Death vs. Monstars

written on Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Rock, Paper, Shotgun pointed me at a lovely Flash game, Death vs. Monstars.



It gets to be a bullet hell shooter, which I normally hate. But it's fairly forgiving and has really smooth mouse control. Seriously, if all bullet hell shooters controlled this well, I'd probably be a fan of the genre. I didn't even bother using slow motion. Ever. And at one point I let out a fully voiced "Woohoo!"

That is not normal for me and shooters.

Indie Impressions: The Power

written on Friday, Jan. 30, 2009

The Power is a basic Metroidvania style game.

(For those who haven't played Metroid or Castlevania, that means it's a platformer where you fight stuff, constantly getting new abilities that let you unlock new areas to explore.)

It's got a simple, slightly neon, art style.





And it's challenging without being frustrating (mostly). It does pull the "go back and collect everything if you want the good ending" garbage, but I had been mostly collecting everything anyway, so I went back and finished it (unlike Shift 3). It was a pleasant diversion.

I will offer one suggestion, though. Getting around was dull. There was no ability I ever received that made it fun to explore. If you really want me to travel all over to collect everything, make getting around a little quicker / more fun. A dash mechanic, a glide mechanic, a multi-directional grapple, or any number of abilities could have made movement more fun.

Demo Impressions: Defense Grid

Defense Grid is a fairly snazzy looking tower defense game. Tower games got a good deal of attention starting maybe a year and a half ago, to the point that some folks in the enthusiast press are physically pained every time a new one comes out. I guess I have the luxury to simply ignore most of them.



As you can see, the production values are high. There's also a British AI that talks to you a bit and alludes to a larger context that may constitute a story, eventually. I don't know why, but people seem to prefer their AIs British. British and confused.

My only real complaint about the game is its feedback mechanism. Some weapons seem to do no damage to certain enemies, but there are no video or audio queues. I only noticed that my lasers weren't harming shielded enemies at all because I happened to have one highlighted at just the right moment. Some feedback along these lines could also punch up the action a bit, as most of the enemies just walk until they fall down, which isn't very visually exciting.

And as we all know from the days of NES Godzilla, visual excitement counts.

Indie Impressions: Shift 3

Shift 3 is a puzzle platformer where you can shift through floors, reversing gravity. It's a decent idea, and decently implemented. But the ending penalizes me for not seeking out every single secret in the game. In Seiklus and Knytt Stories, I didn't mind this because it gave me an excuse to go explore more. Shift 3 wasn't as good as either of those games. And the solutions to puzzles like the one pictured below seemed more tedious than intriguing.



So in the end the author made me feel penalized for not boring myself by wasting a lot of time hunting down clues. So even if I win, I end up with an unpleasant experience. Oh well.

Indie Impressions: The Fancy Pants Adventure: World 2

This may be a repeat for those of you using feed readers. I tried to delete the old post because it published immediately when it was supposed to be on schedule for today. Oh well. :P

The Fancy Pants Adventure is an ongoing platforming adventure. The platforming is kind of physics based, which I usually hate. But the level design and enemy placement aren't too demanding, so Fancy Pants makes it work. And the animation system is pretty impressive too. I'm including a screen shot, but you really have to see the thing in motion to get the full effect. And I'm not including a link to a YouTube video because the frame rate on them is too low to see what I'm talking about.

Indie Impressions: Seven Minutes

First off, I will completely spoil the game, so if you don't want it spoiled just go play it.





Seven Minutes is an exercise in nonsense. If you follow the instructions, nothing happens. If you disobey the instructions, you lose. If you disobey the first instruction, then don't play the game for seven minutes, you win.

The platforming was decent. The graphics were fine. The artsy "message" wasn't even self-consistent. It was just being arbitrary because the author was in love with the idea of being arbitrary.

Many indie games are labors of love.

Self love.

Indie Impressions: Spelunky

Spelunky is a platformer with randomly generated content. Nethack is a cited inspiration, and much like Nethack, the game is a pain. Randomly laid out dungeons with one hit kill spike traps and fidgety controls are not my cup of tea. Especially as you only get one life to complete the game. Plus actually "winning" the game requires some ridiculously unguessable actions.

