Ah

By: Guest Reviewer

On: November 10th, 2009

[This is a guest review by Guert.]

What if you could jump off a skyscraper, plummet down toward the ground at incredible speed, caress the buildings, and live to tell the tale? What if, while diving, you could give thumbs up to fans and flip off protestors? AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, the latest title from Dejobaan, is a skydiving stunt game staged in a futuristic universe. You step off the ledge of a skyscraper and, as you plunge through the floating buildings, you try to earn points by falling close to the structures, earning “kiss” and “hugs” bonuses. For extra points, you can crash through bonus plates, give thumbs up to your fans watching you jump and flip off those who don’t like the show.

The experience is fun and it’s quite satisfying to avoid the buildings and occasionally crash head first into them for a nice excruciating death. The game controls are difficult to get into but once you do, you can start performing some high-paying stunts. The game has a good dose of humor and doesn’t take itself too seriously. For example, the “grab” screen, where you can purchase the full version, has a funny narration that explains the role of pixies in the development of the game. However, some jokes seem funnier on paper. For instance, the game features a meditation video that allows you to meditate in front of your screen. It sounds funny when it’s said out loud but when you experience it in game, it just feels out of place. The visuals are good but sometimes feel amateurish, mostly because it features generic fonts and a few simple “photoshopped” pictures. The audio is also good and fits the game very well. The ergonomics, most notably the menu flow, could have been a bit more polished, but it’s not troublesome.

Aaaaa!!! is a fun game that would benefit of an extra layer of polish. The concept is fun and the experience is entertaining. You can grab the demo, as well as the full game, on Dejobaan’s official website. The demo features 9 levels, the meditation video, and a bunch of hint boxes that tell you fun facts about the game and skydiving. And for those wondering where they may have seen this game before, it’s one of this year’s IGF contestants.

TIGdb: Entry for Aaaaa!!!

Posted in Action, Videos, Windows | Tags: DejobaanGames

Dougy

I don’t like this one.
Always the same again and again.
Could be nicer as you say…
But I’m sure it will find his public :)
Flamebait

The beta was one of the best games I’ve played in a few years, yet it left me with no desire for the finished product.

Still recommended to anyone who likes pulling off feats of agility in FPSes.
http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber RobF

It’s awesome, I love it to bits.

If I had to get rid of anything, it’d be the silly unlock mechanism (why, people, why?) but other than that, utterly stonking.

Doesn’t ‘arf leave me with weird vision afterwards though. Mega-eye-wonkiness ahoy.
Paul Eres

i haven’t played this game, but i think a fighting game without unlocking new fighters (and just giving you all of them from the get-go) would paradoxically have a less replay value, since there’s nothing to work towards, no feeling of progress. i think unlocking things is a way that games which have a lot of different ways to play them but which are very short have to give the player a feeling that they are progressing
X3N

this looks fucking cool, but i have no comp that can run (mac version?)
Mischief Maker

I think unlocking is an abonimation to gaming that exists solely to give people who rent videogames incentive to buy their own copy.

I already went through the drudgery of “earning” the money I paid for the game. Do I really have to spend hours of virtual labor “earning” a fully functional game?

And plants vs zombies is a terrible game held aloft by hype alone.
http://www.dejobaan.com Ichiro

Neat! I am gratified and happy. One clarification:

> the game features a meditation video that allows you to meditate in front of your screen. It sounds funny when itâ€™s said out loud but when you experience it in game, it just feels out of place

We did the meditation to relax people. It’s a genuine, fully-working, Kikia-less, no-funny-business, no-nonsense relaxation. A $39.955 value!

Ohm. (Etc.)
The Monster King

>Paul

the progress in fighting games is getting good with your favorite character, not unlocking new ones. The point of a fighting game is a competition between both parties, the CPU is just practice and anything else is just extra

i agree that unlockables can be annoying in general but they simply shouldn’t exist in fighting games, it makes having a memory card or even shittier more recently a console with all characters unlocked. But a fighting game should by default have all its balanced characters unlocked and any other character is sort of a waste of precious art/programming that could’ve made the game a better one
http://www.LachlanStuart.com BinarySplit

While fun until the day I stopped playing it, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! never gave me the feeling of achievement I’m used to when completing a game. All there is to do in (‘A’**25+’!!!’) is score enough to unlock everything(easy), and then 5-star everything(hard). There are no boss levels, no overarching plot, and AFAIK not even a “You win!” screen.

I’m an “I just won the game!”-feeling junkie. Please don’t deprive me of that feeling in future games.
Ilya Chentsov

My First Skydiving Academy rip-off.
Krux

it is like those endless falling dreams.
RobF

Aye Paul, I always thought the point of a fighting game was the manly challenge of fisticuffs against other human beings and their inevitable defeat at your superior button munging skills.

Or being defeated by someone who’s never played a game before and perfected the ancient art known as “the random button slap”, either/or.

