You've probably played Portal. (If you haven't played Portal, for the love of God go play Portal.) Assuming you have, use Portal as a starting point, but instead of a portal gun, you have a marble. And you throw that marble around the world, and it bounces off of things and makes lovely sort-of-physics-based parabolas as it careens off of walls and platforms. And whatever path the marble took, you can then fly along. Need to cross a lengthy gap? Bounce the marble down a long hall and then skip across like a stone over the water. Need to get around an impossible corner? Bounce the marble off a wall so that it makes a similar corner. That's Sphere. In their words, "a puzzler about trajectory transmission."
Here, the video will help.
It's free. It's really clever, and when you figure out a new puzzle you feel pretty brilliant. It runs on Windows or Mac. If you're patient it'll even play in your browser, via Unity. There's really no reason not to try it right now. Go!
So I've spent most of my gaming time lately playing Diablo III, like the rest of the Internet. Yes, it's fantastic. Yes, the online-only requirement is bullshit and a serious mistake. Yes, it's fantastic despite that. Yes, I'm still looking forward to Torchlight II a whole lot.
Oh, I'm also in the Torchlight II beta. I might talk about that soon.
But right now you need to know about Windward, a crazy and cool action game that loads in your browser and sucked up two hours today I really didn't expect it to take. Also, it's free. Everybody likes free.
RockPaperShotgun, as they are wont to do, did a fine write-up over here, but if you just want the short version it is that it's Sid Meier's Pirates! meets HOARD (which I also wrote up and liked a lot). You get a confined map of the ocean, with ports, lighthouses and guard towers ripe for the taking. You get a ship, and some teammates. You're put up against another team that wants to take the same stuff you do. You fight over it for about 10 minutes. Then you do it again.
It would get old fast (and still may get old, given enough time), but the combat mechanic of Pirates! is represented well here, with your slow moving ships playing a game of strategic positioning to try to point your cannons at your enemies without exposing yourself to their fire. A leveling mechanic and offensive/defensive skills with cooldowns add a bit of persistance and depth, though you can only save your ship across sessions if you choose to toss $10 at a pre-order of the final game (currently this is an alpha). Just the free game is plenty fun, though, and since it loads in your browser via Unity plugin, you've got nothing to lose but time.
Here's some gameplay footage.
I ponied up for the pre-order, myself. I love Pirates!, and I want to see where this is going. Look for me on the ocean, if you try it out. My boat, to nobody's surprise, is named "Serenity."
"But the beauty is in the walking -- we are betrayed by destinations." -- Gwyn Thomas
I played a couple of unique games in the last couple of weeks that have made me do a lot of thinking about what we expect from this medium, and what it's well-suited to deliver outside the experiences we've become accustomed to. I'm sure that according to some people, neither of these even qualify as games, as neither has a fail state, neither provides the player with challenge, and neither has victory conditions. If you can't win, is it a game?
Perhaps not. It may be that we need better terminology, and that labeling these "games" is a disservice to gaming, or to them, or both. But they each gave me something that I don't think any other medium is currently capable of providing in the way that they did, and that's notable to me.
The first, Dear Esther, has received a fair amount of attention from the enthusiast gaming press, largely for being a unique experience in which narrative is more important than gameplay. The battle between gameplay and narrative gets a lot of focus in games journalism, usually because game designers often succeed in serving one only at the expense of the other. In that respect, I don't think Dear Esther actually breaks the mold - it simply eschews "gameplay" in the standard sense almost entirely in favor of its story - but the relationship between narrator and audience has rarely been as interesting to me in a game as it is here.
In some respects, it's easy to pass Dear Esther off as nothing but a storybook with moving pictures, or rather pictures that you move through. The player has no influence whatsoever over the happenings on the ruined, abandoned island they're set upon. You'll walk around, you'll see what there is to see, and you'll be told a sad confusing story set to music. That's it.
That's oversimplifying, of course, but not by much. The trappings are remarkable, I'll admit. Dear Esther is one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, and if it were nothing more than a 3D environment looking as good as it does, it would be worth a few dollars to walk through. The musical score is similarly appealing, haunting and mournful. And the narration, while occasionally heavy-handed, is skilled. But in the end, you're just walking through an empty island while a man tells you a story.
But the beauty is in the walking.
Dear Esther isn't just a story - it's a place. A place with nooks and crannies and buildings and caves and cliffs, all of it lovingly crafted and there for you to experience - or not - as you choose. The story is there waiting to reward you the more you look for it. You take it at your own pace. Hear a bit of narration, then stop and listen to the music and think about it for awhile before you move on. Or rush forward because you want to know what happens next. Or skip an area for awhile, but then go back to it even though it obviously isn't the way to progress because you just need to know if you missed anything. I did all three of those at various points in my multiple playthroughs, and found them all rewarding.
"Multiple playthroughs? Why would you play through a game with no gameplay twice?" "Well, why would you read the same book twice?", he asked cheekily. But it is a valid question, and if it didn't have an interesting answer Dear Esther would be little different from an audiobook you listen to while you walk around. But it does: you don't get the whole story when you first play through the game. You don't even get the same bits of story in the same places, when you play through the game again. It's randomized, and honestly I'm still not sure whether I've seen and heard everything there is. I'll have to play through it yet again to see. If you want the story, you have to explore. Persistently and repeatedly. Your engagement has to go deeper than passive consumption, or the game won't give up what it has to offer. There are no enemies to defeat, no test of skill to overcome, but you need to be curious, and interested. If you're done after one time through, that's fine - if you want more, Dear Esther is happy to give it to you, but you need to buy in first. And that's great, and it's something no other medium of storytelling can do quite this way. It isn't the greatest tale ever told, or even the greatest one I've seen in a game, but it captured my attention and my imagination and I want to see more developers experiment with narrative this bravely. Bravo.
The second game, Proteus, has no explicit story at all, but certainly shares the same basic ethos of rewarding exploration. It's still in development (which means you can nab it for a discount, if you're interested), so I can't write about its features as a finished product, but it's basically a random landscape generator with a strong focus on visual and audio synthesis. It makes a world, different every time you play, and you wander through it enjoying the sights and sounds. The end.
It's hard to get much more different in terms of aesthetics than Proteus is from Dear Esther. There is no attempt made at realism here, and the graphics and sounds are intentionally lo-fi, to the point where I imagine they'll be unattractive to some. (Though to the game's perhaps-accidental credit, they remind me strongly of the aesthetic of King's Quest, which is always good for a few free points with me.)
While I stand in slack-jawed awe of the visual beauty of Dear Esther, Proteus' lack of sharp detail also appeals to me. Its landscapes feel dream-like. Unfinished. Imaginative, like something a child would draw when asked to remember a place they walked through. The colors and shapes aren't quite right, but they're wrong in deliberate and creative ways, and the soundscape of the game is consistently pleasant and interesting. I generated 4 different worlds in Proteus, and as I walked around them I watched blocky leaves fall from trees; walked through the rain as clouds passed over me; chased frogs and lightning bugs who continually danced out of my reach; stumbled across abandoned cottages and graveyards and strange stone cairns. At one point, at night (the audible crickets at night are a nice touch), I found a creepy set of statues atop a snowy peak, and as I stood among them the music swelled and the stars distorted above my head to perform an improptu light show for me. Afterwards I descended to the beach below, and watched their reflections twinkle on the sea.
So that's what Proteus is like, and I hope it'll continue to be just that as it rounds out development and nears release - a large collection of pleasant, surprising experiences for you to explore and relate, a little different every time. If it manages to get a multiplayer mode so you can share them with others, that'd be lovely, but I enjoyed it as a solitary experience as well. Was it a game? I have no idea, but I enjoyed the journey. A destination wasn't needed.
There you have it. Neither of these - games? well, whatever they are - will ask you to shoot bad guys or save princesses or score touchdowns or win races. They won't ask you to do anything but participate. Turn out the lights, put on headphones, hop into their worlds for awhile and poke around. Think. Feel. Listen.
I'm really happy that stuff like this is getting made, and I'm excited to see more of it. If you feel the same way, you can try them out for the price of a lunch. Interested? Walk with me.
Oh, this is a treat. Every once in awhile a game just shows up out of nowhere, grabs me by the throat, and won't let go until I finish it. When the game is free, it's even better.
What if I told you that somebody had taken the isometric perspective of Diablo, the sneaky murdering of Assassin's Creed, and the bouncing-madly-between-enemies combos of Arkham Asylum, and blended them all together into one experience? Would you want to play that? I'd want to play that. Good news! We can.
