Helping out with the kiddies
Monstrous Turtles by Zircon
Whenever I listen to this tune, I picture an animation in which Super Mario World is portrayed in a semi-serious fashion. Mario and Luigi become agents infiltrating Bowser's castle by stealth, dodging traps and navigating the maze of twisty pipes and lava rivers. They locate Peach and a number of Toads in the dungeon and try to sneak them out, but things get complicated when the Koopa Kids discover and chase them. At the end, Bowser himself in one of his more gigantic forms bursts upon the scene and spews flame all over. Mario and Luigi take cover behind a pair of pillars while the blaze rushes past them. Mario glances over to Luigi and holds up a feather; Luigi gulps and nods, holding up a fire flower. In slow-mo, the brothers turn around the pillars to dash forward and confront the snarling dragon-turtle...and the animation ends with a freeze-shot of the dramatic charge.
Hi all. Pretty quiet month IRL. I got tired of hearing during the announcements every Sunday at church that they are DESPERATELY IN NEED OF CHILDREN'S HELPERS, so I volunteered to help out even though I'm probably not the best candidate and am already doing media duty once or twice a month. They haven't gotten me started yet, so I don't know what-all it will involve.
ASCRS is still not completed, alas. I got a good ways into writing the manual for it, but as I was doing so I realized that one of the features I'd decided to skip, namely the ability to apply advantage and disadvantage modifiers to roll elements of an action, really is something I want in there. So I'm implementing that before I move forward. I don't think I'd have been quite done with the manual by the end of the month even if I didn't take that detour. Maybe next month.
Meanwhile, there's the looming question of what to focus on next. Forgotten Gates has been on the back burner for three years now. I'd like to complete that, but it's hard to justify the time it would take when I could be working on improving my skills in systems that are actually in professional use. The next What-Iffers title I had in mind, Star Furs, would be in Unity, which is at least widely-accepted in the indie dev scene...although it occurred to me that I also have Game Maker Studio which I never seriously tried out, and maybe it would be worth at least doing some prototyping in that. Another option might be to implement some scripting in Tabletop Simulator for that board game I was helping to design, The Errand of Zulga. Stuff like automatic board setup, maybe even something that generates a random layout. That hopefully wouldn't be a huge project, although I thought ASCRS would take a couple weeks if I buckled down to it. e.e;
We still haven't managed another Ninja Burger session, even though I've given up on making somebody else GM and we've opened up doing another game night on Saturdays on the off weeks of our Friday ones. We just haven't had enough people show up on a given night, especially early enough.
On Zelda RPG, Daray and Artifa made it to the Temple of Time and activated the timeshift stone they brought with them. This brought the portal to Termina which had once existed there back into being, and Ganondorf was able to repurpose that magical energy to escape from the void between dimensions. BIG G IS BACK. 8O After a little experimentation into how far he could push the timeshift stone (it ended up crumbling it), he made another portal for himself and his agents to escape from under the sea.
This portal brought them out to the Zora's Domain scene, which was more or less wrapping up. Ganondorf curtly told Zelda that if she wants Hyrule to go back to the way it was, she needs to follow him...ALONE. Then he shifted the destination of his portal again and stepped back through it.
Over at Gerudo Fortress, Esava and Shemri got into a conversation about whether there's anything they can do to reverse the flooding and whether that would actually be a good thing for the Gerudo, with Tommy providing humorous side chatter. Also, Lexa, a fairy who was with the group that linked their house up with the Crimson Wolfos, crawled out from under Tommy's hat to join the scene. A bit twinkish as she never posed going under there and I didn't give her permission to assume, but I rolled with it, having Tommy indignant at first and then realizing that this tiny being who could slip into such a small space without even him noticing could become the perfect burglar. >o>
Esava also asked Shemri about Nabooru, particularly whether she has a family. I didn't want to write Nabooru's player into a corner, so I had Shemri respond that she didn't know of any close living relatives to Nabooru, and told him a bit about her being one of the Six Sages. Nabooru herself dropped in on the conversation shortly after that, and Tommy told her Esava wanted to meet her family. non
Cadence of Hyrule:
Remember Crypt of the Necrodancer? Cadence of Hyrule is a sequel to that, set in the Zelda world and released on the Switch. Yep, making an indie game that gets to have an authorized Nintendo franchise-themed sequel would be pretty sweet. ^.^
Anyway, the story is that a guy in the Zelda-verse called Octavio somehow gets his hands on the Golden Lute from the Necrodancer-verse, and he uses it to put the land under its dance-inducing spell and create some music-themed boss monsters -- Gohmaracas, Bass Guitarmos Knights, Wizzroboe, and Gleeockenspiele. Why? Oddly enough, he says he's doing it because the regular heroes of Hyrule aren't doing enough to be ready for the next coming of Ganon, and he's planning to take Ganon on himself. Link and Zelda in particular he casts into a deep slumber so they can't meddle with his work.
