SNES tradition, it stops. The story stops. The creativity stops. The variety and suspense stop. Everything stops.
This was a gigantic waste of potential, one that hurts playing through once you stumble upon what is a tragically unfinished project rather than a project that was out there just "because", and then the creator decided to leave it unfinished just "because". In an alternate universe, there is a great game waiting for us; in that universe, this game is complete and became the example for Rukimin, Marathon, Kill The Guy and heck, even HeavenTrap 1 and 2. However, we were chosen to live in this sad universe, even if beating the first boss promises us to gain unimaginable power if we beat all bosses, including what would have been, with no room for doubts, one of the most memorable fangame final boss fights featuring The Kid against The Guy in a definitive fight. Maybe that sounded too good to be true, though... Even if this game also sins of being too cryptic at times, this could have been a 2010 legend along with Boshy.
People, we will never have this complete, and it is such a big shame. I do recommend it if you can go beyond the pain, if you're one of those people that can actually sit in front of a great movie, watch it, leave it unfinished and be OK with it even if you don't ever finish it. I'm not that kind of people :'(
[4] Likes
How wrong I was. From the moment one opens your game, a cascade of old-school classics references rain all over, just like in the original, with a fantastic sense of humor. You open the freaking menu screen and there is a wonderful style without overdoing it. You enter Stage 1-1 and visuals are exceptional, with an addicting gameplay. So many things, just like in the original, are planned out so well, reading our innocent minds. You even want to hunt down the secrets for discovering their texts! The first death was so unexpected and you get a freaking award for falling for it. This is the Kayin I remember, a brave independent videogame maker that raised the difficulty bar with this entry.
Did I mention the story? It was so freaking good.
All three stages not only have overwhelming creativity and trolls, but exceptional design. How ironic is that the hundreds of generic visual copies your original game spawned used the same graphics/tilesets/etc. as a sign of respect (and sometimes laziness), but your direct sequel didn't. The graphics are more comparable to GOOD fangames from 2015 onwards. Not only that: each stage is different to the other despite being 1-1, 1-2 and 1-3. We being in Stage 1 was no excuse for making single-styled levels. There was a sense of progression and variety. You weren't afraid of heading towards more modern directions visually and gameplay-wise, featuring a somewhat faulty Bionic-Commando-like gimmick that you get used to almost near what is the ending of this game.
And then, featuring a wonderful cutscene promising an ace adventure in the most faithful NES/SNES tradition, it stops. The story stops. The creativity stops. The variety and suspense stop. Everything stops.
This was a gigantic waste of potential, one that hurts playing through once you stumble upon what is a tragically unfinished project rather than a project that was out there just "because", and then the creator decided to leave it unfinished just "because". In an alternate universe, there is a great game waiting for us; in that universe, this game is complete and became the example for Rukimin, Marathon, Kill The Guy and heck, even HeavenTrap 1 and 2. However, we were chosen to live in this sad universe, even if beating the first boss promises us to gain unimaginable power if we beat all bosses, including what would have been, with no room for doubts, one of the most memorable fangame final boss fights featuring The Kid against The Guy in a definitive fight. Maybe that sounded too good to be true, though... Even if this game also sins of being too cryptic at times, this could have been a 2010 legend along with Boshy.
People, we will never have this complete, and it is such a big shame. I do recommend it if you can go beyond the pain, if you're one of those people that can actually sit in front of a great movie, watch it, leave it unfinished and be OK with it even if you don't ever finish it. I'm not that kind of people :'(
Rating: 4.9 49
Difficulty: 50 50
Nov 12, 2019
ElCochran90
For: I Wanna Be the Piyopiyo Trap
For: I Wanna Be the Piyopiyo Trap
Rating includes extra. Difficulty rating supposedly includes only the main stages (although extra doesn't affect it, really).
A great fangame dictionary example of what means to have great/interesting ideas executed badly in a fangame. Gimmicks and visuals are not so much the deal, although half the times they are generic copy-paste IWBTG trash (the other half is quite interesting, like the hilarious Wondows section). The problem is how gimmicks work, there is a language barrier for English-speaking players, and the extra content is horribly bad. Add to that extras that promise much more content than what they offer with ideas that are literally repeated from the main stages and you have a huge disappointment. Particularly annoying is the upper-left stage that has a save every two screens. "Consistency is what you need then", you might think, until you realize it's a trap game. This is not appreciated at all.
