raocow's talkhaus

The cutscene at the start was nice and so was the reward. Tileset is pretty too. I can see this not mixing too well with raocow's normal playstyle. Most of the traps are really difficult and they escalate quickly when strang together.

anonymousbl00dlust wrote:yes. (edit: don't click if you are a rao or a cow)

Parrot cutscene was good
Level is practically chocolate Cool or Cruel

It has interesting ideas, it's just a shame that it's not playable with your average human reflexes alone

there I summed up every single future post concerning this level AND stated my own opinion

KobaBeach wrote:Level is practically chocolate Cool or Cruel

Well, I can beat this pretty easily without savestates. I definitely can't beat Cool or Cruel without tool use. So there's that.

All the obstacles in my level can be beaten on the players first attempt without any 'future predicting'. They are also designed such that they can be consistently beaten once you know what to do. Also, he amount of 'let' the player has precision-wise is a lot higher than you think. The real challenge is in the timing/reaction stuff.

I see how you might think the difficulty levels of this and C|C are similar, but if you actually play them, they really aren't.

KobaBeach wrote:there I summed up every single future post concerning this level AND stated my own opinion

Please do not pronounce universal truths without proper qualification.

anonymousbl00dlust wrote:yes. (edit: don't click if you are a rao or a cow)

So something messed up with caorao's rom. Ended up starting at the end, then halfway through the game. Because, you know, there haven't been enough disasters with this level yet.

I imagine a whole bunch of people are not going to like what they see. But I stand by what I said before-- the level is well-designed. It's just that it was designed for an alternate-reality-cao whose skill level after beating s-mario continued to steadily climb.

Commence the backlash!

I just wanted to go on record before the inevitable backlash in saying that I for one find this level pretty cool and still (barely) palatable difficulty wise. I am looking forward to playing this level myself once you post a download link.

can somebody remind me of the history between rao and bloodlust?

Today's video reminded me of something pholtos did once. Can't wait to see the rest of the level.

Sebby19 wrote:can somebody remind me of the history between rao and bloodlust?

I pester him from the sidelines. Always and forever.

yeah dude has been nagging at me since the something awful days, and somewhere during this we became 'internet friends' due to exposure I guess

The level could be made so much more tolerable if there were like, one or two blocks here and there that you could pause on and catch a breather. Even the -K levels from DKC: Tropical Freeze, despite being muscle memory gauntlets, had a couple of spots where you could regain your momentum.

Like, the design here is good, but it's still flawed in a sense.

S.N.N. wrote:The level could be made so much more tolerable if there were like, one or two blocks here and there that you could pause on and catch a breather. Even the -K levels from DKC: Tropical Freeze, despite being muscle memory gauntlets, had a couple of spots where you could regain your momentum.

Like, the design here is good, but it's still flawed in a sense.

hmm.

I agree that adding some safe spots would make the level less stressful, but it introduces a different problem. Things are designed in such a way that the best strategy is to rush forward without thinking. When you add safe spots to this kind of level, it encourages the player to be more cautious. He/She ends up slowing down and over-analyzing things-- you've seen how many times raocow has died from stalling in front of visually complicated obstacles. None of those deaths added to anything.

So yes, the level is more stressful without safe spots. But I don't think the safe spots would make things any easier.

Besides, the stressfulness of the level is part of the fun, imo.

anonymousbl00dlust wrote:Besides, the stressfulness of the level is part of the fun, imo.

It did not really sound like he was having that much fun. The level was not too long looking at the gameplay though, so it might be learnable given enough time + retries.

I think, judged as a normal level, B-Side is pretty awful. I totally believe that anonymousbl00dlust can beat it easily tool-less, and some obstacles can be passed simply by rushing. However, rushing isn't foolproof, and one has to take into account that level designers are simply better at their own levels (in addition to anon's high difficulty threshold.) There's still very little leeway, and I don't think that the average player (or even above-average player,) would be able to react quickly enough to everything to make rushing really viable. As anon agreed, it could use some more checkpoints.

All that said, I think this level is fantastic, just in a different metric. Yeah, the average person won't be able to do much. They aren't the target audience though. It's made for really good players, ie. the kinds that would actually go out of their way to get all of the Parrot Coins in the preceding levels. TASers and the like can also appreciate the level. When you see the level played well (like anon's video showed,) it's great to watch. It's very well designed, but uses inherently different design philosophies than most "normal," level design, so holding it to the same standards seems wrong.

B-Side isn't going to look very good when raocow plays it, which is fine. I don't think he really fits under the target demographic for the level right now, which is also fine. Watching him stumble through isn't going to really highlight how fantastic the level design here is in the same way as watching it all in a fluid motion or playing it yourself. I think comparing it to poetry like rao did makes a lot of sense, honestly.

Shard1697 wrote:

AUS wrote: Not really!?
Unless you mean, there's someone out there who has achieved god-tier platforming skills in Nitroid that everything in the game is a walk in the park for them, or you're making up false definitions of words that already have definitions (such as the word boring).

You realize boring is like: slow, tedious, repetitive, uninteresting, etc right?

