I wanna be the Xoner

Creator: Corrupt

Average Rating
4.8 / 10
Average Difficulty
53.4 / 100
[Download Not Available]

Tags:

Needle (3) Goner_Game (3)

Screenshots

  • by Zorgo

9 Reviews:

phgQED
Another goner game. My feelings on this one are mixed, and I'm going to try to review every jump to see why.

Firstly, the game pulls a little trick with the tileset. I could take it or leave it, but it does seem like more effort went into that than the actual jump construction.

The jumps themselves are almost always simple named jumps stretched near a theoretical limit, and not in a particularly elegant or even brutal way.

For save one, we have a corner into a 3/4 diamond: that's it. While the individual pieces of this jump were fun to pull off, it very much feels like a 'do this to actually start playing the game'.

For save two we have an extra cramped ledge-grab (which, while it looks menacing, didn't feel that bad) into a sort of double corner. Not very inspired but still interesting on a conceptual level for the first part.

Save three is a diamond into a 4.5/required bhop. It's probably the least creative save and I kind of hate it.

Save four is a t-boned diamond followed by an m-jump. Again, nothing special going on at all, though it does feel somewhat satisfying to pull off, considering how easy it is relative to the rest of the screen.

Save five could have been my favorite if the savepoint hitbox/mask was properly configured. As is, you can't save unless you're aiming at the save, and you also can't save on the very last pixel of the ledge, which means every time you die you'll be required to do the setup before attempting the jump (which is a sort of buffed steak into a 32px ledge). The game has the one-frame tap fix which makes the setup much less painful, but it's still a bit tedious to do every time. The jump itself is pretty fun.

Save six is two baby corners into a... well okay, here we have a jump that's familiar but that I can't name exactly. You're required to stagger/stutter your forward press off the ledge, then hold forward and full jump as soon as possible. It's quite simple but still felt satisfying to execute.

Save seven is yet ANOTHER ledge grab, by now emphasizing what is probably my least favorite part of any goner game. My problem with ledge grabs is that you can include them at theoretically any point in a jump to increase its difficulty exponentially, and once you start following that formula theoretically every single jump you make can start and end with a 32px ledge grab. Playing on controller, my dpad doesn't seem to suffer extensively anywhere else quite as much as 32px ledges, and so when I run into them so frequently it gives me a mild pause. After the ledge grab? Nerfed plane into what is basically a half diamond.

Save eight is a ceiling double diamond. But, oh, wait—right after there's an air save, and below that, a line of conveyor blocks. If you don't react to the save or the conveyor, you can 'make the jump' but still die. That happened a few times.

Save nine is conveyor diamonds into a weird corner thing. The corner thing is kind of simple, still kind of cool, but in the context of the conveyor, is mostly just luck.

Save ten is a jump I know has a name, but I'm not sure what it is: a half invert, maybe? The point is that it's easier with cancels, but cancels aren't required. This is probably my favorite jump in the game, which is a bit sad, in my view.

The last save is a hold left two-block diagonal setup into a corner + uplane. Because the warp is in the uplane you're not actually 'doing' the uplane so much as 'getting inside it'... why do both of those sound highly suggestive? Needle, spikes, penetration... ew.

If you complete the game on it's default 'Xoner' mode, you unlock the hint for goner mode. I played the game again after this unlock because I wanted to see if I had missed something—it turns out, not so much. I do think the game plays better with the default goner tileset tho.

All in all, looking back at each save itemized like this, it seems pretty clear the problem I had with this game is lack of creativity. Even if some of the jumps felt fun or technical to pull off, they were all so rote and ultimately reduced to their named equivalents that pulling them off wasn't rewarding in retrospect. Consider "I did the wacky third save of [goner game x]", as opposed to "I did a ceiling double diamond". To me, the former is much more interesting just because it is composed of unique pieces. But maybe that's not the case for everyone.

A very by the numbers entry in the genre that has a little creative juice in terms of presentation but not much in terms of level design.

Time: ~11min
Deaths: 449

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Tagged as: Needle Goner_Game
[1] Like
Rating: 4.0 40       Difficulty: 50 50
Jul 18, 2022
theTics
Simple one-screen needle game. Even if the name is Xoner, I think game's design and difficulty are too far from Goner game.

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Tagged as: Needle
[1] Like
Rating: 4.0 40       Difficulty: 54 54
Jan 21, 2019
Kilgour22
It's a very simple Goner game, but serves as a good introduction into the sub-genre. Save placement is fair and save balance is decent with some nonstandard jumps occasionally utilized. I finished it in just under 10 minutes with 267 deaths, so needle gods will beat it in a couple minutes and average players will take somewhere around my playtime and death total.

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[1] Like
Rating: 5.0 50       Difficulty: 45 45
Jan 21, 2019
Zorgo
Game starts as your normal Goner-like needle game experience but after first save visuals suddenly change to make game look like it has some production value. Needle design itself is pretty meh but game is not too hard (there is a forced 4.5 jump though).
After beating the game on "Xoner mode", it says that you can activate "Goner mode" by pressing space key at the difficulty select screen. Nothing changes except now you have default Goner visuals.

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Tagged as: Needle Goner_Game
[1] Like
Rating: 3.5 35       Difficulty: 60 60
Jan 21, 2019
MikuStar263
An easier Goner game that doesn't allow cancelling
and has no jumps where cancelling is a must.

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Tagged as: Goner_Game
[0] Likes
Rating: 6.2 62       Difficulty: 50 50
Jul 8, 2019