Brought to us by the brilliant students over at Digipen, Deity is "a stealth action game" controlled entirely by use of the mouse. Far from being a simplified or dumbed-down affair, though, it will tax both your brain and your reflexes with its deliberately limited control scheme. There isn't much in the way of plot, but the basics are these: you're a creature of darkness, harmed by light but capable of shifting effortlessly and unseen through shadow. Your homeland's been invaded by legions of enemies, and you need to sneak through an occupied castle to take down their leader. If you have to take down a bunch of grunts along the way, well, there's no harm in that, is there.
Those guards will never know what hit them.
Basic movement is standard Diablo-style click-to-run, but that's a great way to get killed fast, as anyone who sees you on the ground will start attacking you immediately. Luckily, your specialty happens to be hiding incorporeal in the flames of torches, and (like the gargoyles in the aforementioned Arkham Asylum) they're all over the place. Right-click a torch, and you'll jump to it, changing its color and hiding your presence. If there's another nearby, you can jump from torch to torch, covering large distances almost instantly.
This also forms the first half of the combat mechanic; attack a guard from behind from a hidden position, and you'll instantly kill them as well as regain some health. (Claiming a torch for the first time also gives you a health boost.) Attack a guard from the front, though, and you'll take damage. Careful timing is paramount to success.
The second, more interesting half of combat comes from your ability to "chain" together a number of jumps before needing to get back to a safe place to hide. Hold the right mouse button and left-click, and you'll set a chain waypoint, of which you have a limited supply. (Three at first, more as you progress through the game.) Any guard you hit in the chain will be killed instantly, without damage to you, even if you attack from the front. Gargoyles scattered around the level can be incorporated in your chain jumps as well for tactical advantage and extra distance, though you may not rest on them.
Torch > Guard > Torch. One less enemy, and no-one the wiser.
Chains replenish over time, and using a chain triggers a slow-motion effect to help you plan your moves precisely. Any guard left alive after a chain will start attacking you, so isolating and eliminating groups is key. As the game progresses, each level becomes a freeform combat puzzle, working out how to take down the guards without being spotted and killed. Jump to torch. Chain to gargoyle, guard #1, guard #2, and back to torch. Wait for next patrol, then chain to guard #3, guard #4, gargoyle, back to torch. Move on. It feels great when you get the hang of it, and complications like well lit (therefore deadly) areas and invincible winged guards patrolling the halls keep things from getting too repetitive.
Also protecting against repetition is the length, which is very short - really the only negative thing I have to say about the game. It's the work of less than an hour or so on Normal; I haven't tried Hard yet, so it may provide more of a challenge, but the boss fight at the end was twitchy enough on Normal to make me less than eager to find out.
If you'd like to see how it looks in action, well, here you are:
Regardless of its brevity, I can't recommend downloading Deity enough. Creative, slick and satisfying, it brings to mind some of my favorite games while still being a little different from anything else I've played this year. Digipen frequently delivers stuff worth checking out (remember Igneous? If you never played Igneous, go check that out too), and this is a great example of what they can do at their best.
Deity is...
a great implementation of stealth gameplay in an isometric perspective.
fast-moving and challenging with extremely simple controls.
further proof that Digipen is a force for good in the world of gaming.
over too quickly, but it speaks well of it that I want more.
A little less than 200MB for the installer, Windows only; pick it up here.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
First of all, if you've somehow never made your way to OCRemix, head on over right now and lose hours of your time. There's some truly fantastic work available there, all for free. Every flavor of musical interpretation you could ask for, from chiptune to big band to slow jazz to heavy metal.
Right now, though, I want to call your attention to "25 Year Legend", the album they've just released in honor of the 25th Anniversary of The Legend of Zelda.
I've loved the Zelda series for about 20 of those 25 years, and the overworld music from Link to the Past has a permanent spot in my heart as the most iconic videogame song ever written. It's just a magnificent piece of music.
"25 Year Legend" includes new takes on songs from Link to the Past, Link's Adventure, Ocarina of Time, Link's Awakening, Wind Waker, Majora's Mask, and the newest game Skyward Sword, written by a very diverse group of composers. Not every song on it is an out-of-the-park hit, but it's a delightful variety, an obvious labor of love, and free. If you have any affection for videogame music, please, go check it out.
It's been awhile since I've done a Free and Worth Every Penny installment, but Halloween seemed an excellent time to resurrect this feature (see what I did there? ...sorry), and I can't think of a better way to do it than with my favorite type of freeware: a retro-themed, hard-as-nails side scrolling platformer. Welcome to...
This is as straightforward as they come, folks. You're intrepid hero Jackie Gun. (Yes.) It's Halloween, and you're trapped in a graveyard with a bunch of ghouls, ghosts, spirits, specters, and so on. Help five trapped friendly Caspers escape from their imprisonment, and you'll be free to leave. Go.
If you don't feel like reading, the trailer is going to tell you 90% of what you need to know. Take a look.
Yes, that is Vampire Killer from the Castlevania series playing in the background. It also plays in the game, constantly. Ordinarily, I might rankle a bit at having music ripped from a commercial series plopped into a freeware title, but being as this is a clearly themed homage and Vampire Killer is some of the best videogame music of all time, I'm gonna let it slide. If it bothers you, you won't miss much by turning the volume down.
The gameplay is extremely barebones (heh. bare bones. on Hallow-- sorry again), giving you no more options than you'd expect if you were playing this on the Gameboy it's built to resemble. You can run, jump, and shoot. That's it. No items to collect, just coins for score and the extremely rare health pickup. No areas to unlock. Just one big map, a whole lot of enemies, and you.
There are some secret areas, though, which is a nice touch.
For all its simplicity, it's pretty brutal. You can take five hits before you're done for, that's all. No continues, no checkpoints. You clear this puppy in one try or you start from scratch. And you'll only find one of those precious health pickups when you free one of the five hidden spirits, so don't count on them to save you. Luckily, the game controls well and enemies telegraph their attacks and move in patterns, so it really is just a matter of learning what to expect and then executing well.
Still, you'll see the Game Over screen a lot. It isn't a terribly long game - it's all one interconnected map, no branching paths or doors - so that's a frustration I can deal with, but I certainly would have appreciated a checkpoint after saving each spirit, or at least an Easy Mode with that option. What can I say, I'm getting soft in my old age.
This is not a game trying to hide its influences.
There are a couple of minor gameplay problems that need mentioning. Hit boxes are a little bigger than you think they are at first, leading to some initial frustration as you learn how much room you need to give enemies. You need to press X every time you want to fire, which led to me getting out Pinnacle Game Profiler and setting up a rapid fire profile pretty quickly.
For all the minor kvetching I'm doing, though, I had a good time with 8-Bit Halloween. Lionsoft has put together a tight, fun little side scroller with pleasing Gameboy-inspired visuals, classic music, and well-worn but reliable mechanics. Just the thing to burn through on a late night as the last trick-or-treaters ring your doorbell. Happy Halloween, everybody!
8-Bit Halloween is...
a game that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve. And steals its music outright.
still creative enough in other ways, with challenging level design and an amusingly silly, intentionally throwaway conceit.
maybe a little too happy to kill you, but that's kind of in the spirit of the holiday, isn't it?
probably largely forgettable, but worth a spin if you want a little retro Halloween gaming.
BONUS FOR READING THIS FAR! This is not free, but man is it close and it's totally worth every penny. The Humble Indie Bundle is doing something new: you can get in on the alpha (and all subsequent versions) of the incredible-looking top-down shooter Voxeltron by paying any amount you want! You should do this. Because it's great.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
So, it turns out the game I wanted to write about was waiting literally right around the corner. Which is not to say that I haven't played a lot of good indie titles in the last couple of months - I have, and a few of them I'm hoping to record a podcast about real soon. But they're also getting a lot of coverage elsewhere; this one, I didn't hear about anywhere until I was watching the trailer and then buying and playing the game.
I should be up front before I start talking about it: I have a thing for rhythm games. I'm not particularly good at rhythm games, especially Dance Dance Revolution-style ones (which will be ironic in a minute), but I find them fascinating and deeply satisfying to play, even on the low and medium difficulty settings that I usually end up stuck at.
Sequence is a rhythm-based jRPG. You can view the trailer at the linked Steam page, but I'll embed it here as well for your convenience.
You'll notice watching the trailer that the developer trades on their sense of humor a bit, and that definitely comes through in the game's writing (a blessing in my book, because if there's anything I don't want to do it's play a taking-itself-too-seriously jRPG). But it's the game's mechanics that set it apart from anything I've played recently, so that's primarily what I want to talk about.