But it does have nice graphics (if you're into old pixel art). It's fun to use ropes and bombs to find different ways through the levels. And the idea that "maybe I'll make it through this time" is interesting, if not compelling. If not for the one hit kill spike traps, I probably would have stuck with it.



I guess that's the recurring theme throughout indie games. They're for fairly specific audiences, most of which do not include me anymore (if they ever did).

I am accustomed to a smooth ride.
Or maybe I'm a dog who lost its bite.
I don't expect to be treated like a fool no more.
I don't expect to sleep through the night.
- Paul Simon

Indie Impressions: Iji

I finished Iji. It bore out my early impressions. The gameplay is serviceable, but never really fun. The characters and dialog made it impossible for me to care about the story. And this stinks because it's easy to see that a huge amount of thought and effort went into it.

I'm honestly not sure if I'm sad because of the lost potential of the game, or at how jaded I am that I can't simply overlook the flaws.

Indie Impressions: Iji

Iji is a 2D action game, with art in the style of Out of This World.



I'm not done with it yet. But it didn't take long to get fairly bored. The plot might be interesting but the dialog and characterization is flat, so who cares? The gameplay, well, maybe I picked the wrong path by upgrading melee and hacking instead of gun skills. But so far the combat is also not very exciting. Kick and shoot and duck and jump. It's not laggy, but it's not satisfying.

The game could use a personality.

Indie Impressions: 10800 Zombies

10800 Zombies is an action platformer. Much like Shotgun Ninja, it's got a simple graphical style.



Unlike Shotgun Ninja, it's not much fun to play. The raw movement and shooting is good. It's aesthetically pleasing. But the main obstacles in the game are visibility and often unavoidable cheap hits (generally from the shotgun zombies). I gave it a few tries, then got sick of it.

Indie Impressions: Alien Assault

Alien Assault is an old school shooter. How old school?


This old school.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is dull and punishing. You only have four men to beat the entire game, and you lose all power ups every time you die. Go play MinishoterRS instead.

Indie Impressions: Shotgun Ninja

With a name like Shotgun Ninja, you really can't go wrong. And while the controls are pretty fidgety. The game is easy and short enough that it didn't overstay its welcome.

The graphics are also super retro. But I'm old and like that sort of thing.



I'm the blob of pixels at the top of the screen. No. The yellow blob, not the red spurty blob. That's a couple guys I just shotgunned. If you hold jump, you can hang from the ceiling and shoot guys below you. It's pretty much the sweetest move in the game. :)

Also, here's a quick shout out to the creator of JoyToKey, Ryo Ohkubo. JoyToKey is a handy utility that lets you map keyboard input to a joystick (or in my case, a PS1
controller), which makes playing PC games that don't support joysticks much more fun. Thanks Ryo!

Indie Impressions: Night of the Cephalopods

Night of the Cephalopods looks like a cute SNES style horror game. But it's really more of listening to a guy tell a story. Every time you do something (even stand still) there's some piece of color commentary for the narrator to make. As a proof of concept, it's interesting. As a game, there's not really a game there. Everything moves really slowly, presumably so the dialog can aspire to Lovecraftian wordiness. It's also really easy, which undercuts the tension. But it's not done yet and shows potential to be something special.

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As you can see, I'm doing the indie games as a trickle instead of a torrent. :) It's nice having content in the blog bank, and it gives each game it's own space. Considering how much work goes into each of them (and how mean I am to them), it's only fair.

The Indiegames Torrent Begins (Rose and Camellia)

Indiegames.com has a "best of" section that's sort of like indie gaming awards. Quality indie games don't come out as often as commercial games for obvious reasons (no money), so a lot of the games on the list are from last year, or possibly earlier. Regardless, there's enough new and interesting stuff that I'll have plenty to write about for a while.

Let's start with an older one I finally decided to bother playing.

Rose and Camellia is basically a slap fight. Zip your mouse across the opposing cheek to slap. Zip it across the bottom of the screen in the opposite direction to dodge. Mice are pretty crappy for drawing with, of course, so the interface is the main obstacle. I suspect this game is best played with a tablet.

Also, you don't heal or save between fights which makes the game an exercise in repetition. But the concept is refreshingly bizarre and the art's nice.

