Tuesday, May 31, 2011

I Don't Wanna Be the Guy

A game that has achieved a lot of notoriety on the internet but which I will never, ever touch with a ten foot pole is I Wanna Be the Guy.

Why don't I wanna be The Guy? Because in order to become The Guy, you have to put up with insane cheap shots like this every few seconds.



Everything kills you in this game. (Well, not things that turn you to stone for a few seconds, but if you get turned to stone, you fall like, well... a rock, and the area where this happens has lots of places you'll die if you fall.) Those apples? Any one of them is instant death. So are spikes. So is the moon. Yes, the moon.

And so is this cutscene if you aren't forewarned.



That's right: Dracula's wine glass is instant death, during a cutscene.

And possibly the single most infamous and mind-boggling lethal trap in the game:



Yes, you can be killed by this (fake) error dialog, which I've read closes the game if you click on it (making it a more insidious trap than usual).

The game is practically designed to screw with your instincts, and even if you're really good (much better than I am), you'll die almost constantly. There are a few people who have completed the game on Impossible, which has no save points and thus forces people to replay the whole game upon a single death, but the primary person I've heard of who did this is Japanese, and in Japan they practically start playing video games in the womb. (At any rate, playing through the game on Impossible requires not only insane reflexes and control but perfect memory, because the slightest misstep will result in instant death.)

Oh, yeah, and there are spikes or other instant death zones smeared across the ground of every single room in the game, sans one which has no real part in gameplay except as a red herring.

(If you're curious, but like me uninterested in playing, YouTube has thousands of playthrough type videos, and TVTropes has a page. With regards to the videos, it's like watching a Looney Tunes cartoon, only more violent and sadistic. And Looney Tunes is already pretty darned violent and sadistic. I watched one YouTube user struggle through sixty-some videos. He never did get to be The Guy.)

If you have to cheat to get through Eversion (like I did), this game isn't for you. If you don't mind dying a lot in frustrating ways, well, maybe it is.

-Signing off.

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