Public Commander Keen Forum

FINALLY DONE!

Get it here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4975825/Mart2.zip

Cool! This is in many ways a pretty good modding acheivement, preceded by quite a lot of discourse compared to many mods, so in fact this is probably one of the most long-awaited mods ever.

This mod has quite a lot of similarities to Martinez1 in terms of quality and feel, though the gameplay benefits from the fact that it is a Keen2 mod. All in all I'd say there has been improvement!!

I guess I'll break my initial impressions down in category:

Levels 6/10. I think these levels are on the whole very good basic Keen levels, though not necessarily very innovative, they are in no way derivative. In fact I would have scored them higher but for the fact that there are numerous areas which are way too rich in 5000 point items and ammunition, when I quit game I had like 560 ammo. This is perhaps a tad out of place in what are otherwise well-thought out level ideas and a balanced game. Sprite placement is very appropriate!

Another thing that knocked maybe a mark of the level score is that, though not common, there is some LHS (long hall syndrome). In fact some of the LHS is slightly fun as you pogo across volcanoes spaced 3 or 4 tiles apart - one does have to be awake. But perhaps this should be a bit more tightly edited out!!

Tiles 4/10. Just as with the first mod in the Martinez series, the tiles here rely a lot on the Keen: Vorticons graphics. There are original efforts, no doubt, and they are in themselves not bad. It's just that there are not very many of them. Of course, the tiles serve as a perfectly functional vehicle for the levels and gameplay so that cannot be faulted. The colour scheme is quite pleasant actually, rich and volcanic, quite to my tastes! Maybe a palette patch might have worked well here.

Enemies 4/10. Again, very little new enemies. Enemies from different Keen games are re-cast in different roles, and recoloured into the red-yellow scheme. There is nothing ugly about them, it's just that I've been looking at the Keen1 tank bot etc for more than a decade now, so it fails to overwhelm me with enthusiasm.
To your credit, the vorticon elite are original and are a good well-animated sprite! So make sure to do more of that!

I could comment on other categories but I guess I've said all I need to say about the basics of the game. Well done and hopefully we will see more of your work before too long!

Now you can find this mod on KeenWiki as well: http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/The_Gra ... in_trouble

I have to say that after 10 minutes of play, I'm with 2000+ ammo and plenty of lives. This is one of THOSE mods...

wiivn wrote:I have to say that after 10 minutes of play, I'm with 2000+ ammo and plenty of lives. This is one of THESE mods...

And is that a problem?

It's not a problem (it's the least one). I don't want to get into details, but I'll say it's the easiest mod I've ever played and that was for good.

Hmm.

Full review as follows:


Graphics: 5/10 The graphics are inventive and function well, but they're not anything to phone home about. I see you used a light red colorscheme here but a lot of the graphics look tileish.

Story: 7/10 quite inventive and only misspelled in a few places. A classic 'mirror universe' tale.

Levels: 4/10 There are a number of problems here. First, you have far too much ammunition and points. A mod where you can run out of ammo is good, one with spares... not so much. A good guide is to have just enough shots in a level to kill all the enemies, and 5 more.

Another issue is points, ideally you should have about the same amount of points for each type of item in a level. So if your level has 40 100 point items, 20 200 points, 8 500 points, 4 1000 and 1 teddy bear is good point use. These levels tended to go 'You did a minor task! Have a bajillion points!'

It was also easily possible to leave a level without saving someone, this is a big no-no, especially since new players will not know what they need to do to win. The levels also tended to be quite linear. (Go here, now do that, now...) with little room for exploration or alternate routes, but this was not too evident.

Patching: Rather sparse. As noted the enemies are not too different from the originals, which is a pity as they have a lot of potential.It is amazing, I always say, how much a few tweaks to gameplay can invigorate a mod.

Overall: 5/10. This shows improvement from its predecessor, and I hope to see more improvement in future. The mod is presentable, but with several weak areas that could use ironing out. Aqua Keen2 is a good place to look for where to go with a mod on this level.

Now that I have finished playing Mart2 fully (and before I even read the other comments of course) I'll write my review:

Martinez Mcmeyer 2: The World is in Trouble suffers the same problems all mods and fangames by szemi have.

1. The bright recolored sprites and graphics that don't blend well together are hard on the eyes. In this one there's a notable amount of bright yellow and light red/pink backgrounds, with black speckled platforms that have a yellow outline floating around and a lime green colored martines to control in it. I sometimes wonder if Szemi has partial colorblindness. There's a point item that looked like a disembodied thumb to me, but looking at the F1 help text tells us it's a "lava cola."

