*Litters this post with love*
So! So! (God why do I say so so much there are other transitional words not that I even need to use one to start an entry I am such a good writer. Anyway!)
VVVVVV. It is a game. An indie game. An indie platformer. The pure distilled essence of platforming. Which is funny, because your character can't even jump! Instead, you reverse gravity with the push of a button. It is wonderful.
Seriously guys I am so in love with this game you do not even know. Now, I am not what you would call a gamer, really. I enjoy video games, sure, but my genres of choice are RPG, puzzle, and classic adventure(-esque-at-the-very-least). Most of my favorite games are 10 years old or older and have very forgiving requirements in regards to my hand-eye coordination and reaction time when they have any requirements for them at all. I am, quite frankly, cripplingly bad at anything that does require me to push buttons with anything resembling speed or frequency. I got maybe three worlds into Kingdom Hearts. Never finished so much as the puppy quest in Cave Story. Can't play Halo worth shit. Etc., etc., et freakin' cetera.
The point is, platformers are, like all games I'm bad at, not really my kind of game. The thing about being bad at a game is that games tend to punish the player for failure. Lost health, lost lives, lost points, Cave Story's lost weapon experience that was a huge part of why I never finished it, or even just having to start a section over from the beginning. When you fail as often as I do, the rewards for success rather quickly stop making up for the punishments of failure, especially when the reward is just something like a save point for the next bit of platforming.
VVVVVV has basically eliminated the punishments for failure. Almost every single bit of platforming is preceded by a checkpoint. You can hardly swing a theoretical dead cat in the game without hitting one. There are also infinite lives. Rarely does a death set you back more than 5 or 10 seconds.
Which is not to say that VVVVVV is easy. Not even close. Easy and VVVVVV live on different planets and are No Longer Speaking to Each Other. VVVVVV is hard. Incredibly hard. You will die. You will die a lot.
There is no probably in those sentences, because there is no probably about it. I mean, forget beating the game with no deaths at all, I've yet to see anyone claim to have beaten it with deaths in anything less than the triple digits. (I myself broke 2,000 deaths in my playthrough and have already gotten another 1,500-so messing around trying to get all the trinkets in the post-game, but as mentioned bad at this kind of thing.)
Oh, no, the frequent checkpoints and lack of lives to lose do not make this an easy game. But they make it a manageable and fun one. Nothing in this game has felt impossible for me. Insanely hard at a couple points, yes, but not impossible. It easily could become impossible with only a handful fewer checkpoints, but the way it is right now, you have basically infinite tries to get any one challenge perfect once. And god is nailing something perfect just once damn satisfying.
The game also has a lot of positivity to balance it out. Captain Viridian's default expression is :D, the rooms are all brightly colored (without being eye-searingly bright) and individually named, and the room names are just. Wonderful. I mean, it's just plain hard to get mad at a game when the pair of rooms you're having trouble with are named "I'm Sorry" and "Please Forgive Me". Also the music. VVVVVV has a soundtrack of about a dozen chiptunes that are all very upbeat and catchy and generally really good.
Also, I'd like to take a second and point out that this is a game in which you can't jump that has a total Insurmountable Waist-High Fence count of one. And that one obstacle is completely optional. Basically, this game has a very low Bullshit Quotient. Which is good, because I have a very low tolerance for bullshit in my games. VVVVVV is, at heart, a pretty simple game. You have a total of four buttons to keep track of. Left arrow, right arrow, enter for the pause menu, and the action button, which can be up arrow, down arrow, v, z, or the space bar depending on your preference and you can switch between them freely. (My personal preference is for the space bar, but I've used up/down a few times.) It's built entirely around the gravity-switching mechanic, and it squeezes every bit of fun out of it and then refines it into 100% pure platforming goodness.
Also Terry Cavanagh, the guy who made it, quit his job a couple of years ago to make games full time and is kind of in desperate need of cash dollars so really 15 bucks is not too much for this game.
It's not a perfect game, of course. There's a brief section of leading one of your crew members around that I found to be more frustrating than most of the rest of the game, and while the main plot of having to rescue your scattered crew members is easy to follow, I had some problems following the details of the meta-plot. There's something about unstable dimensions and stuff, but all the details are scattered, mostly in the form of brief snippets on monitors throughout the game, and said snippets use a lot of science that is kind of hard to pay attention to when one's mind is filled to the brim with platforming. But really, that's pretty much it. Anything else I could say as a negative really only just comes down to "OH MY GOD THIS PART WAS SO HARD BUT I GOT IT, I MANAGED TO BEAT IT EVENTUALLY." Also I guess it's kind of short and people view that as a negative? I spent 5 hours on it (beating it, that is. Up to 7 and a half or so now), which is actually I think the longest time I've seen, but I got a damned lot of entertainment out of those 5 hours, so I certainly think it's worth 3 bucks for each of those hours. There's also features like time trials and such that I have yet to bother with.
tl;dr bulleted list:
-Hella fun.
-Very hard in a way that is challenging instead of a way that is punishing.
-Pure platforming goodness with a minimal amount of bullshit.
-Awesome chiptune soundtrack.
-Probably the first 2D platformer I've ever beaten.
-Has a free demo you should at least try!
-Only costs $15 dollars for the full game
At the very least, I think everyone should give the demo a try. Also I'd like to point out that the game is longer than the demo implies. There's more than 5 levels in the game, not even counting the non-level bits to explore. (Also the levels in the demo are fairly short, especially the space station level.)