As you can gather from the video, this is "Rhythm RPG" the way Puzzle Quest is "Puzzle RPG", in that they've taken an existing tried-and-true gameplay genre (DDR-formula pattern matching) and tossed an RPG layer on top of it. Honestly, for $5 I probably would have been pretty happy with that, especially given that the music is catchy and the story at least marginally compelling. But the battle system they've devised hooked me enough to pull several hours from my schedule in the last 24 that I really didn't have to give it, and it deserves explanation.
You don't play this DDR clone on one note track, you play it on three. One is your defensive shield; miss a note here, and you'll take damage. Another is your mana generator; there's no penalty for missing notes on this panel, but every note you hit generates a bit of mana, used to fire off spells. The third is for successfully casting those spells; every time you want to attack (or heal, or use any of the other abilities you gain throughout the game) you'll need to succeed at a note sequence. Mess it up, and the spell fails, wasting the mana for it and making it inaccessible until it recharges.
This fairly simple division of the combat into three unique tasks means you're always splitting your time as a strategic resource, trying to figure out which panel is going to give you the greatest reward. You don't want to ignore the defensive panel or you'll start taking heavy damage, but if those notes come while you're trying to pull off a spell in the casting panel, that's a tradeoff you might make. You'll spend your downtime in the mana generator building up your reserves, but ending a battle faster increases your XP multiplier at the end so you don't want to burn too much time there. It's constantly engaging without (so far, a few hours in) ever becoming too frantic to handle, and it's based on solid rhythm game mechanics that I already enjoyed anyway - combined, it's a huge win.
The story's alright. I can't say I'm exactly engrossed in it, but the writing has moments of genuine wit, the voice acting is pretty decent, and the character art has some personality, in a "this is an anime-styled jRPG" sort of way. The whole thing is aesthetically pleasing, really, through visuals and music both. The RPG mechanics outside of combat are what you'd expect: level up through battling to increase stats; craft items, weapons and armor using drops from your enemies; grind your way through a level to get the necessary ingredients to proceed; repeat. So much so boring if the combat itself wasn't fun to do, but I had enough fun grinding through battles last night to completely lose track of time, so I'm not knocking it for that.
And it's $5. Five dollars. Less than that if you get it while it's on special on Steam. It's crazy - literally insane - to think that Duke Nukem Forever released at ten times the cost of this game (though of course you'll be able to find that one in cereal boxes soon enough). Go check it out. Sadly there's no demo at this point, but again. Guys. Five bucks. I love you, indie developers.
I've let this place get a bit dusty, haven't I. Sorry about that.
Life got a little crazy over the last couple of months - well, crazier than usual, it's been a crazy year - and I just haven't felt much like writing about games. I've still played a few, and managed to knock out a couple of podcast episodes over at Immortal Machines, including an interview with the writer of Bastion that I'm really proud of. (Bastion is utterly fantastic, by the way, and if you haven't played it, you should. It will undoubtedly end up in my list of the year's favorite games.) More of that's on the way, I hope - I'm working my way through the last part of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and want to record an episode all about that; also, there's been a weird surge of indie tower defense variants that I want to do an IndieCast about.
But there hasn't been much writing, and I do feel bad about that. Like exercise, it's a habit that can be hard to restart once you've let it lapse, and it seems to get harder the longer you let it go.
There's a lot of big AAA titles right around the corner, of course - Battlefield 3, Skyrim, the PC version of Arkham City, the PC version of LA Noire - and I may wind up having something to say about those. Torchlight II continues to torture us with its lack of a release date, but they seem pretty adamant that it'll be out this year, so by definition it must be coming soon. It's been a very good year to love games, both small- and large-scale.
You know what I've actually been playing this week, though? Mage Gauntlet on my iPhone.
I don't talk much about iPhone games on here, maybe because I feel like they get covered pretty well by the internet at large already; between TouchArcade, SlideToPlay and following the right folks on Twitter it's hard to miss a good release (and there are so many that I could never keep up). In fact, even with Mage Gauntlet, rather than try to review it I'll just point you to the review over on STP, because it says pretty much everything I would. It's a game that'll hit a really sweet spot for anyone with fond memories of 16-bit action RPG's, but I think it's worth checking out for anyone with an iDevice. I will leave this trailer here for you to check out, because everybody loves trailers.
So if you've got an iPhone, iPad or other iThing, I can't recommend that enough. Check it out; it's on sale through Sunday. The other games by Rocketcat - Hook Champ, Super QuickHook and Hook Worlds - are also great fun, though in a totally different vein.
I could write a huge post about all the iPhone games I think are genuinely great, and how as a platform I think the iPhone really is leaving Nintendo and Sony both in the dust, much as I love my 3DS and its predecessors. At some point perhaps I'll do that. For tonight I just wanted to get the site out of mothballs and post something. Hopefully I'll have more offbeat freeware and indie stuff to talk about soon. Have a good weekend, everyone.
Don’t stop running. Don’t look back. That ship is behind you, it’s always behind you and it’s always getting closer. If you stop, you’re done for. I don’t know what they do to people in those ships but I know I don’t want to be in one. Don’t stop running. Keep moving. <switch.> Take those turns tighter, you’re slowing down every time you go around a corner! How many creatures are chasing me? It was four, but I think it’s five now. Can’t spare the time to check; if one of them catches me it won’t matter. Don’t hit the spikes. Don’t slow down. Keep moving. <switch.> The last jump was impossible, yet here I am on the other side of it. Don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down! Gotta keep moving up. The exit is somewhere up there and the fire below me isn’t going to put itself out. Just thirty or forty more impossible jumps to go. Easy, right? Keep moving!
Another Ludum Dare competition (the 48 hour game dev marathon from which we’ve pulled several of our previous featured games) is in the voting stage, this time with the theme of “Escape.” It was initially my intention to do a round-up of some favorites for you to check out this week, but then I realized that there are almost six hundred entries to this round of Ludum Dare(!), and I spent all morning Sunday playing Flee Buster. As soon as I’m done writing this, I’ll probably be going back to play it some more. [Edit: Actually I just kept playing it while I was writing.] So I guess I’d better just tell you about that one, and call it a success.
ChevyRay’s take on “Escape” is a pulse-pounding tale of three very different characters in terrible peril. In the first, a man flees from the tractor beam of a giant spaceship, running and jumping through traditional platforming levels as fast as he can. The second switches to a top-down maze of tight corridors where a tiny ship must navigate around deadly spikes and evade an ever-increasing number of pursuers. The last mimics the final level of a Metroid game (or, if you prefer your game references a bit more casual, Doodle Jump, I suppose), as a nimble frog leaps higher and higher out of the grasp of a rising flame.
These guys really need your help.
On their own, any one of these three would be a suitable diversion, but probably nothing terribly special. They’re solidly designed levels with the same sort of muscle memory appeal that games like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV have - you can feel yourself getting better at them each time you fail and try again - but it wouldn’t be nearly so compelling without the hook. Flee Buster’s hook is that you only control each of these characters for a few seconds at a time.
In addition to the time pressure of being chased and needing to constantly press forward while avoiding each level’s hazards, a tiny bar at the bottom of the screen measures the time you’ll have to control each scenario. When it runs out, you’re thrust immediately into the next one, no matter what’s going on at the time. (It will, mercifully, let you land if you’re mid-jump when it runs out.) This means that at any given time you’re not just thinking about the character you’re controlling; you’re thinking about the one you’re about to control. And you’re thinking about leaving the one you’re controlling in a safe position so that once you’re done controlling the third character and you come back to this one, you’ll be ready to proceed. It’s a maddening, slightly insane loop, and it’s great. The need to think contextually about three characters while reacting to the immediate circumstances of one adds just enough complexity that the game feels a bit cerebral as well as reflex-driven, making success that much more satisfying.
I hope you like this screen. You'll see it a lot.
Of course, success will be hard to come by, should you come by it at all. Flee Buster is tough, and will sometimes punish you in ways that feel unfair. A single mistake with any one character means game over for all three, and while the game is short by design it does mean that you’re pretty much going for a perfect run, and only that, right from the start. There are tokens strewn along the path in all three levels, which serve as a scoring mechanism, but I can’t imagine any but the most dedicated will want to replay the game to get them all after completing it with less than 100%. There’s also a noticeable disparity in the amount of player agency in the three scenarios: the top-down ship level has enemies you can “trick” a bit, and power-ups to pick up that buy you extra time, while the side scrolling and vertical jumping levels rely solely on perfect platforming. That's not really a complaint - they’re designed to be different - but it would have been nice to see more depth in the precision platforming sections.