The dice section, the aforementioned "Wondows" section, they're quite decent. The Blocks segment is puzzle-ish from time to time but features annoying traps later on, ruining the gimmick imo. Finally, we have terrible bosses. Again, the ideas are very, very nice, but gameplay is annoying and also not always self-explanatory (you would think that shooting the dice when it has a particular face takes you to that section, but no, it doesn't always do it).
K3 took more than one idea from this game. Not only it featured two screens, but also the dice concept and the infamous RNG crystal. This extra makes you enter a portal, which has a 50% chance of making you win or lose. Not too bad, probably, but wait, you have to win 10 times in a row. Do you love probability like I do? This is NOT the extra for you. Simple math says that you have a chance of 1/1024 of winning, which is less than 0.1%. I calculated a rough average of how much it takes you to go into the portal: 2 seconds. Therefore, the expected time for winning is 34.13 minutes, which means you have to press the right key for over half an hour while staring at the screen. What is this, Boshy2? Well, at least you don't have to mash like crazy. You'll end up placing a heavy object, like a cup, over the right arrow key, getting up and going somewhere else to do something else (ironic, because this makes you stop playing lol). By the time you come back, you have already "won" and didn't even see the victory screen.. Just plain bad.
I don't recommend this.
[1] Like
A great fangame dictionary example of what means to have great/interesting ideas executed badly in a fangame. Gimmicks and visuals are not so much the deal, although half the times they are generic copy-paste IWBTG trash (the other half is quite interesting, like the hilarious Wondows section). The problem is how gimmicks work, there is a language barrier for English-speaking players, and the extra content is horribly bad. Add to that extras that promise much more content than what they offer with ideas that are literally repeated from the main stages and you have a huge disappointment. Particularly annoying is the upper-left stage that has a save every two screens. "Consistency is what you need then", you might think, until you realize it's a trap game. This is not appreciated at all.
The dice section, the aforementioned "Wondows" section, they're quite decent. The Blocks segment is puzzle-ish from time to time but features annoying traps later on, ruining the gimmick imo. Finally, we have terrible bosses. Again, the ideas are very, very nice, but gameplay is annoying and also not always self-explanatory (you would think that shooting the dice when it has a particular face takes you to that section, but no, it doesn't always do it).
K3 took more than one idea from this game. Not only it featured two screens, but also the dice concept and the infamous RNG crystal. This extra makes you enter a portal, which has a 50% chance of making you win or lose. Not too bad, probably, but wait, you have to win 10 times in a row. Do you love probability like I do? This is NOT the extra for you. Simple math says that you have a chance of 1/1024 of winning, which is less than 0.1%. I calculated a rough average of how much it takes you to go into the portal: 2 seconds. Therefore, the expected time for winning is 34.13 minutes, which means you have to press the right key for over half an hour while staring at the screen. What is this, Boshy2? Well, at least you don't have to mash like crazy. You'll end up placing a heavy object, like a cup, over the right arrow key, getting up and going somewhere else to do something else (ironic, because this makes you stop playing lol). By the time you come back, you have already "won" and didn't even see the victory screen.. Just plain bad.
I don't recommend this.
Rating: 4.5 45
Difficulty: 34 34
Nov 11, 2019
ElCochran90
For: Wish me luck 2
For: Wish me luck 2
I miss Summer's trap games. I will never say Summer doesn't try to make decent chill beginner games, but it's 2019 and there are people that still haven't learned about visual design. Or do they do this intentionally? :(
Change the visual design and EVERYTHING improves. You can make another Starlit Sky. I still have issues with short games because I finish the game before I started to get involved with them and enjoying the length; they just end so abruptly. This one is a wee bit longer to be enjoyed, but again, just like in the original, everything is ruined by terrible visual choices: Not being able to see the spikes is cheap and annoying. I am rating this one also marginally lower than the original because some jumps are quite precise compared to the average difficulty of the game. Also, good luck finding where the goal is, because it has the same color than the background, tilesets, needles, etc.
