"downvoted". ;)

It is true that lots of voters do not actually answer the question "What this useful?", but in your case I am afraid the voters were right. Personally I did not find your review quite useful because it complains about difficult that to me simply is not there. I am playing 3-1 now and I remember only two cases where I felt the checkpoints too far away and so I had redo the same part an annoying number of times. Still, WHY THERE IS NO SAVE? Or at least the possibility to restart from the last checkpoint?

On the other hand, I understand your pain. I made a review for Trine and I got "trashed," I do not understand why. I described the game, how it works, and why I do not like it much. You might disagree, but it should be useful to understand how the game is before buying. And this is what I tough was the point of the review.


Or maybe for me "Old school" is a compliment since new games tend to be ultra-easy and boring... Here is a piece from another review of JordieoftheVoid2: "The game is quite difficult and suffers from frustrating spikes, especially boss fights. The absolute epitome of trial & error, it won't be difficult to find people who died 50, 60, even 100 times on the last boss, which isn't challenging - it's just plain unfair."
Now, I did not played against the third boss yet, but the first two are totally not unfair. You just need some tries to understand the pattern how they move, how you hurt them and how you have to move... but this is normal. After you understood the boss become easy. What do people expect? To win by pure insight at the first try?

An unfair game would be based on randomness (so there is no pattern) or the boss would be able to counterattack your movements when it is too late to change... For example, if the octopus boss (the second one) would hit random places without any hint of where and so quickly you cannot avoid the boss fight would mean "being in the right stone by pure luck" and it would be definitely unfair. But, until now, nothing like that happened in Giana.

The last boss is really hard to kill. I didn't had any problems with the rest of the game, but I was unable to beat him. The problem isn't that the last battle is unfair, but that it is pretty long and when you do one false move or jump, you will die. I tried to win for some hours, but then fighting the same fight over and over again got frustrating and I gave up. I may return to that boss one day, but right at the moment I don't feel the urge.

But besides the last boss, I don't think that Giana Sisters - Twisted Dreams is a difficult game.

I'm at the final boss now. It IS quite hard!

After trying for about 2.5 hours to beat the final boss, I'm giving up.
I just watched the ending on Youtube and I'm not gonna finish this game (which is something I've never done before with a game).

One reason is the random nature of the boss fight. If you're lucky he doesn't use his fire spire attack for the whole fight, if you're unlucky, he uses it 2 times in a row.

Another reason is that it isn't fun. It's frustrating and repetitive. It doesn't feel like I am making progress and I know that if I beat him I'm not gonna think: "Heck yeah, I did it.", but "Meh, finally got lucky."

And the last reason is that I can't even take a break and return to the boss without having to play the whole final level again. And the final level isn't really hard, just long. I don't know why there isn't a way to just return to the boss itself. Could have easily been a seperate level.

I don't mind trying for an hour to beat a boss and I have a lot of patience with games (I even managed to beat Super Hexagon on Hyper Hexagonest), but this boss... no, just no.

Yup, I gave up as well eventually. Pretty similar feelings as you, only that I spend about twice that time trying.

I completed it on easy difficulty, didn't take but a few tries.

Yes the boss is very random nature, and it's annoying to wait so long for his attacks (maybe it's because that the crumbling platforms have time to come back though).

The thing that always got me was the raining fireballs combined with the homing missile thing.

Just got past the 2nd boss. 49 deaths for the level. Took me five of them just to figure out the trick to dodging the 1-arm swipe. XD

Doesn't help that I'm burning lives trying to work out where all the secret areas are. This game is definitely old school. The only thing that would turn the Nintendo-hard up to 11 would be limited lives (and no, I don't think they should have gone that far. You can keep your Uber-hardmode, thanks. ;) )

I can only stand to play a level or two in a row, but it keeps pulling me back. I love it.

I bought my mother the "Rise of the Owlverlord" on Christmas sale. She loved to play it on C64. But hell! This platformer is ludicrously hard! She can't even pass the tutorial (the part when Maria has to climb up by jumping on owls' heads). I tried my skills with the game too, but I keep failing on the very first level. The pace of the game is way too fast, especially with that swarm of owls chasing you from the very first second of the level. And one tiny error when jumping those platforms and you have to repeat the sequence again. And again and again....In blitz pace. Owlverlord bears more resemblance to "Sonic" than to GS. To me, the new incarnation of Giana is a bloody nightmare. The original Giana wasn't that hard and was much slower paced.

Geminidomino mentioned 49 deaths (!) when fighting one of the bosses... My God. I have enough stress in my work already!

Is "Twisted Dreams" that hard too? :(

Twisted Dreams has has a deceptively gentle start in its first few levels, but then the difficulty spikes up. I suspect that if you're struggling with Owlverlords, you won't get too far in Twisted Dreams without feeling the same way.

Rise of the Owlverlord is the stand alone expansion of Twisted Dream.So Twisted Dream is quite a bit easier. But it still is a hard game overall.

Tell you what, if you can remember the original Giana Sisters, then you are getting too old and must retire. :P

Well, it's been a while since a game caused a CTRL-Alt-Del Shift Delete ragequit :P

Life is too short for the final boss.

I posted some rants about the difficulty level of the sequel, but I bought "Twisted Dreams" some time ago and it seems to be very playable by a casual gamer, to say at least. It's very enjoyable and not overly difficult. There are some tight situations, but it's nothing anyone could not handle.
I have not re-played the beginning of the sequel though as I have not yet finished the first game. I have still so many levels to complete.
What I like about the remake is that I recognise most of the creatures from the C-64's original. Thought I still have not met the bouncing candy nor the bee or the ant. There are many more missing, but I have not reached the end, yet, so I still have hopes for those guys to appear.

If the final boss is so difficult, then point me to a YouTube ending.
You'll spare lots of hours from a fellow man's life and probably increase his (ahem! - mine!) lifespan a lot. ;)