Fortunately, Cadence (the main heroine of the Necrodancer-verse) gets pulled into Hyrule. After a brief tutorial segment playing as Cadence, you get to wake one of the sleeping heroes and go adventuring as them to slay Octavio's champions. Along the way you get to wake whichever one you didn't pick at first, giving you the option to switch heroes at certain places, and eventually Cadence joins the party as well. Then you have a showdown with Octavio and eventually Ganon. As Zelda games go, it's pretty light on story, just an excuse plot to give you Zelda-themed Necrodancer gameplay.
So how is the gameplay? Just about what you'd expect from having played Necrodancer. It's a good bit easier on the whole, primarily because defeated enemies will sometimes drop hearts to heal you whereas traditional Necrodancer was extremely stingy with health restoration (you could occasionally find or buy food items which had to be manually consumed). Also, unless you're playing in permadeath mode, a lot of the equipment you can acquire, most importantly including weapons, will stick with you across lives. You lose rupees, shovel, torch, boots, and ring if you die, and all of those except rupees will wear out over use anyway.
The equipment you can earn includes a lot of the Zelda classics -- boomerang, bow and arrows, hookshot, etc. I found myself rarely using them apart from solving the obligatory puzzles, as they are often tricky to utilize in the fast-paced dance combat and in most cases don't do much damage if any. I probably could be more effective if, say, I made more liberal use of bombs to thin out large groups of baddies, but it's hard to think about such things in the midst of exploring to the beat.
For the heroes, it actually does make a difference which one you're playing because they each have two special abilities mapped to the shoulder buttons. Link and Cadence share the ability to hold out a shield in front of them with R, while Zelda activates Nayru's Love to protect herself for a couple beats and reflect projectiles if she times it right. For L (which you have to earn during the course of the game), Link can do his trademark spin slash, Zelda sends out a Din's Fire blast that acts like a remote-control bomb, and Cadence does an odd shovel move that brings up spikes of earth on some spaces in front of her. I preferred playing as Zelda most of the time, although I usually didn't think to make use of the special abilities regardless.
If you're sharp and familiar with Necrodancer, you may have noticed I mentioned 'in front' a couple times in that last paragraph. Unlike in the first Necrodancer, where both heroes and enemies hopped around as nearly-static sprites, direction of facing is shown and important in this game. It has to be considering how many Zelda items involve throwing or shooting something. X) Some enemies will even telegraph which way they're going to move next this way, although you have to be careful as it can change suddenly due to outside factors preventing them from doing the move they were 'planning'. Stupid keese got me a lot due to that. e.e
Finally, there's the factor that there's an overworld to explore. The map is randomly generated, but that just means that the (mostly) single-screen zones it comprises of are shuffled around and given some random elements in terms of monsters and treasures. Once you clear out all the monsters in a given zone, the musical lock-step is lifted, which is nice for solving puzzles and traversing without having to wait for the beat. Once you're in a dungeon, you find a more traditional Necrodancer-stye random layout, although it still involves a lot of pre-crafted rooms. There's also a Dungeon Mode for the game in which you skip the overworld entirely and just do several floors of dungeon-style play in between bosses.
Bottom line? The Zelda theme is a fun crossover, but really this is a Necrodancer game. Get it if you liked the first one or want a somewhat easier introduction to the series.
Umihara Kawase:
I'd seen this game and its two sequels and been intrigued by them several times, primarily through the Humble Bundle Store if I recall correctly. Recently they were on sale on Steam and I finally decided to snap them up. This first title of the series was originally release on Super Famicom and didn't make it to the US as a Super Nintendo cartridge.
The conceit of Umihara Kawase is that you are a chibified version of a sushi chef (and I wouldn't have learned that detail if I hadn't checked the Wikipedia article) who gets around surreal platformer stages using a stretchy fishing line. These stages are populated with giant walking fish which Kawase can stun and catch with her fishing line, although they're also dangerous to her. There are lots of decorative objects scattered about in the background having to do with school or suburban Japanese life, like protractors, street signs, and garbage cans. It feels like the setting is inspired by childhood daydreams.
