2018-03-11 23:43:10

The gate is the one VG storm title I did not buy, though I did play the demo last year.
I fancied a side scroller so after finishing Superliam for a bit of nostalgia I played The Gate again.
The basic reason I didn't buy the game is  while some of the games' difficulty was okay, there seemed to be a lot of rather unreasonable difficulty ramping in the game, EG instant kill ghosts, a low attack range with your knife as compared to most enemies, status conditions dependent upon items to cure and of course enemies who shouldn't be instant killers which are such as those devil spiders, and this is quite aside from things like the grey lady.

I played through the demo again and seemed to get on generally better, however I was wondering about people's opinions of the game in general, how is the ratio of unfairness vs difficulty curve?

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-12 00:07:32

My biggest problem with the game is the multitude of cheap ways to die, like the rocks appearing out of nowhere that you have to jump over. On a slow system, those could be an instant kill for you, and on a reasonable machine they're just annoying, not even difficult just annoying to deal with.

2018-03-12 01:07:57

I own and have played the gate multiple times. Overall it's a fun game. The difficulty curve smooths out some once you get the sword. There are some difficult, and possibly somewhat cheap sections, but they don't really detract from the whole game.

2018-03-12 02:23:14

The ease of dying makes it feel like an old-school arcade or NES game, IMO. Granted, I've only played on easy so far, and have yet to spare the patience necessary to beat the final boss. But that's basically how a lot of old-school games that I wanted to own-not-rent went.
Still, the price compared to the content seems high. Considering the fully-voiced scenes, menus, stats, etc, and the general audio and gameplay, that feels a little unfair, but it feels like it's lacking a certain something that Super Mario Bros has, with its five level styles, 3 color schemes, indoor and outdoor, day and night, and random bits of scattered scenery. Stuff which I kinda feel like Adventure at C: comes closer to emulating. But, since AAC is free, I feel OK with paying so much for The Gate anyway.
(Admitedly, The Gate is set entirely in a haunted castle. There's a limit to what you can do with that, in terms of the figurative CSS.)

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2018-03-12 12:00:57

@Quasar, I agree about the sword it makes life soooo much easier it's not funny, that is what I mean about attack range, especially since most enemies don't seem to have an attack sound or any way of actually avoiding their attacks, just a random chance of their attack triggering and damaging you when your in range meaning that the only way to stay out of trouble is effectively stay out of range which either means the sword or spamming arrows.

Actually this was why I found The Gate preferable to AAC, though in AAc I got a little tired of how much I needed to hammer the spacebar for even basic enemies, that and the fact that some of the stages obstacles seemed a little whacky, though admitedly I probably need to sit down and spend a little more time with AAC than I have.

In terms of ambience etc, there is a lot more that could be done even in terms of a haunted castle (castlevania anyone?),, but I will say I like the number of enemies and the fact that  your introduced to said enemies successively meaning there are things to discover as time goes on.

Btw, I admit I probably ought to spend a little more time and patience on games generally. Super castlevania took me literally weeks of trying each world before I finished it, especially the final ascending clock tower, ditto with several of the Mega man games.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-12 13:36:33

Oh, you know? the gate! this game is really, really really boaring. For me, it is. Like AAC, but AAC seems eeven 10 times better with it's content, difficulty, and voice acting? no, not that but the story, oh yeah. The price is unreasanably high! 40 dollars for that? no. EEven manamons price is too high for it. Saying things like i worked for it and bla bla, doesn't help it. It's my opinion, it's harshe i guess, but that's my thorts. The gate is boaring, really high priced game and eeven the mid bgt coder could do that witih no problems. who would argue?

2018-03-12 13:42:42

The gate is actually 29 usd not 40. This is a relatively high  price it is true, though I'm afraid just saying "it is boring and the coder could've done better" doesn't explain much to me, EG is it boring due to uninteresting monster attacks or what?

I do notice the levels are larger sizes, but hay the same was true of Superliam.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-12 14:13:24

I played The Gate in demo mode on easy and could not get past the Grey Lady no matter what I tried, so I chose to keep my $30 in my pocket. Not only did the price seem a bit high, as all VG Storm games seem, why pay for a game that is so difficult even on easy that you'll never get to play the rest of the game?

After my frustrating experience with The Gate, and seeing that all of VG Storm's games seem a bit over priced, I deleted the shortcut to their web site from my favorites, I don't plan to be buying anything from them any time soon.

2018-03-12 14:46:53

Actually Orko I have all of Vgstorm's other games.

