As I have since locked away all of my remaining game consoles due to burnout, and my desktop is far too ancient (as am I) to support modern PC gaming, what little gaming I do nowadays comes primarily from this occasionally frustrating little Kindle device and the wild west of apps I have recently been exposed to.
I mean "wild west" in every sense the word, with no hyperbole intended, because it truly is a confusing mess of pay-to-play titles, "free" games with ads or in-game purchases; knockoffs or blatant thefts of previously established brands claiming to be the "official" app of said brand; obviously horrible conversions of flash dress-up games for the girls in broken English; piles upon piles of overwhelmingly useless soundboards or drawing pad apps (even by Newgrounds standards)...
It's horrendously unregulated for sure, but apparently there are still apps worth downloading out there nowadays, the proverbial lone rangers or Clint Eastwoods of the app world.
And then there's just frustrating shit like this:
Commander Pixman is one such "free" platforming game available for the Android OS. It's also now currently in the top five reasons why I want to kill myself.
Using an on-screen d-pad with jump and shoot buttons, the game's ambitious workaround solution to the lack of a proper controller is sadly still very sloppy execution. First of all the kindle is so bulky you can hardly play the game for more than a few minutes at a time, but of course the developers of this game had no real way to get around this issue. They still managed to find a way to fuck it up though. You'll find yourself screaming at the many times when you were irrefutably pressing one direction but went in the other. I think maybe it's because the game senses you pressing two directions in a split-second and simply doesn't know what to do within that split-second, often leading to unfair deaths.
Also frustrating is how they implemented the jump: like any normal game, the height of your jump in this game is determined by how long you press the button. And again that would be fine if this were a game that could be played with a real controller, but as an app it just feels wrong. This is a game were pinpoint accuracy in your jumps is essential to your progression; the fact that there are time trial rewards for each stage with outrageous clear times only adds insult to injury.
Don't get me wrong though, this game isn't just unfair because of controls, oh nononono. There are so many instances, especially in the later levels, where obstacles and enemies are thrown at you with zero time to react, in ways you couldn't possibly predict as a player. For example, they incorporate portals in the later levels with physics to boot; there's one stage with a portal near the very end of the level, but you have to jump at it at just the right angle in order to finish. There's no earthly way to see where this portal leads to beforehand, and on your first few (fifty) attempts the room where that portal ends up in flashes by so fast that you can't strategize for the next time you visit that level... If you even have the patience to do so.
I even encountered a glitch on I think the 73rd or maybe 75th level where there's a narrow channel of spikes that you have to squeeze through. In this same channel there are also moving platforms that are so tightly squeezed together that they slow down the game to what honestly feels like one frame per second. It's moments like these in the game where you don't feel like your death was your fault, rather it was completely unfair with everything in the level, whether it's something far from offscreen or a fault in the programming, out to get you.
Overall, this game has the difficulty of Super Meatboy but with none of the style and satisfaction that comes with beating a level. Fuck this game, don't even look at it, lest you get sucked into the same portal shame that I did.
