#feperd games

Allow me to introduce

@lakefeperd has put out a new demo for Fark the Electric Jester, which I find to be interesting and weird.

Spark the Electric Jester, the original game, was sort of like Freedom Planet insofar as it wore its Sonic influences on its sleeve. Fark, then, has the guts to attempt to take those Sonic influences and bring them in to the third dimension.

The results, at least as far as this April 2018 demo go, are mixed. There’s some smart ideas, here -- wide roads, no scripting, a clear delineation between running, platforming and combat segments, and an interesting take on Sonic’s homing attack: it now has its own devoted button, and can be used whenever you want. The catch is that not all enemies are susceptible to the homing attack, so sometimes its only really useful for closing the gap so you can switch to melee.

Melee is one of the weakest parts of this demo. It’s pretty clear Lake is trying to ape Platinum games here, and while the idea might be sound, the execution needs a lot of work. You’ll note in this video I end up running past a lot of enemies simply because they take too long to deal with. The game is telling you to go fast, go fast, go fast, but then also asks you to stop and bonk on a robot, sometimes for up to a full minute or more. The timing on the parry is too tight, the combat doesn’t feel fluid enough, and I still haven’t been able to land a single hit on those guys with the shields.

It’s nice that the game lets you run past them, because I’d rather just avoid those encounters, but if that was the case, why spend time putting that combat in the game at all? Why devote all those buttons, spend all that time on animation, for something I’d rather ignore?

I also started to get really tired of running by the end of this video. Even if it’s just scattering gems around the road to make you steer more to collect them, there needs to be more gameplay to the running segments than just holding forward. There’s no risk, reward, pass or fail for the most part. You just watch Fark run and try not to bump walls.

Also not pictured here are the cutscenes. An earlier version of this video was going to be the entire demo, but with all three levels, the boss and cutscenes, it came out to nearly 20 minutes. I’d thought about just making a version of the video without cutscenes, which probably would’ve been around 14 minutes, but that would’ve been weird. The cutscenes are also kind of... bad, to be honest. Not poorly animated or anything like that, but they tend to go on for a while for what appears to be a very average video game storyline. There’s also an issue with the villains swearing like sailors, which gives the game a very low brow “I’m a teenager on Newgrounds in 2004” vibe. It’s one of those things where just because you could put swearing in your game doesn’t mean you have to, and you certainly don’t have to put THAT much in. It’s a little cringeworthy.

Something something Spark The Electric Jester 4 or something