Hi, creator of Vertigo here! The screen flipping mechanic came from me trying to find something unique to base my map around. Clearly, unique isn't always the right choice :p I'm pretty sure I didn't know gravity flipping was a thing being made at the time of creating the map, but even if I did, I would have stayed with screen flipping regardless. It just seemed like something that would separate the map from others a little more. Regardless, thanks for sharing your thoughts! it definitely let me understand the controversy around Vertigo a little more! And plus, the lead-up to the map's section of the video was hilarious :D
thanks for commenting! whenever I make these types of videos I always worry that people will not take my(sometimes brutally honest) feedback very well, but I'm glad that you took my comments as honest feedback and not as a malicious attack, I often play up my thoughts and feelings of a level for comedic effect and people tend to perceive that as me maliciously attacking a level/creator which is never my intent, I wish you the best in your future map making endeavors, thanks again for your comment!
hey there. when i first played vertigo, i disliked it mainly because jt felt disorienting. my brain disliked it. but when i went back and replayed, i was surprised at actually how good the map is! the gameplay actually flows surprisingly well, and the screen flipping in my opinion is a great choice. it made it stand out, and i loved the mechanic. it was one of my most favourite intermediate silvers.
i kind of liked the disorientation of vertigo, it forced me to trust my muscle memory when completing a room, and contributed to a really cool aesthetic. i understand people’s frustration because in some sense the map’s difficulty feels artificially increased by the disorientation, but on the other hand it is a genuinely interesting way to increase difficulty.
@@luciawdfg regardless, I would say it's too artificial to overall be good. I didn't hate it as much as this guy did, but it certainly wasn't my favorite (so far SJ has been doing a very good job of having difficulty scale nicely and not expect percision from mechanics not meant for it (D-SIDES I WILL HURT YOU VIOLENTLY))
honestly i'm really glad midnight monsoon exists since my first interactions with modded throwable stuff was me getting thrown into the deep end (advanced/expert jelly juggling maps), so I'm midnight monsoon introduces the idea of throwable juggling in an intermediate level.
tho it is really funny that pointless machine was one of my favorite intermediate maps while pufferfish transport co. was one of my least favorite (banger map, I didn't enjoy it). like, most of the intermediate maps that i liked, you disliked and most of the intermediate maps that you liked I ended up disliking. Tho tbf, I gave, like, a third of intermediate maps either a 1/5 or 2/5 rating and the ones you disliked happened to be the ones I happened to like for the most part (except Vertigo, fuck that map in particular).
so, out of some odd sense of curiosity, i decided to see what the average score i gave the intermediate maps was. I fuck you not, it was 2.47/5 Sleeping Under the Stars 1 Frosted Fragments 4 Fifth Dimension 3 Low-G Botany 4 Sea of Soup 1 Vertigo 1 EAT GIRL 2 Honeyzip Inc 3 In Filtration 4 Supernautica 1 The Tower 1 Construction Conundrum 4 Square the Circle 4 Deep Blue 3 Temple of a Thousand Skies 1 Midnight Monsoon 4 Pufferfish Transportation Co. 1 Pointless Machine 4 Raspberry Roots 1 Goddammit.
Its intermediate! Gotta go fast! Yeah supernautica is a reference to subnautica, but it uses the super technique. Ive also heard that theres a grandmaster difficulty room hidden in it, which is what the coral reef in the distance refers to And temple of a thousand skys is named that cos... theres a load of different skys in the background yeah Theres also more than one lore note in frozen fragments, theres a whole storyline
28:44 you might like Mural Skies in the SC2020 advanced lobby (and also Patricia Taxxon's video essay on SC2020, "Celeste's Biggest Mod (And Why It's Interesting)"), if you haven't already played it. As for Pointless Machines, I would say that while it was a little stressful, the process of gradually burning in more and more of the dash pattern into my memory was not entirely ungratifying. It produced a tangible feeling of growth and I gradually built a more solid grasp of the earlier parts of the pattern while working to remember the later parts. I got a similar feeling of smooth progression and gradually building up a route out of Mural Skies, but that map is extremely open-ended with lots of possible solutions (very much in line with what you're describing about why you like Celeste), and if you're capable of reacting as you play then you don't have to memorize anything. I liked the core idea in Pointless Machines, but I am very glad to never play it again. As for how it's meant to be fun - it's a puzzle map. The fun is supposed to be in finding a way to make the given directions work. it's a novel idea, and I'm glad it's been tried, but I don't think it requires further exploration.
