Hey everyone! I was
a top end Touhou player for many years, and a couple of years ago I did an
I Wanna Be The Barrage LP. You might even be familiar with me from one of these things!
Anyway, I've always loved difficult platformers and got a kick out of the original IWBTG when it came out way back when. I revisited I Wanna occasionally for big name games like Fangame, Kill the Guy, and Galaxy, but for the most part have been completely ignorant about all the other fangames out there. Barrage attracted my attention due to all my danmaku experience with Touhou, but it would be more than a year after that before I randomly wandered into one of Denferok's streams via SpeedRunsLive and was exposed to Kamilia 2 and all sorts of other quality fangames. I was inspired to start Kamilia 2 myself, and, well...
I got stuck on the PYF screen for months. Holy shit. I thought I was good but I was no where near ready to deal with Kamilia 2.
Then I got better at fangames and got a better keyboard and now I'm trying to muster up the energy to deal with the massively unfun Gravity Man fight. Joy! In the mean time I've been enjoying some increasingly difficult needle games. I'm currently getting a kick out of Sunbla's new game, and I've got a big backlog of other stuff I need to play through that I picked up from various streams.
Good difficult platforming has become increasingly rare these days, but IWBTG fangames seem like they might provide me with an infinite amount of it. There's lots of very good, careful design out there from mad geniuses like Rukito - previously I always assumed that all fangames outside the big names were bad, haha. I'm glad to have finally broke into this stuff for real. I'm hoping to start streaming my gameplay once I get some other things in my life sorted out, but until then I'm having a blast with these games.