The unlock system is just an artificial extension system that for most people will mean they’ll hit the wall sooner or later and never see that content. Which seems awfully wasteful to me. “Earning” fake money ingame to unlock parts of a game is work and tbh, if I wanted work I can get that in the real world.

Eufloria managed to straddle this problem well I thought. Those who obsessively want to unlock stuff via tedious grind through the levels can, those who just want to chill and enjoy themselves have the menu option to take it all away. It’s great.

@BinarySplit – Yup, and thank you Dejobaan for -not- including any of those things in your request list. Aaa etc…’s strength is that it’s a wonderful time shaver score attack game. The reward is in besting yourself (or your chums) not in getting to the end.
PHeMoX

“The visuals are good but sometimes feel amateurish, mostly because it features generic fonts and a few simple â€œphotoshoppedâ€ pictures.”

I tend to disagree completely. The overall style is coherent and quite good. At no point does it look amateurish or ‘photoshopped’. I don’t think the photographs look out of place either.

It does look a bit bland at times because it lacks a true Tokio-style city environment with lots of moving billboards, neon lighting and so on. It could use more of a city environment, but regardless gameplay-wise it’s all there.

This game is fun to play and can be very challenging.
Loki

This game is awesome, I love the speed of it.

Just a heads up, direct2drive is selling another indie bundle that includes AAAAaaA (etc) and is well worth the price: http://www.direct2drive.com/481/8716/product/Buy-Best-of-Indie-Bundle-Vol.-2-Download
http://del_duio.sitesled.com Del_Duio

This should win at the IGF for the title alone.

I too thought of My First Skydiving Academy.. ah, at first.
nobody2

Looks amateur to me. No offense to the rest of the game, but these graphics are obnoxiously bad, beyond parody. It looks like it was done by an old colorbind Luddite hippie whose idea of cyberpunk dates back to old Hollywood virtual reality acid sequences.
Paul Eres

@monster king and @oddbob — that’s one point of fighting games, but there are other reasons to play them. personally i play fighting games because they’re pretty, i play them against the ai, unlock every character, and that’s it, i don’t bother with human opponents unless my brother is in the mood to play against me, which is rare. so for my style of play unlocking features is the entire point.

besides, if you don’t like the idea of having entire characters unlockable, how about alternate costumes? those don’t affect gameplay but can still serve as motivation to play the game. i played through the tohshinden series and the dead or alive series mainly just to see all the various costumes that you can unlock.

also, this idea that if we pay for a game we shouldn’t have to work to get access to everything in it is absurd when applied consistently. should metroidvanias and zeldalikes start you off with every ability and every weapon? should you begin with the highest upgrades of your gun in a shmup? should you start with every piece of equipment and every spell in a rpg? it’s more fun that you have to work to get those things, if you’re given all the features of a game right off the bat there’s very little reason to keep playing the game for longer than it takes to see all the things you start with.
Stephen

If you don’t actually want to play through the game to get anything, why even play in the first place? Should computer opponents just lay down for you to kill them, so that you don’t have to “work” in order to achieve victory? Would the ideal game be nothing more than a “You Win!” cut scene followed by a list of all the trophies you’ve won? I think some of you are more in the mood for movies.

It’s nice to have things to unlock. After I go through the game, overcome the challenges, and finally win, it’s great to see that I’ve unlocked even more content! If that stuff was available from the start, victory would just leave me with a “oh, okay, so I guess I’m done” feel.
Bob

Ax26 is great, but the fact that I can never seem to get five stars annoys the crap out of me, which makes the unlocking system a bit of a pain.

Otherwise, I love it.
Joey Joe Joe

Dejobaan makes some excellent/fun things, and without a string of pretention either, you don’t feel like they are in-accessible to you so to speak.

Inago Rage was retro arcadey joy in a and slick high framerate minimalistic package, epidemic groove was fairly addictive as well. and they even replied consistantly to alot of my emails legitly and sincerely and listened to a few suggestions and whatnot, They even sent me a copy for the reccomendation and showed me screenshots of the implementation aftewards! =D

great people all around.
Joey Joe Joe

Also their games look far better in motion, It’s like trying to judge okami or 2D boy’s work on screenshot alone.
http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber RobF

Oh, Stephen. Don’t be a silly with the win button thing, there’s a love.

I thought I explained clearly enough that what AaAaaA is best at is being a score attack jumpy thing. So, it doesn’t matter if someone is a bit poo at a later level but at least they can register some sort of score and get some enjoyment out of it, rather than it remaining a forever locked cube out of their reach.

Offering the option to unlock this stuff doesn’t hurt anyone does it? You can still play it for unlocks if you want. No-one gets killed, no-one dies but more people get to get something out of it.

Remind me again how more people playing a game is a bad thing, please?

Paul, about your examples – why not add the option in to unlock weapons / abilities / whatever?

