YMMV / Progressbar 95

• Awesome Art: Every piece of art in the game, whether it's an icon, a character, or a wallpaper, is guaranteed to look appropriate for the system it's tied to and pretty in some way. It might even look better than actual Windows/Mac systems!
• Awesome Music: The Progressbar 95 theme added in v.0.54 and all its variations is a very catchy song with a simple but friendly melody and a cool techno vibe. Even the bleepy on purpose PB 1 and 2 version can appeal to people who have ever played around with chiptunes or have nostalgia for old PC speakers.
• Breather Level:
  • Matrix levels. There's no distractions like Clippy or pop-ups, and all the segments fall in straight trajectories down the screen. You also get a lot of bonus points for clearing a Matrix level, so just entering one is basically free points.
  • 3D Screensaver levels throw in the screw of segments coming at you from the background which can take some getting used to, but like with Matrix levels, there are no distractions, segments travel in predictable trajectories, and you get lots of points for clearing the level. In short, if you start a level and the screen turns black, enjoy your easy points!
  • Progress Defender, the Tower Defence game mode, is rather easy compared to some of the others. Building three Firewalls at the top of the screen pretty much nullifies the danger of the falling red segments, and Clippy will only do about 10% damage to one before you can close him. Generator towers make it easy to farm blue segments, and even if you accidentally get an orange segment, you can immediately spend it on a tower and still get the perfectionist bonus at the end. There might be some Early Game Hell on higher levels, but aside from that, there's little danger in this mode.
• Catharsis Factor: Clippy, the infamous default Microsoft Office assistant with a penchant for Unwanted Assistance, shows up as a recurring enemy. You could just click his pop-up to make him go away, but why stop there? With the update that adds the Decompiler Gun, you can shoot him to riddle him with checkboxes and radio buttons (this game's visual metaphor for bullet holes) and watch smugly as he begs you to stop.
• Good Bad Bugs: For a short time after Progressbar 1X's release, a pricing bug caused Progessbar 1X and all previous regular systems to cost 2.99$, despite the fact that the preceding offer which includes Progressbar 10 and all previous regular systems costs 17.99$. This post regarding the issue had the devs consider the glitch to be a sale.
• Heartwarming Moments: Visit Progressbar 7 after Windows 7's cancellation and you'll get a message saying "Your Progressbar 7 is out of support! Actually that means nothing... enjoy it!" Since Windows 7 is considered the last good version of Windows for many, seeing it become outdated made them depressed, but Progressbar 7 acknowledging that despite it being outdated, it's still usable felt touching.
• Love to Hate: Clippy's a real nuisance with new ways for him to impede or otherwise annoy the player being added every few updates, which is why many people find him entertaining.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The Floppy disk and HDD sounds, for some. For others, these are annoying. Once you get an SSD, the option to turn the HDD sounds on or off is unlocked for all systems except Progressbar 2000 and lower.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The changes made in Progressbar 1X. You get a radial progressbar with a circular hitbox, which is less wide and taller than a horizontal bar, which would be an interesting change of gameplay. The problem comes from the fact that segments fly from all sides and angles. Because smartphones have a largely vertical screen, segments normally coming from the top are easy to react to. However, this makes it insanely hard to notice segments entering from the sides in time, plus it's likely that you'll be covering those parts of the screen with your finger. You also have to tap on the screen to change the progressbar's segment placement, which is really easy to do on accident and can screw over collecting. This makes Progressbar 1X frustrating to play even on Relax, with players often deciding to play Progress Sweeper on that OS instead. The 0.58 update tried to address it by making the progressbar smaller, but the horizontal screen crunch on a smartphone still makes it nervewracking.
  • Progressbar 11 isn't much better. It uses much of the same UI as 1X, but instead of segments falling down the screen, "Confetti" items spawn stationary on the screen. You might think this is easier since you don't have to keep an eye out on fast-moving objects, but since confetti give comparatively little warning and can spawn right underneath you, it's possible to die to a red confetti that you didn't see. You can play on Hardcore for a more traditional "catch the falling segments" experience, but it uses the angled segments of 1X and, like with Hardcore modes in general, you can't use the three utilities.
  • The Bar OS version of the gameplay for some, especially on higher difficulties. It's surprisingly difficult to track and line up with the moving progress bar, especially on a smaller phone screen.
  • The defragmentation minigame and Progressbar XL can be problematic to play on smartphones, as both suffer from the use of very small hitboxes. For defragmenting, you can easily fail to fix a yellow segment because the game thinks you're tapping in the row above or below the briefly-appearing green segment. For Progressbar XL, you might try to tap an empty space...only to fat-finger the red "13" next to it and die.
  • Progressolitaire doesn't let you stack more than five cards (including face-down cards) in one tableau, meaning that in addition to many deals being Unwinnable by Design, many more are Unintentionally Unwinnable due to this design flaw. Being stuck in an unwinnable state means you have to quit out of the level, which takes away a life. However, there's actually a very small number of random deals, so it's easy enough to memorize each deal. But if you don't know this, it's Trial-and-Error Gameplay.
  • When a Boss Battle begins, your progress bar is set back to the center of the screen...which may put it right in the path of a red segment, meaning you lost all because the game happened to spawn a boss at the worst possible time.
  • When you die, you're forced to try the level again, or try the previous one if you're out of lives. If you want to quit afterwards to the main menus? That takes off another life.
• That One Achievement:
  • Grand, which is unlocked by getting the Grand badge on one system. That requires you to complete 1000 levels on the aforementioned system, something that easily takes up a day or two of continuous play.
  • 50000 DOS Points, which is unlocked by getting more than 50000 points in DOS. To do that, you'd have search for a decent chunk of time, as only bonuses from "BONUS.EXE", "EASTEREGG.TXT", and "UNKNOWN.TXT" actually count. The first one usually gives somewhere between 1000-9000 points, the second gives 3000, and the third has a chance to not do anything, you'll have to find about 10 or more of them, in one session, which is compounded by the fact that many folders are empty.
  • Pink is a new blue, unlocked once you fill an entirely pink progressbar. Pink segments effectively act as negative numbers as you're trying to first change the status to Pink by collecting one at 0% and then get it to -100%, -5% at a time. Getting a blue, orange, or gray segment will reset all progress, which is compounded by the fact that they appear more often than pink ones anyway. Hope that you get 21 pink segments in one perfect run, which is going to take a few minutes at least.
  • NULL, which requires you to fill the progressbar only with grey segments. Take all the setbacks of filling the bar with pink segments combined with the lower drop rate of said grey segments, and you've got quite a difficult task ahead of you.
  • Mission Possible. First, you have to unlock one of the two Progressbar NOT systems, which can take hundreds of hours of gameplay in and of itself. Then you have to set the options in the custom rules option to the most extreme and difficult settings. You then have to play until at least level 7 for the achievement to pop up. This is extremely tough as the amount of red segments is at its maximum, as are popups. At the least you can enter cheat codes to make it easier, but even then you had better hope you haven't entered any recently so that you have three slots free, and even then it's no guarantee you'll do well. You also, because it's hardcore settings in the lowest levels, use any of the power ups like Firewall or Slow Time, either. Good luck!

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