It looks like that other game, made after that increpere one came out. It was called stuck or something. That and this have the same graphics style.

Ran very slowly for me, got to the "leap of faith" room with all the spikes and vertical flying things before giving up. Love the graphical style and overal feel of the game but wish it worked a bit faster on my computer - probably just the computers age and not the game itself however.

I can't do the jump in Nopussyfooting room. :/
I'm stuck! Any suggestions?
Anyway the style is awesome! ;)

same problem in nopussyfooting room :p me=n00b or wut?!

Yeah, no pussyfooting. Damn! But what a great game nonetheless, I hope I finish it sometimes.

You can stand on the platform that's under the "water" in No pussyfooting.

When I touch the water I die.
Why does it happen?
How do I have to jump in the water?

Fun game, I like how it it plays with the narrative through level design. I wonder if there's more than one ending.

On TIGSource someone says that running it in XP compatibility mode fixes the speed if it's too slow.

This just seems to be an exercise in frustration. The player has such horrible, loose control on the character that it becomes near impossible to be sure that any task will be done reliably.

I got as far as the 'Leap of Faith' room as well, but the combination of starting one room back (in the 'Great Bat Tango', a room sole designed to make you wait) and the fact that there are a number of difficult elements in the Leap of Faith chamber made it unenjoyable to try and go further.

I don't know about anyone else, but I found the flailing run of the character to not just be difficult to control but seemingly random. While I appreciate the anti-Mario sensation, of a character who seems to be panicked and has some fairly realistic attributes, as a player I am frustrated that I repeatedly failed simple tasks because I couldn't command my avatar more precisely. And in many scenarios, if you make a mistake, you have no recourse to correct it, because moving at all is just as random.

Unlike many game models, here you don't encounter momentum with your character movements, so tapping forward or backward nets you no subtle changes in speed as much as it causes you to launch full speed in that direction for an indeterminate length of time. Combine all this with the not-quite pixel perfect movements required in several places and you begin to reach near impossibility.

The game has an awesome feel and look. I must also add that the music compliments it very well. However, I couldn't get past the first jump screen. The awesome presentation of the game made me want to figure out the secret (or just get lucky) so I continued trying many many times. .. no luck .. It's a shame that a game that looks so nice and has so much potential would do this to me on the first screen.

"Near impossibility"? NEAR IMPOSSIBILITY? I died 6 or 7 times, and mostly by simple mistakes. In the "Leap of faith" the thing is: you must NOT jump on the second obstacle. This is exactly why the room is called... Leap of faith. Yes, it's that easy. I died once in that room. C'mon, guys. Don't you remember how platformer games used to be hard? I think every time someone calls THIS game hard, Ninja Gaiden commits a seppuku.

P.S.: I'm not even very good at platform games.

Painful. A game with fake pixel art (nowadays, everything that is made of huge blocks is pixel art) and which tries to go for a feel of old games, can't even run smoothly on machines of only a few years old. I stopped trying this game because of that. Looking back at the graphics, I don't know why I even bothered. If you do pixel art, do it properly, please.

Needs a save point on each screen, really pissed me off when I struggled with one level many times then died on the next because of the slippy controls and had to do the previous one again.

This game was fun. Some of you folks need to calm the hell down. It was a 48 Hour LD game.

This game is literally a massive troll. Some people can't make the first jump. For some people, the water kills them. Some people can't just over the spike. For me, the bats moved like 5 times as fast as they were supposed to making "The Great Bat Tango" impossible. These can't all be bugs. The game just randomly decides the first time you boot it up to be impossible for some people.

Or, you know, some people just really suck.

The controls were fine (for me anyway), and the only difficult part was the pixel perfectness and "leap of faith"

I found it fairly easy. There was a bit of precision jumping, but the only complaint that I really had was that the game could have ran a little faster.

Nope. If you set the game to different compatibility modes, it effectively "resets" which "version" of the game you got. Try it. With no compatibility I got fast bats. With XP compatibility I got water that kills me. With Windows 98 compatibility the game played normally and I got to the sword at the end.

I'm playing it on XP, and absolutely no problem here. And I REALLY can't comprehend how some people can find this game hard. A "save point on each screen"??? WHAT? I imagine if these guys ever played a platformer game, like Megaman 2 or Castlevania.

I had some issues with Windows XP. Next I play the game in a notebook with Windows 7 64-bit and I've got no problem with water in "No pussyfooting". :)
I completed the game in a few minutes.

So that's it, I wasted 5 min of my life trying to jump over water because this piece of shit doesn't run the same on different system? Please stop wasting our time with your artsy games.. At least I'm happy it didn't delete files on my HD each time I died (or maybe it did in an artsy way?).