I'm totally overeacting about this murder drones mention at 20:50. Funny that this was posted like 2 weeks before ep8 released and please go watch murder drones it Is an amazing show.
I’m quite exactly the opposite when it comes to EAT GIRL and Pointless Machines😭. I hated EAT GIRL and if I remember correctly I activated invincibility mode for the last 2 rooms because I just couldn’t bare it anymore, but I really enjoyed Pointless Machines, it felt really satisfying for me to remember the right moves and figure out where exactly in the room I am supposed to dash.
Eat Girl is based on the indie game Eat Girl, which is based on Pacman but I make the distinction because Eat Girl is good and maybe check it out, it's $5 on Itch IO. Also you hate peak! Awkward! (I think a big part of what makes Pointless Machines so fun is the aha moment as you figure out your role in the contraption. I don't think there's a trial and error element at all as you can route the rooms with a bino, the biggest element to solve is figuring out how to route around refills. It's a cool map in how it kind of inverts the gameplay expectation and forces you to solve the map inside out kinda.) (Also I hated the tower xvi as well but now really like it. Most playable and readable jan map imo.)
Pointless Machine's gimmick is cool, but it doesn't feel well executed. It feels like they're throwing me into the deep end of playing Celeste in a drastically different way, and the "correct" path usually felt pretty awkward to do, lots of just stalling dashings or unnecessary dashes for the sake of a cleaner path. cool to pull off, don't know why anyone would wanna turn Celeste into a partial memory game.
Vertigo is less of a gravity-flipping and more of a teleporting level for me. With screen flips it's really both, the entire screen changes + up is now down. The legally distinct vvvvvv map from beginner lobby only did specifically gravity flips, which meant that you don't need as much time to get your bearings in order and have easier time planning ahead, while in vertigo I feel like there's no reason to bother looking ahead because it will just give you nausea when you get there. I had difficult enough time planning around just teleports and momentum between them. Honestly, I'd hate it if vertigo wasn't a map, the feeling that it invokes is really fitting to its name and unique, but I sure was glad when I was done with it. I'm glad it exists though, it's neat. Both it and pointless machines feel like actual platformer levels to me, which is fun and not baba is you without an undo button. cough cough dropzle.
To be honest I actively disagree on your take about why pointless machines was bad. As someone that didn't enjoy the level much either I think your reasoning about the set path being the main problem kind of simplifies a large chunk of what makes Celeste "Celeste". Many of the rooms in the actually hard levels in the main game are routing heavy, where you also die if you deviate even slightly from the main solution. Most rooms with the C4 moving blocks have this "problem". The reason why I put the word problem in quotes is because it really isn't one. It's a design decision that I don't usually enjoy but it isn't necessarily bad, just catered to a different play style. The part about "striping away problem solving" surprises me because whilst I didn't enjoy the level either it definitely didn't do that for me. Getting a set order of inputs and being asked how to fit them into a room (that seemingly isn't made for them) is inherently about solving a problem. But the part about "memorizing a pattern" I sort off agree. As someone with really bad memory on these sorts of "specific symbol memorization" type things I also hated that part about the map, and I also did turn on the symbol helper at first. Which I think kept me from overcoming the main issue at hand. I was trying to memorize symbols even thought I was supposed to do something I do in any level. Come up with a route. After I stopped thinking about the dash directions as letters to an alphabet, and realized they were player movements just like in any other routing map, it finally clicked for me. I didn't struggle to memorize the inputs anymore because I didn't have to. The only thing I had to do, is to remember when to deviate from the simplest most optimal solution. Which is something you do often in Celeste. Now is the fact that I didn't realize this sooner my fault. No definitely not. The map is bad I agree with that statement, but the main reason for that is (I think) a lack of communication. And also the pacing being bad. It fails to introduce the mechanic at a digestible rate which makes an already confusing mechanic even worse. The map becomes pure trial and error, simply because you are not encouraged (by the map) to think of the inputs as movements (rather than a code). Which results in not being able to realize what you are doing wrong, because every solution seems to be as likely to work as any other solution. I think that is really the problem at the core of the map. It feels like inputting parts of a password into 400 different devices instead of being able to realize that all the devices are all a part of a single pointless machine. Also you are completely correct. The map looks simply awful. (edit: Also now that I think about it, this is sort of a bigger problem than I thought. If the map had better deco it might have helped with the readability of the map, which could have made the correct solution slightly more "accessible" [I guess?]. Just a few simple tweaks to the aesthetic structuring of the level would be able to point the player in the right direction, which could slightly lessen the communication problem of the map.) I know that a substantial part of this comment can be boiled down to "but that's just your opinion man"-itis. But I hope I was at least partially able to articulate what I found disappointing (at best) about pointless machines. Also, feel free to point and laugh at me! I would be honored by that :)
12:05 i believe that coral "secret" is a hint to thr secret room in that map which takes grandmaster level gameplay to get to
not over the city catching strays even from the other lobby videos
Deserved. That map was a BITCH to silver
Hi, creator of Vertigo here! The screen flipping mechanic came from me trying to find something unique to base my map around. Clearly, unique isn't always the right choice :p
I'm pretty sure I didn't know gravity flipping was a thing being made at the time of creating the map, but even if I did, I would have stayed with screen flipping regardless. It just seemed like something that would separate the map from others a little more.
