YaBoiMarcAntony's Profile
Send a PMJoined on: Apr 26, 2020
Bio:
I used to be here four years ago but I left. I was Guitarsage2k/Parallax5.
These fangames mean a lot to me (attempt at order)
1. I Wanna Kill the Kermit 3
2. I Wanna Walk Out in the Morning Dew
3. Crimson Needle 3
4. I Wanna Kill the Kermit 2
5. I Wanna Figure
6. I Wanna Be Far From Home
7. Phonotransmitter
8. VoVoVo
9. I Wanna Reach the Moon
10. untitled needle game
11. I Wanna Burnmind
12. I Wanna Be the Volatile Presence
13. Domu
14. I Want To Meet Miki
15. I Wanna Go Across the Rainbow
16. Alphazetica
17. I Wanna Stop the Simulation
18. I Wanna Hydrate
19. I Wanna Be the Ocean Princess
20. I Wanna Vibe with the Gods
21. I Wanna Be the Vandal
22. I Wanna Pray to the Platform God
23. I Want
24. I Wanna Pointillism
25. I Wanna be the RO
I've submitted:
245 Ratings!
220 Reviews!
5 Screenshots!

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245 Games
220 Reviews
For: I wanna be far from home
I Wanna Be Far From Home is a game of escapism, or perhaps even a retelling of sorts, I wouldn't know as I'm not the maker. Either way, Far From Home expresses this desire to run and tells a story of running away. The game opens rather oddly with the player in a body of water while an unreachable cliff-side hangs over them, not so much ominously but with no other alternative. From there, you'll soon find that you reside within something of a hub world made up of extremely dense landmasses dotted around in a minimalist fashion. When it comes to the actual design of a given section, there is an unbelievable amount of detail, but thanks to how much room is given, you'll find that this hub world feels serene and pleasant.
There are four different stages that become longer as you go on, the first stage being a single jump while the last stage will probably take a blind player fit for its difficulty anywhere between twenty to forty minutes, depending on the person and their respective skills. In any case, the sense of progression from stage to stage lies not just in the sheer size of each of them, but also in terms of how space is used. The first stage is extremely claustrophobic with a rather tight jump. Aside from that, most all of the screen is dominated by a stuttering black mass. While it is traditionally pretty, there is a sense of negativity associated with the black mass in its totality, not to mention the obvious fact that it kills you upon touching it.
The second stage, however, carves out more room for itself in the black mass, though it is still a rather short stage. Here, you'll find the game beginning to play around with a bit of pathing, the final jump utilizing a vine you use early on in the stage. There's also some tight usage of water, tight in a way that I originally found annoying from a gameplay perspective but grew to enjoy, as well as platforming explicitly around blocks of black. In this way, you cannot simply avoid the reality of this blackness, instead you are forced to come to grips with it and approach it safely in order to beat the stage.
Stage three is where things really begin to open up for the game. Clever pathing can be found all over, with many moments of you returning to a previous section of the stage under a new light, passing through it to get further in the stage. In this way, plasma produces a sort of knot of gameplay in a way reminiscent of the qoqoqo series, though more striking visually thanks to the usage of large screens, and of course it feels different thanks to plasma's extremely unique style of gameplay. There's still platform around bits of the black mass, however you're forced to at times blindly dive into them in order to progress through the stage. The final save ends with a very long fall that takes you through a previous part of the stage in beautiful fashion which then ends simply with you jumping into a warp surrounded by the black mass (I apologize for the repeated usage of the phrase, but it comes up a lot!) In fact, this is the only stage in which you could actually die trying to go for the warp, marking stage three as particularly notable in its usage of this black mass.
The final stage is, as described before, very long. This is, depending on who you ask, to its benefit or a flaw of the game. For my part, I think this length fits perfectly with the theme of the game and also serves the gameplay very well as the length is due to its sheer size. Here, the pathing's genius is not so much in how it retreads old paths but instead in how tightly designed the stage is. There are so many moments where this grand strand comes so close to altogether intertwining with another, and yet there is only one time in which you find yourself touching old ground at any point; otherwise, there are no intersections of any sort, something which stands out to me as a unique form of pathing that I personally love.
