ElCochran90'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
For: I wanna be Friends
My biggest grudge is the difficulty spike towards the ending, which felt way off compared to everything else. Also, it is too short for me fully getting absorbed by an adventure game, but the comedy is gold and the music puns are top-notch.
Finally, my brother witnessed my first blind playthrough, and we laughed several times. I love having these kind of experiences with fangames.
I relate to this game so much :(
For: I wanna be the 針ゲ練習
I am currently introducing my younger brother to fangames and tought him advanced techniques with JTool. My goal is that he has enough skill so that both of us can beat Co-Op with a 100% completion (none of us have played this before). Of course, I tought him about the most generic jumps and useful setups for those jumps considered generic and/or difficult.
Long story short, with two sessions of three hours each, he learned and pulled off the following, CONSISTENTLY: all kinds of gates (including drop gates), diagonals, half diamonds, diamonds, double diamonds (not consistent), TAS jumps, nerfed inverts, upward planes, corners of ALL sorts, M-jumps, F-jumps, sphyncters (not consistent), T-bones, pixel allign logic, Water 2, Water 3, and more (heck, we both learned how to single-jump a half diamond !). He practiced one full day again and he now has the skill that I had to learn by myself in five months. How many screens did I make? 15 in total.
So, I make better generic screens than this game. This has no reason for existing, especially if this is a 2015 submission!!
NightShark, stop leading me to dark corners.
For: I wanna be the Flower
Difficult to put into words. This is not an entire waste and there are parts I'd recommend.
The bad first.
70% of the game is horrible, and of this 70%, there's a 30% that is very interesting. The game is so uneven in style, quality and production value that it seems like a random collab by a bunch of people. This is not the case. It has only two makers. There are four main areas in total, plus three additional ones once you beat the game. The description of the areas is as follows:
-Intro is the most generic thing you will ever see. Not even worth talking about it.
-Yellow area is one huge challenge. There are complaints against this one because you have to endure entire screens without saves, regardless of the difficulty you choose. It certainly was a downer when you die towards the end of a third or fourth screen, but the lack of saves is compensated with a toned-down difficulty, to be frank. Also, when the challenge is not exaggerated (hello Appreciate Meteor Stream!), my consistency is very solid. This was one of the lesser complaints against the memorable and charming Micromedley, but that was never an issue for me. Under pressure, I execute in a similar way unless you surpass the 7-8 minute mark (which means I will never conquer Soulless). Interesting section, bizarre variety, not always of the greatest quality. It's a challenge that not everyone will enjoy, but I'm glad I took it and also that it didn't consist of too many phases, but only three.
-Black area is the blandest area ever. It requires only skill and patience with traps here and there, and an awful "boss". It is a waste of time and horribly uneventful.
-Green area is fun, with a nice background and simplistic (but not bad) graphics and tilesets. The traps here, however, do get frustrating, especially when placed towards the end of a save. Also, gimmicks are very inconsistent, such as that of the leafs falling because it is never clear when you can jump or double-jump. Buffed jumps add to your detah count for free, especially in the first screen.
-Blue area has a fantastic soundtrack and a horrible design, featuring a dark blue that kills your eyes. Kamilia 3 borrowed two strings from this one. Traps abound here so bring extra patience because you might run out of it (like I did), including lots of fake blocks and secret paths that are not always that obvious to figure out. It also has an unspeakably bad maze that will make you beg for a guide if you're impatient. At least 200 free deaths await you here. There is a """hint""", but that "hint" does not really help at all once that I think about it.
Once this is done, extra areas appear:
-The Touhou fight is giving me an amazing opportunity to say not only that I adore Suwako, but that Native Faith is my favorite Touhou song ever. The sprite is not the best one Suwako could be represented with, but the background is ok-ish (suiting enough at least) and the Touhou mechanics are well implemented. Also, it has interesting patterns and out of the 10, only 1 was meh. Funny fight and sort of entertaining.
-Kagamine Rin's inclusion shocked me because I just became the Contrary with the vocaloid song Antichlorobenzene. I thought I would die thousands of times again, especially because the song brought me flashbacks, but I only used 1.5 hours on her. I reckon the avoidance can be "hard", but most of it is pattern you must learn. I literally first-tried the last third of the avoidance, which made me feel powerful and glad. The avoidance, please notice, is the best thing about the game and I'm convinced it was made by the guy that didn't do the worst parts of the game.... Or I could be totally wrong. It is so good that I cannot explain how it is in a game like this.
-The extra stage is just a stupid preamble for the intentionally stupid and undeniably funny bizarre collection of instances preceding the credits. This is where the game experiments with bad jokes and it works so well that, again, questioned if I was even playing the same fangame.
Also, as far as I understand, this game was a 2012 submission, and Kamilia 3 was a 2013 submission. This game mocks Taisa, so it is not a reference to Kamilia 3, but to the original Black??? Mindblowing to say the least.
I recommend only 30% of it, so expect many, if not several awful instances of bad gameplay and quality. If you asked me right now if the whole game is worth the extra, I still wouldn't be able to say. There's more good than bad, that's for sure.
P.S. I expected this game to be much harder, but surprisingly for me, it wasn't. Guess I am good in Adventure fangames and suck at Needle fangames (as a boring fact, I replayed Clear 50 Neon Floors prior to this for practice and I still ended up dying more times, with it not being a trap game like this one).
For: I wanna rely the Needle
A nice introduction to a chill needle atmosphere of average difficulty and creative level design throughout. It is rather too short to be enjoyable, the death sound is absurdly contrasting with the tone (glad it got changed later because it is painfully distracting) and the difficulty curve is a random series (Google "random series") but the good thing is that this became a series in its own and NineightA kept experimenting.
For: I wanna rely the Needle 2
Marginally better than the first entry, unquestionably the hardest. This is a personal grudge: a chill game works better normally if it is simple in difficulty. Rely the Needle 1 reached what was for me the highest difficulty peak to be chilled, but the challenge here is sometimes way off, and again, difficulty curve is as organized as a trash can. The game especially convinces you that the "extra" must be played, so it is impossible to dismiss that portion from the difficulty rating and personal rating, even if it is only three screens long.
I won't deny that the platforming is creative and the design is very relaxing, until you stumble upon quite harsh screens. The biggest insult this game does is the second extra screen, which I gladly uploaded: a save that includes a plane, a corner and a TAS jump just for making you understand: "Hey! 'Extra' is supposed to be harder yo!"
I still recommend it, but expect difficulty on the level of Neonize the Needle or Clear 50 Neon Floors without the rhyme and reason.
At least the death sound got fixed from this entry forward.
34 Favorite Games
369 Cleared Games