This game rocks. Have you thought about porting to iPhone / Android?

I've been playing this more.. damn its fun. And I'm getting more used to adjusting my height with a sliding thumb  . Is there a universal high score board? I dared to make an Open Feint to find out I had no friends and the leaderboard only had me on it

mochigames.com ?

http://www.mudii.co.uk/ ftw

Anyone know how to make MS Ergonomic 4000 keyboard capslock work as BACKSPACE using Colemak on a Macbook Pro.. because the left shift didn't work, then I installed the drivers and the capslock stopped working, and Double Command and PC Keyboard Hack ain't changin it properly (but on the non-usb (built-in) keyboard everything's A-OK).

Got the update - like the new mode! Also realized I could slide my thumb up and down the height changer instead of tapping which helped a lot .

Suggestion feedback:
A control adjustment to consider: being able to hold down on the screen (above the ground, for those using the touch-controls) and have the duration of your holding determine the height of your jump (let go to fall), Mario style. Just a thought.

The timer-combo means sometimes if you go really high up and aim for an enemy at the bottom, you'll run out of time before you can reach them. Have you played with making the combo per-bounce (touch the ground and it ends) or per-bounce + a guaranteed time (you have
XX ticks after hitting something that your combo will not end even if you touch the ground, for those using short bounces).

Kudos 

The original Metroid was damn non-linear.. I don't know what you mean by make it "less linear". There was no direction, no map, doors you could open in any order, fucking secret passageways you had to bomb / shoot walls to find, beat the 2 bosses in either order, get powerups in different orders, not to mention the door/jump glitch that helped you get around too
Are you saying you want to make it more "puzzle" like ala Metroid Prime (switches, levers kind of puzzle?) That would be cool.

I played this
http://www.ninjakiwi.com/Games/Puzzle/Play/Guesstimation.html
today and it reminded me of your game.

I thought the bullets that slowed down while changing shape then sped up were cool. Would prefer enemy bullet speeds to be significantly faster, good prototype though. Looking forward to what you make of it!

I got Nice in 3 tries.. did I win?

Cool game! the blue part after the first ramp is kind of hard to see. The monster seems to warp/get reset at certain checkpoints, so you can save ammo. Haven't beaten it.. how much longer after the second ramp? Restarting is kind of irritating. Great aesthetics!

IMO this game is better than passage because I was laughing..
Reminded me of :

(meaning of life by don hertzfeldt)

Hey, I checked out youtube videos after reading your review/essay. Game looks trippy! Also read RPS review of Pathologic, which sounds really awesome. What are your computer specs BTW?

To my knowledge nobody's ever done a game where you play the endless minions who are pitted against the all-powerful hero, although playing the zombies in Left 4 Dead could be close to that - I haven't played it. But imagine, let's take Doom as an example, there's an AI playing the DOOMguy hero, and you are put into the body of the nearest enemy and have to whittle down his health or whatever as best you can. If you die, not too much of a problem as there are tons more enemies in the level for you to take over. It could also work like an RTS.

I also want to see more games about scale - some games are good with that (Shadow of the Colossus, for example) and the best I've seen are Sins of a Solar Empire and Katamari Damacy, which actually have multiple powers of ten in their game scale. How about using this concept in RTS in terms of teams rather than the overall game - one player plays entities the size of ants, another plays the size of small animals like rats, another team could be human-sized. Obviously you'd have different numbers of units depending on the team to compensate for scale, and all the balancing would be pretty interesting. Like the human-sized team could have 3 big units, whereas the ant-sized team could have 10,000 units.

Or how about an RTS team with no units at all, something like the Creep from Starcraft's Zerg.

I've heard about a pencil-paper game where one player controls a giant Tank and player 2 controls buncha small infantry deciding where to shoot and move and such.

The real issue is do you default select on a gender, and which one goes on the left/right or top/bottom in the menu!? Choose wrong, and you're definitely biased!

Not sure if you're serious, but even if you aren't, it's a decent point.
In the Katamari games (or, Beautiful Katamari at least, but I think it might have been in We ♥ Katamari as well...) when given a choice between two options, the cursor always starts in between both, so that hitting confirm doesn't do anything until you've actually selected a choice.  Of course, in this case it was simply to prevent accidentally picking a choice you didn't mean to, but it could work to prevent a bias, as well.
And of course you could randomize the order of the choices as well, but that won't really have so much of an effect, and is actually probably not a very good idea (since if the choice only occurs once the randomization will be unnoticeable, and if it occurs multiple times, then it will just be confusing.)  Though, as long as you don't have any option selected by default, I'm not sure it matters which one is located where (since it doesn't really take any different amount of effort to hit up as compared to down, or left as compared to right...)

Right, but "Up" over "Down" might be "better". (not serious, just playing politically-correct devil's advocate).
Having the cursor start between options sounds like a good rule-of-thumb for making menus easy to use.

Level 5 was easy (3 tries).. Level 4 was 20ish.. Level 7..  . Cool game! Figuring out LV 7. EDIT: Oh, I *can* split again, just not immediately.. is there an indicator for when?

Thanks. I need to go through the legal and bank setup stuff.
My Developer account is "RageCreations" inspired from http://grassrootsgamemaster.blogspot.com/2008/02/way-forward-for-lottery-ticket.html

"The Courage To Create, gave a word to the central driving force of an artist's creativity: rage."

But does that sound scary to the average iPhone user  ?

Horizontal Shooter Redux & Microbes: 

What was the age-old DOS dogfighting game? Good luck finding someone, project sounds cool!

Pokemon has been mentioned previously - I think Ruby and Sapphire, more than the most recent games, really nailed the "sense of place" aspect of things. This especially tied into the "home" thing mentioned earlier; unlike the recent games, you could set up your personal secret base at specific land features in the overworld, and when you connected your game to your friends' their bases would be added to your world in the same place that they had set them up. There were enough unique features to make the choice of base location feel meaningful - mine was set up in a cave only reachable by surfing across a lake.

Frequently when I was in a contemplative mood I would just stand outside the entrance, watching the reflections of the clouds drift across the lake, listening to the background music and the cries of the wild pokemon in the area. That really exemplifies what a memorable landscape in a game means to me - being special enough that I want to spend time just being there. The Metroid Prime games have often made me regret that there's no "sit and relax" button in the control scheme.

That actually brings me to a bit of a tangent - how do "bottomless" (i.e., fall off and respawn with damage) falls affect your sense of immersion in a landscape, all other things being equal? As I recall, the first Metroid Prime game lacked such features, while the later ones had them.

   for Pokemon world-gameplay integration.
I kind of *liked* the bottomless pit you die in aspect of the landscape.. reminded me it was a harsh alien world, not a videogame!

I enjoyed the Fallout (post-nuclear-war) series, where in the random encounters you could run into bands of travellers/traders/beasts and see corpses and skeletons lying around. All buildings had bathrooms and beds, and many of their citizens carried soda or other kinds of food.

Did no one mention Pikmin this thread?