Paladin of the skies is a great first draught. Yes, the battle system has it's lacks and  waaay too easy, also the story can be a  simplistic in places, but the locations, music and weird items give me enough for a good game, actually I've been considering replaying paladin.

Psychostrike caused a huge controversy when it was first released with people calling it violent and evil and all sorts of other things, or complaining that it's not a propper game. The thing is Psychostrike never pretends to be anything other than what it is, a violent stress reliever. If you go in expecting basically an excuse to beat people up, grab weapons and go sort of nuts, you won't be disappointed.

manamon is by far their best game. yes, it borrows a lot from Pokemon, however that isn't really a reason not to appreciate it. The writing has improved telling a story that has it's dark sides and unique characters (actually far darker than Pokemon's story), as have battle mechanics. My only problem with manamon is the enforced grinding to level your creatures, and the fact that the battle system is a bit opaque to those not familiar with pokemon at the beginning, and that you require a lot of grinding in places to level your creatures up.

Then again, what do you expect from a creature rpg.

it's partly because I have appreciated their work that I'm considering buying the gate, that and the fact that I was in an action/side scroller mood  played most everything in Crazy party and having just finished superliam, while not really wanting to start anything as overloading as bk3 (where I seem to be stuck on the flying level anyway).

If you want a single recommendation, I'd suggest Manamon, though I would recommend checking out jayde's guide just to get a good overview of the system.

Of course, I also need to get stuck in to A hero's call, but as when I tried I found the movement system a bit confusing I probably need to wait until I have the time and energy for that one.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-12 15:27:10

Hmm well, Manamon doesn't really borrow anything from pokemon, it sneaks up behind it, clubs it in the back of the head and robs it blind while it is unconscious.

OK, the gate, in a sentence, its a frigging pile. The combat feels exactly like Psycho Strike. The voice acting is terrible. The levels lack ambiance, feeling mostly empty except for spots of random action. You will literally spend a lot of time with one finger down over the right arrow. The first boss is way too hard to be the first boss. I did get past her, but it took like 2 dozen attempts. I never completed it due to boredom with it, It couldn't even hold my interest long enough for me to reach um, what's her name, the second boss, Morgana or something?

What it all comes down to is that the game feels extremely empty. If you're not gonna have enemies coming at you from all sides, that's fine, but make me feel the impending doom or the foreboding prescience that something is gonna happen. Give me sounds that sort of come to life in front of me, give me spots in the floor that creek as I walk over them. Give me jump scares, ghosts and ghouls, and other stuff  that just pops out in front of me. Yeah I will agree that jump scares are over rated and over used, but its harder to sort of build fear in other ways.

When you couple that with the price, when there is no professional voice acting, and the combat code is copy pasta right from psycho strike, its over priced and arrogant to be asking that much money for the content, and mostly lack of it that is there. Well, I think we can determine that game dev is just a money grab for this developer, look at how he jumped at the chance to make games for Leasey, the most money grabbing scheme out there as far as audio gaming is concerned.

My opinion of the developer in question is rather low though, so take this with a grain of salt.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-03-12 16:06:01

Dark, I tried Palodin but got turned off by the unrealistic sound effects, ding for a wall, boop for a desk, bop for that and beep for this. If you want to sell me an immersive game, at least do me the courtesy of creating sound effects that at least try to make me feel like I'm actually there, instead of in some 80 retro video game!

2018-03-12 16:50:21

Hi,
To be completely honest, I think Psycho Strike and The Gate were conceived from the same base project and taken in their different directions to release two games between the two big rpgs instead of just 1 side scroller. I do think The Gate came first not Psycho Strike (I could be wrong) but yes htere seems to be alot of shared code between the two projects, with Psycho strike having the rpg portion added to it and the gate the different enemy attacks and such.

2018-03-12 17:40:44

I wouldn't disagree that psycho strike probably reused game code from the gate, but in terms of gameplay I do find enough differences, e.g Psycho strike is far more based on multiple weaker  and button mashing, while the gate has fewer stronger enemies. All I wondered about was the difficulty curve, though Quaser does seem to be right from wht I played of the demo that things get masively easier when you pickup the sword.

The grey lady actually I sort of like in a "waaaaag!" factor. Yes, she'll take several attempts to win, but on the other hand she's almost a teaching tool, since the process of keeping at a distance, getting a hit, jumping over and then repeating is almost the way you seem to need to deal with most weaker enemies in the game from what I gathered.

Voice acting could be better.

