I've been sneaking about an hour on it each night. I do like it mostly, it's very good but there are some crazy design decisions. Obviously not being able to tone down Neon is the major one for me - I've resorted to the "pause the music" trick but it's still a bit too wild. I'm just hoping that he doesn't use it for ALL his games from now on but I get the feeling he will. I've never been one for his visualiser stuff
I haven't played for a few days now. I had been slowly replaying the levels over and over again to squeeze as many points out of them as possible, slowly moving up the leaderboards. Then the powerup/powerzone bug was discovered meaning the leaderboards were effectively pointless so I lost a bit of incentive. I'll be back on when that's patched. Until then I might just go on and work my way through the levels ignoring scores. Just a bit gutted that all the hours I've put into bumping up my level restart scores is going to be wiped out.
As for the visualiser stuff I'm in two minds. I've never been interested in the stand alone visualiser apps but now that I can "see through it" in SG, I think Neon works really well. It's still not perfect mind and I can see why for a lot of people it makes the game totally unplayable (as they keep telling me in quite colourful language at every opportunity
).
My concern (voiced on YakYak but completely misinterpreted) was that a lot of people seemed to be advocated remaking an old game and just slapping it on a Neon background without any consideration for whether that would actually make for a better game or not. Games designed around Neon will work but they must be games designed with that in mind . I'm sure Jeff understands that, I'm just not sure everyone else fully appreciates it.
Putting in an option to tone down the Neon stuff is a tricky one. Based on a lot of the feedback it would certainly make sense to include the option if only to make it more accessible for people and help boost sales. If however part of the games inherent difficulty is due to the confusing background then how can you allow them to turn it off without compromising gameplay and highscore tables?
Anyway rant over. Once I "got it" the other night, it did become immeasurably more playable. I still occasionally die due to things I didn't/couldn't see but not as frequently. I just wish the Neon stuff had been toned down on the earlier levels so that I could have concentrated on learning the gameplay mechanics without the "random death" frustration. It would have made the whole experience a hell of a lot more enjoyable.
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