derek: the bosses have been made easier in a patch that i put out this morning, and the hud's been made a little bit less obtrusive, and that strange layering bug's been fixed too, but i agree with all of the criticisms.

kinnas: it's been asked a lot, so i'll look into adding a text skip feature. another suggestion i got was simply just to rewrite the text, trimming it down by a quarter but still retaining all the jokes, etc. both are things i'll consider. (^:

as for a pause feature, i more or less thought that the inventory was good enough, but i'll add in a separate pause feature as well.

thanks for the comments, there're a lot of really good suggestions here.

Got a little further. I'm really liking the plot and characters and stuff. And the cannon mechanic is great. I think the boss is kind of annoying, though, most of all because you hid spikes behind the opaque HUD, which is an awful thing to do. Seriously, you should fix that somehow, because it's really unfair. Also, you should somehow reduce the waiting time before fighting the boss each time. I find that kind of thing really annoying, especially since that battle took quite a few tries. He was pretty hard for a first boss, but I'm not going to complain except for the things I already said.

the latest patch addresses this by making the HUD a LITTLE less obtrusive and by making the first boss do less damage if you run into it. you can download it on the download page: http://www.insignificantstudios.com/preview.php.

thanks for a the comments guys, i'm taking all of these criticisms and making changes as i can!

i agree it's a little bit unclear what you're supposed to be doing after you rescue the mayor. At the same time, I do want the player to explore for a bit after that. all i'll say is that the preview isn't over until it's told to you that the preview is over.

i uploaded a new version where the second boss isn't so freaking difficult.

[windows 95]

i've just released my third preview of the underside. i think the game is notorious enough in the indie games scene, but for all two of you who don't know, the game is a metroidvania, like cave story.

there are two known bugs (the second boss sometimes gets stuck, and there's one point where ip can get stuck in a wall, but you can get out of that just by hitting jump a lot).

mostly, what i want is A) how long it took to complete the demo B) your thoughts on the difficulty. besides that, just general thoughts about the experience.

there are a few points where i think the enemy placement is kind of unfair (one in particular, a raidish on route 66, right next to the gold ring), and i think i need to play around with the HUD a lot more, but besides that, i'm just curious what you guys think of the new stuff (and the old stuff too?)

download link is here:
http://www.insignificantstudios.com/preview.php

edit: apparently the vista bugs aren't fixed?

edit 2: the game works under vista if it's run under windows 95 mode. whatever that means.

finished the project, check out a live demo video here if you want, wa wa we wo.

because i've got bad news for you, padre

are they by any chance english exams

Hey dude how many old ass Klik games do you have lying around that don't exist on the internets anymore?

i have destruction carnival, astrospoon, crop crusader, ultra car, naimstaith, and i might have future fantasy. too bad most of these games aren't very good, and there's always that strange sound bug that makes knp games go crazy and die.

nathan spencer chokes you within the first 5 minutes of the game. owned much?

on the real though, this game owns. the first two karoshi games were a "verah nace" - borat. the ones after those though...

eh...

"not so much" - borat

such a beautiful return to form, heh

i'm only voting nay instead of nay on condition because that inevitably means i will have to do 99% of the work on his stupid game

It's a pretty amazing concept. Pretty meta.

Anyway, I suggest that you move away a bit from the Guitar Hero influence. For one, your game is not about guitars, nor heroes. The interface (meant to imitate a guitar's neck) doesn't make much sense, given this. So, yeah, I do think you can do something different for the interface, that will make the interesting concepts in your game stand out so much more. Maybe take inspiration in the innards of an NES, or something of the sort.

well as i've said, i'm really doing this project for a class, and the reason that there's a guitar/bass/drum set up is because i'm using the metaphor of a band to describe how the NES hardware works. it actually works out pretty well, and it's explained in the longer 'about' section on the site.

The concept sounds great but if it might be hard to make players compete because most ways for the emulator player to influence the rhythm player could only be made for some of the roms.
I think it would be fun to make both parts go faster if the rhythm player did well.

that's kind of the point though. it really depends on whether the person on the emulator wants to play super aggressively (to make things harder for the band players and maybe easier for himself) or play super conservatively (to make things easier for the band players but maybe harder from themselves). it brings out a level of emergent gameplay which i think is really interesting. again, competition isn't really the main point of the project, but it's something i'm kind of looking into.