Still, for a free game designed over the course of 48 hours, those are absolutely negligible issues. Flee Buster is a tight, addictive experience that requires nothing but your web browser and some free time (though I did end up using a gamepad, as my skills with the arrow keys aren’t what they used to be), and you should definitely check it out. The aesthetics are effective but very simple; this one’s all about the gameplay. Congratulations to ChevyRay for knocking out a very solid little game with a clever concept in almost no time at all; I wish him luck in the competition!
Flee Buster is...
a tightly controlled, clever mix of several classic gameplay styles.
extremely unforgiving, but fast and short enough that it usually doesn’t feel punishing.
stressful; it develops a surprising amount of tension in a very short period of time.
a game I will probably never 100%, but I will beat it. So help me, I will.
Maybe you will too. Flee Buster works everywhere Flash does, so head on over to ChevyRay’s website and find out!
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
I tossed up links to this stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc etc, but it certainly merits a mention here as well: last week saw the release of some really great Indie RPG's, for prices that can only reasonably be called stupidly low.
Dungeons of Dredmor is a game I've been looking forward to for months, after interviewing the developers on the Immortal Machines podcast back in February. David and Nicholas from Gaslamp Games were hilarious to talk to, and it was clear that they wanted their quirky sense of humor to be front and center in their game. I'm pleased to say that from my first few hours with the game they certainly succeeded; Dredmor plays like a combination of Nethack, Quest for Glory and Monty Python, and that's a pretty brilliant blend. It's remarkably user-friendly for a roguelike, but it'll still kill you at the drop of a hat. Oh, and it's less than five dollars. So there's that.
Here's the trailer. Give it a look, and if you like it, your money will be well spent.
The other two started life as releases on XBox Live Indie Games, but just showed up on Steam for even less money than Dredmor: Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World. Very much also in the "comedy RPG" genre, they play like classic Final Fantasy styled 16 bit RPG's, only funnier. I haven't spent much time yet with Cthulhu Saves the World, but here's the story pitch: the mighty Cthulhu awakens after eons of slumber, ready to rain madness and terror upon the Earth. Then a wizard curses him and steals all his powers, and the only way he can get them back is to become a hero. If he wants to destroy the world, he needs to save it first.
That kind of sells itself, doesn't it?
Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World can be had together in a bundle pack for under three dollars! If you're even remotely interested there's pretty much no reason not to do this.
The best news is, to listen to the blogs and Twitter feeds of the developers, they're having huge success on Steam with these absurdly low prices. They've consistently been near the top of the best sellers list since release, and it seems like the whole thing has exceeded their expectations. I wish them the best; this is precisely why I love the indie scene so much.
I'll leave you with the very amusing trailer for Cthulhu Saves the World - if you want to see the Breath of Death VII trailer too, it's here.
As I'm sure you noticed by the title of the article, I am abusing my column's purview a little bit this week, and writing about a game that is not strictly freeware. You can download it for free, and at the very least you should absolutely do that, because it's brilliant. But it's technically a "pay what you want" affair, which means developer Joost van Dongen is hoping you'll like it enough to cough up a few dollars, and if you do he'll give you a little extra content as part of the bargain. I'm hoping you will, too, and I'm here to tell you why. So what am I asking you to buy?
...Not a terribly evocative name, I'll grant you, so some preliminary explanations are in order. Proun is, first and foremost, a racing game. It is also a pattern recognition game, but the primary objective is getting to the finish line as fast as possible, preferably before your opponents.
You may notice it looks a little different from most racing games.
The method by which you accomplish that, though, is likely a bit of a departure from most racing games you've played. Gone are collisions with other racers. Gone are drifting and tight cornering. You are locked solidly to a predetermined course, and the only task before you is to avoid the obstacles in your way as you speed down the track.
It will still be some of the most difficult racing you've ever done.
Before I talk more about the mechanics, though, I want to gush for a moment over how absolutely stunning Proun is. Frequent readers of the column know that I'm a sucker for simple, clean, stylized art, and I think Joost's work here is nothing short of marvelous. The world of Proun is built from entirely abstract structures that never stop being fun and playful while they ruin your perfect run and draw strings of obscenities from you as you hit restart yet another goddamned time. Everything looks elegant, clean and graceful, as though Joost had taken the aesthetic of Mirror's Edge, stripped it down to its even more bare elements, and crafted a racing game from the pieces. The little touches and bits of polish aren't skimped on, either, with the way it can handle a near-infinite number of transparent ghost racers for you to compete against on future runs, or the way your racing ball "de-rezzes" a bit when it gets too close to an obstacle.
And the music! Oh man, the music. Tell you what, let me just show you some video, because you need to see this thing in motion before I talk about how it plays.
Right, so, the mechanics. As I'm sure you gleaned from the video, you're locked to a cylindrical track that never branches off - it simply runs straight from the start to the end, with you and your opponents along for the ride. The landscape / obstacles (one and the same, really) sit attached to the track, forcing you to constantly swing around it to avoid them as you hurtle onwards. The less you swerve, the faster you go, so keeping to a straight racing line benefits your time... but the faster you go, the harder it is to see what's coming and avoid it.
As I said in the introduction, it does become a bit of a pattern recognition game, especially as you reach the higher speed levels of the game (there are four, starting at "Fast" and going up to "Speed of Light"), but the patterns are consistent, recognizable and fun. Sometimes, making tight 360 degree rotations around the cylinder will get you past a set of obstacles; sometimes a tight slalom is required. Since you can't collide with your opponents, your only real enemy is the track, and beating the track yields immense satisfaction.
Oh yeah, also, split screen local multiplayer.
If I have to knock the game for anything, it's only the things I wish it had that it doesn't. I'm not sure how online multiplayer would work out in a game requiring such twitchy reflexes, but I do wish it had it. And Mr. van Dongen's website and highscore servers have been a bit crushed by the game's popularity, requiring him to issue a patch for it temporarily taking out the highscore functionality (and the website linked for the game is a temporary one, Proun-Game.com being down).
Still, what's here is fantastic, and I haven't even gotten around to trying the user-made levels. According to the between-level info screen, this project represents six years of Joost's spare time, and he's selling it for whatever people think it's worth. Including nothing, but really, it's worth a fair chunk more than that. But don't take my word for it. Go find out for yourself.
Alec Meer over on RockPaperShotgun has this to say, and I don't think I could put it much better, so rather than the standard bullet list here I'll let him sum up:
Quote:
It’s (very) short and simple and pretty much only does the one thing, but it makes me want to use silly superlatives such as ‘life-affirming.’ I’ve felt like I’ve been in a bit of a games black hole this last couple of weeks, because I’ve only played the so-so likes of Dungeon Siege 3, Alice 2 and Duke Nukem 4. They’ve all got something to recommend them (and, to varying degrees, the opposite), but they didn’t exactly fill me with THE WONDER OF VIDEOGAMES. Proun does.
Proun is Windows-only and carries a hefty (compared to most things we write about here) 330MB footprint, but it's worth every byte and every penny you choose to give it. Go race.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
As an unapologetic fan of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, I was a little disappointed - though not particularly surprised, I suppose - to hear that On Stranger Tides is apparently one of the weaker of the four films, and not worth rushing out to see for its opening this weekend. Still, seeing as the world does not appear to have ended, we all need something to do, so let me suggest that you discard one nautical adventure for another. This one won't take as long as seeing Johnny Depp yearn to be in a better film, and will cost you considerably less.
Originally submitted as an entry in Ludum Dare 19 (theme: discovery), The Wager is a randomly generated exercise in risk and reward, placing you on a Sid Meier's Pirates!-esque ocean map and challenging you to rip as much profit from it as possible in a limited timeframe. As per the title, your arch-nemesis Sir Lester Marwood has entered into a gentleman's wager with you: each of you has a year to explore as far as you can, hopefully bringing back holds full of loot and valuable information to sell. Whichever of you manages to bring back more than the other will get the spoils of both. The game is on. Set sail!
This island could hold plunder, or peril.... is it worth the time to explore it?
A bit similar to Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and other randomized, short-form map exploration games, The Wager populates its map with islands full of treasure and trouble for you to discover, and lets you choose where you'll invest your limited time. The actual core gameplay mechanic couldn't be simpler: when you come across a new island, you are given a prompt telling you how long it would take you to explore it. If you choose Yes, that number of days are counted off and you gain the benefits (and potential consequences) of your exploration. If you choose No, you keep sailing. Repeat until out of time.