Btw I didn't know that Aaron was now working for Leasy, if so that is a black mark at least from me, though we'll see when his next release comes out.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-12 19:26:37

I like the game, although I will certainly not deny that certain points can be brutally unfair, I'm looking at you, corridor of ghosts. I made it as far as the final boss but I had to quit because I spent as much time cursing and swearing as anything else. I never beat the game. I'm sure I'll pick it back up at some point but not at the moment.

But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!

2018-03-12 19:55:37

I don't know all that he's done for them, but that My Country Place is definitely only available on Leasey. Too bad, because it don't sound like a bad little game. Ah wel, if I never see another game from him, it won't bother me much. I probably wouldn't buy it, I felt ripped off at Psycho strike, Manamon is fun though, if you don't mind how much it basically ripped off pokemon.

@11 I'd tend to agree.
@12 Psycho Strike was first.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-03-12 21:09:14

PsychoStrike was released first, but AFAIK we know little to nothing about the development process, and PsychoStrike could have been a quick collaboration using what Aaron was already working on for The Gate to save time, or something of that nature.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2018-03-12 21:36:15

So I feel I need to clear up a misconception here.

Aaron is not "working" for leasey. It was a one off contract job and nothing more, from what I can tell. It seems like this topic is getting a little too much on the flamey side. Let's cool it down a tad please.

Take care, it's a desert out there.

