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Modding / Re: Jukebox mod
« on: December 15, 2007, 06:26:57 am »
This is a great idea but...
where's the fun if you can't sing along?
where's the fun if you can't sing along?
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Support / Re: Slow game with a Nvidia Ti4000
« on: December 14, 2007, 08:15:25 am »It was amazing for it's time! But it's pretty ancient compared to the current line-up of video cards. As reference, it's older than a Nvidia GeForce 5200.It is of course about 2-3 times faster than an FX 5200, but yes... They're about as fast as eg FX5600s and have basically the same reliable directX/OGL support (due to nVidia infamously using 32 bit "2.0" shaders instead of 24 and ruining an entire generation of graphics cards in a gambit which didn't pay off until SM3.0 -_-). If the game runs fine on a fast GF2 or 4MX then a Ti42 shouldn't have any issues at all, especially on minimum settings which I assume they've both tried.
As an aside, and more ontopic perhaps, when crushingly low FPS are obtained (like Alec's 1FPS guy), with Introversion's Darwinia at least, this often tended to be actually caused by sound driver issues (but I think that might simply have been a symptom of Darwinia's dodgy sound engine) - my advice would be to check you have up to date sound drivers, but this is a bit of a long shot.
3
Gameplay / Re: How to get to Lobster (Spoilers)
« on: December 13, 2007, 04:34:32 am »
If you line yourself up just right you can actually just jump on the very right hand side and skip the bubbles altogether!
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Gameplay / Re: Ixis' Treasure Hunter's FAQ
« on: December 12, 2007, 07:04:40 am »I don't know if anyone else has posted where the Royal Soup is or not, but I found it the plant in the Sun-Temple Secret room where you get the Metal Key treasure. It's in the shadows on the dark side of the room (left of the key), but if you use the Light Form you can see it find the right note to sing.I just came across that as well:
Royal Soup:
Speed +2 for 30 seconds
made with a Hearty Soup and a Veggie Cake
5
Support / Re: Works better on Linux than Vista :D
« on: December 12, 2007, 04:13:40 am »
This is probably caused by the shocking driver level OpenGL support in Vista, compared with the typically excellent support in Linux (since there isn't anything else to support anyway).
On top of this, nVidia cards typically obtain higher OGL framerates than their ATi counterparts.
On top of this, nVidia cards typically obtain higher OGL framerates than their ATi counterparts.
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Gameplay / Re: The ending, final boss, etc. [Obviously spoilers]
« on: December 11, 2007, 05:14:59 am »
Yeah, maybe it's subtle, but I think you're actually supposed to be experiencing Naija's life (ie playing the whole game)through your child's interaction with the blue crystal in the "secret" ending, hence all the voice over stuff talking about things in past tence.
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Support / Re: Newest Cumulative Patch: for 2007.12.07 and 2007.12.08 Full Versions
« on: December 11, 2007, 03:20:08 am »The missing creature in the forest is now working, as well as some tiny map/boss tweaks.Yeah, I don't suppose you could be any more specific about what you've changed? It's always nice to see what's been addressed.
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Gameplay / Re: Finally! A review from someone who's beaten the game.
« on: December 11, 2007, 03:04:39 am »
I too bave finished the game and would like to write a review! There will of course, be huge SPOILERS. Also bare in mind I tend to write A LOT about EVERYTHING EVER, so this post is going to be huge. I don't know if this really classes as a review, or maybe more of a feedback session, I dunno, I guess other people'll have to tell me!
First of all, this is the one of the types of game I most like to play, it's a 2D side scrolling game where the whole map would be available to you, but you don't have the ability to explore bits of it until you unlock new powers and abilities. So basically this game simply can't fail to get a good review from me. Seriously, play the demo if you haven't already bought it. Now, annoyingly, I'm the sort of person who picks out all the negative aspects in things, I seem to have a talent for noticing them. I'm not trying to be negative, as I'll explain at the time, I really do think this game is very good, completely aside from how many people made it, if this game was made by 200 people I'd be equally impressed with the actual game - that is, it's not getting any special treatment for being a 2-man indie game.
The music and art direction, are, frankly, pretty much perfect. Nothing looks out of place, you almost always know when you're in a certain area because everything around you tells you. I still now take some time every now and again just to work out how to sing a long to the background music. I can't possibly say anything that does them justice. And, speaking of the singing, you can tell that the person who encouraged the guys to have the game controlled with just the mouse was a (probably male) engineer of some description - it means that while you're playing the game with one hand, you can be eating slices of pizza with the other. This wins so many bonus points. Many of the costumes you can obtain are hilarious, but functional, and if I learn I missed any really good ones then I would replay the whole game just to get them.
