is barbuta a la-mulana-like?
i need more of this.
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any idea if campanella 2 has extends or any such affordances, or would i have to do the whole game in one life?
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pretty confident it’s one life, yeah – it very much seems to be a roguelike with similar design sensibilities to spelunky 2 (read: everything is extremely dangerous and can be instantly fatal)
maybe there’s an item akin to the anhk in spelunky but that would be the extent of it, i think.
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Yeah I think Campanella 2 is probably the hardest game of all 50. There’s a lot to like about it but it’s too merciless for me. At some point after playing perfectly for 10 minutes and edging out a small advantage, then getting insta-killed because I popped out of the ship at the wrong moment around some later-game enemies I was given little opportunity to understand, I don’t really want to keep playing.
(The easiest game of all 50, The Big Bell Race, also stars the UFO ship! I wonder if this was intentional to demonstrate how difficulty is all about context)
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It’s one life only unfortunately. I’ll agree with others here and say its really difficult and a bit too dependant on random elements for my liking. Had more than one run end because of layouts with rooms spaced too far apart for my meager fuel gauge. Felt really satisfying to get a gold disc on it though.
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i’ve not beaten it yet, but it doesn’t feel too random to me. after i understood the mechanics, every instance of me running out of fuel has been decidedly my fault for playing too greedy, but maybe i haven’t played enough yet to be particularly unlucky.
fuel is pretty reliable between red doors, end of level, shops, fuel gates, etc, that you shouldn’t ever be entering a new zone without a full tank. it’s a press-your-luck mechanic like so many other games have in this collection.
i imagine it’s a lot like spleunky: you can get lucky and have an easier run based on what was offered to you, but a skilled player can still win with a minimal kit.
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hey they fixed the one crash i had in divers (which is the only crash i’ve experienced in 40 hours)
I can’t make it past two days in Onion Delivery. What a gleefully chaotic and mean game.
It’s vaguely a Crazy Taxi like (though I guess you do deliveries rather than taxiing), but whereas the map in Crazy Taxi is secretly just a fancy racing circuit, the map in this game is genuinely a modestly-sized city. Destinations are selected at random. The HUD displays the name of the location your next destination (which you’ll learn as you go along), a radar of your location relative to it, and your poor protagonist’s constantly terrified expression.
While there is a time limit, from my experience (playing 20 minutes), the real difficulty is not dying. You have three hitpoints. Making it to a destination restores your hitpoints (and, naturally, adds some time to your timer). You lose hitpoints by running into cars (in traffic or parked), falling into water, and hitting some road hazards. Plenty of other things don’t hurt you (running over pedestrians or fire hydrants or flowers, running into walls, etc.), but regardless only one of my deaths was because of a time out.
Dodging hazards in this is complicated by the peculiar steering controls. The car moves in 8 directions. Pressing left or right briefly will just make the car strafe slightly. Holding left or right will snap your car’s acceleration to the next facing direction. (The game does not have any in-between angles.) Steering in reverse feels like it works the opposite way that it should (brain issue?). Either way your car doesn’t steer very good. You can hold both gas/brake at the same time to do something like a handbrake turn, which is useful but takes a bit of finesse. Bonking into walls changes your facing direction in a way I don’t understand.
Anyhow, the goal is just to make it through a week of this job. This just involves meeting your quota of destinations for the day (5 on day one). Once you meet your quota, you have to return home, but you can also work overtime. Working overtime just means visiting more destinations for score, except they only fill up your health and not your time (not worth it imo). Day 2 adds hazards to the mix, helpfully introduced by the morning news report. There’s a decent variety of them, and they’re randomly selected. The first hazard I experienced was a giant hopping onion tracking me down. The hazards can and will hurt you.
I have not beaten day 2.
I’m afraid of what horrors day 3 could offer.
The music’s a bop, at least.
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I think I’ve actually managed to start Pilot’s Quest for real after a few sessions. Looking forward to logging in tomorrow and seeing the makings of my new empire before me.
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I somehow got to day 4 in Onion Delivery during my first session and haven’t gotten anywhere near there since
This may be because I now compulsively reset if I feel like my early game has gone poorly, which is a bad idea but 9 year old me woulda done the same thing, I can’t believe these old habits have come back, truly a marvel of games
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fwiw, the timer is only running while ufo50 is open
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i’m pretty consistently getting to area 3 now but playing a little too unsafe there. it’s the right difficulty to keep me very engaged but yeah i can see not having tolerance for it. i’m p. unfamiliar with all the possible area 3s so sometimes it feels like i’m doomed to die to something before i understand it. the deaths in this video seemed pretty preventable, tho.
(beware: probably a bunch of mechanical “spoilers” for campanella 2)
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2 was definitely hard but i finally pulled through. fuel was the main issue so i was definitely prioritizing the limit increases. your fuel only goes down when your thrusting so i think it helps to start each level off going up, getting as many stars as you can, and then coasting down as much as possible. endgame spoiler/tip after the last boss there’s a metroid style escape sequence. don’t panic, you keep getting fuel and the time limit isnt as brutal as it could be.
still nerve wracking though!
anyways i’ve beaten 20 of these and its my goty for sure
7 Likes
Divers is an interesting one. Starting it out, I was intrigued by its dark marine cave aesthetic. I was a bit turned off by the equipment system, with its identical weapons in three different elemental alignments. It seemed like it was going to be all about simple grinding in deeply hostile territory.
I’ve powered through the abrasive opening, and I’m starting to understand the appeal here. It kind of reminds me of Dragon Quest 1 in its thoughtfully tuned math. While grinding helps, that’s not really what the game is about. You don’t need to be able to fight off the enemies with ease. You’re heavily incentivized to avoid combat and instead search for treasure, which will push you forward much more quickly than leveling up.
As you come to understand the cave, you devise tense little missions for yourself – if you weaken your guys by burdening them with utility items instead of weapons, and then avoid enemies as much as possible to get through this side path, at the end you can bomb a wall open and then retreat to base to put their weapons back on before you proceed. It’s compelling!
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Dang…well back to the drawing board I guess.
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I just found and collected Mooncat in Divers. I have no idea what this does, but it’s now hanging out on the side of my inventory screen, lol.
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the first time i got past level 1 i beat carmel carmel
i think it’s a fine gradius but i do think the lives system is balanced wrong and the difficulty very front-loaded. the game would be a lot kinder if it just let you continue from where you died and then you, the player, would actually feel like you’re making progress.
there’s apparently some way to get a “true boss” i don’t know about. hmm!
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I bet you have to snapshot all the UFOs
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oh right yeah that’s a good theory bc the credits show you the enemies you captured.
1 Like