2018-03-12 23:32:34

here's my honest opinions on all of aaron's games, and I'm not going to sugar cote or exadurate any of this. If people don't like what I have to say, then that's fine, so here we go.
AAC, I really enjoyed. It was nice and retro-sounding, there were some interesting challenges while playing through it along with the puzzles and various achievements, you actually had a sense of accomplishment when you finally finished it, plus there is some replayability with the difficulty levels and such. This goes without even mentioning the abilities of the stage creator, and stages like remnent put this to great use and showed just what could be done with it. To be honest remnent could have almost been considered a seperat game in its own right.
Paladin was sort of a disappointment. I guess it just kind of... worked, no more than it had to. It could have really used some more sounds, at least footsteps and a few battle sounds. The battles in general felt very empty and generic. Enemy descriptions and spell descriptions would really have been nice. Also the story seams to just be full of random things glewed together in strange combinations. For example, there seams to be a decent security presents around on the paladin, however they apparently aren't compitent enough to clear out the casino, they overlook a teleporter leading to a gangster hideout, and they totally miss the huge drug making operations being conducted right under their noses. When transitioning to a new area, it often felt like the story was randomly being thought of as the game was developed. Whenever new areas were needed aaron would just slap on a new random piece to the story and hope it fits together.
Psycho strike is mostly a lot of unused potential. Mark my words when I say that if done right, it could have gone so so so many places. It was a really fun thing to pass the time with when it first came out, and if you're playing it for the first time it can be quite cool to discover all the weapons and try things. However, there's so much it could have done, but ended up not doing. It was originally advertized as a first person game, which is not correct. But consider how awesome the game would have been if it were first person with actual objects you could run into and destroy rather than a simple side scroler. If not a first person view, a truely 2d game would have been awesome. You wanna escape the police for a bit? Go jump over the counter in the bar and take cover. Need a better position to snipe from? Climb onto an abandoned tractor in the farm. There was enough content in place for you to do things like a campagne mode. There is the system of setting a goal but a sort of story would have been a lot better. Overall, i think it should have focussed a little more on the gangster part, not on the senselessly killing part. How about drug runs? Kidnappings for ransum? Database hacking for liquid assets? Also, psycho strike's feature list talked about you having to manage your base. That is not actually a thing. Perhaps your base could periodically come under attack, and you'd have to defend it. You could do this yourself and also place things like mines or sentry guns to make it harder for invaders. From what I know, there were a grand total of 0 updates released for the game, even though when it first came out aaron announced more content being in the works. That content never came. Lastly, the AI is pretty easy to fool. There's a really simple trick that works most of the time. All you have to do is make sure there's an item near the entrance of whatever area you're in. Then when a cop comes in, you have to jump behind them. For some reason, if you're behind police, their AI will prioritize the item as long as its in their sight range, and will stop caring about you until they've picked it up. This gives you ample time to shoot them in the back while they carelessly run for the item, letting you stay alive a lot longer. For obvious reasons this is most effective when going solo because group members can get in your way and then things probably will get hairy quite quickly.
The gate was in my opinion a rip-off. I have a few gripes about it, notably the story. In the beginning, you had one. However, as soon as you got past the vampire girl Whose name I forget, it just sort of stops until you reach the final boss and it just becomes an endless killing fest. There's no *real* strategy involved for most of the enemies. For the majority, after you get the sword its usually go right/left towards them, hit them as often as you can, then jump back, rince and repeat till they go away. There's no randomness to the levels, meaning that once you've played through it on easy or perhaps normal, you're basically done unless you play infinit mode. Speaking of difficulty, its very, very unbalanced. The gray lady shouldn't be the first boss in my opinion. It scares a lot of people off who might want to buy the game if the very first boss encounter prooves to be as difficult as people say it is. Also any difficulty past medium is basically impossible to play because the enemies simply become too tough after a certain point. On hard, this is reached when you fight this powerful zombie boss. He kills you in three or four hits, and you can only get at max one hit in before he hits you. Since he can move faster than you can jump, you can't even avoid him,. He has too much health to be killed before he kills you even if you have healing items, and his health resets every time you die and respawn. The levels feel extremely empty and generic. Aside from the obsticals and items, there's nothing to the castle. It feels a lot less like a castle and a lot more like a series of empty hallways. This was advertized as a horror game, but there's no real horror element to it aside from the occasional jum pscare, which quickly loses its novelty. If you play any good mainstream horror games, they don't just throw a bunch of jumpscares at you. They give you tidbits of a scary plot, let you fill in the blanks as to what happened, and basically provide a lot of unpleasant immagery and sounds. While I know that graphics kind of fall away here, you can do a lot when it comes to creating a suspenseful horror atmosphere with sound. As it is right now, the gate just sounds like your average hack & slash side scroler. Compared to other vg storm games, the music is very sub-par. It seams to only be one track that slightly shifts in intensity if an enemy is near you, and other tracks for cutscenes. There's a lot of cheep difficulty enhancements, such as instakill ghosts, rocks spawning on top of you, and the spiders basically being inescapable if they stun you. The voice acting is also pretty bad, and I don't see why it should be a part of the reason why the game costs 35 bucks. The level of voice acting seen here could have been easily achieved by using royalty free actors which wouldn't have charged squat for their record time.
Manamon is a little bit of a different story, its the other vg storm game besides aac that I liked. Since braillemon is far from a finished game, and the pokemon crystal access scripts cause nvda to lag when speaking and have labeling issues, manamon is a great alternative to the pokemon series. I don't really care that its basically a clone of pokemon with changed names and sounds, there's a lot of mainstream pokemon clones out there as well, just like there's a whole bunch of minecraft or GTA rip-offs. The story is definitely better than the one presented in paladin, the sounds both for the world, creatures, and attacks are well done and the music is mostly good too. My two gripes are: First, the large amounts of grinding needed, since bosses skale only with highest mon level. I don't know much about how much time you typically spend grinding in your standard pokemon game because many letsplayers don't show grinding on screen, but I doubt its as much as the amount of time you need to invest here when it comes to leveling up your mons and keeping them at a similar level to each other so the skaling bosses don't trash them. My other problem is the price. I'll be clear here, I am not as entitled as to think I should be getting games for free. Manamon deserves to be payed for, it likely took a lot of time to design the game and its story, come up with creature descriptions and make the sounds, movelists and stats for them. I also know that much of manamon's music was produced just for the game, but even with all that factored in $40 seams kind of high. I would have set the bar at  $30 at most. Some people like jade have raised concerns over things like movelist balancing issues and the like. Those are things I didn't really notice and won't say anything about because it was those people who actually had enough time on their hands to sit down and compare all the mon movelists and do all that.
In conclusion, I still think aac was aaron's best game. This is kinda ironic, since aac was both his first game, and a free one at that. It also seams to have the most features and replayability of all his games. I won't say anything about my country place, because leasey.

I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.

2018-03-12 23:36:53 (edited by pulseman45 2018-03-12 23:38:14)

@8 and 10: I agree with both of you.
Add the fact that enemies feel like they are floating, because it was decided their cries would completely replace their footsteps.
And of course it culminates in the bosses shouting the same sentences over and over again, as if some of them weren't annoying enough already.
And the predictable ending, and the fact that besides higher difficulties and survival mode you don't have much more to continue the experience, compared to some other games.
The fact you can't anticipate attacks is a mixed bag for me. I like the surprise effect but when you have the sword you always do the same things to avoid attacks and kill the enemies. And you would better have that sword over that VGStorm knife, no range, no startup time, no recovery time, and no way my space bar deservs such a treatment.