Taking a step back from that, I would say maybe there are some minor integration issues with the world appearence and the story. The fact that you can collect treasures from around all of Aquaria and have them change your home satiates the desire to have a visable impact on the world - and it makes sense, you're just little Naija in the big expansive world of Aquaria, you've taken this little part as your own and are changing it through your adventures, why should anything else change, it's "the world". At the same time though, as you progress through the game, you're defeating the perverted shadows of huge Aquarian Gods - with the deaths of these Gods I would have in somes ways expected to see the environments change/improve - in that in releasing these tortured spirits, you'd get strong feedback that you're really doing good in the world, but alas, nothing really changes in the world. And frankly, it's easy to see why - this would have been a huge amount of work, and it's not *really* all that important because you get enough feedback through other means to accept the actions the game encourages anyway.
This, really, is the 3rd largest fault with the game I can see. And it's pathetically small, and can really be argued either way, and honestly I feel bad bringing it up because I don't really buy it myself. Expect this trend to continue.
The actual gameplay tends to revolve around changing yourself to overcome obsticals, which allows you to have layered puzzles - in that just because you work out what form to use to accomplish one part of a puzzle, this can reveal that there can be a secondary stage to the puzzle which adds further complications, especially in boss situations. An example is a side boss hanging from the roof in the ice caves area, simply by looking at it (thanks to the art direction), you work out that you have to hit it in it's soft underbelly. This becomes a case of working out how to make it fall off the roof as it chucks big explosive bombs of some sort at you, but, when you *do* accomplish that, you realise that its underbelly really isn't that soft and you don't have anything that can hurt it. Then it occurs to you that you need to grab one of *its* bombs, then change form to make it fall off, go back to normal Naija, and then drop the bomb on top of it, all in the space of a few seconds, because of course, the explosives have a fuse. Once you work this out, the boss becomes really very easy, but is implossible up until that point. This sort of puzzle boss doesn't seem to be particularly common in games (it certainly isn't unique), but the key that really makes them work and less frustrating in Aquaria is that, you can actually stop spamming your ineffectual attacks, change form, turn your shield on, and be *relatively* immune to nonphysical attacks, which gives you the chance to study the bosses and move around almost liesurely. It isn't an extreme all the time shoot em up. I do get the impression that a lot of people forgot about this and focussed on spamming attacks from energy form - now granted, a lot of the bosses do include a section where you have to do this, some of them exclusively, but for the ones that do have a puzzle component, this is invaluable and really does theme Aquaria in a lot of ways. You can go throug the whole game spamming energy form attacks, or you can just swim around dodging everything - you don't *need* to destroy everything, and why would you want to?
Again, taking a step back, there are some issues with some of these puzzle bosses. Two of the bosses in particular that I've heard people have real problems with are the Mithalas Cathedral boss, and the Octopus side boss, in both cases because people couldn't work out how to hurt them. I never had an issue with the octopus boss, or in fact, any other boss in the game, but I did with the Cathedral boss. Now, in both of those cases you had to be relatively close to the boss in order to notice the key to defeating them. In the case of the octopus boss, there's a big flailing tentacle warding you off from getting too close to it, so naturally, no one goes near the thing, why would they, they're just going to get hurt. But, if you never go near it, you never discover that that's when it reveals it's vulnrebility and lets you hurt it. This boss breaks my above comments because it blacks on the area around it and makes you have to use Sun form to reilluminate the area, making you vulnreble to the enemies it creates and it's own ranged attacks (although you can time it with sound effects or learn to dodge them in the dark to be ok. In the second case, the Mithalas Cathedral boss, the one I had a problem with, the issue is somewhat more of a (I would say) design error, or rather maybe an omission. You pick up pretty quickly that you can't shoot this boss to death, and that you need to use explosive poison frogbeast things to hurt it. The problem was how to use them, I was almost immidietly certain I had to make it eat them (because that's what you *always* do with explosive poison frogbeasts). I tried blowing them up (because they were explosive) on top of its head, I tried binding them and getting him to grab me while I was carrying one to see if he'd eat it. The trick was that, once you had a poison frogbeast thing, if you shot him a lot, he'd retreat to the other end of the room and then suck in a load of water, and you if you were near it, and the frogbeast if you dragged one over there, and it'd get hurt (hooray). The issue here was twofold, really, again, you attack from range - who in their right mind would go close to a giant scary boss, but If you didn't get close, you wouldn't notice that he was sucking in a huge quantity of water - I was fighting this boss for over and hour trying to work out what I was doing wrong, and I fealt like a complete idiot when I couldn't work it out - but additionally, the problem here really, is not that you needed to go close to figure this out. Probably the very first thing that the boss did when I entered the room, was suck up a load of water and show me what I needed to do to beat it. The problem is that I had *no idea whatsoever* that it had just done that - there is no graphical effect, no debris/bubbles in the water to visibly show you that water is moving, it just stands at the other end and opens its mouth. Try spinning on the spot, if you have frame buffer effects there are huge water ripples everywhere - water is clearly being moved around. This boss just opens its mouth at you, and you have no idea what it's doing unless you're close enough to get sucked in by it - and I spent all my time cowering near the entrance like a sensible mer-person. Obviously, now I know, I'm really annoyed I spent hours and hours trying to work this out, because all that time was spent fruitlessly experimenting with things which were *close*, but, completely wrong. The problem is that, in this kind of situation, the gameplay mechanic generally makes you feel like an idiot, rather than that the puzzle is really hard, but, if you don't get stuck then it's a non-issue, if you can get a subtle nudge in he right direction (see Portal) it doesn't have to detract from the experience.