Regardless, thanks for sharing your thoughts! it definitely let me understand the controversy around Vertigo a little more! And plus, the lead-up to the map's section of the video was hilarious :D
thanks for commenting! whenever I make these types of videos I always worry that people will not take my(sometimes brutally honest) feedback very well, but I'm glad that you took my comments as honest feedback and not as a malicious attack, I often play up my thoughts and feelings of a level for comedic effect and people tend to perceive that as me maliciously attacking a level/creator which is never my intent, I wish you the best in your future map making endeavors, thanks again for your comment!
hey there.
when i first played vertigo, i disliked it mainly because jt felt disorienting. my brain disliked it.
but when i went back and replayed, i was surprised at actually how good the map is!
the gameplay actually flows surprisingly well, and the screen flipping in my opinion is a great choice. it made it stand out, and i loved the mechanic.
it was one of my most favourite intermediate silvers.
Dont worry about it, similar to the other comment, I found it pretty disorienting at first but really didnt mind it once i got used to it.
i kind of liked the disorientation of vertigo, it forced me to trust my muscle memory when completing a room, and contributed to a really cool aesthetic. i understand people’s frustration because in some sense the map’s difficulty feels artificially increased by the disorientation, but on the other hand it is a genuinely interesting way to increase difficulty.
@@luciawdfg regardless, I would say it's too artificial to overall be good. I didn't hate it as much as this guy did, but it certainly wasn't my favorite (so far SJ has been doing a very good job of having difficulty scale nicely and not expect percision from mechanics not meant for it (D-SIDES I WILL HURT YOU VIOLENTLY))
Madeling. This intermediate is quite strawberry jam's celeste levels me broke
True!
.
Yes
Stroke a bro had
EAT GIRL is actually based on the game EAT GIRL, truly shocking
Looking forward to the advanced vid, GL on the farewell golden!
honestly i'm really glad midnight monsoon exists since my first interactions with modded throwable stuff was me getting thrown into the deep end (advanced/expert jelly juggling maps), so I'm midnight monsoon introduces the idea of throwable juggling in an intermediate level.
tho it is really funny that pointless machine was one of my favorite intermediate maps while pufferfish transport co. was one of my least favorite (banger map, I didn't enjoy it). like, most of the intermediate maps that i liked, you disliked and most of the intermediate maps that you liked I ended up disliking. Tho tbf, I gave, like, a third of intermediate maps either a 1/5 or 2/5 rating and the ones you disliked happened to be the ones I happened to like for the most part (except Vertigo, fuck that map in particular).
so, out of some odd sense of curiosity, i decided to see what the average score i gave the intermediate maps was. I fuck you not, it was 2.47/5
Sleeping Under the Stars 1
Frosted Fragments 4
Fifth Dimension 3
Low-G Botany 4
Sea of Soup 1
Vertigo 1
EAT GIRL 2
Honeyzip Inc 3
In Filtration 4
Supernautica 1
The Tower 1
Construction Conundrum 4
Square the Circle 4
Deep Blue 3
Temple of a Thousand Skies 1
Midnight Monsoon 4
Pufferfish Transportation Co. 1
Pointless Machine 4
Raspberry Roots 1
Goddammit.