Chillin'

Ya ever have one of those days when you go to work, and you can't wait to leave, but when you get home, you don't want to do anything but go to sleep. But you know that if you go to sleep, you're going to have to get up and go to work. It's a trap. That was today for me. When I got home I played some more Unreal Tournament. Popping heads is fun. And I'm still thinking about making a Matrix Moves optimized level. There are actually more decent maps for Matrix Moves (and Lazy Matrix) than I thought, but there still aren't enough.

I also played the original demo of De Blob, a student project that's becoming a Wii game. I enjoyed the Wii demo at PAX, but it didn't seem to have anywhere to go. You avoid cops and water and color the town. The original is actually a little more forgiving, if you can believe that.



I hope they figure out how to make the Wii game stay fun longer.

Takin' It Easy

I decided to take it easy and just screw around today. It's amazing how trying to keep this blog going full speed has turned gaming into work. I get way more accomplished at home than I do from nine to five.

I tried a bunch of the Indie Games' list of best freeware games. I didn't care for most of them, so I'm not going to write them up.

Frozzd


The Pitch: Collect the little fire guys to fight the ice guys, while running upside down on giant snowballs.

My Opinion: Simple fun. Good for kids.

Gore

Just kidding. This one isn't free, though it should be. I played it on GameTap in god mode, just to run around and shoot stuff for no reason. It was released three years after Quake 3 and looks like a Quake 2 mod. But just look at that picture. That's blood and chunks coming off of me as I have a chainsaw fight with a bunch of skeletons. Is that not the very definition of awesome? :)

Keepalive: Banana Nababa & Farnsworth Blog

First off, I finished one more game on the TIGS best freeware games of 2007 list.

Banana Nababa


The Pitch: Fight six difficult NES style bosses.

My Opinion: It does what it says. I played it. I cursed at it. I enjoyed it. I think the length was appropriate too, as I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it much longer. :)

Other than that, I've mostly just been playing Rise of Nations for my Farnsworth blog. The problem is that it requires so much attention that I don't take many screenshots. It also requires a lot of time to write and revise because I'm doing so much more than I'm writing that I have to do a lot of condensing. It also (as I suspected going in) gets harder and harder to sustain the humor / premise. Meh. I'm already to the point where I can trounce the computer on Very Easy and Easy, and Moderate is my personal goal to be up to snuff for the LAN parties. I'm guessing three more entries, then out, much like the short and sweet Dwarf Fortress blog.

TIGS freeware awards (cont.)

My impressions of the games on The Independant Gaming Sources best freeware games of 2007 continue.

Ninjah


The Pitch: Traverse levels with your jump, grapple line, and hover gun, touching only whatever color terrain you've attuned yourself to.

My Opinion: It's a mostly fun action puzzler similar to N. Those types of games are always a difficult balancing act as if they're too puzzly, they bog down and lose the action. If they're too actiony, people without twitch reflexes won't be able to play them. Ninjah lets you choose your own level of difficulty by letting you shift the action into slomo for especially tricky parts. You won't have a great completion time for the level, but you will be able to complete it and move on. The last real level (49) is a notable exception slowing the pace of the game unacceptably, and I didn't bother to finish it.

Polychromatic Funkmonkey


The Pitch: Build bridges in the air.

My Opinion: Don't bother. It's tedious.

The Jeluvian Project
is hosted on a download site so slow, my children will have to write the review.

Mr. Blocko
It must be great in multiplayer because single was a big fat sack of "who cares".

Trilby: The Art of Theft


The Pitch: Conduct daring robberies.

My Opinion: I generally hate stealth games, and this is not an exception. I don't have the patience for them, unless being stealthy feels cool, which, for all the fedoras and suits, it doesn't in this game. Also the difficulty ramp near what I assume to be the end of the game was no fun at all. And this is from the guy who completed Hitman 2 on the highest possible difficulty on a machine that couldn't maintain a consistent frame rate. Of course, I had more time on my hands back then. :)

Cottage of Doom


The Pitch: Barricade yourself in a cabin while fending off a never ending stream of zombies.

My Opinion: Meh. The barricading holds off the zombies, but since points are only scored for comboing kills, it feels pretty pointless, especially since it's sometimes difficult to hit a zombie, even at point blank range.