Of course, that alone would quickly comprise a recipe for tedium even in a very short game, so a few other subtle choices and constraints are presented to keep you on your toes. A diminishing "supplies" meter and an increasing "disease" meter limit how long you can remain at sea without visiting a port. You can pay to upgrade your ship and mitigate these concerns, of course, but then that's money you won't have in the final scoring. Returning to your main port will also let you sell information about the islands you've visited, which will cause them to be colonized and turn into ports themselves which you can use on subsequent sailings. Whether you choose to spend your precious time and early earnings on investments in hopes of maximizing your future profits (or stockpile right from the start and hope for the best) will impact your bottom line... and at the end of the year, that's all that will matter.
Coal! Nice. Don't know about that offer, though....
There's no question that in large part The Wager gets by on quirky charm rather than deep gameplay, but it has a lot of that charm to spread around. Random events like the one depicted in the screenshot above throw some tricky wrenches into the works mid-game, and are fun to read even if they really boil down to a 50/50 chance of helping or hurting you. (Just wait until you meet Mr. Crackers, the Wonder Parrot.) The dastardly Sir Lester Marwood regularly sends you correspondence evaluating your progress, and his snide tone greatly increases the satisfaction of soundly thrashing him. Oh, and the music is great, perfectly fitting the "adventure on the high seas" theme and routinely calling the Monkey Island games to mind.
Considering that the game was originally developed in 72 hours (the limitation on all Ludum Dare entries - from their site you can download the LD version or an expanded one, which is the one I played), I'm really impressed with what Peter Silk and Kieran Walsh of Surprised Man put together here. It's straightforward, it's funny, it has 3 difficulty settings to pit yourself against, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. Bravo, gents. More like this, please.
The Wager is...
charming and clever without being complicated.
clearly inspired by games like Sid Meier's Pirates! and Monkey Island, which is worth a lot of points with me all by itself.
not much more than a diversion, but a very pleasant one.
the most piratey fun you can have this weekend for free.
Windows only, about 15MB. Pour yourself a glass of rum and take it for a spin.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
The Free and Worth Every Penny column is no stranger to games designed with an intentionally "retro" aesthetic. Some of the best titles I've written up for this feature have looked like classic SNES, Nintendo, or even Gameboy games. But I'm not sure I've done one yet that looks like it could be at home on the Atari 2600. What a pleasant surprise that one of the simplest visual experiences I've had in years earns its place so confidently among the others. Welcome to Tottenham.
Quite different from the side-scrolling action or Metroidvania-styled adventures referenced above, Tottenham is a bare bones arcade game - a little bit Qix, a little bit Asteroids... maybe even a little bit Yars' Revenge, for anyone who gets that reference. Taking a simple concept and combining clever, varied level design with the need for careful planning and twitchy reflexes in equal measure, Theta Games has produced a unique pleasure: a genuinely new game that feels like it should be old.
Pretty, isn't it? Now blow it up.
The simple concept is this: you need to connect point A to point B. Every level has a green square where you begin, and a red square where you must end. In between... well, in between there could be a lot of things. Most of the levels contain a maze of black and colored lines and squares that you'll need to clear a path through ("I was inspired by the mosaics of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (installed at the Tottenham Court Road London Underground station) to make this game," says the designer). Some of the levels will also have enemies, that may move at random or may chase you. The final level... well, I'm not going to spoil that for you. It's something different.
The catch is this: you can only make your way through the level by causing explosions, and you're terribly fragile. Every projectile you fire, if it hits something solid, will fling debris in all directions, including back at you. You need to not only be outside the blast radius when one of your shots hits, but also out of the trajectory of any shrapnel that may come your way. And since this debris itself, once settled, becomes the new layout of the level, you could end up trapping yourself in a corner if you aren't careful, or blocking a previously clear part of the path from green to red you need to create. It's a great mechanic - slightly random but never feeling unfair - and, when combined with enemies you need to avoid and eliminate, leads to some wonderfully frantic moments in an otherwise peaceful game.
Boom. One step closer.
The visual aesthetic is a matter of taste, obviously, but I love the simple beauty of the levels, especially after looking at the inspirations that led to them, and the fact that the player deforms the level as they play lends the whole thing a sort of procedural art feel that I more often associate with music games. Speaking of music, the soundtrack is pleasant, if repetitive, and the game is short enough (under 30 minutes, for me) that I never wanted to turn it off. Controls are as straightforward and tight as they can be, and would indeed work on an Atari 2600 joystick: arrows to move, spacebar to fire. I played through the game once using the keyboard, and once with a gamepad after mapping the keys, and found it equally enjoyable either way.
I don't have much of anything negative to say about Tottenham, honestly, other than that I wish there were more of it. I would happily have played through another 20 levels of this, and if Theta Games wanted to make more and charge some reasonable amount for them, they'd have my money. It scratched an itch not many games scratch these days, unless you're playing something like Space Invaders on an emulator, and did so thoughtfully and with style. Recommended without hesitation.
Tottenham is...
a throwback title that recalls a simplicity of play few games capture well.
comfortable in its own skin, never branching too far from a small, simple set of mechanics.
inspired by endangered London Underground artwork, and honestly, how cool is that?
a game I expect I'll go back to many times, and suspect some of you will too.
This tiny 5MB download is sadly Windows only, but should run great on just about any machine (or, I imagine, in WINE or on an Intel Mac running Parallels / Windows). Don't wait: go get it now.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
Last week, Mike and I discovered that we had both been looking at the same game with an eye towards writing it up for this feature. Naturally, it only made sense to tag-team it, so we hopped on Skype late at night, and Free and Worth Every Penny After Hours was born. This will be an occasional variant on our standard format; we talked, we wrote down what we said, you get to read it. We hope it's informative, or at least amusing.
Eric: ...We are now theoretically recording words. I’m going to verify that. Mike: Okay. Eric: You can never really trust these things. Mike: Computers are not trustworthy. Eric: No. They are built to deceive us.
Eric: We are in fact recording, or so says the file. Mike: Alright. Rad. So. Eric: So. Mike: You like video games, right? Eric: I like video games. Mike: Do you like to play them? Eric: I do. I like to play free video games. Mike: Do you like to play free video games that are called Sky Island? Eric: Well, I only know of the one. Mike: The one. But have you played it? Eric: I have! Well, I haven’t played all of it. I’ve played through level seven. Mike: I don’t know what level I’m on, but I got stuck. I eventually figured it out. This game is kind of a mind-fuck, would you say? Eric: I would say that it’s a little weird. I’m a bit frustrated right now. I’m playing it while we’re talking… Mike: As am I. Eric: ...so there will be moments where this conversation either stops or makes no sense or who knows. I don’t at all like the combat mechanic. In fact, I think it’s really terrible. Mike: And by combat mechanic you mean the "getting the dudes over the little moon icon"? Eric: Right. Right. So we should probably talk a little bit about the mechanics of the game first.
Eric: Sky Island is kind of like a poor man’s Fez. Mike: I’ve seen some screenshots of Fez, so I feel like I know what it’s all about. But, what’s Fez all about? Eric: Well, Fez and Sky Island are both two dimensional puzzle platformers where you control a little dude who’s running and jumping left and right, up and down on a bunch of... well, platforms. And your running and jumping interaction with the world is entirely in 2D. Where the puzzle element comes in – in Sky Island this is done by clicking and dragging the mouse and in Fez, I dunno, cause I haven’t played Fez – essentially you can freeze time and rotate the world. Mike: So this game operates on 4 planes, do you know if Fez does or is it more than that? Eric: I think Fez is thirteen dimensional? I don’t know.
Eric: This is actually a little funny, and a little weird, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I heard about Sky Island over on the Indie Games Blog at indiegames.com; they wrote it up as one of their browser game picks – spoilers, we get some of our ideas from other blogs. Mike: Spoilers, I get all of my ideas from other blogs. Eric: But the creator of Fez actually showed up in the comment thread on indiegames.com and kind of crapped all over Sky Island. Mike: Nooo. Eric: And I don’t know how I feel about that. Mike: I don’t feel good about that at all! Eric: I don’t want to overstate it. He said, "This thing plays nothing like Fez and falls into all the traps we took very painstaking efforts to avoid. So, you know, don’t think that this is Fez." Which, alright, sure I guess. But I didn't think this was Fez. I thought this was Sky Island. Mike: I was operating under the same assumption. Eric: That’s the name that they put on the game.