2018-03-13 01:40:16

Two things I don't like about the gate:
- Nightmare difficulty is a hell mode where nearly, nearly nothing but the first three goblins are beatable. No more dreaming of ghost. it comes, you can call your next instakill.
- There's a room where you're suppose to help someone there in the level with the zombie boss, and there're like loads of unreasonable mobs inside that even if you play easy, you have no chance to beat them.

I agree about the gray lady being too hard to be the first boss, even though I can manage her without losing a life. Morgana is way easier, tbh.

Why do ghost hunters have to hunt ghosts? Well, there's a fear of being ghosted out there. They may need therapy as well as their ghost hunting kit.

2018-03-13 08:08:13

hi guise can some one help me to assist how can I play the gait nicely. I have downloaded the game but in the starting I am dying while I am trying to play the game

want peace to be there everywhere around the world also I want an immediate sollution to be given for this war so that the bloodshed could be ended. live peacefully, let others also live peacefully

2018-03-13 09:43:00

Hey and good morning everyone.
Hmm, honestly, and I am serious about that, i didn't really have problems with the gray lady, sure, for a first boss, for some it might be a bit to hard, but personally speaking, i found her pritty entertaining as a first boss.
Before you go at me, it's perfectly ok if some people have problems with something, like an enemy, where others just go through like it's nothing. Everyone has ihis or her strong points or weaknesses, but hey, we are here to help, aren't we?
Regarding the gameplay and the game itself, I didn't find it to be really entertaining and couldn't keep me adicted for very long. The gameplay seams just dull and boring to me, we have the same jumpscares over and over, when you walk and there is nothing there for the last 10 seconds or so, you can guess with a 90 percent chance that there is a ... oh, there is a bunch of enemys again, couldn't have guessed that beforehand, irony off.
The atmosfere is also not really good in my opinion, the dynamic music that he used here and in psycho strike is an interesting idea, but I have the feeling that it hasn't been used to it's full potential.
Greetings moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2018-03-13 10:24:20

Thumbs up to Sterlock here, frankly I confess this topic has been depressing me since I was despairing of anyone being able to express a critical opinion without condemnation.

Any game has good or bad points, but bad points don't mean the developer is the spawn of satan or some money grubbing attention hog or whatever. IN my personal experience very few games are utter and total awful from stem to stern, or completely lovely all the way through, there's always a mix of good and bad and that indeed is why I posted this topic, to get people's opinions on said mix in The Gate, which has nothing to do with any speculations about Aaron's character, motivations, game creation process etc.

So in that vane, a thumbs up to Conor and Simba giving me the sort of info without starting up the flame throwers.

As regards the gate and tactics as I said above, it seems that the Grey lady is almost a teaching tool rather like the uba encounter in The Ensign. As such I didn't mind her too much myself, indeed when I downloaded the demo this time around I only lost two lives to her before doing her in.
My concerns with difficulty are more about the other monsters such as those devil spiders and instant attack ghosts since from a pure mechanics perspective I do not like the fact that basically enemies do not  have actual attacks that you can avoid, they simply have a chance of damaging you when your in range, which effectively means you need to be damnably lucky with the knife (as well as abuse your spacebar as Pulsseman said), until you get the sword.

So more critical opinions welcome, though please go easy on the rants and flaming big_smile.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-13 10:34:40

While the difficulty curve may be slightly off in the early game, as mentioned previously, things even out markedly once the sword is acquired. As far as dealing with ghosts and the gray lady in the early game, judicious use of arrows goes a long way. Later in the game, you can use some enemies' attacks to your advantage. There is an enemy that places bombs which can be used to blow up other enemies. One tactic I have fun with is letting that enemy follow me until I collect a bunch of other enemies following me, then let it drop a bomb and run while the other enemies get blown away. There's also a wind enemy that does minor damage and blows you several steps away. This can actually be used to your advantage if you get surrounded.

2018-03-13 11:05:01

Are the bombs you speak of the ones dropped by the bird bomber quasar? I let one plant a bomb once but it killed me even though I was some distance away.
If they can damage other enemies that might be a good way to relieve the difficulty of a few sections such as the attack by a hole pack of demon dogs towards the end of stage three and is good evidence for difficulty in the game becoming a bit less unfair than I thought, ----- after all I have no problems with games that give you tactical options (that is what good games are made for), it's just games that ramp up the unfairness which mildly irritate me.

This is why I didn't mind the grey lady, even though I did have to practice a while first time around until I got her speed and distances down.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)