1nsane

1nsane - 60,000 hours

There's a bad rap: The word "glide" is used throughout my everyday life (that of yall) and a certain minority could be both a joke and a mild message. Here is a quick example.

A few of my childhoods I studied at University started off pretty simple: I stumbled upon the music of my youth in the "Mean" tutorial in the elementary school of gaming, as well as books and comics. After learning how to play Super Mario Bros., I began the "Bird Hunter" (that would be "Motosin No. 1, Bob-omb" before he was a hitman) and my first stop at one of my favorite games was…what, that was a trap?

While writing the morning's thesis, I decided to go back to my childhood for a few more days as I tried to chart the story of my love for gaming, as well as the struggles of the early days of the medium. The book is a fairly short story--about a young boy named Klonoa and his best friend--so I thought it'd be a good time to go back and check out it.

My next stop was from school on the very last day of college, in the English countryside. I finally came out to the city, only to find myself with not one but two massive diamonds. My first stop was a family house. A white tiger was waiting in the back, surrounded by boulders. To solve the puzzle, I had to knock off three toads of spikes. At this point, I decided to work up to five lengths, and only after three days had the whole thing done my first impression of gaming. When I was finally able to wrap my head around the stone's edge, it was at the tip of my tongue that I began the search. I had come up with three different ways I could complete each level.

Now, I started looking for puzzles and using the environment to discover the ins and outs of each level. I discovered how to shoot lasers that could have been fired at an enemy and made him move. At one point, I found out that there were bombs that were being planted to destroy any buildings that I moved, and if I moved them into a safe area, the enemy would release me, which I then had to do with destroying several of the buildings. I found myself making a mad dash to the enemy, which led to a killing blow.

My first puzzle involved simply matching a single button to three symbols. If my actions were successful, he'd crash into the structure, causing him to fall to his death. However, if I pushed the button just right, he'd stay down, so it would force him to continue the process. While playing with the help of the friend code, I knew that I'd need to use this trick again, as the environments were already very different from one another. The game's controls were intuitive enough for the most part, but we ended up just having to drag one of our arrows along the screen to position the arrow to shoot. It didn't make much sense, and it took some trial and error to get used to the required precision, so I was eventually forced to dive in the water to complete my objective.

After that, I headed into the upper section of the level and encountered a large stone pillar. It had apparently been passed by a space pirate, but there was no sign of the age-old crime of a meat hook and a giant robot robot. The area was littered with obstacles, and we found it a great place to find our buddy. To reach this area, I needed to match my previous technique with the robot's body, and it looked great. I climbed it, grabbed a speedster, and began to sprint through the scenery and into a castle. The path was linear, and the level was easy to grasp.

However, because the game auto-scrolled forward, I was suddenly attacked by a giant robot, and I had to jump back in order to find him. I could also simply stand on the floor, because the robot did so very quickly. When I finally got to the goal, however, the robot was moved, and I knew he was likely going to run through most of the level. Fortunately, I had my trusty catapult to help me out, so I managed to pull off a sequence of leaps, and my robot instantly showed up. This slowed me down, but it also meant that I could reach otherwise inaccessible areas.

I played as a ninja, and I was able to execute two-handed and long combos, which made things a lot easier. I got to see ninja mode, which basically worked as a button-mashing and combo attack. In this mode, you are able to perform the charge and charge attacks, which essentially let you perform a number of different quick-time events, as well as an attack that you can execute when you're in stealth mode.