Go go go go go.
VVVVVV. It is a game. An indie game. An indie platformer. The pure distilled essence of platforming. Which is funny, because your character can't even jump! Instead, you reverse gravity with the push of a button. It is wonderful.
Seriously guys I am so in love with this game you do not even know. Now, I am not what you would call a gamer, really. I enjoy video games, sure, but my genres of choice are RPG, puzzle, and classic adventure(-esque-at-the-very-least). Most of my favorite games are 10 years old or older and have very forgiving requirements in regards to my hand-eye coordination and reaction time when they have any requirements for them at all. I am, quite frankly, cripplingly bad at anything that does require me to push buttons with anything resembling speed or frequency. I got maybe three worlds into Kingdom Hearts. Never finished so much as the puppy quest in Cave Story. Can't play Halo worth shit. Etc., etc., et freakin' cetera.
The point is, platformers are, like all games I'm bad at, not really my kind of game. The thing about being bad at a game is that games tend to punish the player for failure. Lost health, lost lives, lost points, Cave Story's lost weapon experience that was a huge part of why I never finished it, or even just having to start a section over from the beginning. When you fail as often as I do, the rewards for success rather quickly stop making up for the punishments of failure, especially when the reward is just something like a save point for the next bit of platforming.
VVVVVV has basically eliminated the punishments for failure. Almost every single bit of platforming is preceded by a checkpoint. You can hardly swing a theoretical dead cat in the game without hitting one. There are also infinite lives. Rarely does a death set you back more than 5 or 10 seconds.
Which is not to say that VVVVVV is easy. Not even close. Easy and VVVVVV live on different planets and are No Longer Speaking to Each Other. VVVVVV is hard. Incredibly hard. You will die. You will die a lot.
There is no probably in those sentences, because there is no probably about it. I mean, forget beating the game with no deaths at all, I've yet to see anyone claim to have beaten it with deaths in anything less than the triple digits. (I myself broke 2,000 deaths in my playthrough and have already gotten another 1,500-so messing around trying to get all the trinkets in the post-game, but as mentioned bad at this kind of thing.)
Oh, no, the frequent checkpoints and lack of lives to lose do not make this an easy game. But they make it a manageable and fun one. Nothing in this game has felt impossible for me. Insanely hard at a couple points, yes, but not impossible. It easily could become impossible with only a handful fewer checkpoints, but the way it is right now, you have basically infinite tries to get any one challenge perfect once. And god is nailing something perfect just once damn satisfying.
The game also has a lot of positivity to balance it out. Captain Viridian's default expression is :D, the rooms are all brightly colored (without being eye-searingly bright) and individually named, and the room names are just. Wonderful. I mean, it's just plain hard to get mad at a game when the pair of rooms you're having trouble with are named "I'm Sorry" and "Please Forgive Me". Also the music. VVVVVV has a soundtrack of about a dozen chiptunes that are all very upbeat and catchy and generally really good.
Also, I'd like to take a second and point out that this is a game in which you can't jump that has a total Insurmountable Waist-High Fence count of one. And that one obstacle is completely optional. Basically, this game has a very low Bullshit Quotient. Which is good, because I have a very low tolerance for bullshit in my games. VVVVVV is, at heart, a pretty simple game. You have a total of four buttons to keep track of. Left arrow, right arrow, enter for the pause menu, and the action button, which can be up arrow, down arrow, v, z, or the space bar depending on your preference and you can switch between them freely. (My personal preference is for the space bar, but I've used up/down a few times.) It's built entirely around the gravity-switching mechanic, and it squeezes every bit of fun out of it and then refines it into 100% pure platforming goodness.
Also Terry Cavanagh, the guy who made it, quit his job a couple of years ago to make games full time and is kind of in desperate need of cash dollars so really 15 bucks is not too much for this game.
It's not a perfect game, of course. There's a brief section of leading one of your crew members around that I found to be more frustrating than most of the rest of the game, and while the main plot of having to rescue your scattered crew members is easy to follow, I had some problems following the details of the meta-plot. There's something about unstable dimensions and stuff, but all the details are scattered, mostly in the form of brief snippets on monitors throughout the game, and said snippets use a lot of science that is kind of hard to pay attention to when one's mind is filled to the brim with platforming. But really, that's pretty much it. Anything else I could say as a negative really only just comes down to "OH MY GOD THIS PART WAS SO HARD BUT I GOT IT, I MANAGED TO BEAT IT EVENTUALLY." Also I guess it's kind of short and people view that as a negative? I spent 5 hours on it (beating it, that is. Up to 7 and a half or so now), which is actually I think the longest time I've seen, but I got a damned lot of entertainment out of those 5 hours, so I certainly think it's worth 3 bucks for each of those hours. There's also features like time trials and such that I have yet to bother with.
tl;dr bulleted list:
-Hella fun.
-Very hard in a way that is challenging instead of a way that is punishing.
-Pure platforming goodness with a minimal amount of bullshit.
-Awesome chiptune soundtrack.
-Probably the first 2D platformer I've ever beaten.
-Has a free demo you should at least try!
-Only costs $15 dollars for the full game
At the very least, I think everyone should give the demo a try. Also I'd like to point out that the game is longer than the demo implies. There's more than 5 levels in the game, not even counting the non-level bits to explore. (Also the levels in the demo are fairly short, especially the space station level.)
Go go go go go.