Gameplay wise, this stage is also the most difficult by far, utilizing a lot of rather tight jumps and tough maneuvers. With that said, at no point is the black mass involved in any of this, and in that way it begins to feel like this black mass merely existed and that the platforming itself was indeed carved into it, placed there by some unknown being. Finally, the exit warp is hidden away far at the top, surrounded by pillars of water and plus signs. This final warp out feels the most safe of the bunch, both due to the pleasant design of its surroundings and the fact that death at this point is essentially impossible. In stage one, you could plausibly die thanks to, well, idiocy. Stage two there's no chance of death, but the path to the warp is so tight and uncomfortable that it's left feeling unsafe in that way, and of course stage three is the one most plausible to die to.
Upon clearing the final stage, you find yourself in a position of being able to jump all the way back down to the cliffside, which now hangs below rather than above, and leaving the hub to go to the end. You find yourself in an area that feels less welcoming than the hub world of the previous, a small tower at the top of which lies a grand chasm filled with red water, water which you are forced to dive into. Any attempt to jump out forces you further down, and as you go down the screen fades to black, leaving us with this exchange:
"I am sorry I took so long."
"Welcome home."
What I find especially harrowing about this game is that this ending is not in itself a particularly positive one in tone. The entire game sees the player essentially just biding time until they come home, with each stage's increasing length feeling like its own form of running away. In this way, it feels like the black mass is life itself whereas that which makes up the stages themselves is a manifestation of the player character. As you traverse each stage, this black mass becomes more and more of a looming presence until it peaks in stage three, a peak you'd traditionally expect at stage four. If this game were about facing your fears or troubles and not running away, it'd only be natural that the final confrontation, as it were, would be a culmination of a previously-established pattern. With each stage, more and more of the black mass becomes relevant to the platforming, and yet that isn't so with Far From Home. Instead, the final stage is a self-made tribulation, as if it's the player knowing their return home is inevitable and they're doing anything they can to keep that reality away.
So, in the end, it feels less like the player's coming to terms with what they have to do and more like them knowing it's an inevitability. The player's final dive into the red water is less so them standing up to what they've been running away from for so long and more so as if they've been coerced to it by the reality of life. Running away forever is simply not feasible, not unless you give up altogether. Some day, somehow, you'll have to stand up to what you've been running from, and in this case that end came by force.
I Wanna Be Far From Home is a wish, one that's made knowing how futile it is, a concept I'm far too familiar with. Every day I wake up, I wish so desperately that things could just magically change and be like old times or somehow improve, and that day never comes. I wish I could just leave all this behind and live a new life, and yet I know that I could never do it. I wish, in short, I could be anywhere but here, a wish I've had time and time again, and yet I know that it could never become true. Admittedly, I don't think my life would be better if it did come true, but it pains me now to know I just can't run away, no matter how much I want to. Yet, in all this wishing and hoping, all this dreaming of running away from here, I realize now that I've been running away all this time.
And so I come home.
For: I wanna walk through solstice
For: I Wanna be the AIW
The best aspect of a dopamine-like is that you really can't make anything generic within it, at least if you do it right, which I think phg does. The block layouts are always super unique and that alone makes for a very interesting dynamic in gameplay, and that unique block layout almost always enforces interesting paths and jumps. I don't greatly agree with the usage of the word "generic" to describe the gameplay in AIW, though a few jumps are fairly straightforward and not particularly exciting, the main detractor for phg needle as it is (I've played many phg maps in IWM and I find that some sections can be rather interesting and others decidedly not, in the case of AIW I think that it mostly borders on the former rather than the latter). For the most part, I found this a fairly unique and surprisingly good needle game, although I do wish there was more in the way of gameplay variety than there is, even any use of basic gimmicks would have made this even better for me.
Phg also composed the music for this game, music which is also very good. The stage one song is very good while the stage two song is simply quite good. I don't love the semi-staccato drums, but I concede their purpose in the second song.
For: April is the Cruelest Month
Link to the version without YYC compile for iwpo gamers. The current dl link won't have the proper version for a few days but yeah.
(5/7/2022): https://pastebin.com/XqcNNSGR
I talk about the game here and what most everything means and what the game is about. It was written over the course of three different days in random bursts, one of which was before a certain date, and the other two of which were written after. It is very long.
- - - - - -
This is a floor game primarily inspired by I Wanna Figure which, like Figure, is a damn hard game, long as well (beyond that, the similarities are mostly pretty surface level - if you don't like Figure, you could very well like this game). I worked on the game over the course of February and March and I am extremely happy with the work I did in the time I did it in as I'm not used to working so fast. This speed was mostly necessary though for reasons not worth getting into now, but you can probably come back in a few months to find me overexplain everything about the game.