@@snolls105why do you like construction conundrum
"Sorry gay people."
- LarryTheSlime, 2024.
your idea of what makes Celeste fun is literally just breath of the wild, you should try it.
I mean yeah you are kind of right, I have like over 200 hours in Breath of the Wild and its probably one of my top 10 favorite games
@@larrytheslime fair
I am so excited for this, because you used my favorite map in the entire mod as your example for "some were good"
Its intermediate! Gotta go fast!
Yeah supernautica is a reference to subnautica, but it uses the super technique. Ive also heard that theres a grandmaster difficulty room hidden in it, which is what the coral reef in the distance refers to
And temple of a thousand skys is named that cos... theres a load of different skys in the background yeah
Theres also more than one lore note in frozen fragments, theres a whole storyline
1:15 it would make more sense to use raspberries since the heart side is called raspberry roots
and blueberries for beginner lobby
Advanced lobby better be mangoes
28:44 you might like Mural Skies in the SC2020 advanced lobby (and also Patricia Taxxon's video essay on SC2020, "Celeste's Biggest Mod (And Why It's Interesting)"), if you haven't already played it. As for Pointless Machines, I would say that while it was a little stressful, the process of gradually burning in more and more of the dash pattern into my memory was not entirely ungratifying. It produced a tangible feeling of growth and I gradually built a more solid grasp of the earlier parts of the pattern while working to remember the later parts. I got a similar feeling of smooth progression and gradually building up a route out of Mural Skies, but that map is extremely open-ended with lots of possible solutions (very much in line with what you're describing about why you like Celeste), and if you're capable of reacting as you play then you don't have to memorize anything. I liked the core idea in Pointless Machines, but I am very glad to never play it again. As for how it's meant to be fun - it's a puzzle map. The fun is supposed to be in finding a way to make the given directions work. it's a novel idea, and I'm glad it's been tried, but I don't think it requires further exploration.
I'm totally overeacting about this murder drones mention at 20:50. Funny that this was posted like 2 weeks before ep8 released and please go watch murder drones it Is an amazing show.
I’m quite exactly the opposite when it comes to EAT GIRL and Pointless Machines😭. I hated EAT GIRL and if I remember correctly I activated invincibility mode for the last 2 rooms because I just couldn’t bare it anymore, but I really enjoyed Pointless Machines, it felt really satisfying for me to remember the right moves and figure out where exactly in the room I am supposed to dash.
Yeah, Vertigo was ROUGH.
i fucking love squaring the circle
The tower 14 is so bad that its getting referenced even before the video its in, that level was pain lol
who started the gaslight to rename the tower 16 to 14
@@tayashie_ idk thats just what he said in the video and i didnt want to type the roman numerals
Eat Girl is based on the indie game Eat Girl, which is based on Pacman but I make the distinction because Eat Girl is good and maybe check it out, it's $5 on Itch IO.
Also you hate peak! Awkward!
(I think a big part of what makes Pointless Machines so fun is the aha moment as you figure out your role in the contraption. I don't think there's a trial and error element at all as you can route the rooms with a bino, the biggest element to solve is figuring out how to route around refills. It's a cool map in how it kind of inverts the gameplay expectation and forces you to solve the map inside out kinda.)
(Also I hated the tower xvi as well but now really like it. Most playable and readable jan map imo.)
ya the only problem I have with the tower xvi is that it's a yellow expert in disguise and thats not really a part of the map itself anyway
Pointless Machine's gimmick is cool, but it doesn't feel well executed. It feels like they're throwing me into the deep end of playing Celeste in a drastically different way, and the "correct" path usually felt pretty awkward to do, lots of just stalling dashings or unnecessary dashes for the sake of a cleaner path. cool to pull off, don't know why anyone would wanna turn Celeste into a partial memory game.
Vertigo is less of a gravity-flipping and more of a teleporting level for me. With screen flips it's really both, the entire screen changes + up is now down. The legally distinct vvvvvv map from beginner lobby only did specifically gravity flips, which meant that you don't need as much time to get your bearings in order and have easier time planning ahead, while in vertigo I feel like there's no reason to bother looking ahead because it will just give you nausea when you get there. I had difficult enough time planning around just teleports and momentum between them.