The gameplay revolves almost entirely around the use of the fishing line to swing, climb, and sometimes even slingshot around the courses. At first it feels like there isn't that much you can do with it. You cast the line out in any of the eight cardinal directions, and it'll latch onto any surface (or object) that isn't ice. You can swing left and right a little while hanging, but it doesn't give you much momentum. You can also reel in or out, with down and up unintuitively being the buttons for each since reeling in usually takes you up. Just basic latching onto things and pulling yourself to them is enough to get you through the first dozen or so stages, but soon it gets pretty hard to navigate that way.
The real breakthrough comes when you figure out how to take advantage of the fishing line's bungee cord-like bounciness. If you play some line out while hanging, especially at the high point of a bounce, you'll gain some momentum by falling which then transfers into stretching the line. Swing back and forth to direct this momentum, then reel in at a critical moment to sling yourself strongly in the direction you want to go. This makes it possible to gradually boost yourself up straight walls by latching onto higher and higher spots, swing yourself up and around ledges to get on top of them, and even launch yourself across gaps too large to clear otherwise. Of course, it takes practice, and the most effective times to do something are often the scariest, like when you're jumping off a ledge, latching onto a block nearby, and letting go on your first swift swing underneath so that you don't lose the momentum you gained by falling.
The layout of one stage leading into another is rather funky in this game. It's a holdout from ye olde days when games expected you to start from the beginning each time you play and you have limited lives to get as far as you can. However, some stages have multiple exits, which cause you to skip around to different stages. Naturally, the more difficult-to-reach exits tend to lead to higher-level stages, although it's not a strict matter of skipping ahead. In fact, eventually you reach branching paths of stages, which occasionally converge together again, but ultimately any given run isn't going to hit all the stages. In fact, there are four different ending points to the game, and one of them can only be reached by an odd '30-minute rule' -- once a run has gone on for 30 minutes or more, any door might lead to one of the four ending stages. Also, there's nothing special about any of the endings -- you go through the final door and the credits roll, that's it.
Mercifully, there is a practice mode where you can replay any stage without worrying about your number of lives. You have to reach a given stage in the regular game first, though -- not beat it at least, but blaze a trail there through the stages leading to it one way or another. I'm not ashamed to say there are some stages I've only bothered to beat in practice mode, and a few I haven't even reached. The stunts required to get to some of the exit doors are ridiculously finicky -- I looked up YouTube videos to confirm how they're done and it's simply not worth the headache.
Bottom line? It's a fun and challenging game once you really get the hang of it, but if you're an obsessive completionist, you want to steer clear of getting hooked on this one. c.c
Umihara Kawase Shun:
Aaaand here's the second title of the series, which was originally released on Nintendo DS. Still no story to speak of, you're in this weird daydream world to catch legged fish and sling to hard-to-reach doors because why not.
The visuals this time an odd mix of 3D platforms and 2D sprites. The sprites frankly look like they were drawn in colored pencil and scanned in. It can feel a little disconcerting, but you get used to it much like everything else in this crazy series.
They added a few quality-of-life features this time around that are pretty nice. You have the option of reconfiguring the controls, including having buttons specifically for casting your line each of the four diagonal directions. Having grown used to just using the D-pad, I rarely used those, but it's good that they're available. The practice mode also shows a layout of which stages are connected to which others, which can help you plan out your next survival mode run to find new stages -- although it doesn't remind you which doors lead where or hint which stages have doors you haven't been through yet. Finally, they're more generous with lives in a sense: as you clear a certain number of stages, they'll give you the option to 'continue' after running out of lives, with more and more continues granted the more stages you've completed.
Other than those, it's pretty similar to the first game. I will say there are even more goals and stages that I decided not to bother with on this one. One of them, for example, requires you to sling yourself hard from a platform that sinks gradually from your weight, at just the right time and velocity to hit a slanted platform off-screen to your right, and jump from that platform without losing your momentum in order to get just barely close enough to latch onto another platform. Yeah, I'll pass, thanks. :P
Bottom line? Worthwhile for the stages that are reasonably winnable, but make sure you have a high tolerance for frustration for even that. Possibly a better starting point to the series than the first, but it could make the first one more difficult if you get used to the extra controls.
