Sorry, I've been very busy at work.
'Splosion Man was recently on sale for 240 (or maybe 160, don't remember) microsoft points, which seemed too good a deal to pass up.
I stopped playing the game today, hopefully for good. I hadn't even finished it.
At around World 3 the game stops being even remotely fun. Remember Battletoads? Well there was a reason the novelty wore off fast. I am a big fan of punishing difficulty under the appropriate circumstances - i.e. when it actually revolves around developing transferable and generalizable skills - but when it consists of rote button-pressing and memorization of level layout - a la Ninja Gaiden (NES not the more recent incarnations) - it is NOT fun. There were definitely some bad levels in worlds 1 and 2 but the game took a nose dive straight into the concrete in world 3. It had enough good times to make it worth my investment though.
One interesting thing about the game is the adaptive scoring used. Since this is theoretically supposed to be a music blog, you probably know that adaptive scoring responds to the player's input and the on-screen action. Well, in this case, every time you EXplode (I'm sorry, I was a loyal follower of Homestar Runner for a while and certainly found "your head asplode" amusing, but eliminating a syllable really does nothing for the game), a guitar part comes in. And maybe the volume increases. Since embarrassingly enough I didn't notice this aspect of gameplay until shortly before I stopped playing the game - I just thought the guitar was awkwardly cutting in and out due to sound overload or something, because while interesting it is not very effective - I didn't notice any other changes than the guitar. I'd like to do some adaptive scoring some day soon, that'd be fun.
-R
P.S. Daniel and I are working on Episode 2 of Shafted, hopefully to be released by the new year (we're both pretty busy).
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