And that's the 2nd largest problem with the game. Changing a small graphical effect 50% removes this problem. Once again it's relatively minor.
The story, as mentioned, sees you defeating perverted shadows of gods who were either betrayed by their own people, or corrupted by the Creator. There are also numerous messages scrawled around Aquaria in a direct english letter for symbol code (with the main menu basically being the rosetta stone for working them out). The most valuable of these messges are problably in the sun temple boss' chamber, the other ones scattered around are quite interesting but their plot pertinance is usually covered in voice over/cutscene. The way the story develops is relatively character driven, in that, you're not exploring because someone told you to or whatever, you're exploring because you want to learn about your past and your identity, which changes the way the game works entirely (even through really it's still the same). There's pretty much no loose ends (though there never seems to be much of a followup on some of the comments the Cathedral Boss makes) and it all ties up quite nicely. The general jist is that you defeat a god, and it gives you a new ability, which lets you explore further into the world of Aquaria. Honestly, the story probably won't fail to involve you and make you want to play, it's just one of those stories.
There is, for me though, one rather large fly in the ointment with the story. And that fly, is Li. First of all, if you miss finding him in the veil, you are almost DOOMED to explore all around the Abyss over and over and go *completely insane* after getting sun form. I certainly did. I had to get help to find him, or more accurately, realise he even existed in the first place. (I suppose If there'd been a comment in the Licave, the name of which I only got after the event, that this camp seemed to be in use, I might have found him on my own, but alas I didn't). Now, I found the hidden memory in the sun tower before I found Li. Had it really pressed the point that this guy came back day after day and was still looking around the area, I would have checked it out. It didn't, so it never occured to me to go and see if I could find him. Secondarly, after searching around the whole world for like 2 hours, and I finally got a hint from someone to check out the waters around the veil, I was really kinda annoyed with the whole thing. When you finally do meet Li, you instantly take to him and become involved, and it pains me to say this: I just couldn't buy into this. Maybe it's because of all the frustation at that sodding door in the abyss, but I really think if I'd found him normally I would feel the same about this. I don't know about you, but I don't randomly kiss guys who I have feint memories of. I just could not buy into this relationship. Had there been something more, I mean, if you'd discovered him searching and you just sort of met each other properly and he'd stayed a scuba diver and *nothing really romantic happened*, but you still worked together and the relationship developed from that, rather than *randomly on the spot*, I could buy into that. But not the way it was done, and I gotta say that really seemed forced to me. Really, really forced, and I did not like it one bit. I mean example, the sort of sacrifice and gift mechanic - in a boss fight, Li sacrifices eg his air supply and therefore his normal human self to save you (speaking of his hidden feelings etc) and, as he drowns, you (not realising the consequences) then do what you do in the story as it is. Yes, it's Clich
First of all, this is the one of the types of game I most like to play, it's a 2D side scrolling game where the whole map would be available to you, but you don't have the ability to explore bits of it until you unlock new powers and abilities. So basically this game simply can't fail to get a good review from me. Seriously, play the demo if you haven't already bought it. Now, annoyingly, I'm the sort of person who picks out all the negative aspects in things, I seem to have a talent for noticing them. I'm not trying to be negative, as I'll explain at the time, I really do think this game is very good, completely aside from how many people made it, if this game was made by 200 people I'd be equally impressed with the actual game - that is, it's not getting any special treatment for being a 2-man indie game.