>>>>WHAT? I imagine if these guys ever played a platformer game, like Megaman 2 or Castlevania.

oh lol, this pile of pixelated crap is the next Castlevania!

Tim - I don't think you understand. There are not "problems" with the game. Cactus and Arthur have made a game that intentionally gives random people random bugs. Running in a different folder or running in compatibility mode basically just gives you another chance at what bugs you may or may not have. So far I believe the following "bugs" (or any combination) are randomly picked at the start:
-game moves in slow motion
-jump is slightly lower (can't make first jump)
-jump is slightly higher (can make it over sword at end)
-bats and obstacles move faster (impossible to pass certain room)
-the red water kills you
-respawn takes a long time
-checkpoints don't work
-room names are changed

Actually, I think there's another effect, too, where you jump only slightly lower, just enough to get over the first jump, but low enough to make the spike rooms a lot harder.

Zmann - I can confirm that effect. Playing on a Vista machine, no compatibility settings, I got a jump that was high enough to get past the first jump but that made the spike rooms very difficult (impossible for me, but maybe it's possible with ninja pixel-perfect skills). Or maybe it's enlarging the hitbox of the spikes?

Also, running into the sword at the end simply threw me back to the title screen on XP, but switching to 98 compatibility and running into the sword gave me an actual Game Over screen with its own special text. Leaving that screen quit the game entirely instead of showing the title screen again.

What Zmann says is right though - different compatibility modes don't necessarily give a predictable result on different computers. I've personally never seen any "versions" except normal, can't jump over spikes, and Game Over screen.

And yes I did play through the game once on every compatibility setting. Sad, I know :(

Just realized something...look at the theme(s) people.

Spoilers: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=9284.msg289976#msg289976

I had 05, spikes are one pixel taller. No wonder the game was such a bitch.

"Hey guys, let's make a game with bugs that make it impossible to play!"

Some people ought to be bitch-slapped til they can't get up

It was actually:
"Hey man, let's make a game where the people who play it have different experiences, and then we see how they react and if/how they figure out that they aren't really playing the same game."

I guess some people didn't appreciate this :)

That's what procedural generation is for, not bugs! People who leave bugs in their games on purpose are idiots. Those who put them there on purpose are no better than people who write viruses and need to be kicked hard to get their pretentious little asses back on track.

@cactus:

I can only imagine you chuckling endlessly to yourself as you read the responses to your devious little toy. I'm stuck between wanting to congratulate you for the clever high-concept, or smack you for the sneakiness of it all.

Upon leaning of the differing 'versions', I gave it another shot. I couldn't seem to coax many of the modes mentioned here out of the game, only my previous slippery control experience and a slow-mo mode with presumably normal controls. I'm not sure if Windows 7 has anything to do with that, or if there's some other input required to evoke the other modes.

Regardless, with non-flailing controls and a big advantage offered for my timing, clearing Dungeon the second time round was pretty simple. There's not a lot to say about the whole product beyond that; it's got a great grasp of a very classic style, and uses the linear format very effectively.

my 2 cents:
I enjoyed the game very much on its own. I thought the narriation was brilliant and the gameplay, while short, to be good fun.

The bug concept I really didnt care for. I'm not much for internet drama and I dont need cactus or podunkian to tell me that most people on tigsource are idiots. I already knew that :P

I know this sounds like I'm missing the whole point, but MY point is that it was actually a pretty good game even without (or rather despite) the gimmick.

Oh, great, another "artsy" meta-thingie, "look at me, I'm a totally post-modern, vanguardist conceptual genius with superior web-awareness".

One of the authors has said that 'games don't have to be fun'. 'Nuff said.

As for me (and a lot of people):

Fun = Good game
Not Fun = Bad game (or no game at all)

Just an opinion, of course.

Liked the "I'm/I'm not" part, though. THAT was clever. Credit where credit is due.

Huhuhu...

Tricky little devil. I understand now why I suffered so much in this game.

BTW people, cactus is a genius. He sure likes concept, but he makes some really fun games as well.
So this one sure was frustrating (that was the point of it, wasn't it ?), but if you don't now his work, I think you should go to his site and grab some of his best games. There are some pure jewels.

If, by pure jewels, you mean things made to piss the player off that don't have to be fun, then ok. After seeing this, I myself will be staying the hell away from anything else made by him. He seems like nothing more than a heinous little prick, based on this thing.

Hah, I thought this was brilliant. At first I was really frustrated by that danged "pussyfooted" room, but when I came back to get some answers and figured it out, I had a good laugh. Good job, cactus & Mr. Podunkian, very entertaining.