Click to viewWhenever I listen to this tune, I picture an animation in which Super Mario World is portrayed in a semi-serious fashion. Mario and Luigi become agents infiltrating Bowser's castle by stealth, dodging traps and navigating the maze of twisty pipes and lava rivers. They locate Peach and a number of Toads in the dungeon and try to sneak them out, but things get complicated when the Koopa Kids discover and chase them. At the end, Bowser himself in one of his more gigantic forms bursts upon the scene and spews flame all over. Mario and Luigi take cover behind a pair of pillars while the blaze rushes past them. Mario glances over to Luigi and holds up a feather; Luigi gulps and nods, holding up a fire flower. In slow-mo, the brothers turn around the pillars to dash forward and confront the snarling dragon-turtle...and the animation ends with a freeze-shot of the dramatic charge.
Hi all. Pretty quiet month IRL. I got tired of hearing during the announcements every Sunday at church that they are DESPERATELY IN NEED OF CHILDREN'S HELPERS, so I volunteered to help out even though I'm probably not the best candidate and am already doing media duty once or twice a month. They haven't gotten me started yet, so I don't know what-all it will involve.
ASCRS is still not completed, alas. I got a good ways into writing the manual for it, but as I was doing so I realized that one of the features I'd decided to skip, namely the ability to apply advantage and disadvantage modifiers to roll elements of an action, really is something I want in there. So I'm implementing that before I move forward. I don't think I'd have been quite done with the manual by the end of the month even if I didn't take that detour. Maybe next month.
Meanwhile, there's the looming question of what to focus on next. Forgotten Gates has been on the back burner for three years now. I'd like to complete that, but it's hard to justify the time it would take when I could be working on improving my skills in systems that are actually in professional use. The next What-Iffers title I had in mind, Star Furs, would be in Unity, which is at least widely-accepted in the indie dev scene...although it occurred to me that I also have Game Maker Studio which I never seriously tried out, and maybe it would be worth at least doing some prototyping in that. Another option might be to implement some scripting in Tabletop Simulator for that board game I was helping to design, The Errand of Zulga. Stuff like automatic board setup, maybe even something that generates a random layout. That hopefully wouldn't be a huge project, although I thought ASCRS would take a couple weeks if I buckled down to it. e.e;
We still haven't managed another Ninja Burger session, even though I've given up on making somebody else GM and we've opened up doing another game night on Saturdays on the off weeks of our Friday ones. We just haven't had enough people show up on a given night, especially early enough.
On Zelda RPG, Daray and Artifa made it to the Temple of Time and activated the timeshift stone they brought with them. This brought the portal to Termina which had once existed there back into being, and Ganondorf was able to repurpose that magical energy to escape from the void between dimensions. BIG G IS BACK. 8O After a little experimentation into how far he could push the timeshift stone (it ended up crumbling it), he made another portal for himself and his agents to escape from under the sea.
This portal brought them out to the Zora's Domain scene, which was more or less wrapping up. Ganondorf curtly told Zelda that if she wants Hyrule to go back to the way it was, she needs to follow him...ALONE. Then he shifted the destination of his portal again and stepped back through it.
Over at Gerudo Fortress, Esava and Shemri got into a conversation about whether there's anything they can do to reverse the flooding and whether that would actually be a good thing for the Gerudo, with Tommy providing humorous side chatter. Also, Lexa, a fairy who was with the group that linked their house up with the Crimson Wolfos, crawled out from under Tommy's hat to join the scene. A bit twinkish as she never posed going under there and I didn't give her permission to assume, but I rolled with it, having Tommy indignant at first and then realizing that this tiny being who could slip into such a small space without even him noticing could become the perfect burglar. >o>
Esava also asked Shemri about Nabooru, particularly whether she has a family. I didn't want to write Nabooru's player into a corner, so I had Shemri respond that she didn't know of any close living relatives to Nabooru, and told him a bit about her being one of the Six Sages. Nabooru herself dropped in on the conversation shortly after that, and Tommy told her Esava wanted to meet her family. non
Cadence of Hyrule:
Remember Crypt of the Necrodancer? Cadence of Hyrule is a sequel to that, set in the Zelda world and released on the Switch. Yep, making an indie game that gets to have an authorized Nintendo franchise-themed sequel would be pretty sweet. ^.^
Anyway, the story is that a guy in the Zelda-verse called Octavio somehow gets his hands on the Golden Lute from the Necrodancer-verse, and he uses it to put the land under its dance-inducing spell and create some music-themed boss monsters -- Gohmaracas, Bass Guitarmos Knights, Wizzroboe, and Gleeockenspiele. Why? Oddly enough, he says he's doing it because the regular heroes of Hyrule aren't doing enough to be ready for the next coming of Ganon, and he's planning to take Ganon on himself. Link and Zelda in particular he casts into a deep slumber so they can't meddle with his work.
