Rex Texas

Whooo-ee, git along, lil' doggy!

I was amused by how little the developers of this little gem seemed to know about what a stereotypical Texan looks like, because for a guy whose name translates to "King of Texas," the titular character looks less like a cowboy and more like "Rico Rodriguez Jr."  It's weird, because the icon for this game is a guy in a 10-gallon hat assembled about as crudely as one would expect his moral and intellectual spirits to be (just kidding, Texas. I love you <3).

anyhow, my relative impression of Rex Texas, if drawn on a graph, would sort of resemble a beautiful Texas mountainside.  For all who would rather I do the visualizing for them, that looks a bit like this:

                  /|
                /  |
              /    |
            /      |
          /        |
____/          |

Boy howdy, I hate making half-assed ASCII art. The things I do for my nigh-nonexistent audience...

Now, let's break that graph down a bit, shall we?  Let's start with the ground-level line at the beginning.  first impressions of Rex Texas were a bit shaky.  This may have been because the combination of amoxicillin and clavulanic acid in my system has basically reduced my digestive system to a porridge palatable only to those troll-things from The Hobbit, but I was nauseous within the first 5 minutes of play because the developers put way too much stake in the "world" part of the word "overworld" and designed the damn thing as a sphere that shifts along with you, making me feel almost seasick.  Not only that, but dying was way too easy. In addition, I was not a fan of this game's "read a barely intelligible sign and hope for the best" method of conveyance which left me confused and completely out of flow.

I started climbing the metaphorical mountain when I entered my first cave and got my first powerup, the double jump.  Suddenly, traversing the map was more fun than it was in Just Cause 2.  There are few better feelings that the DigiPen Game Gallery has made me feel than the one I get from watching Riccito hookshot onto a mountain and then do a little tumble-roll up onto a cliff.  My immersion only increased as I explored the cave more and found more powerups that made exploring the overworld even more enjoyable and rewarding.  It was honestly some of the most fun I've had in a very long time, and I've replayed more than a few of my favorite games this summer.  It wasn't long before I found myself adding little games to the game, such as "hey, let's see if I can clear this cave without having Riccito touch the ground once" I couldn't help but notice, however, that the one thing this game lacked was direction.

Sure, you can occasionally stumble onto a map that points to a particular place on the map and says "you should totally check this place out," but even Just Cause 2 was able to justify your crazy mass murdering and exploration somehow.  In this game, there's just kinda nothing.  "This won't be a problem," I thought, "as long as the game lets me continue from where I left off after I exit."  After all, this game is basically designed to be a toybox to distract you from your miserable life for a few wonderful moments before you go back to filling in timesheets, and being able to pick it up and put it down is essential to a game like that.  Otherwise, it would make as much sense as an action figures that vaporizes once you stop playing with it.

And, since you already saw the graph, I'm pretty sure you all know where I'm going with this.  I really hate it when developers forget that people might not want to sit through your game in one go.  It doesn't matter how fun your game is, people aren't always going to have 3 hours free to get through your whole fiasco.  That's why I was never a fan of the early NES games, but even with those, you could just pause the game and turn off your TV, but a computer is a device that gets absent-mindedly turned off and on all the time.  Yeah, that's not my most compelling argument, but still.  Learn how to make your game save a player's progress, dammit!

That's all I got for today.  Until next time, stay a-grapplin'

Links
Text Lexus: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=1408