PEGBRJE: The Forgotten Side Series of Technical Fun Times

You miss me? Neither did I.

This entry got buried in work, I’m not going to lie. There’s barely any coherency or structure to when I added any game series to this list, so please go easy on me.

‘General’

An issue I’ve run into time and time again, but still can’t find out why; there will be many games in which I will attempt to use my controller only for it to drift off into space. For context, I use a PS4 controller with DS4Windows when native support doesn’t exist. Many times I’ve attempted to use my controller with and without DS4Windows and the camera floats off into the distance. The problem is in it’s inconsistency; I can’t seem to figure out which titles dislike my controller and why, such as when Last Word wouldn’t let me use my controller for the first bit of playthrough. I will get to the bottom of this, I refuse to have joycon drift on anything but my Switch.

This covers a bunch of different games that I really don’t wish to list out because I never thought it would be a problem when I first encountered it back in page 2/3. So just, be prepared non-Microsoft controller users.

Cats are Liquid — A Light in the Shadows

Cute game, but there’s one major catveat (I couldn’t resist); the ability to climb up walls is not restrictive to just walls. This sounds weird, but essentially thanks to the cat’s ability to latch onto walls and climb them, I was able to jump off of any surface. That angled wall that could be grabbed and climbed? Now I could just jump up it quickly instead of waiting. That sequence of rotating squares that should pose a challenge in patience? Yeah brute forced that with speed and a lot of powerful ‘boings’. Even the ceiling wasn’t safe. This made a lot of the game unintentionally trivial, as I ended up utilizing speed to just brute force my way through puzzles and levels. When the cat can become air, I only ever utilized it as a very last resort, like all of the walls being spiked, as it was just so much slower than what I had become used to.

Now this sounds petty and pedantic, but there’s a reason; I’m not a ‘speed’ player of platformers. They make me anxious, and I usually have to try a level numerous times to get a quicker route completed. The fact that I was able to grab hold of a quick method so rapidly sort of trivialized almost every challenging zone. This could be completely intentional, a platformer made for those of us that get too nervous and all. It didn’t feel like it was trying to be though, so I’m slotting this under technical issues hopefully sorted out in the sequel.

Tiny Dangerous Dungeon

Bizarre interaction in which pressing the pause button on controller (my case, RT) lead to half of the menu UI disappearing. Every attempt at pausing or bringing it back were met with the sound effects from what those buttons would do in game, such as the jump sound and the knife throw sound.

DATA LOSS

The expanding ping system is, from what I could gather, weirdly consistent in its recognition when it comes to expansion and detection of the security robot. There were numerous times that I would get dinged for 2 seconds on a circle that was basically faded, but that didn’t matter — I would lose 2 seconds regardless. It lead to a lot of weird scenarios where I would expect the security camera to dock me two seconds, only for it to not recognize the circle I thought was at the same opacity. Just weirdly inconsistent and caused a lot of hesitance in a game that is timed.

DERE EVIL .EXE

Input controls of arrow keys showed my character running, but movement did not occur. Mashing the arrow keys lead to inconsistent movement that didn’t make sense. After unplugging my controller and restarting the game, it appears to now work as intended — which is to say, super slidey and really hard to predict and control. Can’t win them all.

HellStar Squadron

This game could not be installed with the Itch.io client for some reason. Works fine installing from just the website though.

Forgiveness: Escape Room

This game needs an editor, because there are capitalizations and spelling mistakes everywhere in the subtitles. Doesn’t detract from the experience too much, but is still really weird.

LazerGrrl

Another title that seemingly hates the itch.io launcher, for attempting to install it fails.

BOTOLO

Controls for up/down were backwards which threw me off hard. I kept losing to the easy AI. I’m sad now.

Aight that’s enough for now.