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Monday, September 17, 2007



You might remember a few months ago a game called Qui'Ifon (developer: ultim8p00) was posted about, which had some similarities to Cave Story. Since then, the engine has been reworked, its name has changed to The Undertaking and a new demo has been released, although apparently it was a rushed release so expect some bugs.

Author's description: "It's basically Cave Story meets swords meets Knytt (or Seiklus)." However, he also goes on to say that he wants to distance it from Cave Story.

Comments

there are just too many castleroids these days, not all of them good.i actually find this one to be much more interesting:http://www.l-ames.com/nothing/

There's not enough castleroids (metroidvania?) out there! Especially ones that are good. Give me more! More! "Nothing" looks good though.

I wasn't keen on the presentation with this. There's no way to skip the intro, Alt+F4 doesn't work, the backgrounds lack the finesse of other ¨castleroid¨ games.Could be good but this demo hasn't impressed me.

A lot of the new "castleroids" just have big graphics. That's what turns me off about most of them. This, and Nothing are good examples of what I'm talking about.I know Nifflas' games are Castleroids, but the way he does his graphics is very appealing to me. Small, neat, and not a strain on the eyes.I think more developers need to go smaller and more detailed rather than big and imposing.

Game itself's fairly cool so far, albeit a bit unpolished. The main menu's too slow in responding, though, and trying to shut the game down is a real nightmare. First got to go through that whole blurry intro thing again, and if you pressed spacebar to skip the introduction one time too many, the entire game starts again, instead of letting you choose "Quit", and you can start all over again in trying to shut it down. Ended up using Windows Task Manager, but that gave me such a hard time getting my screen's resolution back to something useful.

kon-tiki, the EXACT same thing happened to me... i didn't even find that damn sword.

Nate, I agree with you about graphics. Of course, the same could be said about most games getting hung up on graphics rather than gameplay. Still, new games are encouraging.

I quite liked the graphics, actually. Sure, they're a bit crude and the guy doesn't have arms, plus the jumping animation is less than basic, but it sets a good atmosphere and are nice to look at, plus it doesn't perform any stylebreaks. It's not like the character is a pixel sprite and the entire world is polygon-based. That's already more than quite a few games manage to do. It's utterly killed by the main menu and the inability to shut the game off, though.

Well it is a rushed demo, so I think those issues will be pretty easy to iron out for the final version and I'm sure they will be.

I feel like it has made some definite improvements over the last demo build. There is a greater sense of atmosphere and the music feels much more dynamic and mixed with ambient sounds. The big problem with this build is the same as the last one; unskipable cutscenes. This one adds even adds a frustrating menu interface on top of that. But then again, for a rushed demo, it's pretty solid.

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