2. The tenuous grasp of the English language makes the story hard to understand. The title is "the world is in trouble," but the plot is about saving these aliens oppressor keen captured on another planet?

The ending was cute though. It took me a minute to get the "It's a sunny day. No school!" joke. The joke being, since it's an opposite universe, they go to school on snow days.

Now that I've gotten through the negativity, I will say this: the levels are enjoyable.
It may not seem like I'm saying much, but fun levels is something a lot of keen modders struggle to create. Often they try to do too much, making them too hard and unfun. Though a bit on the easy side, Szemi just has this magic touch to level designs that just feel good the whole way through, and there's no point I ever feel live ragequitting. He could try trimming down on the nuclear blasters, though. He gives the player far more than they ever need. Better than not enough, I suppose

Look forward to seeing this trilogy completed

Spoilers:
How did Oppressor Keen kidnap Commander Keen, by the way?

Could someone you'tube some of this?

just download the mod and start it up. it takes the same amount of time. This isn't duke nukem forever with insane loading times or a huge file to download at all.

Szemi's avatar is kind of all you need to see as a preview, anyway.
and there's a keen wiki page where I'm sure there's screenshots.

When did we start using rubrics to evaluate mods?

Me personally, about three years now.

VikingBoyBilly wrote:Now that I have finished playing Mart2 fully (and before I even read the other comments of course) I'll write my review:

Martinez Mcmeyer 2: The World is in Trouble suffers the same problems all mods and fangames by szemi have.

1. The bright recolored sprites and graphics that don't blend well together are hard on the eyes. In this one there's a notable amount of bright yellow and light red/pink backgrounds, with black speckled platforms that have a yellow outline floating around and a lime green colored martines to control in it. I sometimes wonder if Szemi has partial colorblindness. There's a point item that looked like a disembodied thumb to me, but looking at the F1 help text tells us it's a "lava cola."

2. The tenuous grasp of the English language makes the story hard to understand. The title is "the world is in trouble," but the plot is about saving these aliens oppressor keen captured on another planet?

The ending was cute though. It took me a minute to get the "It's a sunny day. No school!" joke. The joke being, since it's an opposite universe, they go to school on snow days.

Now that I've gotten through the negativity, I will say this: the levels are enjoyable.
It may not seem like I'm saying much, but fun levels is something a lot of keen modders struggle to create. Often they try to do too much, making them too hard and unfun. Though a bit on the easy side, Szemi just has this magic touch to level designs that just feel good the whole way through, and there's no point I ever feel live ragequitting. He could try trimming down on the nuclear blasters, though. He gives the player far more than they ever need. Better than not enough, I suppose

Look forward to seeing this trilogy completed

Spoilers:
How did Oppressor Keen kidnap Commander Keen, by the way?

1. I'm not a colourblind at all!
2. Commander Keen is an easter egg in the game, which will have affection in Martinez 3: Commander Keen will help your adventure on Electricus XII.
3. To react to your spoiler I'm gonna release Martinez episode 1 ultimate version, which will have major changes, so Oppressor Keen will be deleted from the Martinez episode 1 story. Instead Oppressor Keen will be in Mart3 only, so what I'm trying to say is I'm about to update Martinez episode 1.(At last!)
4. Martinez McMeyer 3 will be harder than Mart1-2!

Does anyone else experience massive slowdown with this mod? I'm thinking it might be the multitude of animated tiles on-screen at once, but either way it's led to a bunch of unfair deaths (not that death is anything to be worried about in Mart2). The fact that you can get stuck in levels (for example, the long falling staircase...if you hit the bottom, you don't die, but you can't pogo high enough to get back up, missing the blue key or not shooting the green gem on the Babbo level, etc.) is supremely frustrating. Also, color scheme aside, some of the level entrances (I'm looking at you, random lava streams and certain mountains) are completely unintuitive. Why can Mart cross the lava river at its widest, but no where else? Why can he enter one mountain, but none of the others?

Also, one beef that I have with more than this particular mod is the fact that a readme with instructions isn't included. Now I realize that 95% of people who play the mods are going to know what to do, but a huge frustration I have with playing a mod for any other game is the fact that the author expects that I intrinsically know how to run it.

Also, szemi I believe you have a misunderstanding of the word affection. Recently I've noticed you've been using it a lot to describe when something will have an effect on something else (e.g. Commander Keen is an easter egg in the game, which will have affection in Martinez 3 would make a lot more sense written as Commander Keen is an easter egg in the game, which will have an effect on Martinez 3). Affection, almost exclusively, refers to a feeling of caring and should not be confused with the verb affect, which means to cause an effect on something. Isn't English fun?!