Bjorn

Idle Digging - Shovel Knight

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Please tell me that Shovel Knight is more like a cross between Duck Tales and Mega Man and nothing like 1001 Spikes, that game was more masocore than hardcore, as in "we are pure evil and will set traps where we know you will have to stand for more than a nanosecond.".

 

It looks tough but fair from what I've seen, but so did 1001 Spikes. :|

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I'm not sure where the comparison is coming from, because 1001 Spikes sold itself entirely on its extreme bullshit difficulty.

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Duck Tales x Mega Man is a good comparison. The difficulty skews more towards the Mega Man side of things, but it's not I Want to Be the Guy.

There are a bunch of ways for you to scale the difficulty for yourself though. You can smash checkpoints for bonus money. There are consumables you can opt into that give you healing. There are chievos that reward you for beating levels without getting hurt. And there is NG+ of course.

The level design and controls allow for a very high level of play, but it doesn't demand that you display it for the privilege of seeing the credits.

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There are apparently over 300 of these weird codes.

 

http://www.idigitaltimes.com/articles/23163/20140523/shovel-knight-release-date-interview-wii-steam.htm

 

Q: Tell me all the cool secrets so I don't have to find them myself!

YCG: We added a ton of secrets and to tell you all of them would take all day! Besides the enormous amount of in-game secret areas, collectable items, and sub-weapons, the team also implemented 300+ additional secret codes that unlock very different, crazy things from cool abilities to Shovel Knight being 4 times his normal size! These were mainly done as a fulfillment of one our Kickstarter rewards: the "Gimme the Dirt" tier.

The pledgers who backed this tier will be rewarded with a letter from the team, a sample of dirt from one of the locations in the game and a secret that only they know! Those secret codes are going to be theirs to do with as they see fit, and we are really excited to see what happens to them. Will they be out online within a week? Or will somebody take their precious secret to the grave? We'll have to wait and find out!

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That's awesome that there are a few hundred players out there that will have one secret that only they know, and they'll have to decide whether they want to share it or not.   Like, that's maybe the best Kickstarter reward I've seen. 

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Wow, I saw that linked from GameFaqs the other day (the 3rd I think) and only about 20 codes were written in to the spread sheet. That didn't take long at all.

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I'm sort of disappointed at how many of those cheats are just "start with good items". I was hoping for a lot more wacky stuff like the Butt Mode and the 4x Size mode.

 

Anyway I devoured everything this game had to offer in mere days. I think three days? I got all the cheesemints. D:

 

I can't wait for the three boss campaigns. Do we actually know which three it'll be? I know the backers get to vote on it, but I'm not a backer so I don't know nothin'.

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I can't wait for the three boss campaigns. Do we actually know which three it'll be? I know the backers get to vote on it, but I'm not a backer so I don't know nothin'.

 

Specter Knight, Plague Knight, and King Knight won the vote.

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Good, good. That's two out of three. Should've replaced King Knight with Tinker Knight or Polar Knight, though.

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Been playing this in chunks for about a week and really enjoying myself. The difficulty of the later levels is in a pretty comfortable spot between legitimately challenging and outright frustrating.

So, I just got to the end of the Enchantress' gate (second to last stage I guess). Went into the fight with black knight, was doing a drop attack on him as he was flying upwards and... I popped back to the checkpoint screen. He's still stuck flying around on the boss screen and now I'm stuck on this one. I guess they only made the invisible wall so high? :|

 

dTxkStT.png

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I picked this up for the 3DS last night.  So far I'm enjoying it, but I feel like his movement is really slow and it's throwing me off.  I keep thinking I can make jumps that I can't or end up getting hit by attacks because I'm not moving out of the way fast enough.  I'm getting used to it though.  Also I beat 4 bosses before Tegan told me I could change the relics from up+attack to an actual button.  Doh.

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I have decided there is only one way for me to play this game controller-wise:

 

ghIqJ.jpg

 

Edit: I also kind of wish there was a 240p resolution support available so whenever I get a Sony PVM someday (when I have room for one) I could run this game on it...but that's kind of a crazy thing to expect (my dream is to someday have a dedicated retro gaming space with a Sony PVM or some other old high quality 15khz CRT that can do 240p with a ton of old consoles hooked up to it along with a PC with an ArcadeVGA card in it).

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Does anyone else not like Shovel Knight? I know that it's clearly a well-made game, but the levels are incredibly long for their level of difficulty and I just find the whole experience tedious.

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I like it, but not as much as most people apparently.  I think it's mostly fun but I completely get what you're saying about it being tedious.

 

On another note, I think I beat it last night but my game crashed and I haven't attempted the boss again.  The complete lack of music during the fight should have tipped me off that something was wrong.  At first I thought it was just a strange but kind of cool design choice to have a final boss battle without music.

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Goddammit, I was about to buy it for a my trip and I just found out it's not in the EU eShop yet. I guess I'll buy the Steam version by the time it comes out of the 3DS it will be too late for me. :|

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I'm waiting impatiently for this to arrive on EU 3DS. Release is still TBC. ??? Unless they're delaying due to the rumoured system-wide cross buy thing... which would be nice. But damnit, I've got some long flights coming up!

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Does anyone else not like Shovel Knight? I know that it's clearly a well-made game, but the levels are incredibly long for their level of difficulty and I just find the whole experience tedious.

 

Yeah, I bought it a while a go and I got through 5 or 6 levels and just became incredibly frustrated, and so just gave up on the whole thing. There's some stuff that really bugs me about it, mainly that spikes are an IIINSTA-KILL and that just instantly kills my enjoyment of the game. I understand that it's about the platforming challenge, but I never played the games that it's inspired by so I don't really have any sort of nostalgic ties to that genre. Not that I'm trying to Shovel Knight is attempting to rely on nostalgia alone. It's a really well presented game, the music is fantastic and it's quite an achievement to create what they've done with their self-imposed rules. 

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