Post by WallaceLovecraft in Surfacing comments

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WallaceLovecraft4 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

I thought this game was pretty amazing. I loved the art and how cute the characters were.

Story was good and cute.

The writing was really nice and wholesome. The people in the towns were pretty mean and you feel it. Felt bad for the seal.

The music feels really old but it works. It was alright.

The game itself looks very old school. Perhaps nes-like? Store description says gameboy so I guess gameboy.

I felt the puzzle-like things in the game were pretty easy to beat and I’m thankful for that since I’m bad at those things. It took me a couple tries to get past that grass area. (The bottom last picture on the store page) and a house section cause I got a little lost.

I would say that the random encounters were kind of annoying but it is a love hate relationship. I like it but I also don’t. Like when you’re trying to do a puzzle and enemies keep popping up, it got annoying is what I mean. The good thing is that the enemies were easy to beat for most of the game so I didn’t mind much.
I never actually used all my skills or items in the game which is unfortunate. The only things I used were mainly the 50 hp things and the remove poison skill. You get a lot of money from the enemies and pretty good items from them so that’s always nice. Items from chests were great too.

I felt that the items in the store were very well priced.

I thought some of the enemies were interesting. Like the plastic things being some of the enemies is neat.

There was one section of the game where I felt the tiles looked messy with all the blue. Even though it was relatively easy to navigate and beat enemies, it wasn’t nice to look at but that was only one screen of the game though from what I remember so it wasn’t actually that bad.

Extracting the game could have been easier.

I really enjoyed this game and hope other people do too!

AllonBachuth4 years ago

Thank you so much for the in-depth analysis! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

The colors being only black, white, and two shades of blue is explicitly taken from one of the color palettes Game Boy games could have if played on a Game Boy Color. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_palettes#Game_Boy_Color

As for extracting the game, I'm not sure what I could have done to make it easier. It's a single download and extraction, then Setup.exe installs the game, then you click RPG_RT.exe to play it. I don't see where the difficulty comes in. If it's a matter of the installer or the file name of the executable, those are are immutable aspects of RPG Maker 2003 that I unfortunately have no control over.

WallaceLovecraft4 years ago

The extracting process is relatively easy but when you do, there are a couple of files that get extracted.

1st, the file that you first download is a rar file.

2nd, once extracted there’s another surfacing compressed archive folder called surfacing.lzh and a setup.exe above it. So I was sitting there thinking which one am I supposed to use and what is a lzh file? And whats the point of the setup file when you can just extract the lzh file which then extracts a bunch of folders and files, like a typical rpg maker game, into the one space where you are extracting? Like you could just make a folder and drag and drop the lzh file in there and then extract it but why would we have to do that ourselves?

Using the setup is an easy way to extract though. The thing is with the setup file is that if you don’t click on make an uninstall file then you’d have to go and search for it’s location after you’re done playing it to delete it. If you’re like me, you have a ssd and another hard drive and I keep my indie games in the other hard drive that’s on my computer so if I forgot to click "make an uninstall" then I’d have to go in search for it in the c drive to delete it. And why is the exe for the game called rpg_rt?

Not a big deal but would prefer to just extract the file, click on the surfacing folder like in the lzh file, scroll to the bottom of the folder, click on the surfacing.exe, and start playing.

itch.io

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