Fortunately, Cadence (the main heroine of the Necrodancer-verse) gets pulled into Hyrule. After a brief tutorial segment playing as Cadence, you get to wake one of the sleeping heroes and go adventuring as them to slay Octavio's champions. Along the way you get to wake whichever one you didn't pick at first, giving you the option to switch heroes at certain places, and eventually Cadence joins the party as well. Then you have a showdown with Octavio and eventually Ganon. As Zelda games go, it's pretty light on story, just an excuse plot to give you Zelda-themed Necrodancer gameplay.
So how is the gameplay? Just about what you'd expect from having played Necrodancer. It's a good bit easier on the whole, primarily because defeated enemies will sometimes drop hearts to heal you whereas traditional Necrodancer was extremely stingy with health restoration (you could occasionally find or buy food items which had to be manually consumed). Also, unless you're playing in permadeath mode, a lot of the equipment you can acquire, most importantly including weapons, will stick with you across lives. You lose rupees, shovel, torch, boots, and ring if you die, and all of those except rupees will wear out over use anyway.
The equipment you can earn includes a lot of the Zelda classics -- boomerang, bow and arrows, hookshot, etc. I found myself rarely using them apart from solving the obligatory puzzles, as they are often tricky to utilize in the fast-paced dance combat and in most cases don't do much damage if any. I probably could be more effective if, say, I made more liberal use of bombs to thin out large groups of baddies, but it's hard to think about such things in the midst of exploring to the beat.
For the heroes, it actually does make a difference which one you're playing because they each have two special abilities mapped to the shoulder buttons. Link and Cadence share the ability to hold out a shield in front of them with R, while Zelda activates Nayru's Love to protect herself for a couple beats and reflect projectiles if she times it right. For L (which you have to earn during the course of the game), Link can do his trademark spin slash, Zelda sends out a Din's Fire blast that acts like a remote-control bomb, and Cadence does an odd shovel move that brings up spikes of earth on some spaces in front of her. I preferred playing as Zelda most of the time, although I usually didn't think to make use of the special abilities regardless.
If you're sharp and familiar with Necrodancer, you may have noticed I mentioned 'in front' a couple times in that last paragraph. Unlike in the first Necrodancer, where both heroes and enemies hopped around as nearly-static sprites, direction of facing is shown and important in this game. It has to be considering how many Zelda items involve throwing or shooting something. X) Some enemies will even telegraph which way they're going to move next this way, although you have to be careful as it can change suddenly due to outside factors preventing them from doing the move they were 'planning'. Stupid keese got me a lot due to that. e.e
Finally, there's the factor that there's an overworld to explore. The map is randomly generated, but that just means that the (mostly) single-screen zones it comprises of are shuffled around and given some random elements in terms of monsters and treasures. Once you clear out all the monsters in a given zone, the musical lock-step is lifted, which is nice for solving puzzles and traversing without having to wait for the beat. Once you're in a dungeon, you find a more traditional Necrodancer-stye random layout, although it still involves a lot of pre-crafted rooms. There's also a Dungeon Mode for the game in which you skip the overworld entirely and just do several floors of dungeon-style play in between bosses.
Bottom line? The Zelda theme is a fun crossover, but really this is a Necrodancer game. Get it if you liked the first one or want a somewhat easier introduction to the series.
Umihara Kawase:
I'd seen this game and its two sequels and been intrigued by them several times, primarily through the Humble Bundle Store if I recall correctly. Recently they were on sale on Steam and I finally decided to snap them up. This first title of the series was originally release on Super Famicom and didn't make it to the US as a Super Nintendo cartridge.
The conceit of Umihara Kawase is that you are a chibified version of a sushi chef (and I wouldn't have learned that detail if I hadn't checked the Wikipedia article) who gets around surreal platformer stages using a stretchy fishing line. These stages are populated with giant walking fish which Kawase can stun and catch with her fishing line, although they're also dangerous to her. There are lots of decorative objects scattered about in the background having to do with school or suburban Japanese life, like protractors, street signs, and garbage cans. It feels like the setting is inspired by childhood daydreams.