Serious question by the way, not sarcastic.
Paul Eres

@oddbob – okay, serious answer:

i don’t mind it being an option, but as a separate thing from the game. through a sandbox mode, or through cheat keys. if it’s a title screen option then that’d take away a lot of the challenge of a game. i mean, imagine if you’re playing good old crystalis and your current quest was ‘find the sword of fire!’. you could just go to the options, unlock ‘sword of fire’, and quest accomplished. that’d be too strong of a temptation for a lot of people, robbing them of the experience of completing that quest.

i know that whenever i’m allowed to cheat in a game pretty easy, i do so: i played baldur’s gate normally until i find a program that allowed me to just give myself any item or set of stats i wanted to; same thing with a bunch of other games. the mere existence of such programs made those games too easy for me, and i’d have preferred if they were as hidden away as possible so i didn’t know about them.

i certainly think such things should exist, and that even in some cases can even improve the play experience by allowing people to get past parts that are especially troubling them, but they also have the danger of destroying the challenge, because most people don’t have the self-restraint to play without them when they’re easily available. and even for those who do have that self-restraint, in the back of their mind they know that it’s not really much of a challenge if there’s a far easier alternative way to solve the challenge, and they’re intentionally doing it the hard, intended way instead of the easy, cheating way.

but i certainly think there’s room for disagreement about this, as i see the virtues of both. i think it really depends on how self-disciplined the players are. like gamefaqs, it’s a good thing for the self-disciplined and a bad thing for those who lack it. i remember square officially requesting that no faqs be written for final fantasy 9 at one time (of course they were ignored), and jon blow making the contents of ‘official walkthrough’ of braid on his site a sentence something along the lines of ‘try to do it without a walkthrough’. i suspect the position of people on this issue depends on how much self-discipline they have.

one middle-range solution is to allow in-game cheating, but only a limited amount of it, like how time f*ck let you skip x levels, and no more.
judgespear

“personally i play fighting games because theyâ€™re pretty”

this is why I never take Paul Eres seriously
Advenith

I’ve been waiting for this one for awhile. I really loved the test version they released awhile back, although the new demo’s stages seem very beginner-focused. Having seen the test version, I know it gets much more complex, but the early stages felt a bit bland because of it. A few more billboards and things in these stages would’ve been nice and added a bit of visual impact. Other than that, I’ve got no complaints, and I can’t wait to buy the full version. :D
nik

The curators and critics have well found their place in these comment pages!
Paul Eres

playing games to stimulate one’s visual field is actually pretty common — that was also the reason i liked out of this world, ico, okami, and many others

and of course i didn’t mean that i play *all* fighting games for their graphics, just most of them. particularly sf4, sf3, tohshinden, dead or alive, and the samurai shodown series. the gameplay in those games is pretty stupid, it’s just button-mashing as robf said, but the graphics make them worth playing at least once, especially as a game developer looking to improve the looks of one’s own games
judgespear

uh, no they’re not. watch videos of people who actually know how to play. if you’re button mashing, then you’re doing it wrong and really don’t know how to play fighting games at all. learn how to piano tap buttons.

watch this for an example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJLTa_eBLAo
megablast

paul eres is a graphics whore
llort

“particularly sf4, sf3, tohshinden, dead or alive, and the samurai shodown series. the gameplay in those games is pretty stupid, itâ€™s just button-mashing as robf said”

Just…

Wow.
John K

They have securely positioned themselves as the alphabetically first game forevermore at the least :P
madrain

I play fighting games for the graphics. I play WAY too many games to spend weeks mastering a single game (exception: Soul Caliber). It’s why I tend to prefer 2D fighters to 3D fighters. Character design is better, and level presentation is lush and beautiful, generally. Some of the more “realistic” 3D fighting games bore me because there’s nothing worth looking at.

I play the demo of Aaaaaaetc. often, but have little incentive to buy. I too wish there were some more ‘story’ and just a little more atmosphere. If there were a ‘night mode’ where things were a lot darker with some neon glowing, like shibuya at night, I’d be there. If meditation mode were an endless fall with randomly placed buildings and no score or dying, I’d be there. As it is, it falls a little short graphically, and the only incentives I see to play are unlockables/achievements, which I care little about, and scoring, which is a mode of gameplay I stopped caring about in the late 80’s.
Anonymous

Wow when did all of the trolls come out of the woodwork.
ZeppMan217

I enjoyed the demo. Bought this game. But the full game is getting too boring after you’ve finished a half of the levels.
joe

i really wish this game didn’t have gameplay or any other game for that matter. it gets in the way of the graphics which in my opinion are the most underappreciated and disrespected part of video games
rmiller

anyone who thinks fighting games are button mashing doesn’t know how to play fighting games. learn how to piano tap buttons, seriously. or better yet, don’t play them at all if you don’t understand them.
rmiller

watch a top tier player like daigo play a fighting game. tell me if that’s button mashing.

better yet, go to youtube and type “daigo hands” and see how you’re really supposed to play.
rmiller

err crap looks like someone beat me to saying the same exact thing.