all balls are circles, but not all circles are balls. you know? streamed dec 20th '23
if your puzzle game needs a flashing indicator to tell players where they can stack or clear -- doesn't that mean you haven't made the design speak for itself? TORYUMON, like SEN-KNOW, is trapped in its messy visualistic overly specific building-block subgenre. as the devlog indicates, it's easy to create pure failstates where placing a pattern against the wall completely screws you. SEN-KNOW manages this with a strange, under-indicated block-decay system. as for this game? the devlog gives us a perfect picture of the design challenge: the math doesn't work! there are too many types of block! making the garbage blocks be four quarter circles is a hack at best, a bandaid at worst. leon did demonstrate to me how powerful the chain-theory of high-level play can be, but much like high-level sen-know, the level of abstraction and specialization is pretty out there.
look: the music rocks, the sound design is nice and crispy, some of the best i've seen in this series. the game commits hard and well its aesthetic, unfortunately alongside Chinese stereotypes that Japanese devs often fall into. i love that the playfield a place, a door; that touch three-dimensionalizes the game into place-ness that i find truly admirable. as leon noted, having character-specific traits that aren't drop tables is truly great, maybe only CALCUNE comes to mind as an alternative pick, and this seems way more balanced. still i... the dev said it himself, and leon summarized it as such: "this game was mainly a historical afterthought." sen-know was an aesthetic tour-de-force, and this is...a few tweaks away from being "not a game." 6.0/10
- info on jamp via https://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/JAMP
- game development in the Phillipines: https://www.scribd.com/document/56911359/Game-Development-in-the-Philippines-1992-2008
- the devlog in question. please note i read out a machine translation, so i apologize for the many inaccuracies. i'm having a lot of trouble figuring out who exactly the hell wrote this, but here you go: https://www.wizforest.com/diary/150305.html;
- leon's cohost: https://cohost.org/leon
- Vikas music's excellent channel of eurobeat remixes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWQ4IVOuXa8M9htzbaSKlmg
- a 1cc playthrough by webbedspace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OQTrOW9lVE
thanks to leon for killing me, and also for explaining some subtlties of the game i wouldn't have encountered otherwise. thanks to euan for finding the devlog. art of me by Minasheep! (minasheep on cohost, itch, twitch, and patreon.) next up is № 47: Hebereke no Popoon (1994, Sunsoft/Atlus). i hope you'll join us!