Eric: We should probably talk about what the game is though, as opposed to what it is not. Mike: Yeah. One of my friends who doesn’t have the largest vocabulary, when I showed this to him, he said it was like Mario but gay. Eric: .....? Mike: And then when I told him to mess around with the mouse he went, "Whoa my god." So there’s nothing new here as far as platforming goes. You jump on things, you jump over things, you collect things, but being able to move around in space and reorient yourself in space is a lot of fun. Eric: It’s legitimately difficult too. You definitely need to think in a way that you might not have while playing other similar platform puzzle games. Where I don’t know where I come down is whether or not the game is challenging because of its design, or just because of some of the weird quirks of its execution.
Mike: I guess this is a good time to bring up the combat again. To kill a bad guy, what you have to do, you have to rotate the platform he’s own so that he ends up facing the camera on top of an icon on the platform. Actually being able to do that is kind of a feat. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass. I think that I just now figured out how to do it, like, I can do it without randomly spinning the world around for five minutes, but... Eric: It’s a simple idea, but doing it should be simpler. Mike: Yeah, I don’t think I should have to spin around for five minutes before I get the hang of killing one dude. Eric: I like the concept behind taking this 2D world and spinning it into 3D and showing me the different sides, but I kind of hate the way the logic of the game positions me when I do it. Because it always assumes, if you can picture – and to someone reading this, this might make no sense, but once you play the game you’ll know what I’m talking about – If you picture looking at a table, but you’re only looking at that table from the side so you only see it as a platform... the game always assumes that your character is on the closest edge of the table. Mike: Oh yes! This is an important thing to mention! Eric: No matter which way you’re spinning the world, your character will always end up on the closest edge of the table, and depending on where things are positioned elsewhere in the world, that completely changes where you’ll end up when you’re done spinning. So you need to spend, in my opinion, a little too much time tweaking your angle and spinning around to find which side of this 3D object you need to be at the "front" of when you’re done spinning. Mike: Now at the same time, there are some neat moments. You know those little blasty cannon guys you need to avoid at some points? I guess the best way to put it is, you can avoid this trap without actually moving your character. Eric: Right, because you just spin the world until you’re on the other side of it. Mike: Yeah. It’s kind of disorienting; it’s kind of cool. Like, the first time I did it, I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but, once again, once you get the hang of it, it’s a neat way to traverse a 3 dimensional world. Eric: For sure. Mike: Although it might have helped if they explained it better, or implemented it better.
Eric: Another thing I liked a lot was the ability to spin the world while you’re in mid air. Which essentially means that in addition to always figuring out which side of an object you need to be on, you can also end up essentially jumping off a platform and then spinning the world such that a different platform ends up under you. Which is kind of infuriating, when you’re just randomly spinning saying, "What, what do I need to do? I don’t understand. This is pissing me off." But also really satisfying when you figure it out or luck into it or whichever way it happens to go. Mike: I think a lot of lucking happens. But it’s funny, the first time I played it, a lot of lucking -- well, it was all lucking. Eric: It’s a technical term, lucking. Mike: Lucking, yeah. The next time around though, I dunno, it was like it had sort of settled in my brain a little bit. The stuff that was at first like "bluuuuh" was a little more intuitive this time around. Eric: You know, while we’ve been talking, I’ve made it to level 9, so I’m getting the hang of it a little more. I’m having fun with it. I’ve probably put all of 40 minutes into it at this point, and who knows if I make it through the full set of levels. I’ve got another six to go. But, it’s different. It’s interesting. It’s visually pleasing. Mike: Yeah, Sky Island, I think we talked about it enough. Did we not mention anything? Eric: I don’t think so. I think it’s a pretty neat little game. It looks nice. It’s kinda working my brain in a new way and I always appreciate that. And it’s free and, if you have Flash, you can play it so, you know, you should. Mike: Right on. I agree. Eric: Sky Island by Neutronized. Go do it. Mike: Go play it. Eric: Alright. Mike: Cool.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
Just a quick note, since I know Free and Worth Every Penny has been on hiatus for awhile (Mike and I collaborated on something last week, that'll be written up and posted soon) to say that the indie action strategy game HOARD by Big Sandwich Games is now out on Steam, and after playing around with the tutorial and a couple of single player maps, I really recommend giving it a look.
HOARD got a fair amount of podcast buzz when it came out on PSN late last year, but not having a PS3 I didn't get the chance to check it out. I remember hearing about it on the Gamers With Jobs Conference Call and thinking that it sounded like a lot of fun, though, so when it showed up for pre-order on Steam at under $10, I jumped on it. I'm glad that I did.
The gameplay is fairly simple, which means it's quick to learn and easy to jump in and start playing. You control a dragon on a fantasy-themed map that looks very much like an animated board game (which wins it some points with me right out of the gate). As a dragon, your goal is straightforward: you want gold. You want all the gold. How you get it is up to you. Towns and other structures on the map can be destroyed, and their wealth collected. These towns also send out carts you can raid, though, and if you let the towns live long enough to upgrade, they'll send out higher-valued carts. You can even convince the towns to pay you tribute, by doing enough damage to them without destroying them. Castles can be sacked, and princesses kidnapped and held for ransom. You're up against the clock, which means deciding how to invest your time will determine your success or failure.
You're also up against the other players - one to three other dragons vying for the same resources as you. Spend time trying to inspire fealty in a town, and another dragon may come along and destroy it, ruining your efforts. Fail to snatch up a princess making her way across the map, and you can bet someone else will get to her first. The map itself will fight back, too, sending knights to try to rescue their damsels in distress, robbers to try to steal from your hoard, and other nuisances dragons must deal with as a matter of course.
None of it on its own is terribly complex, but put it all together in a fast playing game (a round might take 15 or 20 minutes, not long at all given how much is going on) and you have a compelling system that forces you to make quick, fun decisions routinely while you play. I haven't jumped into multiplayer with other humans yet, but I'm looking forward to it; both cooperative and PvP modes are offered.
Here's a rather frenetic trailer, if you'd like to see it in motion:
For $8.99, the current asking price, I think it's not a bad deal. Best of all, there's a demo you can download and decide for yourself.
The Puzzle-RPG hybrid is not, at this point, a particularly novel genre. Obviously, Puzzle Quest is the game that comes most readily to mind, but other games have picked up the idea and run with it in the time since; Gyromancer fits the mold, as do iPhone success stories like Dungeon Raid and Sword & Poker. Today, though, I do have something a little different for you. Today I have the brainchild that comes about when somebody decides that the game that really needs a little RPG love... is Minesweeper.
Tongue planted firmly in cheek, Legend of the Golden Robot riffs on pretty much all the stereotypical RPG tropes, tossing them on top of a gameplay style that I certainly didn't expect would accept them as well as it does. While I don't think it's going to hold anybody's attention for weeks to come, there's more to like here than I anticipated, and I'm excited to share it with you.
As soon as you start up Legend of the Golden Robot, you'll know that it isn't a game that expects you to take it at all seriously. With a hero who's a thinly veiled Indiana Jones parody tossed into a world where Indy has no place being, a deep story is obviously not the focus here. There's an evil wizard. If you collect a whole lot of treasure, you can defeat him with a golden robot. Go.
Yeah, that's how it tends to go with evil wizards.
So what is the focus? Progressive exploration, handled through a combination of Minesweeper-style area maps and battles that take place as you explore them. The basic gameplay structure is this: you have 24 hours of in-game time to explore each area map. Digging up a tile might take 1, 2 or more hours depending on the terrain type and your equipment. Moving between tiles also takes up time. So does fighting. There's no game-ending "explosion" equivalent to Minesweeper's risk/reward equation, but there is a different balancing act to manage: entering a map costs money, and you need to recoup your investment. Later maps require a higher investment to enter, so you must prioritize your movement and your digging to try to ensure finding the best treasure.
I wonder why the elves never dig for the treasure. They clearly spend all day here.
It's remarkable to me how engaging the Minesweeper formula still is after all these years. Much like a Sudoku puzzle or any other "logical elimination" challenge, I found myself carefully considering my options before any move or dig attempt, as a wasted dig costs precious time, and time is money. There is, of course, the classic annoyance of needing to essentially start blind, and occasionally needing to simply guess when enough information isn't there to lead you to a conclusion, but the lack of an instant-fail condition mitigates that problem.
As for the battles, they're a fairly straightforward and frankly kind of tedious affair that I'm not really sure the game needed. It's an excuse to give you more stats to grind and equipment to buy with the money you're earning, but just having equipment that lets you play the Minesweeper-inspired part more effectively probably could have scratched the RPG itch for me. Turn-based battles with few options most often devolve into repeatedly clicking the same thing, especially once the enemies are less of a threat to you, and that certainly held to be true here.