Honestly, I'd hate it if vertigo wasn't a map, the feeling that it invokes is really fitting to its name and unique, but I sure was glad when I was done with it. I'm glad it exists though, it's neat. Both it and pointless machines feel like actual platformer levels to me, which is fun and not baba is you without an undo button. cough cough dropzle.
Oh really? It broke you? I’m sorry, try doing it without intermediate tech, then we’ll talk. /j (I’m making a UA-cam video about it lol)
Im sorry for using Intermediate tech in the video about Intermediate Levels 😔
ok now gm lobby without gm tech
@@raslei_ now gm lobby without intermediate tech (gm tech is still allowed)
2:16 larrytheslimersbars
Wanna stop here? Advanced onward is harder than Farewell.
Yippee you uploaded a video again
To be honest I actively disagree on your take about why pointless machines was bad. As someone that didn't enjoy the level much either I think your reasoning about the set path being the main problem kind of simplifies a large chunk of what makes Celeste "Celeste". Many of the rooms in the actually hard levels in the main game are routing heavy, where you also die if you deviate even slightly from the main solution. Most rooms with the C4 moving blocks have this "problem". The reason why I put the word problem in quotes is because it really isn't one. It's a design decision that I don't usually enjoy but it isn't necessarily bad, just catered to a different play style.
The part about "striping away problem solving" surprises me because whilst I didn't enjoy the level either it definitely didn't do that for me. Getting a set order of inputs and being asked how to fit them into a room (that seemingly isn't made for them) is inherently about solving a problem. But the part about "memorizing a pattern" I sort off agree. As someone with really bad memory on these sorts of "specific symbol memorization" type things I also hated that part about the map, and I also did turn on the symbol helper at first. Which I think kept me from overcoming the main issue at hand. I was trying to memorize symbols even thought I was supposed to do something I do in any level. Come up with a route.
After I stopped thinking about the dash directions as letters to an alphabet, and realized they were player movements just like in any other routing map, it finally clicked for me. I didn't struggle to memorize the inputs anymore because I didn't have to. The only thing I had to do, is to remember when to deviate from the simplest most optimal solution. Which is something you do often in Celeste.
Now is the fact that I didn't realize this sooner my fault. No definitely not. The map is bad I agree with that statement, but the main reason for that is (I think) a lack of communication. And also the pacing being bad. It fails to introduce the mechanic at a digestible rate which makes an already confusing mechanic even worse. The map becomes pure trial and error, simply because you are not encouraged (by the map) to think of the inputs as movements (rather than a code). Which results in not being able to realize what you are doing wrong, because every solution seems to be as likely to work as any other solution.
I think that is really the problem at the core of the map. It feels like inputting parts of a password into 400 different devices instead of being able to realize that all the devices are all a part of a single pointless machine.
Also you are completely correct. The map looks simply awful.
(edit: Also now that I think about it, this is sort of a bigger problem than I thought. If the map had better deco it might have helped with the readability of the map, which could have made the correct solution slightly more "accessible" [I guess?]. Just a few simple tweaks to the aesthetic structuring of the level would be able to point the player in the right direction, which could slightly lessen the communication problem of the map.)
I know that a substantial part of this comment can be boiled down to "but that's just your opinion man"-itis. But I hope I was at least partially able to articulate what I found disappointing (at best) about pointless machines. Also, feel free to point and laugh at me! I would be honored by that :)
the superdash puffer move should be called the suffer honestly
Sincerely, #1 the Tower 14 hater
Hear me out
Puper
Tower 14, the little brother of tower 16
consider grounded ultra -> gultra, chained ultra -> chultra, spring cancel -> sprancel. puffer super -> puper fits the pattern
aren't you the 8b golden guy
yes I have been streaming the goldens recently... so yes probably?
grapes are the superior fruit imo
15:50 he dodjin’
Oh, don't worry, I'm currently being broken with Expert, I'm sure you'll have fun with Advanced!
I don’t like soup level because the bubbles are super slow
harold
Based pointless machine hater
I'm sorry for your loss. I just couldn't let him live after he stated that EAT GIRL was good
IT IS GOOD SHUSH
But it is good
:D
It's not that deep