Poacher-glitches and other discussion.

[Alakaizer]

I've been playing Poacher off and on since it came out, and I just found a glitch, and hopefully this can come to Yahtzee's attention. I was moving up through the water after obtaining the artifact, and I was also moving to the right, so when I moved up from one screen to the next, I became lodged in the pipe.

For more discussion value, what's you opinion of Poacher? I personally find it really, really good. The level design is fairly intuitive, while still making you think, and it's funny.

 

[arkady]

I've got totally stuck in the spyrite mines.

Spoiler

After getting through the bits I have to demolish, to get above where the artifact is, I get to an insurmountable wall. There are platforms coming from the ceiling, and leading away, but I can't work out how to get to the cave in itself. Any help?

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Podunk]

I've been having a tough time with the controls. Particularly jumping, aiming up/down, and shooting at the same time. : ( It's a bit unresponsive, only works like 1/10 times. It's important, though, since you don't have 8-direction shooting! Oh, and I'm hoping you get a better gun later. Reload times are killing me.

captcha: full stop. Just like what you have to do to shoot down/up. XD

 

[Alakaizer]

I've been having a tough time with the controls. Particularly jumping, aiming up/down, and shooting at the same time. : ( It's a bit unresponsive, only works like 1/10 times. It's important, though, since you don't have 8-direction shooting! Oh, and I'm hoping you get a better gun later. Reload times are killing me.

captcha: full stop. Just like what you have to do to shoot down/up. XD

You can buy a Rubik's Cube from the shopkeeper(s) once to improve reload times.

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

This game is bloody frustrating. Some enemies only spawn in or shoot at you when they're within the frame, so if you activate them at the wrong time it screws with the intended timing and becomes almost impossible to get past without taking a lot of damage. Or monsters just fall on top of you out of nowhere without warning. Especially those fucking bats and birds which just swoop in from out-of-frame and attack you.

Also your shotgun's spread is really strange. Often you have to aim dead-on, even if your target is very close to you. And your inability to fire in more than 4 directions, combined with your terrible reload speed (even with the upgrade), causes situations in which you're pathetically impotent versus the might of those stupid bats that can fly in arcs.

I find that rather than adapt to things as they happen using a repertoire of fun, easy-to-use abilities (like in say, Rayman Origins), the only way to get past the harder parts is to die and restart over and over until you've memorised the exact pattern of movements and actions you need to progress. Maybe that's the intention, but I find it very annoying. In Rayman, I die because I make a mistake, and I'm eager to try again; here I die because the world fucks me over without warning.

The story's pretty funny though. Although even that's wearing thin a bit by now as it's the same joke over and over again: a fantasy setting with Yorkshire accents LOL.

 

[Scow2]

I couldn't get it to run: It ate my processor faster than the Cookie Monster goes through Chips Ahoy.

 

[Febel]

I couldn't get it to run: It ate my processor faster than the Cookie Monster goes through Chips Ahoy.

How...how old is your computer?

Anyway, Poacher's pretty good. It's not great, though. A bunch of of jumping puzzles had me gnashing my teeth in frustration due to the literally split-second timing you have to manage in order to pull it off. Like someone else said above I've also had difficulty with jumping, shooting and moving at the same time. Seems as though the controls only respond half the time when I do it. The scarcity of savepoints is also frustrating when combined with the above. Nothing like spending twenty minutes on a ridiculously challenging jump puzzle only to make it to the top with one health and a half dozen enemies to fight your way through before you can even think of saving.

All that aside I've enjoyed it so far. The story is relatively simple with interesting characters and pretty fun gameplay. I'm pretty sure that if I wasn't already an anglophile I wouldn't be able to understand a word Derek says but hey, that's part of his charm. Yahtzee continues to show that he can make even extremely simple graphics scary with those things in the crystal tomb and overall I'd recommend it to anyone who feels like playing a relatively short, simple metroidvania game.

As for glitches, I'm not sure if its only in that one room

Spoiler

The hidden side room with the grenade capacity upgrade early in the sunken city

but the game crashed a couple of times on me. I'm not certain but I think it was because I was trying to sink in the water, hold a grenade and shoot upwards so I would descend faster. Only happened twice but then I only did it twice so for all I know it'll crash everytime someone tries that.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well it's a solid one man band game, pretty standard indie 2D platformer really with added charm.

But it sadly bring all the prehistoric platformer conventions, clunky animations, bump damage enemies, animations and hit boxes don't match(so even if an enemy doesn't visually touch you they can still harm you), unclear bullet trajectory, bad checkpoint placement, scene resets, ...
I got about half hour into it until I hit my annoyance barrier, I've seen enough.

 

[demi]

I have a weird glitch.
Holding the down arrow while walking right won't allow me to jump or shoot in that direction.
Doing the same walking in the left direction yields no problems at all.

Spoiler

this gets really bad when it comes to the double jump. Instead of being able to jump rightward and shoot down to keep the momentum while still moving in the right direction, it won't let me double jump at all. I have to jump rightward, let go of the right arrow, and press down then shoot, all in a split second.

Double jump works fine going to the left.

 

[Treleus]

I've discovered a major glitch in the following fight:

Spoiler

In the fight with the Judge of the Earth, I get this error message after using the Spirit of Peace to heal myself and fire at his eyeballs while moving around at the same time:

In script grenadescript:
Error in code at line 52:
if(gg.type = CH_PEACE) gg.goaway = 1
^
at position 10: Unknown variable type

___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event
for object egotop:

In script grenadescript:
Error in code at line 52:
if(gg.type = CH_PEACE) gg.goaway = 1
^
at position 10: Unknown variable type

This happened about three times, and this is the latest message. But the really strange thing is that after I beat him on this try, the platforms don't appear and I fall to my death. I've tried fighting him two times afterwards, without causing the error, but the platforms still don't appear and I die.

I've also experienced movement glitches when using my Logitech Rumblepad 2 controller. Sometimes whenever I have Derek moving in one direction, and then immediately turn the other way, he'll keeping running in the same direction until I give the opposite direction another good push on the D-pad.

 

[Treleus]

I've got totally stuck in the spyrite mines.

Spoiler

After getting through the bits I have to demolish, to get above where the artifact is, I get to an insurmountable wall. There are platforms coming from the ceiling, and leading away, but I can't work out how to get to the cave in itself. Any help?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Yeah, I got stuck there too. Here's what you have to do:

Spoiler

The spyrite wall you break is connected to a wall on the other side that you can use to get to the next room. So once you destroy the spyrite, you have to make a break for the other side before the wall disintegrates.

Forgot to give my opinion on Poacher: Lots of fun! Great humor, fun characters and artwork, excellent boss music (especially for the secret boss), and overall a fine love letter to the hallowed classics of Super Metroid and Castlevania: SOTN. My only criticism of it is that it needed more overworld music, at least one for each of the major areas you had to visit EXCEPT the Crystal Tombs (the creepy ambiance works there): The Spyrite Mines, the Lidenbrock Sea, the Great Library, and just because they're large areas, the Forest and Jungle.

 

[Lina Jones]

Massive necro bump, I know, but I thought worth bringing up.

For a couple years now, I'd been unable to play Poacher on Windows 8, due to a driver error that caused Windows 8 to be incompatible with most Game Maker Studio games. Upgrading to Windows 10, however, seems to have fixed the problem.