The Underside, demo 3
Posted by Lorne Whiting Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:28:00 GMT
Arthur “Mr. Podunkian” Lee released a new The Underside demo into the hungry claws of the indie games community recently.
I personally have nothing but words of cloying praise for the game, I mean, except for the tutorial phase but that’s been talked about enough. But yeah, it’s bitchin’, and obvious that Mr Lee put a lot of love into the game. The demo’s about twice as long as the last, and features such awesome things as beating a turnip launching flower with a baseball bat, and murdering no-good cheats in order to steal their improvised grappling hooks.
Though it’s fairly linear at this moment, all the areas blocked by signs and pig-cops will supposedly be places you can explore later.
Anyway, check it out, it’s pretty goddamn awesome, and the Ruins (pictured) has some super-bitchin’ music.
Seriously I love that music.
I’ve really enjoyed it, despite me being absolutely horrible at it. The music is indeed awesome in the ruins.
Any second now…
I was with you all the way, Arthur.
Cave Story love letter.
The game is also cool!
This is a rip off of Cave Story! Just look at the similarities. They are both computer games. They are both downloadable from the internet. The main characters in both games can jump!
This is a travesty of plagiarism. And look out for my write-up about how the cult classic game from the NES days called “Super Mario Bros.” ripped off most of Cave Story’s core gameplay mechanics.
Jay is boring me. >:[
not a cave story ripoff
Someone use the mod tool to recreate Cave Story. That would be hilarious.
Reading “Eragon” has taught me that even when you stick very close to cliché genre conventions and borrow heavily from other works, you can still create something great that has its own very distinct personality.
If the game has its own feel, it’s its own game, no matter how similar the art style and interface are.
Now, I should really try the demo to figure out whether it does…
I played the demo that was up about a month ago, and I can’t play any more until it’s done. It’s good, but I have a feeling playing through the content piece by piece, as well as probably starting over more than once each release, would ruin it a bit.
Very Cave Story-ish but I would definitely play this, nonetheless… It looks great!
There are way too many insta-death spikes in this game. Yeah, Cave Story had them, but those were pretty minor and not to this extent. This game almost puts Mega Man to shame.
It’s as if Earthbound and Cave Story got together and had a beautiful little baby! <3
Love the music.
Well, it does rip off Cave Story in terms of art style and game mechanics.
Shouldn’t really matter all that much if it rips off Cave Story. Don’t they say that emulation / copying is the most flattering kind of compliment? :P
Wow, this is why i love TIGSource. I really expected the first commen t to be a ‘cave story rip-off’, but I am pleased to see this community mature and evolve. I was really curious about the underside, so i gotta check it out, even though it’s 5 am and im stone drunk! hug s and high fives all around!
ops: i finally ordered those sexy polytron t-shirts today! whoopdeeewhoooooooo
This is a platformer! And its maker is a platformer maker!
I remember all of the shit Arthur Lee caught when the first demo, almost two years and 5 million bad Cave Story rip offs later the Underside is looking to be the BEST game influenced by CS. Now no more demos till it’s done! You proved yourself it’s awesome!
I too am kinda scared of the whole demo thing. Besides the fact I might be playing through a lot of what I played through in the early demos, it could totally diminish the experience when the real thing’s out. Still, there are few games I’m looking forward to more than this.
Being like Cave Story shouldn’t be bad. Cave Story is awesome. Noone criticizes games being similar to Rogue.
Also this game is amazing.
For those who couldn’t pick up on the facetiousness of my comment, I was being sarcastic. People throw around “cave story ripoff” like Cave Story was the first platformer. You might as well call platformers SMB ripoffs.
Not that they didn’t get it, it’s just that the joke sucked :P
I was first pretty annoyed, thinking that this was going to be a cheap Cave Story ripoff, but I played it and then saw it as more of a tribute than anything else. It’s great fun…characters and dialogue remind me a little of Paper Mario somehow…I don’t know why.
I don’t quite see how you can compare people calling The Underside a “cave story ripoff” with calling all platformers a “smb ripoff”. The Underside was intentionally made to feel and look similar to Cave Story.
I’m glad we’ve all gotten past the mean spirited “CAVE STORY RIPOFF” sillyness and can now appreciate this game for the unique dose of awesomeness it is.
This could easily end up being a “must play classic” of freeware gaming. I can’t wait. This demo is awesome.
Yeah, Jay, I think we all got you were joking, but it’d be a lot more topical if you waited until SOMEONE ELSE SAID IT FIRST because you ended up just being annoying, and now UnrealClock is trying to debate with you.
Cave Story 2: The Underside :)
This came out for the SNES in an alternate dimension, and super mario came out as an indie game.
You have the opportunity to make a game. Any game. Any idea, no restrictions, the world’s your oyster, so to speak. What to do, what to do?
