By John Walker on April 15th, 2008 at 11:19 pm.
We mentioned a few weeks back that Mr JellyCar Walaber was working on a new game, for both PC and Xbox Live Marketplace. Well, it’s finished.
Built using Microsoft’s XNA, it’s designed to only work with a gamepad of some nature, and ideally a 360 controller. The game is an attempt to create a reasonably accurate physics model of a human gymnast, albeit one built of rectangles, teaching you to spin, flip, grab and leap about the horizontal bars. It then gets extremely silly, flipping you from boingy poles down curved corridors of poles, challenging you to master the remarkably complicated controls. Left analogue stick does the top half of the body, right taking care of the legs. And there’s a slo-mo mode for mastering the trickiest moments.
The only trouble is, it doesn’t seem especially fond of non-360 controllers, and the person with the adapter for the 360 pad moved out of my house a few months back. A couple of controllers were plugged in, but both had the right analogue permanently jammed to the left, which is quite a problem in the dizzying world of gymnastics. However, if you have yourself a 360 pad, or a controller with which it will comply, definitely get yourself a copy. It’s completely free, and really rather satisfying to get to grips with. And you can play it on PC now, rather than waiting for the Xbox version.
But, it’s so damned hard to control! (even with a 360 pad)
I watched the tutorial, thought “oh, that looks fairly simple” and then I failed, I failed so hard I’m going to continue failing for at least 3 more months.
I build momentum, release and generally just plow into either the floor or a nearby bar – any actual grabbing that occurs is purely by accident!
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Awww “get to grips with” *wince*
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How dare you wince at my High Comedy?!
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Just a note on non-360 pads, there is a note in the readme about this, but you can open the “controller.cfg” file with a text editor (the file is in the “Content” directory of the game install), and adjust the controller mapping, including how the various axis’ are mapped to the right stick, which makes it possible to play with a DUALSHOCK via USB adapter, or SIXAXIS, etc.
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Gymnastic fantastic but controls kind of tragic!
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Been addicted to this for a week now.
Once you get the hang of the controls it’s… erm… still a bloody hard game. Those challenge levels are killer! Game could really benefit from some kind of checkpoint system (like Trials2) or a “rewind time” system (e.g. PoP, Braid etc.) because making a couple of difficult transitions on “Hop, Skip and Jump” by then stacking it on one of the later moves = starting all over again. Harsh. :-(
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The trapezes are giving me horrible flashbacks to my Lagrangian mechanics course.
Brrr.
But yeah, as Duncan says, it can be a real nightmare overcoming most of the level, before smashing your face into the final bar. The horror. The horror.
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