Haha, role playing games... I enjoy games of the exact opposite type *grin*
Most people already know I enjoy puzzle games of the DOS aera, like Lemmings, One Step Beyond, Pushover, Avish, Stoneage... won't discuss those.
I played a lot of
Garden Gnome Carnage (link to Youtube), an arcade scoring game from 2007 describable with "so, you're this appartment building, and...", in both the old Gamemaker version and the newer Flash version. It may look stupid, but it can be played with skill. Despite not playing for over a year, I'm still in the
GGC global highscores with at most two people legitly above me (scores not divisible by 10 must be phoney), I used the nicknames Eiderdaus, Rodent from Hell, Nagetier, and Schlagetier. Maybe there are more strong players on the game console version.
These months, I've played a lot of
Quadnet (screenshots and a video), an arcade DOS game, from the later 1990's. It's one of the purest games in this genre, you're a spaceship in a rectangular play area, and avoid/shoot metal spheres flying around, their number increasing over time. The player has the normal 4 keys to move in eight directions, and then 4 more keys to shoot in four directions independently from his motion. There are youtube videos with people scoring over 2 million points, I'm way below these with a highscore of
650,000.
Since a few days ago, I'm experimenting with a new key layout in Quadnet (it allows you to remap inside the game): two rows of four keys à la < v ^ > instead of the default two inverted-T layouts. This uses 8 fingers instead of 6, omitting the middle fingers' need to jump between keys. At first, this is extremely confusing in such a fast game, and I
haven't even gotten half of the old highscore yet. I've been using the new layout for a week now, and have just beaten the old-layout highscore with 720,000.
geoo has suggested alternative 8-finger layouts. I probably won't use them, but new players might consider them as serious alternatives to dual < v ^ >; they seem easier to learn. One suggestion: keep inverted-T except for the up direction, which is moved to the pinky finger. Second: keep inverted-T except for the down direction, which is moved to the thumb. The whole inverted-T should be moved up in that case, e.g. qwerty Caps, Q, S, LeftAlt, and something similar for the right hand. Both of these ideas have the hands mirror each other, unlike my layout, which is not symmetric.
Screenshot of the current highscore table:
-- Simon