Clone another game! Don’t make it look original, that’s for chumps. Make the main character, as well as the entire game look almost exactly but not quite like another, EXTREMELY POPULAR indie game. That’ll win points with fans who wouldn’t know a ripoff if it hit them in the face. They’ll vigorously defend it, despite the fact that they’ve never actually bothered to play this incredibly popular, indie game. Because this is the Internet, and you don’t need to actually see if it’s actually like anything similar. Just shout until you’re blue in the face that it isn’t, and it’ll be alright.
Seriously though, well done on carbon copying the look and feel of another game. You’re well on your way to being hired in the game industry. Good for you.
Woah, why all the hate for this game, Fepic?
Sure, the Underside copies the look of Cave Story, and does it pretty well. Even so, the face-sets and the character art manage to be distinct - just look at Al (unmasked), Duncan and Johnny.
But as for the ‘feel’? I wonder if you’ve actually played through the demo, because the feel of the game is unquestionably “The Underside” and not “Cave Story”. First up, the humour in TU is quirky, surreal and satirical and as such the game has a completely different tone to CS. Even when you have equivalent items (CS’ Health Box and the Invincible Burger, for example) the strength of the imagination in TU’s concepts set it completely apart.
Furthermore, TU introduces a lot of mechanics completely alien to CS: the cannon jumps, the tyre swinging, the left/right screen wrapping, the melee combat. All of these feel original and comfortable within the world of the Underside.
But I guess you can’t please everyone, eh?
RIGHT
With that over, let me just say that I’ve played through the demo until the point where the Pondunkian HIMSELF stopped me - and I thought it was a complete blast from start to finish. The level design, the characters, the enemies and the puzzles - they’re all so fun and satisfying. Five thumbs up.
P.S. @Lorne: Baseball bat? I thought I found everything; clearly not. Time to fire up the demo again…
I loved it, too bad Pondunkian still uses a lot of sprites from cave story.
Also people saying “if that’s a cave story rip-off so every platformers is a smb rip” are dumb or what? a platformer is something, stealing a lot of sprites, effects and “feel” recreating them almost 1:1 is another thing. It’s just like how Giana Sisters ripped off SMB.
Too bad because the game has his own soul
Eclipse, Podunkian hasn’t used any sprites from any other game. Some may look similar, but they’re completely his own.
Also, Kid Icarus ripoff.
This looks like it should be good, however I feel it is my civic duty to take issue with this statement from the about page:
“the game’s graphics and engine are (believe it or not) completely original. the game’s engine is written in clickteam’s multimedia fusion 2”
So… the game’s engine is completely original to clickteam then?
that’s like saying every engine coded in game maker belongs to the people who made game maker
yeah, it’s perfectly reasonable to code an engine in another engine. i created the ‘tomato engine’ for the game ‘fedora spade’ in ‘game maker’. it’s an engine to create adventure games created in another engine, and so far 4 adventure games have been made on it, another on the way
I’m not saying that it isn’t, but to say that it’s completely original is barefaced bullshittery. MMF is supplying the graphics engine, the sound engine, the event handling, the collision detection… Sure, you can add some stuff on to that but it’s still like building a sandcastle and claiming you invented the beach.
That said, its purely a picky point of semantics and I’m sure isn’t an evil plot by Mr. Lee to take over the universe.
by that argument, you can’t say that something is original if you use C++ libraries or something, because you’re still using someone else’s code
I put the word ‘completely’ in bold for a reason, you know. Don’t make me use allcaps, you rascal…
To answer your point anyway; I would personally say that depends on the library you use. For example, I’m currently writing a game engine which uses irrLicht as a 3d graphics renderer. All the physics, AI, editing tools etc. are mine, but I still wouldn’t say the engine is ‘completely original’ because the graphics engine is such a major part of it.
But maybe that’s just me. And like I say since he gave full credit to clickteam it’s not like he’s trying to pull anything. Losing interest in 3… 2… 1…
No, you weren’t interesting in the first place.
“MMF is supplying the graphics engine”
Well, then the graphic card is supplying the “graphics engine” for most modern games. There is then no such thing as a “graphics engine”?
Nice game! But I’m stuck now… I got the hotel room from the mayor and went there but there’s nothing interesting inside. Where should I go next?
fun game but i think it should have nicer graphics, maybe something cool and 3d like Teenage Lawnmower, that game looks really nice.
Eduardo: Your goal at this point is to return to the caves where you started the game, particularly the house where you got the hi-jump sneakers. Use the grappling arm to explore the area beyond the mayor’s office until you find a path that leads you back towards the start.
It’s easy to get lost at this point. Just keep exploring and you will find your way.
Eduardo: Now that you have the grapplan’ hook you can backtrack to the first area of the game.
Thanks for the tips.
