And so, we begin our journey, into
Text Scrolling Simulator 2018.
I mean Ordeal Pillar.
Dialogue, dialogue, and more dialogue. Inspecting a pointless object can give you paragraphs of it. Whenever you actually get to play the mod, its ludicrously hard, and whenever you die, guess what. You have to read the dialogue again. Yeah, you put in skipflags to have it read faster, but its still a waste of time. Then there's the fireball se- oh I mean the "Warm Handgun" section where you light torches. Great concept, terrible execution. When you light a torch, it displays this beautiful cutscene using <CMPs that upon watching it for the first time is pure eye candy. Then you have to watch the first torch go out. Then the second one. The cutscene is incredibly slow and I'm just sitting here wondering when I can actually play. This happens for every torch you light. The sad part is that there's a FAO and (presumably. correct me if i'm wrong) a TRA right before/after them, so why not just do a FAO and FAI if you've already seen the cutscene. It doesn't help that the fourth torch you need to light is in a tricky position behind a bunch of instant death spikes. Seriously what am I supposed to do? At this point it looks like there aren't going to be any new or fun mechanics, and the game punishes you for killing enemies. If I were to quit right here I would say this mod was terrible, but thankfully I won't because I have seen your updates and it does look like you've spent a lot of careful time and effort on this mod, which is something not a lot of people do. I'm just disappointed that you spent more time on flashy CMPs than doing important things like making the mod more enjoyable. Speaking of important things, artwork is very important. The artwork in this mod is incredibly bland. The minute you open the mod, you get a title screen that looks like it was made in microsoft paint. The main character looks like he has cataracts, and the first cloudy background you see is 100% stagnant. Making it move wouldn't even be that hard either, just remove the sun, change the background scroll type to 5, and ask someone to make a 10 second asm hack to make the background scroll slower. Now that I've got that out of my system, let's go back to the "Warm Handgun" trial. Once you figure out how to do the fourth torch, you'll find the last two are incredibly easy, although they're surrounded by death spikes (you sure do love your death spikes, huh). So you go on, and your handgun, like the machine gu- I mean- crud I forgot the name... And your handgun, like the machine gun but different, also disappears into a burst of light. You get another life capsule, and- the text after it uses TURS as if I had a skipflag so I missed the oh so important lore. Great. I also nearly forgot to save because I didn't see the bed, because it blended in with the wall so well. For the love of cod just use save points. Waiting for the screen to fade in and out is a pain. You have to do a lot of waiting in this game. Seasons in the time it took to make this mod and all its fancy CMPs you could have just written a book.
The third trial involves you running away from more enemies you can't kill. I'm beginning to notice a pattern. This section is incredibly painful because it's nearly impossible to do it in one try, or even two. Firstly, the blocks that you fall through are a mix of the background color and the foreground, so as I'm running for my life its a bit difficult to notice. Then the section where you have to jump on the press to get over the bouncy wall is also hard because you don't realize what you're supposed to do until it's too late. Also, if you accidentally run into the wall, it pushes you right under the press. Now that I know where most everything, I noticed you reused the same presses, which is actually an incredibly cool concept, but I don't think it makes up for everything else. At the part where you're about to get crushed between two pillars, I had no idea you were supposed to shoot the blocks beneath you, even though they look different. This is because I didn't have anywhere near enough time to look at my surroundings deeply and think of what to do. Yeah, the trial is called speed, but no one is that quick thinking. You can make a lazy excuse like "it's about going through it multiple times to know what to do so you do it better", but it is implied our protagonist only has one life, so this excuse would be just that, an excuse. Then you go on and name the fourth trial "reflexes". What am I in for now? Oh you just jump fast when you hear the roaring sound. Maybe you got the names mixed up?
Now that I've gone through the save room for a fifth, err, fourth time, I realize the object placement in the room is really throwing me off. I know it's a minor complaint, but the chest being in the middle makes me want to sleep in the bed first, but then I'd have to get the item every time I died. When you do get the item first, you usually forget to save at the bed and have to redo the previous trials. Now, once you get into trial 5, that's when the mod actually becomes fun. The fight with the angel is by far the best part of the mod I've experience at this point. It was fun, and I could actually do something. The sad part is that it was literally just the doctor fight with an annoying change (you had to shoot the crystal instead of the doctor, which is bad because it's always behind him). I'm also not entirely sure why the angel statue goes for the second power core even though it wants you to kill it? It just doesn't make much sense to me. Afterwards, you get treated to the top, where you can get a gift or not get one. The obvious choice was to not get one, because it's a cliche and is used in almost everything, so I went with that. Apparently there's more of the tower, and your dad's in there. So, let's just hope section 2 is better than the first part. I also don't really understand why the angels all talk with heavy spacing between their words. It seems kinda pointless and is just a waste of time in my opinion. I've also noticed that the trend of everything having at least two NODs of dialogue hasn't stopped.
The sixth tria- I mean the first ordeal (?) has you killing the stronger enemies and sparing the weaker ones. The problem is that the weak ones die in one hit, so this trial is incredibly time consuming. It's not fun, killing the same enemies over and over. I got to the very last room too, only to accidentally hit a small enemy when I was killing the larger one. It doesn't exactly help that if you die twice you have to watch a stupid cutscene, then watch the first cutscene again. Resetting the game every time you die is faster. This entire mod is just time consuming. Anyway, if the smaller enemies are just going to die anyway, what's the point of not shooting them? This section gave me a ton of trouble, especially the section with the birds, as I kept accidentally letting go up the up key and shooting a smaller enemy to my left. It doesn't really help that your weapon's range is so far, and the fact that half the enemies in this area jump right over your shots.
