I love Splosion Man! (2)

Well, the competition event came and went on Splosion Man last weekend. I am not normally a person who tries speed runs, but I thought I would give this a go. I managed a time of 2:52:11 which put me just outside the top 100 when I got it, and 135 when the competition ended. I retried the level so many times, but could not beat that time. I don't think I did too badly; the par time for the level is 3:30:00, so I beat that by over 30 seconds.

The top time was something like 2:10, which is an amazing time.

The person who was 2nd overall with a time of 2:11 posted a video of their best run on youtube, and it was truly breathtaking to watch. I have total respect for this player!

I hadn't worked out how to avoid the spikes at the end like that; if I had, I would have been able to shave more off of my time, but there were still a lot of points where I just couldn't make it through quickly enough.

Overall it was a fun event. More games should feature this knd of worldwide competition event! :)

A few days later, I beat HARDCORE MODE, which I think of as being a great achievement.



Some levels did give me a lot of trouble, and I played them again and again to complete them... other levels which I dreaded after spending ages on them the first time round, I beat on my first or second go, surprising myself. The last boss took me about an hour to defeat the first time I played it, but only took me about 3 attempts on hardcore mode! I guess I levelled up as a player. :)

The only thing left for me in the game is to improve my scores and times (but I am already in the top 150 worldwide for overall game time), and to finish multiplayer and get all the cakes... but multiplayer isn't working out for me.

• There's too much lag. I have talked to other people who have much faster internet connections, and they still experience the same out-of-sync problems that I experienced.


• It seems that most other players I have found aren't very good and it's impossible to get them to cooperate on in game puzzles and sploding simultaneously.


• I was playing with several people, they kept jumping off of a ledge into a vat of acid... making the level incompletable unless everyone suicides as well, so after a large number of times, the dreaded "you can take the Way Of The Coward to skip this level" popped up. Someone immediately selected it and skipped the level, even though I was hosting the game. I quit out of it immediately but I now have that level skipped on my scores, and that annoys me. I have never ever chosen the way of the coward. It's not my way of playing. >:(

So, online multimplayer is not for me. :(

I still love this game though. I think it might well be "Game of the year" for me. :)

I love Splosion Man!

Over the last month or so, I've been playing a game I bought on Xbox Live Arcade called Splosion Man.

It's a simple, fast paced, colourful 2D platformer. The premise is simple, you are a little orange guy who was some kind of science experiment and wants to get to the exit of each level or defeat one of the game's three bosses. Splosion Man's natural state is on fire, and he can run left and right, and "splode" (explode). That's all he can do. Every face button on the joypad is mapped to "splode", and Splosion Man uses his explosions to jump, blow up scientists and furniture, to deflect bullets, set animals free, and throw switches.

There are naturally lots of obstacles, scientists throwing switches to make barriers, robots and guns attacking you, etc, as you try and make your way through each level. Also, Splosion Man can only "splode" three times before he needs to charge up again (either by standing on the ground or holding a wall for a while). So, the game can be quite tricky.

There is also a bonus item on each level - a huge cake - for people to hunt down and collect, if they like doing that sort of thing. I made it my mission to collect every single one on single-player mode before finishing the game!

The game to me is just pure fun. I really do love this game, to me it seems the perfect 2D platformer.

Things I like:

• Only one button! It's as though I'm back in the days of the arcade with a joystick and one button, or grasping an Atari 2600 joystick in my hands. It's so simple and even though the one button performs so many roles, I never have contextual use issues. All it does is "splode", and the objects in the world interpret that however they see fit.


• The controls are friendly. You tend to only need wide movements to move, platforms are laid out generously so that jumping isn't so difficult that you won't get things nailed before you give up out of frustration.


• Timed sections aren't really timed. Sometimes you'll have a level containing ever rising cold water - instant death for Splosion Man! So you need to run through these levels.... but I did notice that sometimes the water will seem to "wait for you" before getting higher, in certain parts. It's just friendly like that.


• The graphics are nice and bright, platforms and switches are nice and clear, there are never any foreground / background visual problems for me. It looks great. Splosion Man does cute little animations when he's moving or standing as well. He seems such a sweet little kid as well as a complete psycho blowing up scientists everywhere.


• The game makes me laugh. Splosion Man's cute little animations are funny, the way scientists blow up into pieces of cooked meat that look like they're from a delicatessen counter is funny, Splosion Man's erratic speech - muttering weird things about meat between levels is also kind of funny. The ending credits segment was hilarious!


• The sound is great. The soundtrack for the single player and multi player modes were written by two different composers but both suit the game well. There's also a funny song about eating doughnuts. The soundtrack is available for free download on the official website, which is a nice gesture. I like the jazzy tracks, they sound like they're from a 1960s spy film or something by Henry Mancini.


• There are loads of levels. 50 in single player mode spanning three whole worlds, then the same again in multi player mode. (NB: entirely different levels, 100 in total)


• Loads of Leaderboards. Each level has a best time leaderboard and a best score leaderboard. There are also the overall best score and best time leaderboards, so there's always reason to retry levels to try and better your scores, if you like that sort of competition.


• Level design is really tight. You usually know where to go, and the levels seem really well thought out.


• Hardcore Mode. When you finish the single player game, you unlock Hardcore Mode, whereby you can go through the game again, but this time there are no in-level checkpoints and enemies / lasers kill you in one shot. I like that, because it's not a case of "we made the game harder by adding more enemies", it's just a case of "the game was perfect as you played it, we're not going to change it - to prove your mastery, you have to go through playing a perfect game".

I'm still battling through Hardcore Mode on single player, I'm on level 2-6 as of this evening.

I've hardly made a dent in multiplayer mode really, I'm only on level 1-11; the game goes really weird if a player is suffering lag; the platforms appear in different places for each player and it seems really glitchy. Fortunately there's local multiplayer! ^_^



When I finished the game, as well as the end credits, it told me about a competition which the developers (Twisted Pixel) are setting - whoever gets the best time on level 3-8 between September the 6th to the 12th will get a trophy and a signed poster. :) I like the sound of that! I don't think I'll be anywhere near good enough to win though, I'm in the thousands on most of the leaderboards.