Portal: The Flash Version


The Pitch: It's Portal, only 2D.

My Opinion: It's better than Portal, up until the point where the maps get overly complicated.

Powder Game


The Pitch: Play with various materials. Watch the dots dance.

My Opinion: While more of a toy than a game, I spent about an hour just playing around with powder, seed, water, and magma.

MinishoterRS


The Pitch: Super low res shooting action.

My Opinion: Super awesome! Hahaha. You get to lay waste to hordes of bad guys as a flying ghost cat! Plus, on easy, the last boss was the perfect speed of bullet hell that I had to dodge like crazy, but didn't take hits. That was so fun.

Plasma Warrior


The Premise: Download the wiped out colony's computer records.

My Opinion: It's like super lightweight Metroid. Some of the sound effects were a little grating, but overall I really enjoyed this one. Old school looks without the old school punishment.

Whew! That was a lot of games. It's amazing what I'll do to avoid Rise of Nations. :P

TIGS Freeware Game Award Winners

The Independant Gaming Source (TIGS) released their list of best freeware games of 2007. Unfortunately, TIGS's forums are down, so I can't see the rest of the games. Oh well. Here are the four I downloaded before it died.

Fraxy



The Pitch: Fight giant enemy ships.

My Opinion: Fraxy is a cool engine and level editor. When someone makes a game with it, it could be awesome. Currently, all you can do currently is fight random enemies forever, using only two of the six or so weapons the game offers. The fact that this is fun for a half hour shows a lot of promise. And yes, the second picture is me being attacked by a Christmas tree. The star detaches and attacks separately.

The Cleaner


The Pitch: Fight stuff with magic.

My Opinion: I liked the art. The Out of This World style cut scenes were good. Some of the sound effects were pretty annoying. I didn't want to use certain weapons because their sound effects got on my nerves. The gameplay was decent, if somewhat randomly unforgiving. The puzzles were generally good. The last level I played (after killing the invisible super soldier) didn't seem to have a way out, though.

Return to Sector 9


The Pitch: Fight waves of aliens in space.

My Opinion: I've probably been playing first person shooters for too long, but when the left hand turns and the right hand moves, I die a lot. It's obviously a really polished game, with nice graphics, sound, and rewards, but the controls killed it for me.

Hurrican



The Pitch: Shoot stuff.

My Opinion: It's a remake of the Amiga classic Turrican. I only take it on faith that it's a classic. I tried the Genesis version, and it sucked. This version is decidedly better, especially graphically, with raytraced sprites and piles of particle, glow, and smoke effects. The gameplay is simplistic, but serviceable. Just don't use the default controls. Gamepad only. Oh yeah, and keep it on easy. This remake is faithful to the punishing difficulty of the original.

Even More IGF Finalists

Whew! Still plowin' through 'em.

poesysteme


The Premise: Populate an ecosystem with words and watch them interact.

My Opinion: It's more of an experiment than a game. I got bored after a minute or two and moved on.

Polarity

The Premise: Use magnetism to get your little avatar through a maze.

My Opinion: It doesn't run, and there's no forum or FAQ or other help on the web site.

Rückblende (Flashback)

The Premise: Wander around a house, viewing memories.

My Opinion: It's not really a game, per se. But I enjoyed watching the animation.

Synaesthete


The Premise: Avoid enemies while playing Frequency (hit the correct buttons in time with the music) to shoot.

My Opinion: It's like rubbing your stomach and patting your head. Usually I just found an easy part of the rhythm to play along with and ran away from stuff. The novelty of it saw me through to the end, but I worry that, like Serious Sam, running backwards while shooting might become tiresome after much more.

Foamzilla

The Premise: Terrorize people as a giant foam monster.

My Opinion: I looked at the videos on YouTube and decided it wasn't worth installing UT2k4 just to look at. I thought about downloading the walkthrough movie, but at the speed it was downloading, it was going to take just as long. :P

Flipside


The Premise: Flip the world from happy to evil to solve puzzles and progress.

My Opinion: Nice art, but bad controls and scads of cheap one hit kills make it only for the masochistic. I didn't bother to finish it.