Oh no, not a Dwarf Soldier, whatever will I do. Yawn.
Still, I do think the RPG elements bring more good than bad to the table. It's fun to head to the shop and see what new equipment can make you either a better fighter or a better treasure hunter between expeditions; there's the usual stat allocating after gaining levels; there are even minigames you can play at the tavern for bonuses, if you feel so inclined. It's a casual experience for sure (even death is easily recovered from via a Typing of the Dead style minigame), but one that kept me more engrossed than I gave it credit for initially.
Mmmm, delicious, delicious stats.
So there you have it; yet another gameplay style on which the RPG can be layered with at least a modicum of success. What'll be next? Snake? SkiFree? Let me know your predictions, and we'll all find out together.
Legend of the Golden Robot is...
self aware and lighthearted, which always earns points with me.
not a great RPG, but still a pretty great idea.
a neat spin on one of the oldest and most-played PC games around.
worth at least a few minutes of your time, even just as a curiosity.
It's a Flash game hosted on Kongregate, so you can head over there right now and give it a whirl. Enjoy.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
It has not generally been the purview of this column to discuss MMOs, for reasons that at one point would have been self-evident; not long ago, most of the free MMOs (aside from MUDs, which I wouldn't even begin to know how to narrow down) just weren't very good. As we all know, though, there is an ever-increasing tendency for even highly anticipated MMO games to take a free-to-play approach, even if it's usually accompanied by an optional purchase incentive. Today's column is not about one of those highly anticipated games. It isn't even, strictly speaking, about an MMO, if you consider that the server population tends to stay well under 100 people per server. But it's the closest a game that looks like it belongs in the NES era is ever likely to come.
Silk Games' NEStalgia bills itself as "Dragon Warrior 3 meets World of Warcraft", which is a pretty specific (and, in my brief experience with the game, accurate) description. The setup is purely classic 8-Bit RPG, with your standard selection of classes [half of which are behind a pay wall, but the game is fully playable without ever paying a dime], an overworld map with random battle encounters, zoomed-in town, castle and dungeon maps... everything you remember, be it fondly or otherwise, from the RPGs that sucked away so much time in many of our early gaming lives.
And thus did the career of RNGR begin. ...Sorry. 8-Bit humor.
There is a bit of a disconnect, plot-wise, right from the start. Like most old-school RPG's, you're immediately set up to obviously be a special, chosen "Champion" who's thrust into the middle of an ongoing intrigue where you are unexpected and potentially unwelcome... just like the other 30 "champions" running around with you on the server. Even in the very first introductory dungeon where the exposition is given, you'll see other players wandering around, getting started on the same 'special' path you're on. Granted, to some extent almost every MMO has this problem, but it stood out for me a bit more than usual here.
I don't foresee bad things happening to First Wizard Roen at all. He'll probably be fine.
If you can get past the thin plot, though, there's plenty going on here to like, especially for the price tag. You'll be thrust pretty quickly into the quest and grind loop, but I found that 'the grind' in NEStalgia didn't bother me all that much, for some reason - perhaps because I always expected to need to battle a bunch of enemies in order to progress when I was playing a Dragon Warrior or a Final Fantasy of the 8-bit era. It's just what you had to do.
The battle system is run along the standard Attack / Magic / Item / Flee lines, and doesn't mess around too much with what you'd expect to find. It's easy to use, and the developers have done a good job of walking you through the necessary mechanics early in the game so you understand how they work in context. NPC's that you come across will give you quests to complete, some plot-related, and some of the "fetch 5 widgets" variety. As you level up, character points are auto-allocated and new abilities are gained at set level intervals. There's nothing really new here, per se, except for all the other people playing it with you.
You... don't look like the slimes I remember.
So how does that factor in? Well, given the apparent limitations of the tech, surprisingly well. You can, of course, group with other players to fight as a party, which I understand is pretty much necessary to take on some of the game's bosses. PVP is also available, though given the game's unexpectedly popular public debut (it's been in beta for months), the developer has temporarily switched all servers to PVE [PVP still optional, but never required]. Eventually, there will be both forced-PVP and RP servers. More surprising to me was that NEStalgia also sports guilds with customizable clothing and has a full auction house where players can trade items across the server. All in all, it's pretty impressive stuff.
Obviously the aesthetics aren't going to be an area I can lavish a ton of praise on - it's designed to look and sound like a primitive RPG, and it does. But the sprites are generally well designed, the music is listenable, and all the sound effects you would expect to find - the battle victory fanfare, the "going up the stairs" sound, and so on - are accounted for. If you're into this sort of thing, you'll probably dig it, and if you're not, you've probably stopped reading by now.
Yes, this is considerably more familiar. Here's my gold, I'll stay the night.
I haven't played more than a couple hours of the game, so I can't speak to the late- or even mid-game content, but there's an extensive wiki that can give you some idea of NEStalgia's depth, if you're interested. I don't know how much time I'll end up putting into it, but it's a neat idea and I'm really glad it's out there. Maybe the next time I get a hankering to play a NES RPG, I'll decide that having 40 other people along for the ride would be just the ticket.
NEStalgia is...
a lovingly made 'MMO' throwback to the 8-Bit RPG.
clunky in all the ways you remember those being, but not offensively so.
surprisingly fully-featured in its multi-player aspects, considering how traditionally single-player the games it imitates are.
ambitious, quirky, likeable and worth a try if you have any fondness for this sort of thing.
NEStalgia is Windows only, and runs on the BYOND platform, which means you'll need an account to log in and play. You'll be walked through account creation on your first time, though, and it isn't complicated. Should you decide to subscribe, $9 per year will get you the 2nd four classes, the ability to run a guild, and some extra content and abilities.
If you want to try to catch me on there, I'm playing on the Zenithia server. Happy hunting!
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
He didn't even know she was there. Not really. Which was a hell of a thing to admit, given what he was prepared to go through to have her. To risk one's life for a mirage - to push the limits of strength and endurance for what might have been no more than a specter - was a stupid decision. But a string of such decisions had made him who he was, and he was not going to change now. He had seen her; he had wanted her; she had eluded him. There was no choice to be made. Only commitment and execution. The Gods help whatever stood in his way.
I don't have a terribly long list of things to say about Tiny Barbarian, other than that it's charming and fun and I think you should try it. Michael Stearns' videogame homage to the Robert E. Howard short story The Frost-Giant's Daughter plays out as a straightforward action platformer, but I think it has the right combination of gameplay variety, pleasant aesthetics and reasonable duration to stand out as being worth your attention.
Barbarians are singularly unconcerned with dressing for the weather.
If you've ever read a Conan the Barbarian story, you'll know that they aren't exactly weighed down with unnecessary plot detail, and Tiny Barbarian is well-served by having an extremely simple premise that doesn't require a lengthy explanation to get you going. "On a frozen battlefield, a love-struck barbarian chases a mysterious woman who does not reciprocate his feelings." There you have it. She evades, and you pursue. It's simple, but being a fan of the original story already, it was certainly enough to hook me in. And let's be honest: this is the story games have told almost from the very beginning. "Thank you, Conan! But your ghostly apparition is in another castle!" Indeed.
With narrative swiftly out of the way, the game is free to focus on a small, dense set of gameplay mechanics with which to challenge your mini muscle man. It starts off easy enough - jump over some pits, avoid some spikes - but soon, you'll be fighting your way through undead soldiers, fending off nimble wolves, leaping over archers' arrows, dodging falling obstacles and dealing with the scorn of your quarry - who, as it turns out, really doesn't want to be caught.
Really should have started by buying her dinner.
Controls are minimal and suitably tight; arrows to move, Z to jump, X to attack. Jump height is variable based on how long you hold down the key, which you'll need to handle deftly for some of the more challenging leaps in the game. Your sword provides your only attack, but stringing together several hits yields combo strikes that do more damage and knock your opponents back, hopefully off a ledge or into something sharp. I was glad for the assistance of a gamepad, especially during the notably difficult final battle (notable enough that the developer has mocked up a Nintendo Power "Counselor's Corner" segment with tips on beating it), but the difficulty level was quite reasonable for the rest of the game. Each screen is its own checkpoint, meaning that death will never set you back too far, and every enemy has a pattern to exploit, given some trial and error.
The graphics deserve special mention as being atmospheric and very well drawn. Your barbarian's animations are excellent, and the ambient visuals do a great job of keeping the screen interesting without making it too busy. Enemy design is a bit spartan, but effective, and the whole thing has the look of a lost, high-quality NES title, which is pretty clearly the intent. The music is also good, if a bit repetitive at times. My only real aesthetic complaint is with the sound design; very cliched "jump" and "you got a coin!" noises serve to constantly remind the player that they're playing an 8-bit-style videogame. Given how consistently themed to fit the minimalist narrative the rest of the design is, I thought that stood out as being somewhat out of place.