The music and art direction, are, frankly, pretty much perfect. Nothing looks out of place, you almost always know when you're in a certain area because everything around you tells you. I still now take some time every now and again just to work out how to sing a long to the background music. I can't possibly say anything that does them justice. And, speaking of the singing, you can tell that the person who encouraged the guys to have the game controlled with just the mouse was a (probably male) engineer of some description - it means that while you're playing the game with one hand, you can be eating slices of pizza with the other. This wins so many bonus points. Many of the costumes you can obtain are hilarious, but functional, and if I learn I missed any really good ones then I would replay the whole game just to get them.
Taking a step back from that, I would say maybe there are some minor integration issues with the world appearence and the story. The fact that you can collect treasures from around all of Aquaria and have them change your home satiates the desire to have a visable impact on the world - and it makes sense, you're just little Naija in the big expansive world of Aquaria, you've taken this little part as your own and are changing it through your adventures, why should anything else change, it's "the world". At the same time though, as you progress through the game, you're defeating the perverted shadows of huge Aquarian Gods - with the deaths of these Gods I would have in somes ways expected to see the environments change/improve - in that in releasing these tortured spirits, you'd get strong feedback that you're really doing good in the world, but alas, nothing really changes in the world. And frankly, it's easy to see why - this would have been a huge amount of work, and it's not *really* all that important because you get enough feedback through other means to accept the actions the game encourages anyway.
This, really, is the 3rd largest fault with the game I can see. And it's pathetically small, and can really be argued either way, and honestly I feel bad bringing it up because I don't really buy it myself. Expect this trend to continue.
The actual gameplay tends to revolve around changing yourself to overcome obsticals, which allows you to have layered puzzles - in that just because you work out what form to use to accomplish one part of a puzzle, this can reveal that there can be a secondary stage to the puzzle which adds further complications, especially in boss situations. An example is a side boss hanging from the roof in the ice caves area, simply by looking at it (thanks to the art direction), you work out that you have to hit it in it's soft underbelly. This becomes a case of working out how to make it fall off the roof as it chucks big explosive bombs of some sort at you, but, when you *do* accomplish that, you realise that its underbelly really isn't that soft and you don't have anything that can hurt it. Then it occurs to you that you need to grab one of *its* bombs, then change form to make it fall off, go back to normal Naija, and then drop the bomb on top of it, all in the space of a few seconds, because of course, the explosives have a fuse. Once you work this out, the boss becomes really very easy, but is implossible up until that point. This sort of puzzle boss doesn't seem to be particularly common in games (it certainly isn't unique), but the key that really makes them work and less frustrating in Aquaria is that, you can actually stop spamming your ineffectual attacks, change form, turn your shield on, and be *relatively* immune to nonphysical attacks, which gives you the chance to study the bosses and move around almost liesurely. It isn't an extreme all the time shoot em up. I do get the impression that a lot of people forgot about this and focussed on spamming attacks from energy form - now granted, a lot of the bosses do include a section where you have to do this, some of them exclusively, but for the ones that do have a puzzle component, this is invaluable and really does theme Aquaria in a lot of ways. You can go throug the whole game spamming energy form attacks, or you can just swim around dodging everything - you don't *need* to destroy everything, and why would you want to?
Again, taking a step back, there are some issues with some of these puzzle bosses. Two of the bosses in particular that I've heard people have real problems with are the Mithalas Cathedral boss, and the Octopus side boss, in both cases because people couldn't work out how to hurt them. I never had an issue with the octopus boss, or in fact, any other boss in the game, but I did with the Cathedral boss. Now, in both of those cases you had to be relatively close to the boss in order to notice the key to defeating them. In the case of the octopus boss, there's a big flailing tentacle warding you off from getting too close to it, so naturally, no one goes near the thing, why would they, they're just going to get hurt. But, if you never go near it, you never discover that that's when it reveals it's vulnrebility and lets you hurt it. This boss breaks my above comments because it blacks on the area around it and makes you have to use Sun form to reilluminate the area, making you vulnreble to the enemies it creates and it's own ranged attacks (although you can time it with sound effects or learn to dodge them in the dark to be ok. In the second case, the Mithalas Cathedral boss, the one I had a problem with, the issue is somewhat more of a (I would say) design error, or rather maybe an omission. You pick up pretty quickly that you can't shoot this boss to death, and that you need to use explosive poison frogbeast things to hurt it. The problem was how to use them, I was almost immidietly certain I had to make it eat them (because that's what you *always* do with explosive poison frogbeasts). I tried blowing them up (because they were explosive) on top of its head, I tried binding