The gameplay revolves almost entirely around the use of the fishing line to swing, climb, and sometimes even slingshot around the courses. At first it feels like there isn't that much you can do with it. You cast the line out in any of the eight cardinal directions, and it'll latch onto any surface (or object) that isn't ice. You can swing left and right a little while hanging, but it doesn't give you much momentum. You can also reel in or out, with down and up unintuitively being the buttons for each since reeling in usually takes you up. Just basic latching onto things and pulling yourself to them is enough to get you through the first dozen or so stages, but soon it gets pretty hard to navigate that way.
The real breakthrough comes when you figure out how to take advantage of the fishing line's bungee cord-like bounciness. If you play some line out while hanging, especially at the high point of a bounce, you'll gain some momentum by falling which then transfers into stretching the line. Swing back and forth to direct this momentum, then reel in at a critical moment to sling yourself strongly in the direction you want to go. This makes it possible to gradually boost yourself up straight walls by latching onto higher and higher spots, swing yourself up and around ledges to get on top of them, and even launch yourself across gaps too large to clear otherwise. Of course, it takes practice, and the most effective times to do something are often the scariest, like when you're jumping off a ledge, latching onto a block nearby, and letting go on your first swift swing underneath so that you don't lose the momentum you gained by falling.
The layout of one stage leading into another is rather funky in this game. It's a holdout from ye olde days when games expected you to start from the beginning each time you play and you have limited lives to get as far as you can. However, some stages have multiple exits, which cause you to skip around to different stages. Naturally, the more difficult-to-reach exits tend to lead to higher-level stages, although it's not a strict matter of skipping ahead. In fact, eventually you reach branching paths of stages, which occasionally converge together again, but ultimately any given run isn't going to hit all the stages. In fact, there are four different ending points to the game, and one of them can only be reached by an odd '30-minute rule' -- once a run has gone on for 30 minutes or more, any door might lead to one of the four ending stages. Also, there's nothing special about any of the endings -- you go through the final door and the credits roll, that's it.
Mercifully, there is a practice mode where you can replay any stage without worrying about your number of lives. You have to reach a given stage in the regular game first, though -- not beat it at least, but blaze a trail there through the stages leading to it one way or another. I'm not ashamed to say there are some stages I've only bothered to beat in practice mode, and a few I haven't even reached. The stunts required to get to some of the exit doors are ridiculously finicky -- I looked up YouTube videos to confirm how they're done and it's simply not worth the headache.
Bottom line? It's a fun and challenging game once you really get the hang of it, but if you're an obsessive completionist, you want to steer clear of getting hooked on this one. c.c
Umihara Kawase Shun:
Aaaand here's the second title of the series, which was originally released on Nintendo DS. Still no story to speak of, you're in this weird daydream world to catch legged fish and sling to hard-to-reach doors because why not.
The visuals this time an odd mix of 3D platforms and 2D sprites. The sprites frankly look like they were drawn in colored pencil and scanned in. It can feel a little disconcerting, but you get used to it much like everything else in this crazy series.
They added a few quality-of-life features this time around that are pretty nice. You have the option of reconfiguring the controls, including having buttons specifically for casting your line each of the four diagonal directions. Having grown used to just using the D-pad, I rarely used those, but it's good that they're available. The practice mode also shows a layout of which stages are connected to which others, which can help you plan out your next survival mode run to find new stages -- although it doesn't remind you which doors lead where or hint which stages have doors you haven't been through yet. Finally, they're more generous with lives in a sense: as you clear a certain number of stages, they'll give you the option to 'continue' after running out of lives, with more and more continues granted the more stages you've completed.
Other than those, it's pretty similar to the first game. I will say there are even more goals and stages that I decided not to bother with on this one. One of them, for example, requires you to sling yourself hard from a platform that sinks gradually from your weight, at just the right time and velocity to hit a slanted platform off-screen to your right, and jump from that platform without losing your momentum in order to get just barely close enough to latch onto another platform. Yeah, I'll pass, thanks. :P
Bottom line? Worthwhile for the stages that are reasonably winnable, but make sure you have a high tolerance for frustration for even that. Possibly a better starting point to the series than the first, but it could make the first one more difficult if you get used to the extra controls.