Most 2D platformers are oriented left-to-right, so the player predominantly starts in the left end of the level and progress is made towards the right (this is a cool observation but one I had made earlier)
It was one of my favorite platformer series when I was a kid. There's seven games in the original series: games 1-3 are straightforward side-view platformers, and the other four have a slanted view that gives the illusion of 3D
@Miniman This is where it gets interesting, they follow LTR pretty rigidly for games 1-3 but as they change the angle of view, they suddenly have about 50/50 LTR and RTL levels
It's a peculiar change, seeing as it was made by the same people. Seems like there must be a reason for it
but I have observed that often, as the technology available for creating video games changes, often the same people will do drastically different things in some way because they can
I have a hypothesis of my own that, due to how the slanted 2D view works, they found they could easily hide secret areas on right-side walls (left-side is harder because the entire "Keen-facing" surface of the wall is player-visible)
Secrets like that might've been too easy to figure out by accident if the levels were always LTR
Yeah, Commander Keen is a decent series of platformers for its time but ultimately I don't think they're of particular value to anyone who isn't nostalgic for them or interested in retro games in general
Keen 4 is my personal favorite and that one should be available for free, though? It was the shareware episode of the second (unfinished) trilogy
@Miniman Yep, lots of people had it because of that. Adult me hopes the sales of Keen 5 and 6 (which had a demo of its own) made up for the relatively big investment in making a full-fledged game as a shareware
it's about a vampire who has a grudge against all other vampires and proceeds to murder a swath through all of them all while giving semi shaksperian sounding monologues expositioning the world he is in to the player
I loved it but yes don't play it expecting cozy bunny stuff
XD
it's murder and platforming and puzzle solving
and also rather old now for sure
and it's also not even technically about the main character which I didn't even know when I was playing it as a kid
but I love it for all it is still XD
(basically it's set after the first game in the series, which is about the actual main character (also a vampire) and picks up after the cannon ending of that first game but now from the point of view of,..... well this completely different vampire)
I'll stop there because if I don't I will talk about this game until no one on the planet wants to read anymore XD
I kinda thought Raziel was the main character of Legacy of Kain
which, you know,... looking back was silly of me but I literally didn't know it was in the middle of a franchise that existed before it was made XD
but I know now that it literally picks up after the consequences of the first game's ending can be fully seen,... and I actually really enjoy that I know that now and didn't at the time
also between 1 and 2 the most egregious thing I can think of is that they changed the two main characters motivations
Raziel, instead of being a "vengeful monster/angel of purification?" bent on destroying vampires is "looking for the truth" and Kain, instead of being a "jelous god" is now the guy trying to save the world in an incredibly convoluted plot that requires him to have acted like he did in the first game,....... XD
I have no idea why they made those decisions but wtv
Well, the first Soul Reaver game was originally intended to be the only one. Had they enough time they probably wouldn't have changed the plot like they did
The original idea was to have Kain die there and Raziel succeed in purging all the vampires from the land. So... probably no more sequel.
Funny thing is that the Chronoplast visions in the first game still show events from the original script.
So they had to retcon it - part by introducing new events that would look like the old ones (the intended battle with Kain at the mountain retreat was somehow remade in a later game) and part by claiming that some other visions were only possibilities or straight made up visions.
I mean, I'm really not upset by it to a large degree
just more or less disapointed?
I really wish the first game had ended with one of the two of them dying
or that the second game was about setting up their actual final cofrontation as two people who could never be reconciled
OR actually like,.... coherently set up why they would work together,.... instead of just the incoherent sliding into being freinds because,... that's what the new plot needed
(@doppelgreener @BESW that last one comes from me looking up and seeing on my bulletin board a picture of the student who died three years ago this weekend....)
Yeah--at least after three years I've started to recognize that I'm going to get pensive this time of year, and know why. So I handle it a lot better this year than I did two ago =|
@doppelgreener Yeah. Whatever it says about my parenting, for a three-year period I spend as many evenings doing something with her (among other students) as I did my own kids.
I think that says positive things. Life isn't zero-sum, and being able to spend time around others enriched your life and yourself, and by extension everyone whose life you are in.
@nitsua60 I'm sorry, Nits. My sister died this month also and while I don't mark her day of passing in any way (I mark her birthday), it still affects me.