Finished Tales from Space: About a Blob 1 of 4 #JumpingJune
I got better at controlling the blob but it never stopped being slightly awkward. In order to reach blue orbs out of reach of just normal jumping you have to find the sweet spot of doing a diagonal slam, followed immediately by a jump to get enough vertical and lateral speed to reach the high ones. Trying to do this over death pits is really annoying, if there is one wrong move and you die you get sent back to the last spawn point and every blue orb collected since then is lost. Many times I had spent several minutes meticulously jumping to collect orbs only to be killed by weapon fire or fall to my death erasing all that work.
Something I discovered late in the process is you can game the system via the co-op mode. At any time you can press start on player 2 and another blob enters the game. As long as one blob is alive, the other can respawn after a few seconds. So if you are low on HP, tag in player 2, kill yourself by pressing select, respawn at full HP, then kill player 2 with select and then don't press X to respawn and you're back in single player. There are also a few time based puzzles (such as pressing a button over here unlocks a gate over there) that will be made less frustrating by temporarily bringing in player 2 to wait by the door which opens.
Though one of best uses of player 2 is as a fail safe when collecting orbs in precarious positions or to grab orbs that are easier to acquire by grabbing them as you fall to your death. In single player mode, you have to survive to the next check point for acquired orbs to be saved, but in multiplayer (even if it's just one person inching along with 2 blobs) as long as one survives it doesn't matter. So you can park player 2 in a safe place nearby and then go for the dangerous orbs with player 1.
One thing the developers did do right is once you acquire a blue orb and reach a save point you never have to collect it again. Orbs or friendly NPC blobs (3 hidden blobs per level) you have picked up on previous playthroughs are grayed out. So if you were to come up a few orbs short of 85% for gold ranking in a run, instead of recollecting all the orbs again you only have to collect a few that you have not previously collected to put you over the top.
The trophy distribution is quite bizarre, you get a silver trophy for silver ranking in all levels (like 60-84% completion), a gold trophy for gold ranking in all levels (85-99% completion), a bronze trophy for platinum ranking in all levels (100% of blue orbs and all 3 blob friends), and a bronze trophy for speed runs (really hard minimum time limits to beat levels). So the two hardest trophies by far are bronze. Getting gold rank isn't really that hard since blob friends are worth like 15% each and most levels have a LOT of orbs. If you look in the lower right hand corner the gauge fills up as you acquire orbs and blob friends and will change color depending on your current ranking.
It's a pretty easy 950ish TT points if you do everything but the two hardest trophies.
was the story on that first goal Pharm? Jesus Christ, I expect to see that in peewee leagues not the Stanley Cup Finals.