Also like Figure, Hard is an available difficulty, though unlike Figure, so is Very Hard. While Hard likely would be a feasible achievement, I do not know if Very Hard is really feasible, but I'd love to see it happen.
Enjoy!
For: Extreme Depths 2
It's always fun to think of the original that came before a sequel when talking about said sequel. Extreme Depths 1 is a nothing special needle game with just a hint of the charm and ingenuity that Watson's future productions would have in spades, even having the ever-present Gamemaker Lite logo in the top left, hanging over like Damocles' sword - yet, the disaster of a shitty game doesn't come is as it's rather decent, all things considered. With that game in mind, how does Extreme Depths 2 fare in comparison?
Well, it's bigger, infinitely more visually impressive, featuring more interesting and enjoyable needle as well as a few fantastic bosses to boot, not to mention a killer soundtrack that keeps the energy up at all times. In short, it is a massively superior game; in long-form, it is a game that somehow manages to expand upon its original iteration in a way that makes you wonder what in God's name could have led to the growth of the Giant Sequoia of Extreme Depths 2. Should you track the lines, the conclusion is clear: take the bricks of the original, and make them a rainbow!
The game is broken up into 8 main stages, 7 of which hold a secret each, a boss that opens the way to an extra stage (which is fully unlocked with those 7 secrets), which upon completion leads you to the TRUE final boss of the game, an outrageously good conclusion to what is already a damn good game. This description, then, acts as a mere façade of the tower that is Extreme Depths 2, and should you take a look beyond these colorful bricks, you'll find yourself a game that both revels in its simplicity and teems with creativity. On the one hand, should you pull back the layers and layers of visual flair in the main stages, you'd have a lot of super simple platforming that, while satisfying to play, does not exactly excite me, having seen more creative and enjoyable platforming elsewhere. All the same, the charm and excitement of the game elevates this simplistic platforming to a degree that allows the game to differentiate itself from more simplistic and basic needle games. All you need to take your platforming to the next level is some style, so says the adage I made up on the spot.
Even so, this "problem" of simplicity can be safely defenestrated upon entering the eight stage, though perhaps do the deed at a lower stage so that it may survive upon impact with the ground below, eight floors would be a mighty fall! In any case, the eight stage introduces more unique and interesting gimmicks, a pattern which persists well into the extra stages beyond, these making up the best bulk of the platforming in the game. I enjoyed each stage greatly, but I think my personal favorite may have to be the cherry cycles stage, as basic as it may be to say. Nonetheless, you're not starved for high quality content once you break into this part of the game.
With that said, the highlight of the game lies with it's bosses, and seeing as this comes from someone that is primarily a needle player, that should stand as VERY high praise! In particular, the final boss is beyond spectacular, being made up of three super interesting phases with (relatively) high difficulty to boot, leading to a rather tense finale that had me wiping sweat off my brow. I won't speak too much on this boss as I just don't feel like using the spoiler function (though I've already stated some spoilers here in the first place, so perhaps it's a bit of a moot point), but suffice it to say, it is definitely one of my favorite fights ever.
I have espoused the virtues of Watson as a maker time and time again, and with the release of Extreme Depths 2, I find myself leaning towards taking it further, going on to say that Watson could very well be the most consistently brilliant maker out there. No one has his consistency in quality and very few could ever hope to match the ingenious nature of his design. While he has produced none of my absolute favorite games, I would not be surprised to find him releasing something sooner rather than later which matches the quality of my absolute favorite games. Here's to you, Watson, the man of the hour and the man that, for me, defines this brilliant modern era of fangames. Congratulations on getting this game out here. The love and care you put into it is clear to me and it was well worth all the effort.
7 Games
Game | Difficulty | Average Rating | # of Ratings |
---|---|---|---|
April is the Cruelest Month | 88.0 | 8.6 | 6 |
I Wanna Flying Disc | 90.0 | N/A | 2 |
I Don't Wanna Dwell | 70.1 | 7.7 | 12 |
Nebulous Thoughts | 81.3 | 9.2 | 17 |
Strewn Detritus | 69.1 | 7.2 | 14 |
The Sunken Cathedral | 70.4 | 8.4 | 20 |
I Wanna be the Ziggomatic Drukqs | 71.2 | 7.2 | 7 |
44 Favorite Games
234 Cleared Games