Ooooookay so this is two-for-two where the HTML5 port has just been… straight-up inferior to just emulating it on Flash. In this case, what forced me to switch was… just straight-up horrendous framerate. I kept up at it for… the first quarter of the game? until I hit a point where the framerate impacted my ability to see what I was doing. I then switched to the Flash version, which also had some issues, though at least they… in a way kind of added to the gameplay experience? The speed (and ground traction) of my character seemed to vary wildly depending on what my graphics settings were — if they were set to high, the hedgehog would slide at mach speed off of platforms to the point where at points I straight up clipped into the walls; if they were set to low, he’d slow his roll, which sometimes helped to ease myself down an obstacle, but sometimes cause me to really need to tilt the level if I wanted him to move. It was honestly a bit of fun figuring out which graphics setting worked best for which level, even if the process of doing so once caused me to misclick and reset all my progress. It’s unintentional, but it's a degree of customizability that… honestly added a bit of an extra dimension to gameplay: figuring out what sort of control scheme I wanted for the given challenge ahead. Sadly this doesn’t… entirely preserve the game — some platforms/obstacles don’t function as intended, some later levels are just kind of awful when you’re not dealing with the intended physics/framerate, and those levels… do tank the game a bit, enough to maybe make me question whether this is one of the games I’d recommend.
Which is a shame, because for something I had no impression of going in… this is pretty solid! It plays… like a table maze except not top-down. You play by tilting the level in a circular motion, causing the little hedgehog guy within to move along, as flat surfaces become slopes, things that are vertical become horizontal, and at some points you have to flick/move very fast to fling the guy through the air. There’s a difficulty curve that does a good job of building up and testing the player’s skills, and the game drops particular obstacles in and out so that while you never forget them when they turn up again you never quite get sick of them, either. It’s also fascinating to see where elements of level design seem reminiscent of other Nitrome games, either reused from games before (there are one or two levels here that seem ported from Hot Air), or design concepts that I know get revisited in future games. There are some stinker levels, some parts of the game where you get killed before you even know what the obstacle of the level is, and… my recommendation for this one is definitely more conditional given how much the emulation fucks with some of the later levels, but aside from that… yeah, I liked this! It’s a cute little platformer with a neat mechanic which might not stick in my memory forever but was pretty nice for the time I played it. Would recommend.
Which is a shame, because for something I had no impression of going in… this is pretty solid! It plays… like a table maze except not top-down. You play by tilting the level in a circular motion, causing the little hedgehog guy within to move along, as flat surfaces become slopes, things that are vertical become horizontal, and at some points you have to flick/move very fast to fling the guy through the air. There’s a difficulty curve that does a good job of building up and testing the player’s skills, and the game drops particular obstacles in and out so that while you never forget them when they turn up again you never quite get sick of them, either. It’s also fascinating to see where elements of level design seem reminiscent of other Nitrome games, either reused from games before (there are one or two levels here that seem ported from Hot Air), or design concepts that I know get revisited in future games. There are some stinker levels, some parts of the game where you get killed before you even know what the obstacle of the level is, and… my recommendation for this one is definitely more conditional given how much the emulation fucks with some of the later levels, but aside from that… yeah, I liked this! It’s a cute little platformer with a neat mechanic which might not stick in my memory forever but was pretty nice for the time I played it. Would recommend.