Beginners should look somewhere else.
[2] Likes
Change the visual design and EVERYTHING improves. You can make another Starlit Sky. I still have issues with short games because I finish the game before I started to get involved with them and enjoying the length; they just end so abruptly. This one is a wee bit longer to be enjoyed, but again, just like in the original, everything is ruined by terrible visual choices: Not being able to see the spikes is cheap and annoying. I am rating this one also marginally lower than the original because some jumps are quite precise compared to the average difficulty of the game. Also, good luck finding where the goal is, because it has the same color than the background, tilesets, needles, etc.
Beginners should look somewhere else.
Rating: 2.4 24
Difficulty: 30 30
Nov 10, 2019
ElCochran90
For: Not Another Needle Game
For: Not Another Needle Game
200th FANGAME.
Rating includes all endings (with a focus on the True Ending). Difficulty rating is for bad ending. Consider a difficulty rating of 75 for True Ending.
I'll begin with what might make you hate me more than you already do (probably) due to my rating system: this is The Shawshank Redemption of fangames. It is the most overrated fangame of all times, but certainly a good one. Having one of the highest possible ratings in the site with the most representative sample available (over 130 reviews as of today, even surpassing the Boshy titan), this is a phenomenon that became the new modern measure to measure not only needle fangames, but fangame-making in general.
Onto the good stuff then. Released in 2015, this game exploits everything that can be done in a gimmick fangame and transforms a simple, clichéd premise into an unforgettable experience. Up to this day, I will defend Cube (1997) as an underrated independent sci-fi horror film; the environment and thrilling moments it created were iconic. Transform the horror elements into needle and humor, and add Kayin's love for old good videogame classics and Thenader2's love for neon. You get this: an outstanding amalgamation of style and humor, a challenge that will certainly make you grow bigger and more skillful hands, a celebration of the reach and extent of fangames for the newer generation, and a modern landmark that Thenewgeezer should have charged every penny for, just like Nemega. The effort behind this is tremendous and the creativity seems to be endless. The final result is a rollercoaster of many emotions and a remarkable sense of accomplishment.
The difficulty curve is exceptional, even if kind of uneven, up to the last teleport gimmick. From there, it reaches a fixed level of difficulty and never lets go with random peaks that do add cheap difficulty, such as traps, corners and planes. Well, it's supposed to be a comprehensive needle game, so I will not fully complain against that, although that did cost many frustrating free deaths.
The humor is simple and quite effective during the first half of the game; during the second half, after Bad Ending, it does become dull and forced because you're repeating the same rooms upside down with some modifications to make reasonable challenges. It's even ironic that the creator says "I've got nothing" in different ways many times during the second half. Still, having a protagonist resembling HAL 9000 with a twisted sense of humor and breaking the fourth wall is a tremendous addition throughout and changes the quality of the entire experience. The revelation of who turns out to be the AI is shocking and amazing, and the fact that he has a "master" raises more eyebrows. Who's more powerful than the legendary enemy Geezer?
The music... The music choices are worth making your house windows vibrate. Each song was carefully selected to communicate emotions and create an environment: adventure, fear, dread, desperation, epicness, a climactic foreshadowing of the ending... Everything's here. The second half of the game, after Bad Ending, has actually the best choices and with the final 20-floor challenge I was exploding my house with noise. This is how you close a rollercoaster ride.
Production value is amazing for what is, in essence, a minimalist project and I am surprised that my potato PC didn't explode. With so many screens to conquer, I would be lying if I said there is no variety. Expect great visuals from time to time, especially as you keep progressing, because the first 60 floors are shockingly repetitive visually, the gravity section has a very questionable pixelated background and the triple jump section is, well, you already know IWBTG. However, it stores many surprises. Even if the black and white visuals can be easily replicated and happen to appear in the worst fangames possible such as GGM and Conquer the Blow Game 1, here, the aesthetics are correlated effectively with the music to show why this is such a nice design instead of a lazy choice.