Diablo rip-off
“Cannot load pxplay.mfx. This object might need an external program or library not yet installed.”
Weird, I ran it in Windows 95 mode, and even tried running it as an administrator… But still to no avail. Anybody else having this problem on Vista?
I’m able to run it fine in Vista using the ALL CAPS instructions given by the site.
All the site says is:
“VISTA USERS: RUN THE GAME IN WINDOWS 95 MODE!”
Which I tried, and it still doesn’t work.
CAVE STORY UP IN THIS BITCH
I got stuck after you turn the switch on…
I love it, nice work :D
I really like games whose worlds feel “real” in some way, with their own little mythologies and such, which this one does beautifully. Great atmosphere. (someone said it feels a bit Paper Marioish, yeah totally, I love those games in the exact same way)
The tutorial bit at the start didn’t bother me, it’s total nintendo style. You seem to be able to skip the text faster by pressing Z and X together.
Nice engine too, I like the scrolling and the way the screen snaps to certain places.
Did you hear that, Cave Story?! You can SKIP the TEXT in this game. SKIP THE TEXT. Bloody cave story.
This game is gonna be way better than cave story
CS will become the ripoff
paul jeffries – the word ‘completely’ original was used simply to try to make it clear to people who thought the game was a cave story mod that the underlying game engine is entirely separate from that, without outright stating “this is not a cave story mod,” which would sound a little awkward i think.
i’m glad the indie community’s gotten past the similarities, it shows a lot of growth in the attitude of its members (^:. thanks for the write up!
sorry for the double comment, but, phubans, someone said on the comments section of my unbearably disgusting looking website that downloading and installing ‘msvcr71.dll’ fixes the issue. it has to do with me stupidly writing the pxtone player extension in not-visual-studios-6.0. i hope this resolves the issues
“…almost two years and 5 million bad Cave Story rip offs later…”
I must have missed them. Please mention a single bad Cave Story ripoff that I can try.
unexplained crash for me (game just completely froze) right after I was given Buzzdrin’s reward… boo :(
really wanted to play the demo to death but it crashes at that point everytime.
I really like the game (And I Do!) but… the movement and jumping physics are absoloutely -aggrivating-. You just feel like you don’t have any weight and you are slideing and stopping harshly, jumping even more of an ordeal.
Kibble stole my words. Yeah, Earthbound + Cave Story. Two of my favs, together!
“characters and dialogue remind me a little of Paper Mario somehow…I don’t know why.”
me too, its that quirkyness and and the way it doesnt take itself serious. also you feel like your part of the city like in papermario, and there are events going on.
great humor and solid gameplay ( to be expected from a cave story rip… uh inspired game )
Very cool! Really nice gameplay, graphics, and music. It’s clear that a lot of love went into the making of this game. I can’t wait to play the full version.
Wiktionary defines “rip-off” as “A theft or robbery; A scam; A copy, especially one that is illegal or inferior.” The Underside is clearly none of these things — and anyone who sees it as such is probably just an a-hole looking for something to complain about. Personally, I see it as more of a tribute, though it stands on its own just fine.
Great! I got it working… Fantastic little game so far.
My only suggestion is to make the game full screen to immerse the player fully into the experience.
Other than that, well done!
phubans - alt + enter goes into fullscreen mode. alternately, you can change it in config.ini
Great damn fun! This game’s gonna rock when it gets finished.
I find myself thinking it’s a shame with the Cave Story similiarities though. I’m not saying it’s a ripoff, i’m saying this is a man who had the chance to do something entirely original and awesome. So it’s a shame to see basically reused tiles and character designs from Cave Story when he could have done all his own thing instead.
That’s all it is though, a few tiles and some characters here and there. It’s all good. But try and tell me Ip looks nothing like Quote and i’ll smack your teeth in!
ip looks nothing like quote
Will this Cave Story mod be compatible with the PSP version?
@Bisse: Once again, no, Underside doesn’t “reuse” anything from Cave Story. It’s done in a similar style, but every tile and sprite was made from scratch.
Oh, and Ip looks nothing like Quote.
Yeah, he looks nothing like Quote. Ip is a cat who dresses like a Earthbound hero. =)
Just finished the demo - I’m sure I missed a bunch of stuff along the way, but I don’t want to spend any more time with it until the full game is out. The demo was pretty long - it took me close to 4 hours to finish it. Wonderfully done - even though the whole Cave Story-ness of it is hard to look past at first. Someone mentioned a crash right after getting the Buzzdrin’s thank-you-letter - I thought I got it too, but it wasn’t a real crash - wait a while and the game will resume I think - it’s a scripting error of some sort. Moreover - I got some serious performance issues in larger rooms on my netbook.
The game’s totally a ripoff of Dwarf Fortress.
Podunkian is a shameless unoriginal bastard.