Despite the smooth movement throwing off the low res aesthetic, I still had a lot of fun playing. It reminded me of a battle network game.
Doctor_Succubus
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I love the art for this game, however, even at 2x resolution, it's quite hard to see. I would consider a minimum of 4x.
The music, while lovely, sounds less like the sawtoothy blips of a nokia and more like a midi instrument.
I really wanted to beat this game, but I couldn't seem to progress past the area after the first boss. The controls have a low latency, making it tedious to navigate at times.
I love this. It feels like an adorable love letter to Super Metroid; the broken lab containers, crawling spikey enemies, and you even nailed the isolated rainy atmosphere of the surface of zebes! My overlying problems with the game are with the controls. The high jump is a bit awkward to use, compared to the rest of your smooth movements. Needing momentum to move with the high jump properly makes platforming difficult and tedious. Also, you forgot about the select button! Using metroid two which was on the gameboy as an example, you could swap between missiles and your normal gun by pressing select. (On keyboards, select is usually mapped to the shift key). Being able to swap weapons like this would make gameplay even more crisp.
As a shameless picross addict, I really love this game. The idea of a nonogram with a character moving through it is super unique, and the cowboy theme is super cute. Honestly, the picross part alone is enough to make this super fun to play, so my only gripes come with the surrounding presentation. I feel the color palette doesn't quite match up to the theme of the game.
There's so much story and soul packed into this adorable game! It's super quirky and I love it! I only have a few small problems, firstly, in the quicker sections of the song, the arrows overlapped each other, which obstructed the direction they were pointing in. Secondly, a huge problem with this game, and the one other rhythm game of this jam, is that you try and make an adorable rhythm game with lot's of fun and story in the background, then ruin it completely by having a beat bar on the side of it all. I feel for rhythm games like these, you go all beat bar or no beat bar at all. A perfect example of a super fun rhythm game that doesn't make use of a bar is the rhythm heaven series. I really recommend you check it out, as it's not only fun but quite intuitive in how it takes simple inputs and musical/visual cues and turns them into a full functioning rhythm game.
I don't feel that a lack of diagonal movement takes away from gameplay. A lot of older games, like Zelda, don't allow for diagonal movement. This is not only done to save on animations, but also because of the math behind diagonal moves. For example, if your character can move in any straight line of 4 directions at 1 pixel per frame, then the diagonal movement speed will not be 1 pixel per frame. Instead it will actually be a vector splitting the hypotenuse of the linear movement planes. This diagonal movement speed will instead be 1.41 pixels per frame.
I love the smooth animations, and this palette really fits the tropical theme. My biggest gripes are a small collection of elements that make the platforming experience quite tedious and ultimately lead me to some hilarious deaths. For example, the falling platforms that look exactly like normal platforms in the first stage, the 10 second wait for the moving platform in the second stage, (I hopped in to the water because the lack of a clear forward path lead me to believe I could swim), and of course the A(s) and B(a) buttons being swapped. (In a classic Nintendo manner, A is reserved for jumping, and B for attacking).
A cute little game, however, it doesn't quite feel like a gameboy game. This is due to having the ability to scale the entire course to the screen, as well as the image rotation on the disc. If you're looking for great examples of golf on a gameboy setting... Then I'd recommenced looking into the game 'Golf' on the Gameboy XD
A fun idea, however, a sidescrolling tower defense game will have some problems that a top view one wont. For example, having to leave my incompetent troops on the front line while I go all the way back to the shop for backup. Instead, I'd suggest having the ability to call for help anywhere on the map, but the kicker is that your aid will still spawn at the camp, leaving you to fend for yourself until they slowly hustle to your location.
It was a lot of fun playing around with the different mechanics of robo's forms (treads was definitely my favorite!) My biggest problem was with the control scheme; my fingers kept getting mixed up! With a game boy in mind, I feel quick actions like jump and shoot should always be close to each other, like mapping them to (a)Z and (b)X respectively. Then, the more technical actions of form changing and weapon swapping could be mapped to (start) Enter and (select)Shift. Also, getting shot at by objects that are not in your current view is always frustrating.
I always love games that require fine maneuvering! The graphics are crisp yet gritty and together with the espionage elements, the game gives me some lovely Ghost Babel vibes. The screen transition is also quite unique, however, I found myself waiting for it to pass a whole lot, considering how many times I died before finally finishing.