OK. I went back and got the remaining trinket in Roadtrip to the Moon. It took me like an hour, most of it spent on that initial segment, from Diverging Streets down and back up, before the first checkpoint on that path.
But I think I've figured out why that segment is so frustrating: Bad difficulty curving. Specifically, that segment gets easier as you go along instead of harder. So instead of, over time, typically making it farther and farther into that segment (while occasionally screwing up at the beginning) until eventually you make it through, you spent the vast majority of the time screwing up at the beginning, and hardly any time seeing the improvement you're making on the easier parts ahead.
I wonder if that initial downstroke is so hard because it lacks the visual cues that would make it learnable? I mean, it's clever, how it works, I thought it was neat the first time, but it is damned frustrating when you are going for the trinket! That bit of cleverness may not have been such a good idea.
BIG ADDENDUM: Let me just add stuff here rather than causing a proliferatino of entries on the same topic.
Firstly, I got the remaining trinket in Vertiginous Veridian. It has nothing to do with Centipede. It's actually really obvious if you bother to look at the geography of it.
Secondly, the room in Vertiginous Veridian that wasn't exactly tested enough is Sunk Costs.
Thirdly, warp lines (when you just warp between rooms at the edge of the screen) bug me. They didn't exist in the original game. You had wrapping, and you had warp tokens, but no warp lines. And they're often used to implement ad-hoc forms of wrapping, which breaks the convention that you can look at the background to tell which way wrapping works in a given room! (And then learning to ignore this caused me to waste a lot of time on Leap of Faith, when all I had to do is look at the background...
Lastly, I find it kind of strange that neither of the levels using the new music (assuming A New Dimension doesn't, I haven't much played it yet) are either of the ones by Souleye. Because I would have thought the new music would have been added because he made a level, and wrote a new song to go with it, so Terry added it. :) But apparently not. And like I said earlier, AFAIK, Piercing the Sky isn't even used...
OK. I think that's all for now.
OH WAIT ONE LAST THING: I do have to wonder what it is that has caused Terry's old explanation of why a level editor would be impossible to no longer be true. Or how that was worked around.
-Harry
But I think I've figured out why that segment is so frustrating: Bad difficulty curving. Specifically, that segment gets easier as you go along instead of harder. So instead of, over time, typically making it farther and farther into that segment (while occasionally screwing up at the beginning) until eventually you make it through, you spent the vast majority of the time screwing up at the beginning, and hardly any time seeing the improvement you're making on the easier parts ahead.
I wonder if that initial downstroke is so hard because it lacks the visual cues that would make it learnable? I mean, it's clever, how it works, I thought it was neat the first time, but it is damned frustrating when you are going for the trinket! That bit of cleverness may not have been such a good idea.
BIG ADDENDUM: Let me just add stuff here rather than causing a proliferatino of entries on the same topic.
Firstly, I got the remaining trinket in Vertiginous Veridian. It has nothing to do with Centipede. It's actually really obvious if you bother to look at the geography of it.
Secondly, the room in Vertiginous Veridian that wasn't exactly tested enough is Sunk Costs.
Thirdly, warp lines (when you just warp between rooms at the edge of the screen) bug me. They didn't exist in the original game. You had wrapping, and you had warp tokens, but no warp lines. And they're often used to implement ad-hoc forms of wrapping, which breaks the convention that you can look at the background to tell which way wrapping works in a given room! (And then learning to ignore this caused me to waste a lot of time on Leap of Faith, when all I had to do is look at the background...
Lastly, I find it kind of strange that neither of the levels using the new music (assuming A New Dimension doesn't, I haven't much played it yet) are either of the ones by Souleye. Because I would have thought the new music would have been added because he made a level, and wrote a new song to go with it, so Terry added it. :) But apparently not. And like I said earlier, AFAIK, Piercing the Sky isn't even used...
OK. I think that's all for now.
OH WAIT ONE LAST THING: I do have to wonder what it is that has caused Terry's old explanation of why a level editor would be impossible to no longer be true. Or how that was worked around.
-Harry
