raocow's talkhaus

Seeing as we're on the topic of areas of the game that totally blocked progress: I never got past the first level of The Kid's warpzone; honestly, just having it be filled with spikes didn't really feel in spirit with a game that had far more interesting ways of killing you. Never got past World 6, ...

this As someone who didn't have it in them to beat Hideout and couldn't manage to SS-rank Backup Shift, that looks completely absurd. Spike jumping in official levels (something I never bothered figuring out) seems a bit off, but I guess that's par for the course for a level that would appear to co...

Probably the lack of any actual time limit and, the ability to expand your level out really far, the fact that you can have every enemy type in play at once, and the complete triviality of just being able to string level segments along. I guess the larger screen size also plays a role, seeing as it ...

Which, by the way, I find it REALLY INTERESTING that they changed the first world of the game and added button input tutorials. Originally the game was old school style and just dumps you in the game and says "Hey, figure it out, good luck" And the part in the movie is all about explainin...

Let's play "Let's play parodius"?

Is it just me or do Konami really like dick moves? I gave up playing Portrait of Ruin just recently because of that boss underneath the Throne Room. I just find that infuriatingly unreasonable and these Parodius games seem to be full of unreasonable events too. Which one? There's two you could be t...

Might as well drop some newer stuff down here: Some more harpy game-related stuff: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16909401/screenshots/theonewithharpiesinit0113.png spikeworld https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16909401/screenshots/theonewithharpiesinit0078.png renovations to the first dungeon...

I feel singularly unqualified to contribute to this conversation (being about as stereotypical a WASP as they come) and in any case most of the stuff I'd be saying has been said in some form or another already, but please, if you see me deviate from my general position of attempted neutrality, let m...

thanks ditocoaf for clarifying what I said. Have people figured out multi midpoints in SMBX? If you don't mind people being able to skip a lot of the level once they've gone through it once, there's the 'put a smw star on a unique layer and have an event that happens when that layer's empty' trick,...

The level's turning 90 and then 180 degrees, both of which are points at which fulcrums are clearly not doing their job of helping keep disparate forces balanced.

Shame "A Study in Pivots" doesn't sound as neat, though.

So what did that first level have to do with fulcrums, anyway? I mean, it was an amazing-looking level, but I didn't see anything that looked like a lever in there.

The thing is that most of the levels that got lousy ranks got there because they were either unfocused or overstayed their welcome, not because they were painful-looking kaizo wannabes, and putting them in an glitchy-looking overworld is grossly underselling them (or overselling, if you were hoping ...

Being able to magically teleport and attack almost instantaneously seemed to trivialize a lot of that fight, but I guess that's fitting for a game that just gives you so many ways to let you cheese through it. Was galamoth doing so much damage meant to be a sign that you should just find a way to ch...

I have a terrible, terrible idea for what I want to do for my level. It's going to be fantastic. Rejected level names: Actually, It's About Phantos in Abandoned Oceans I Read in a Book That in Kanto Fortresses Are More Like Villas Half Life Inspired My Take on Mega Goomba in This Level. Dude, I Just...

Long answer: the inverted castle is sitting on a huge chunk of (also inverted) land, which is why there's also those upside-down pine trees outside the anti-chapel.

Short answer: lazy devs

ASMT isn't snes-friendly, due in part to it using an old version of Addmusic (which allowed songs that caused the sound to cut out completely and the game to crash once a new stage was loaded up). As other people have said, though, there's many reasons as to why this isn't going to happen, most of w...

Eh, cave levels have a tendency to not be as exciting as other level types, especially when bunched up together. Didn't help that that last one had its ascension thing complicated by the inclusion of that puzzle stuff, making it seem like a bunch of small puzzle levels stitched together instead of s...

Hardmode can't go wrong, right?

Isn't he going to be walking on the ceiling from here on out, though?

The metroidvanias really like the idea of going through an alternate version of what you've gone through beforehand; HoD has the dark worldy but otherwise just palette swapped Castle B, AoS has the greyscale Chaotic Realm, and PoR has the remixed second group of paintings. But yeah, as other people ...

Ah yes, the Big Ball of Bodies, something that's a bit of a staple of the metroidvania castlevanias. The exact size of the ball changes from game to game, but there's usually lasers involved. Harmony of Dissonance, ever the overachiever, went and threw in a second one made of skeletons. As other peo...

Maybe the succubus wouldn't have been such a pushover had she actually bothered to wear something. Anyway, in other games with the super jump, it usually gets mapped to one of the shoulder buttons, which I guess makes it a whole lot easier to figure out than in this one, where you have the transform...

If I recall correctly it was also in Harmony of Dissonance but it definitely wasn't in anything newer than that. It doesn't seem to be in HoD , which is a bit strange since that was a game that seemed to borrow a lot from SotN (fakeedit: as lejes said above). ...man, HoD was honestly a pretty odd c...

I wasn't aware harpies were filled with explosives, or had the ability to shoot energy beams shaped liked smaller birds. I also find it a bit interesting how the clock tower goes from being the penultimate area in the classic castlevanias to being more around the halfway point in the metroidvania on...

Even if there isn't consistency between areas, there should at least be some sort of easily recognizable symbol/pattern/motif that lets someone know where they are in relation to everything as a whole. Some sort of map would also be really useful, even if it's just going to end up showing various co...