Rating Curve

Tries to fight against its 1.9 limitations rather than working within them.

F Nostalgists is an amazing anti-Dear Nostalgists, taking every concept from that and just flipping it on its head, while still managing simplicity on its own terms.

Side note, Jayuff is so so so good at making levels. He made this in 2019 and it hasn't aged a single minute, he was just so ahead of his time. But where did he find this song lmao

I remember playing Scarlet Surge in the Chaos Gauntlet about 8 years ago and playing it day after day. As a younger kid who was awful at video games, it was exceptionally difficult and took a ton of effort, yet I continued to come back. Why? I can point to many things, from the constantly active, vibrant, pulsing structures that gave the level its unmistakable identity, to the well-crafted gameplay designed to keep you engaged yet still insatiable for more even through the second minute of the level, to the honestly electric, raw, energetic song that perfectly matched what was on screen. Between all of those things, it added together to something greater than what was seen at face value.

So when one of the best creators of the era, someone I considered one of my favorite creators ever, posted a remaster of Scarlet Surge, it should've been a dream come true! That was 5 years ago, and I remember downloading the Scarlet Pulse and pressing play with high hopes. At this point, I had gotten a lot better at the game, so relatively speaking, it should've felt just as challenging to me as Scarlet Surge once did, and therefore just as special of an experience. However, when I ran through the level a few times, all I felt was... indifference.

Indeed, the designs were more detailed, it was much more polished, and it had brand new gameplay more befitting of its new desired difficulty range. But this time, it felt different. It felt as though the soul was sucked from it. The once completely dark background that provided so much to Scarlet Surge's vibrancy and contrast was now just another pulsing unit of the level. Gone was the dual in the original, the most iconic gameplay swapped for something straight out of the featured tab. Bright, vibrant colors that once permeated the level were dulled down, partly to accommodate the new details that were tacked on to make the level more conventionally good. Worst of all, the gameplay could've been extremely fun as a standalone product, but instead was littered with weird transitions and click inconsistencies.

Scarlet Pulse is still a perfectly fine level. I just wish it were so much more.

It's Cataclysm on steroids and is very nice but loses a lot of identity in terms of color scheme. This level just throws a bunch of orange at you and it kind of registers in your brain as mush at the end aside from the piano part. I didn't really like the choice of completely redoing Cataclysm's extremely iconic wave part either, especially when the part they replaced it with is just a bogstandard semi flow part. Also, although this has little to do with the level, Manix calling this a remake of Another Cataclysm to enter it into the GDS CC still leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

Kips mastered color theory a decade ago and we're all just trying to play catch-up.

I actually like the new "bossfight" interacting with the level a lot, but this level is insanely unbalanced and disgusting to play. Also, another case of a solo remade as a megacollab where the worst parts drag down the quality of the best parts, near perfect buildup just for the climax to be a bog-standard gradientxxd part...

Putting Titanium Core inside a collapsing spaceship is ELITEEEE. Ideas are built upon super well, there's significantly less jank. However in this pursuit of aesthetics the gameplay has been swept to the wayside, I would've liked to see the ship breaking down interact with the gameplay more. Also, both of the gimmick gameplay parts are insanely broken and don't work half the time.

I don't think GrenadeOfTacos' usual semi-core style works well for a Decode revision, there's way too much going on at any given point in the level save for like the ball. 0:31 especially is insanely busy to the detriment of the level. There are still some great ideas generated, the spikes in the slow wave being cones is hilarious, and Pennutoh almost always makes really fun stuff.

I understand there wasn't a lot to work with but that just means there's supposed to be a huge base to work with that can expand in any direction. This level just feels like Stalemate got black mold or something.

An absolute atrocity. Insanely inconsistent and annoying gameplay littered throughout the level, with zero indication or care put into it at all, the level genuinely feels like it got 0 playtesting. So surely this means they worked really hard on the decoration right? Nope, they just took Nine Circles, which was already shot in the chest 43 times by all the spinoffs people made, and made it bald. Making the structures pulse is the simplest thing possible and whoever made the first part of the wave didn't seem to get the memo...