them and getting him to grab me while I was carrying one to see if he'd eat it. The trick was that, once you had a poison frogbeast thing, if you shot him a lot, he'd retreat to the other end of the room and then suck in a load of water, and you if you were near it, and the frogbeast if you dragged one over there, and it'd get hurt (hooray). The issue here was twofold, really, again, you attack from range - who in their right mind would go close to a giant scary boss, but If you didn't get close, you wouldn't notice that he was sucking in a huge quantity of water - I was fighting this boss for over and hour trying to work out what I was doing wrong, and I fealt like a complete idiot when I couldn't work it out - but additionally, the problem here really, is not that you needed to go close to figure this out. Probably the very first thing that the boss did when I entered the room, was suck up a load of water and show me what I needed to do to beat it. The problem is that I had *no idea whatsoever* that it had just done that - there is no graphical effect, no debris/bubbles in the water to visibly show you that water is moving, it just stands at the other end and opens its mouth. Try spinning on the spot, if you have frame buffer effects there are huge water ripples everywhere - water is clearly being moved around. This boss just opens its mouth at you, and you have no idea what it's doing unless you're close enough to get sucked in by it - and I spent all my time cowering near the entrance like a sensible mer-person. Obviously, now I know, I'm really annoyed I spent hours and hours trying to work this out, because all that time was spent fruitlessly experimenting with things which were *close*, but, completely wrong. The problem is that, in this kind of situation, the gameplay mechanic generally makes you feel like an idiot, rather than that the puzzle is really hard, but, if you don't get stuck then it's a non-issue, if you can get a subtle nudge in he right direction (see Portal) it doesn't have to detract from the experience.
And that's the 2nd largest problem with the game. Changing a small graphical effect 50% removes this problem. Once again it's relatively minor.
The story, as mentioned, sees you defeating perverted shadows of gods who were either betrayed by their own people, or corrupted by the Creator. There are also numerous messages scrawled around Aquaria in a direct english letter for symbol code (with the main menu basically being the rosetta stone for working them out). The most valuable of these messges are problably in the sun temple boss' chamber, the other ones scattered around are quite interesting but their plot pertinance is usually covered in voice over/cutscene. The way the story develops is relatively character driven, in that, you're not exploring because someone told you to or whatever, you're exploring because you want to learn about your past and your identity, which changes the way the game works entirely (even through really it's still the same). There's pretty much no loose ends (though there never seems to be much of a followup on some of the comments the Cathedral Boss makes) and it all ties up quite nicely. The general jist is that you defeat a god, and it gives you a new ability, which lets you explore further into the world of Aquaria. Honestly, the story probably won't fail to involve you and make you want to play, it's just one of those stories.
There is, for me though, one rather large fly in the ointment with the story. And that fly, is Li. First of all, if you miss finding him in the veil, you are almost DOOMED to explore all around the Abyss over and over and go *completely insane* after getting sun form. I certainly did. I had to get help to find him, or more accurately, realise he even existed in the first place. (I suppose If there'd been a comment in the Licave, the name of which I only got after the event, that this camp seemed to be in use, I might have found him on my own, but alas I didn't). Now, I found the hidden memory in the sun tower before I found Li. Had it really pressed the point that this guy came back day after day and was still looking around the area, I would have checked it out. It didn't, so it never occured to me to go and see if I could find him. Secondarly, after searching around the whole world for like 2 hours, and I finally got a hint from someone to check out the waters around the veil, I was really kinda annoyed with the whole thing. When you finally do meet Li, you instantly take to him and become involved, and it pains me to say this: I just couldn't buy into this. Maybe it's because of all the frustation at that sodding door in the abyss, but I really think if I'd found him normally I would feel the same about this. I don't know about you, but I don't randomly kiss guys who I have feint memories of. I just could not buy into this relationship. Had there been something more, I mean, if you'd discovered him searching and you just sort of met each other properly and he'd stayed a scuba diver and *nothing really romantic happened*, but you still worked together and the relationship developed from that, rather than *randomly on the spot*, I could buy into that. But not the way it was done, and I gotta say that really seemed forced to me. Really, really forced, and I did not like it one bit. I mean example, the sort of sacrifice and gift mechanic - in a boss fight, Li sacrifices eg his air supply and therefore his normal human self to save you (speaking of his hidden feelings etc) and, as he drowns, you (not realising the consequences) then do what you do in the story as it is. Yes, it's Clich
9
Gameplay / Re: The Turtle and the Whale
« on: December 10, 2007, 05:52:49 am »
Yeah I kind of have the same problem as Laharah, except the other way around; I found a whale but no idea about a song for it: don't suppose I could get a hint on the general area to find the whale song?
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