Finally, gimmicks are always a dangerous game, and the game makes a terrific job at using standard ones creatively plus adding new ones, like the famous teleport gimmick which became iconic, and also combining them in very intelligent ways. The most annoying one is combining heavy gravity with jump refreshers because that is just wanting to make your fingers break. However, the second half of the game brings along the goods in this department because it is no longer subject to linearity regarding the introduction of one gimmick per set of 20 floors or to a particular level of difficulty.
Now, not everything is roses. The first 60 floors are so shockingly repetitive that even Thenewgeezer had to acknowledge it: "Disappointed with the level design? At least the platforms aren't brown!" There is a clear confession there, but if you give time to the game and hunt down the secrets, which locations are indirectly told to you through a glitched text box for avoiding using a guide or tutorial videos, everything begins to go upwards. This harms replayability.
Speaking about the difficulty curve, it is puzzling that the most celebrated fangame experience on this site based on numbers alone is a Veteran experience. Why is this puzzling? Not only because it will be the first fangame newcomers will encounter when they make a filter based on votes/popularity, but also because this game presents itself during the beginning as beginner-friendly. It teaches you about align and other difficult jumps, but also teaches you the most basic jumps with illustrations and names! This is knowledge a veteran already has, but for some reason, it is here (btw, the TAS jump is called the "ledge jump" here). What's the real target market of this fangame? It is difficult to tell unless someone else tells you about it.
Finally, we have the implications of the True Ending. You have to repeat everything upside down with some modifcations, and this obviously means going through the screens you despised. Not only that; if we take the first 60 screens and multiply that by 2, that's exactly 30% of the game's entire content that is quite uneventful. This is fixed, however, with the more interesting stages being improved with a better soundtrack, amazing flashy effects that make you go disco, a more creative level design (ironically, because everything was upsidw down the whole time) and a more balanced difficulty. Please applaud Geezer for designing an entire game in such a way that it also works upside down: INSANE.
Overall, the game is a punch to the face and it pumps you up throughout. The fact that this game costs $0 but Apple users actually have to pay money for that unspeakably bad abomination called I Wanna Be the Four Elements is a proof that the world should just burst into flames.
The world would have to wait 4 years for having an effort named "Chill Needle 2", which is the closest a needle/gimmick fangame ever got to the quality of this one. I am excluding the CN sequels because their aim is different and are on another league... a league I won't be able to reach for many years still.
[3] Likes
Rating includes all endings (with a focus on the True Ending). Difficulty rating is for bad ending. Consider a difficulty rating of 75 for True Ending.
I'll begin with what might make you hate me more than you already do (probably) due to my rating system: this is The Shawshank Redemption of fangames. It is the most overrated fangame of all times, but certainly a good one. Having one of the highest possible ratings in the site with the most representative sample available (over 130 reviews as of today, even surpassing the Boshy titan), this is a phenomenon that became the new modern measure to measure not only needle fangames, but fangame-making in general.
Onto the good stuff then. Released in 2015, this game exploits everything that can be done in a gimmick fangame and transforms a simple, clichéd premise into an unforgettable experience. Up to this day, I will defend Cube (1997) as an underrated independent sci-fi horror film; the environment and thrilling moments it created were iconic. Transform the horror elements into needle and humor, and add Kayin's love for old good videogame classics and Thenader2's love for neon. You get this: an outstanding amalgamation of style and humor, a challenge that will certainly make you grow bigger and more skillful hands, a celebration of the reach and extent of fangames for the newer generation, and a modern landmark that Thenewgeezer should have charged every penny for, just like Nemega. The effort behind this is tremendous and the creativity seems to be endless. The final result is a rollercoaster of many emotions and a remarkable sense of accomplishment.
The difficulty curve is exceptional, even if kind of uneven, up to the last teleport gimmick. From there, it reaches a fixed level of difficulty and never lets go with random peaks that do add cheap difficulty, such as traps, corners and planes. Well, it's supposed to be a comprehensive needle game, so I will not fully complain against that, although that did cost many frustrating free deaths.