You... do realize that those thing are themselves subjective, right?
What people consider too slow/tedious/repetitive/uninteresting/etc, ie boring, varies wildly from person to person. Because it's subjective.

Yeah fun is subjective we've heard that a bunch of times already.

But there's a problem when someone is being snarky and relentless towards the said game, with no regards to other people that hear that, to the point that you feel bad for liking it. I've already seen this happen in this thread and it's insulting to the creator of the game and the fans.

"Subjective" means a given person may enjoy it. And if the person can't enjoy it because someone else is ruining the experience with such comments, there's something wrong.

if your fun is ruined because other people dont enjoy it then somethings wrong

There's a difference between not enjoying it and swooping in to make a useless comment just for one's amusement that no one else shares, no matter how much people tell you to cut it out.

okay cool nobody cares about what you say either so cut it out thanks

Well, that level was sure something.

But yeah, my opinion on it is that the level kind of feels like a wasted opportunity. I mean, the graphics and music are incredible and the ideas used in the level design are also really well done, but it just falls down because of a difficulty level somewhat set at 'just below kaizo'. Kind of reminds of Japanese hack Super Mario LD in that sense, another game where the levels have interesting ideas but the difficulty is just set too high.

It just makes me wish anonymousbloodlust tried making some easy/reasonable levels for a change. I'd love to see what they'd be like.

TLDR: Nice aesthetics, nice level ideas/design (for sadists), but too hard for any reasonable person to play.

ano0maly wrote:There's a difference between not enjoying it and swooping in to make a useless comment just for one's amusement that no one else shares, no matter how much people tell you to cut it out.

Criticism is good, so long as it's not dogmatic. The only thing that really irritates me is when people write-off a level as objectively bad, just because they personally don't like it.

(Speaking of which, I was expecting the worst today after that flame-war greeting fiasco. But all the criticism I've gotten so far has been really constructive. So... I just wanted to say thanks. Talkhaus is a pretty cool guy.)

Man, what a difficult looking level. Lots of trial and error; at least the level doesn't make you reload everytime you'd die.

anonymousbl00dlust wrote:yes. (edit: don't click if you are a rao or a cow)

So something messed up with caorao's rom. Ended up starting at the end, then halfway through the game. Because, you know, there haven't been enough disasters with this level yet.

I imagine a whole bunch of people are not going to like what they see. But I stand by what I said before-- the level is well-designed. It's just that it was designed for an alternate-reality-cao whose skill level after beating s-mario continued to steadily climb.

Commence the backlash!

Jeez, that's a crazy level. I'm not even sure how you managed to miss some of those obstacles or stay alive seemingly being offscreen.

anonymousbl00dlust wrote:I agree that adding some safe spots would make the level less stressful, but it introduces a different problem. Things are designed in such a way that the best strategy is to rush forward without thinking. When you add safe spots to this kind of level, it encourages the player to be more cautious. He/She ends up slowing down and over-analyzing things-- you've seen how many times raocow has died from stalling in front of visually complicated obstacles. None of those deaths added to anything.

So yes, the level is more stressful without safe spots. But I don't think the safe spots would make things any easier.

I think this is a time simple graphics could have helped a little with difficulty. Making the background black, foreground blocks white, and anything that could hurt you red or something could help with figuring out where you should be heading. And splitting the level up a little more (separating some of the parts a bit and adding in checkpoints there) would probably help it feel less infuriating. Simply reloading at the beginning of the area and seemingly not having lives was a good choice though I think.

If we use the metric that has been used for most of the LP, AKA judging a game as a game, this was one of the most horrible things ever. Still exceeds Further Over There by a long shot.

Septentrion Pleiades wrote:If we use the metric that has been used for most of the LP, AKA judging a game as a game, this was one of the most horrible things ever. Still exceeds Further Over There by a long shot.

Truth be told, anyone who dislikes my level is a racist pedophile.

bam.

anonymousbl00dlust wrote:All the obstacles in my level can be beaten on the players first attempt without any 'future predicting'.

I honestly don't believe you. Like, are you just saying that to sound pretty, or do you somehow have some upper level knowledge that lets you know this?

I doubt that any player has beaten it first time. I also doubt that enough players have played the level for you to notice that each trap has at least been beaten without future knowledge.

Just going by the video you posted alone, I seriously doubt that the level can be beaten without trial by dying..which I don't mind too much, I just seriously have a hard time thinking that some of these can be beaten without knowing what's happening. (see: that weird autoscroll segment in particular, not the final segment)

anonymousbl00dlust wrote:All the obstacles in my level can be beaten on the players first attempt without any 'future predicting'.

Except the part with the sideways Thwomp right after the Grinder bit. There's no way anybody could predict that, and raocow even alluded to it in the video.

S.N.N. wrote:

anonymousbl00dlust wrote:All the obstacles in my level can be beaten on the players first attempt without any 'future predicting'.

Except the part with the sideways Thwomp right after the Grinder bit. There's no way anybody could predict that, and raocow even alluded to it in the video.

Obviously, this level is Jedi training. Remember when roacow was first killed when the entire level moved down for the first time? He should not have spinjump that high before it moved.

Clearly, this is a perfectly crafted level. It's a good thing the creator is around to point out how great his level is.