The second ordeal has you do the same thing as in the second trial, but it starts off in such a way that I didn't know I was supposed to shoot the torches with my normal polar sta- handgun. After figuring it out, the second part of the trial is even harder because of the torch on the top right. This one is in a very tricky spot and requires a lot of experimentation with the fireba- warm handgun. It doesn't really help that if you die you have to watch a cutscene, then go through to process of turning you handgun into the warm one again. I actually couldn't figure out how to get past this part, so I used cave editor to move the torch into a more reachable spot, and while I was doing it I noticed a ton of other terribly placed torches and had to fix those as well. What a mod. Seriously, why are they like this? They're incredibly hard to reach, and you have to be incredibly lucky to do so. Opening the game up again and reliving the dialogue gave me another question. Why is the character talking so calmly as the walls are practically closing in on him? I can just imagine him sitting there, making a drawn out speech about whether he wants to turn his handgun into the warm handgun or not, as the darkening walls just slowly envelop him. The dialogue is far too long and drawn out. This guy doesn't even seem concerned about the walls of darkness about to crush him. Imagine if you just removed the <KEY before the part where he modifies his gun. You'd die before you even change the guns out.
So I managed to get past the second ordeal, and onto the third, and my cod it's horrible. You have to run through a hallway of bouncy blocks that throw you everywhere, so without perfect precision, you get smashed. Then you have to jump onto one tile wide platforms made up of said bouncy tiles while over a sea of death spikes. What a fun and interesting challenge. Guess what, after you make it through, you have to do it backwards. Why? Just why? I want to like this mod, I really do, but please... Pixel perfect jumps and death spikes do not mix, as you have (probably. if my memory servers correctly) said yourself when talking about my mod #4. By sheer luck, I somehow managed to complete this ordeal after 30 minutes of pure agony.
Due to the TUR that you put in instead of normal text for some reason (even though I didn't die yet?), I accidentally skipped the name of the fourth ordeal. So it's the same as the fourth trial, which goes along with the pattern, but this time you have jump in certain directions. What really caught me off guard was that it said to only react to the fourth sound, so I ignored the first one entirely, and died. Great. I'm supposed to react to the fourth one after the first one. That's not complicated at all. And even after you get through it, you have to make a near pixel perfect jump up to the next section of the ordeal. What fun. It also barely gives you any time to react, which is especially hard during the segments where you have to count the number of sounds. I actually had to mod through this one too.
You also misused the word "affect" in the part where the angel is talking about how Geovanni cut the stones. Also nice pun, instead of Giovanni it's Geovanni hahahahaha. Anyway it's kind of hard to not miss grammar errors when the angels talk so slow. Also the angel drones on and on for way too long. Honestly if you were to remove all the pointless dialogue I could beat this mod in under 30 minutes.
Anyway, I made my way to the fifth ordeal, and found myself in a rather fun boss battle, only to lose control of the block critter and fall into the spike. Also, you don't really need to say "Suddenly, the mysterious voice returns." It's kinda implied. Anyway, I really liked this section (except for the fact that the critters can fall off the stage), until I had to go through the same boss battle four times. Yeah, it's a neat concept that was done entirely with TSC, but you really couldn't think of something new? Some invincible beetles (at least that's what I think they are) in front of a big beetle isn't exactly that fun four times in a row. You can just stand on the smaller beetles and spam bullets onto the big one. I also adore how half of the blocks on this tower are floating even though it is implied he constructed the tower by hand.
After you reach Geovanni, you have to go through some more agonizing vanilla boss fights (whose bosses have way too much health) after choosing a weapon "that you've used in the pillar" (one of which was not in the pillar). Seriously these bosses are hard. The fact that you have to beat 4+ bosses with a measly 30 health is terrible. I had to mod the game again to get through this segment. The bosses themselves are nothing special. Simple vanilla reskins. Whenever they die they drop some painfully slow dialogue, one in particular mentioning a "Marcus". Who exactly is Marcus? Do I need to dig deep into the Ordeal Pillar lore? Was Marcus really the angel's ex-husband from the future? I don't know. It's all just pointless. Anyhow, after I kill all the bosses, it just becomes a "run away before the place falls apart" stage. No non-vanilla final boss. It's just Balrog, Toroko, some Ravils, and Ballos, and you have to beat them all with under 30 health. So after you leave, the player remarks about smelling fresh air, but he was just outside minutes earlier. And so, the worst dad in the world shoves his son into his jacket and gets a move on. Wonderful.
So I beat it. It was a decent mod. It had a lot of potential. If you ignore the painful dialogue and wait times, it's a solid mod. The problem is that those make up most of the mod, so they're hard to ignore. What really disappoints me is how hard you tried to avoid ASM. You went as far as making the timer for the last section solely out of vanilla assets. This would be fine, except for the fact that there are several timer hacks already in existence. The bosses were all vanilla, minus the two that were slightly changed, and a lot of this mod could really be fleshed out with ASM. Changing a single number in the game's code (that number of course, hopefully being the later boss' health values) could have made this mod much more interesting and fun. The only positive thing I can really say about it is that the areas look really nice (except the stagnant backgrounds) due to tile placement. The actual gameplay is mediocre at best, and the story is too drawn out and I think at the end of the day you just tried too hard. I really wanted to like this mod, but after spending 5 hours on it I can come to the conclusion that I don't.
