i'm playing sylvie game for the first time. I meant to type "a sylvie game" but my impression of sylvie (as a person who must have huge reach because friends from multiple social circles follow her, only to find out that we have roughly equivalent twitter follows) is that she would be voted most likely to make a game called "sylvie game" somewhere within the fantastic spreadsheet on sylvie.website which, finger-confoundingly, is called SylveyGames
i think sylvie may or may not follow me on here. I do not remember. hello! all of my sentences are like that. it's kind of what I find funny. your website is great and I look forward to basking in the emotions and thoughts you put in your games
anyway so i obviously picked sylvie100: legend of the four games completely arbitrarily because
- i want something i can play as frictionlessly as possible on a macbook laptop
- i had the realization today that who i was as a child (minigame collections) formed the identity of all the games i want to make today (minigame collections). on a related tangent, today I ended up on a American Candy Brand website looking for suggestions for what to ask a friend to bring to Japan as a reverse souvenir and it triggered some memories deep down of playing branded neopets minigames or doing some kind of unhealthy-food neopets-related brand experience. something about the bright colors and product placement just feels very adobe shockwave, y'know?
- no third bullet point. it was near the top of the list and I am impressionable
I've played the first two games and felt it enough to write about, with the first game (S. PUZZLE) serving mostly as an aesthetic introduction to S.RACING, giving me the sensation that these games are four different games that combine similar assets into very different experiences (EDITOR NOTE: I went back and played the other two after this and the cuboid that annihilated me disagrees with this statement)
to me, the experience of S. PUZZLE is a very "there are 100 NES roms and a rom of Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island on this bootleg GBA cart and I have just launched Karateka and I have no idea what I'm doiOh no I just walked off the island whee" experience. it's intriguing in the kind of adversarial way where you are like "ok, I guess it's turn-based, so I'll move towards a gem" and suddenly the cats have multiplied either by eating the gems or playing the game of life or possibly just because there were three cats in a trenchcoat on a square and not just one, and then a cat presumably touches you and the puzzle resets and you're like oh no the cats are bad
what I'm saying is that I clicked over to S. RACING and immediately sunk like 20 runs into it because I'm emerging all of the gameplay in this one. you spend your first run in S. RACING understanding the rules of the game: it's a real-time circuit racer that takes place in a 2D grid you navigate with WASD, where you need to tag the catpoint every lap and pick up all 10 gems by the end of the race, which awards you a score and a medal (if applicable).
you then realize your time is like 200% of the medal time and you're like, ok, I can beat that, right? and you start exploring the bounds of the game and understanding the tools it gives you.
you realize that you can hold down arrows to move, but also the penalty from being stuck on Bad Road (i.e. not road) isn't worth the cost, so you switch to discrete taps. you realize the gems, all situated on Bad Road, count as Good Road on first pickup, so effectively they function as one-time shortcuts, except for the one gem that's located right before a long corner so it's worth it to cut that corner every time. a "lap" counts as "go to the cat and come back", so technically you just need to loop once for all the gems, then just go half a lap out, turn around, and walk home. is that faster? it feels better. maybe it just lets me keep only half the course in muscle memory so it's easier to execute. speaking of muscle memory, you start timing out in terms of taps how long you get stuck on Bad Road, because you need to hang a sharp right immediately after getting off that tile and overshooting puts you in a lot of trouble. tap tap tap tap go. now that's savings, right?
and then you miss silver by 1, but you weren't even in bronze for like 19 runs, so that's plenty accomplished, right? such great gamespace exploration in such a small minigame