It's a matter of taste, though, and at worst a minor misstep in an otherwise very solid effort; certainly not enough to dissuade me from recommending that you play it. A full playthrough can easily be done in under 20 minutes, though if you want all the collectibles (I didn't) I expect you'll be going through several times to find them. Will you get the girl in the end? If you've read the short story, you already know the answer. If not, you'll have to find out for yourselves.
Tiny Barbarian is...
a great example of restrained design leading to a short but really enjoyable title.
great looking, even if the sound design made me raise my eyebrows a bit.
not terribly challenging until the end, but solidly engaging he whole way through.
inspired by an 80-year-old barbarian pulp fiction short story, and can't we always use more of that, really?
Tiny Barbarian is a less-than-5MB download for Windows only, and you can get it right here.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
I'm a sucker for re-envisioned games. Always have been. I know there's a point of view that sees derivative works to be lacking in creativity, but I've always thought that a loving homage is one of the nicest compliments a game can receive. Way back in Issue 29, I wrote about Pixel Force Left 4 Dead, in which Eric Ruth "de-made" the best zombie game around into a top-down 8-bit style shooter. Well, Eric is back, and this time he's applied his skills to an even more ambitious undertaking.
Pixel Force Halo takes the same 8-bit aesthetic that took Left 4 Dead so gracefully into the top-down shooter genre, and uses it to re-paint one of the world's most beloved FPS games as a side-scroller. I think you'll find the results, while mixed at times, to be well worth your attention.
For a complete change of perspective and an obviously vast reduction in technical complexity, Pixel Force Halo manages to keep a surprising amount of the material on which its namesake hung its hat. Your diminutive Master Chief will face off against the expected arrangement of Covenant forces, using an array of weapons, exposives and vehicles. Only one gun can be carried at a time (though the infinite ammo pistol is always available, should your primary run out of clips), so you'll be constantly switching weapons and tactics based on what you can find in the field.
While generally limited to 8-directional firing (the needler being a marvelous and powerful exception), all the weapons do a surprisingly good job of mimicking their console counterparts. The plasma pistol is a peashooter unless you power up its shots, at which point it becomes formidable. The rocket launcher is slow and devastating. You will, at some point, get a plasma grenade stuck to you, and shout obscenities as you try to run away before it blows you up.
Plasma grenade RUN!!
The gameplay notes are retained just about as clearly as the weapon variety. You will face off against Grunts, Elites and Brutes; you will run over enemy infantry with the Warthog; you will chuck grenades at unsuspecting enemies who haven't seen you yet; you will frantically dodge fire as you face off against a Banshee all by yourself; you will shake in fear a bit the first time an Invisible Elite or a Hunter shows up. For a game in a different genre, it all still feels very Halo.
Unfortunately, there are places where strict adherence to the Halo legacy does the game no favors, and some bits aren't as tight as others. The Flood is still awful, and I really never enjoyed them in Pixel Force Halo any more than I did in the original. The top-down vehicle sections, while a neat diversion, all end up feeling a bit same-y, even when you get to switch to the Scorpion Tank, which you'd think would be more satisfying. And several times the narrow multi-tiered level design got me trapped in enemy fire I couldn't avoid, leading to deaths that felt a bit cheap. Checkpoints are mercifully frequent, but with no recharging shields and few health packs, I still spent more time cursing at the game than I might have liked.
The Warthog IS pretty sweet, though.
Still, there's a whole lot to like here, and I was glad that I played through the whole thing. It's meatier than you might expect, summarizing the entire story of the first Halo game over the course of some 9 or 10 missions that took me the better part of two hours to complete. There's a Hardcore mode waiting for you after you're done, too, if you can handle it. With completely custom-made graphics, sound effects and music (including some very well composed NES chiptunes), it's clear that a lot of love went into making Pixel Force Halo. I'd say it's worth giving it a little bit of yours in return.
Pixel Force Halo is...
a charming "de-make" of one of the most popular console games of all time.
a surprisingly accurate translation of Halo into the style of something more like Contra.
sadly burdened by some of the same problems Halo had, and a few new minor ones.
nevertheless a very impressive effort and well worth your time to download and play.
The game is keyboard-controlled by default, but I was glad for the services of a gamepad and some key mapping to make it more playable. Button use is minimal, but intense at times.
Pixel Force Halo is Windows only, weighs in under 15MB, and can be downloaded right here. Remarkably, this showed up as a news item on Bungie.net, which I'm guessing means that they know about it and have no issue with it. So it may be here to stay, safe from legal challenge. ...You might want to get it now, though, just in case.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
Between a BBS love story two weeks ago and Mike's choose-your-own-adventure look at the virtual end of the world last week, I feel like the column is once again veering off into "what is a game anyway?" territory (spoiler: I don't know any more, and neither do you), as it is wont to do every so often. This week, let's put things firmly back in the wheelhouse of PC gaming, and talk strategy. Not slow, methodical strategy, though. No plodding, Civ-style games in this roundup. This week your strategy fix comes in a double dose, and it comes fast.
To start us off, let me give you possibly the most stripped-down approach to the Real Time Strategy genre I've seen in years. Pixel Legions hands you control of squads of highly energetic, somewhat unpredictable tiny soldiers as they square off against similarly diminutive enemies in extremely fast-paced warfare.
In some respects, this reminded me of Galcon, a game I first played on my iPhone which later ended up on Steam and - well, pretty much everywhere - but there are several things that set Pixel Legions apart. The ability to move your base, which spawns new squads of soldiers at a more or less constant rate, is critical to success on many of the levels. Also, the maps have a bit more of a puzzle feel to them than the big multi-planet setups of Galcon; here, everything happens in very tight quarters, and you need to execute your strategy immediately and with precision in order to win. The levels play out quickly enough that re-starting them to find a better strategy becomes commonplace, and while the first couple of them are simple tutorial fare, press on and you'll find a challenge waiting for you.
I actually feel like the game gets a bit too quick and chaotic at times - you need to micromanage every squad and your base constantly, and things can take a turn for the worse very fast - but I chalk that up to a general aversion I have to that sort of gameplay in any game. Pixel Legions does a great job of stripping the RTS formula down to just tactics. No resource gathering, no base building, no tech tree. Take your tiny army and make smart decisions to lead it to victory. It's very satisfying to see how much difference a good flanking maneuver makes, or to lure your opponents into an ambush.
Pixel Legions is a Flash game, so head on over there with a supported browser and take command.
Next up, a very different type of strategy game - you may even feel like I'm cheating a bit, putting it in the same genre. I went back and forth on it a bit myself, but while it certainly does require more twitchy reflex ability than Pixel Legions, I think you'll still find that it's brains rather than brawn that get you through Ten Second War.
Describing this is going to be a little bit tricky, since it's something I had to play myself to really understand, but I'll do my best. Each level in Ten Second War takes, at most, ten seconds, because that's all the time you're given to control the units at your disposal. The twist is that you get to repeat those ten seconds for each unit on the field, in sequence, until every unit has its orders and they all execute them simultaneously.
In some ways, it feels like the planning phase to a game like Rainbow Six (the original, young'uns, not this Vegas stuff)... select a guy, tell him where he's going to go, who he's going to shoot, and move on to the next guy. Where Ten Second War gets brilliant is that it lets you keep giving units orders during their ten second phase even if they've been killed, banking on subsequent units to keep them safe. I know, that doesn't make much sense. Let me explain.
You start controlling Unit 1, and take him out around a corner, where three turrets are waiting. He blows up turrets one and two, but turret three manages to hit him at the six second mark. You keep giving him his orders, though, taking him down a hallway to take out two more turrets before his ten seconds are up.
Unit 2 is now under your control. As long as Unit 2 manages to take out the third turret that killed Unit 1 before the six second mark, that event will no longer happen. Unit 1 will head down the hallway and keep carrying out his orders, safe and sound.
Repeat that for as many units as you have control of: each unit has the ability to not only carry out new orders, but also to protect prior units from the enemies that destroyed them, erasing those events from the final result. With 6 different unit types that have differing abilities, around 40 levels, and a level editor, there's a lot to dig into here, and the concept is unique and solid. Don't miss this one - it's a treat.
Ten Second War is a 2MB Windows download, and you can pick it up right here.
That's it for this round - have fun, and see you next week.
"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.