The humor is simple and quite effective during the first half of the game; during the second half, after Bad Ending, it does become dull and forced because you're repeating the same rooms upside down with some modifications to make reasonable challenges. It's even ironic that the creator says "I've got nothing" in different ways many times during the second half. Still, having a protagonist resembling HAL 9000 with a twisted sense of humor and breaking the fourth wall is a tremendous addition throughout and changes the quality of the entire experience. The revelation of who turns out to be the AI is shocking and amazing, and the fact that he has a "master" raises more eyebrows. Who's more powerful than the legendary enemy Geezer?
The music... The music choices are worth making your house windows vibrate. Each song was carefully selected to communicate emotions and create an environment: adventure, fear, dread, desperation, epicness, a climactic foreshadowing of the ending... Everything's here. The second half of the game, after Bad Ending, has actually the best choices and with the final 20-floor challenge I was exploding my house with noise. This is how you close a rollercoaster ride.
Production value is amazing for what is, in essence, a minimalist project and I am surprised that my potato PC didn't explode. With so many screens to conquer, I would be lying if I said there is no variety. Expect great visuals from time to time, especially as you keep progressing, because the first 60 floors are shockingly repetitive visually, the gravity section has a very questionable pixelated background and the triple jump section is, well, you already know IWBTG. However, it stores many surprises. Even if the black and white visuals can be easily replicated and happen to appear in the worst fangames possible such as GGM and Conquer the Blow Game 1, here, the aesthetics are correlated effectively with the music to show why this is such a nice design instead of a lazy choice.
Finally, gimmicks are always a dangerous game, and the game makes a terrific job at using standard ones creatively plus adding new ones, like the famous teleport gimmick which became iconic, and also combining them in very intelligent ways. The most annoying one is combining heavy gravity with jump refreshers because that is just wanting to make your fingers break. However, the second half of the game brings along the goods in this department because it is no longer subject to linearity regarding the introduction of one gimmick per set of 20 floors or to a particular level of difficulty.
Now, not everything is roses. The first 60 floors are so shockingly repetitive that even Thenewgeezer had to acknowledge it: "Disappointed with the level design? At least the platforms aren't brown!" There is a clear confession there, but if you give time to the game and hunt down the secrets, which locations are indirectly told to you through a glitched text box for avoiding using a guide or tutorial videos, everything begins to go upwards. This harms replayability.
Speaking about the difficulty curve, it is puzzling that the most celebrated fangame experience on this site based on numbers alone is a Veteran experience. Why is this puzzling? Not only because it will be the first fangame newcomers will encounter when they make a filter based on votes/popularity, but also because this game presents itself during the beginning as beginner-friendly. It teaches you about align and other difficult jumps, but also teaches you the most basic jumps with illustrations and names! This is knowledge a veteran already has, but for some reason, it is here (btw, the TAS jump is called the "ledge jump" here). What's the real target market of this fangame? It is difficult to tell unless someone else tells you about it.
Finally, we have the implications of the True Ending. You have to repeat everything upside down with some modifcations, and this obviously means going through the screens you despised. Not only that; if we take the first 60 screens and multiply that by 2, that's exactly 30% of the game's entire content that is quite uneventful. This is fixed, however, with the more interesting stages being improved with a better soundtrack, amazing flashy effects that make you go disco, a more creative level design (ironically, because everything was upsidw down the whole time) and a more balanced difficulty. Please applaud Geezer for designing an entire game in such a way that it also works upside down: INSANE.
Overall, the game is a punch to the face and it pumps you up throughout. The fact that this game costs $0 but Apple users actually have to pay money for that unspeakably bad abomination called I Wanna Be the Four Elements is a proof that the world should just burst into flames.
The world would have to wait 4 years for having an effort named "Chill Needle 2", which is the closest a needle/gimmick fangame ever got to the quality of this one. I am excluding the CN sequels because their aim is different and are on another league... a league I won't be able to reach for many years still.
Rating: 7.0 70
Difficulty: 70 70
Nov 6, 2019
ElCochran90
For: I wanna a lot of Spike
For: I wanna a lot of Spike
Five minutes wasted. At least the song is catchy but my eyes are bleeding. I can't tell the intentions of this existing.
Thank God I just realized this is my 199th fangame. I will play something worthy next.
[0] Likes
Thank God I just realized this is my 199th fangame. I will play something worthy next.
Rating: 0.8 8
Difficulty: 45 45
Oct 28, 2019
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