Jimmy’s Lost His Toilet Paper, and you’ve got to go find it! This is a new 7-day game from Petri “Fuck Yeah!” Purho. In each level you’ve got to roll up the loose toilet paper and head toward the exit, a task which is made much more difficult by platforms, crates, and other obstacles. The concept is not only incredibly cute, but it works great in practice, and creates some interesting (and challenging) physical puzzles. I’d love to see Petri polish it up a bit more (à la Crayon Physics)... for one thing, it could definitely benefit from some kind of save feature/level select screen.
Dirk Valentine combines sweet pixel art with mustachioed gentlemen and steampunk. And a chain cannon. I feel like it could be great instead of just good if Nitrome would only:
1. Take out like 3/4’s of the messages from “Monty,” the irritating old fart that enjoys telling you things like “avoid the deadly green gas!” and basically spoiling the fun of figuring anything out for yourself for the first dozen or so levels.
2. Add a little variation in the level artwork. As good as it is, it gets a bit tedious toward the end.
I also wish that secondary objectives like collecting medals and rescuing gents were meaningful gameplay-wise, but that’s a minor quibble. Otherwise, I had a good time with this one – the chain cannon’s abilities are pretty interesting, and the puzzles inspired by them are well thought-out.
Take the weapons from the Quake and Unreal Series (the shotguns, the grenade-launchers, the laser-cannons), throw in swords, over-sized wooden mallets, and grapple-hooks for good measure and give the whole arsenal to a tiny, round, and colorful race of giggling cuteness that one might come across if say… Tribbles got into a large stash of food. Now force these creatures to fight each other in battles ranging from death matches to rounds of capture-the-flag.
Well, actually, don’t do that – it’s already been done, and turned into an surprisingly polished and addictive experience.
Officially, Teeworlds (originally titled “Teewars“) is a 2d multiplayer-only platform shooter available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and with its gunning and grappling cuteness it recalls memories of games like Soldat, Liero, and the cute-but-brutal landscapes of the Worms Series. Although it’s only in version 0.4.2, Teeworlds has already shown amazing progress and is perfectly playable right now.
The controls of Teeworlds are standard controls for and big-title FPS (WASD for movement, number keys for weapons, click to fire, etc) and fit the gameplay very well. Of course, the player can remap any of these keys if need be. The customization doesn’t stop there though; each player can customize the shape and color of their individual character or even make their own maps via the map maker. Another aspect of the controls I really thought was innovative for a game of this type was the emoticon system: just push leftShift, and a circular menu will appear with several choices. Simply move the mouse over the emoticon you want to appear over your character, and release shift. Simple as that.
You can even go one step further if that level of freedom isn’t enough: Teeworlds is an open-source project, which has led to many, many, custom skins and mods on the part of the community.
Game play is easy to learn, and soon you’ll be a double-jumpin’ grapple-swingin’ gun-wieldin’ machine, so be sure to check this game out.
I searched for Super Secret Ninja on TIGSource last night and was shocked to discover that it has never been mentioned. For shame!
In Super Secret Ninja, you use a grappling hook to speedily swing past the bad guys and get to the exit (arrow keys to move, up to jump, CTRL to grapple). Death comes if you run out of time or get noticed by too many enemies.
What at first seems like a bland game quickly becomes a frenzied race to the finish as the randomly generated levels get longer and filled with more baddies. Each grapple becomes the difference between a flawless escape and an embarrassing confrontation with the enemy.
PS: Hello everyone! In the (quite probable) event that you have no idea who I am, Derek invited the two writers of Puppy Buckets, Alehkhs and I, to help him out with TIGSource. Hopefully you’ll approve!
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:03:00 GMT
[Guest review by MisterX]
Has Clonk really never been featured on TIGSource? It’s a German indie game series (with English language support) that’s probably a lot less known worldwide than it is here, in Germany. But I’m not exaggerating when I say that they’re some of the very best games I know – and I’m not only talking about indie games. It’s quite a long-running series, with the first Clonk being released in 1994. Nine titles onwards there is “Clonk Rage”, the latest game. Following its release, the largely identical predecessor, Clonk Endeavour, has been released for free, though its online component has been stripped from it.
So if it really is unknown around here, I’ll try to summarize the game a bit. Basically, Clonk is an extensive 2D action-adventure-strategy platformer. Usually you control a group of the Clonks, using them to build up a settlement. For the building process you need resources, which you can get by digging into the ground. There you can dig for coal, pump up oil, or blow up veins of ore and gold. While gold is the common currency in the game, you also need energy – coal is used to fire up furnaces, which melt ore to metal. And windmills are used to power elevators which will let you mine more professionally.
At least, that’s the most common scenario. Actually that’s just a tiny bit of what Clonk offers in terms of variety, but summing it all up is practically impossible. Other popular scenarios are the middle age, where huge castles are built and knights fight hand-to-hand or on horseback, and the Western, where small towns are built and cowboys shoot each other. There are also several flavors of foreign worlds, like the arctic, a deep jungle… you name it.
There’s an uncountable amount of more stuff due to Clonk’s modability. For at least 10 years now there’s been a huge community of people who have created all sorts of stuff. It ranges from level mods that use pre-made content, or scripted adventures (for example, there is a neat Diablo-esque level that includes questing and leveling up), to completely original scenarios, like a cool sci-fi pack that includes armored troops with machine guns, hoverbikes, and huge complexes full of alien scum. I hope that helps explain why it’s so hard to just define Clonk.
Technically, the series has come quite far. While it featured cute, but crude, hand-drawn 2D pixel art in the past, the game now features a 3D look that isn’t any less charming. Probably most interesting though is the destructibility of the terrain, which reminds of Cortex Command, and the “fluid” physics. The water in the game is pretty dynamic, making rain a lethal foe as it loves to flood your mine shafts. The only thing that hasn’t really changed is the quite archaic midi music. For me that’s simply added nostalgia, but it might be annoying for new players (F1 disables music!).
And to briefly cover one of Clonk’s most important aspects: there is multiplayer. All kinds of it. You can play in split-screen with up to 4 players sharing a keyboard, but you can also plug in as many gamepads as you’d like. There’s also internet-play, which works mighty fine without especially much lag. And how you play is entirely up to you: You may want to play a small “Melee”, which is a kind of deathmatch, or you may build up huge colonies with walls and other defenses to have really big battles. Or you can just play a level cooperatively to build up a huge colony with a friend… or twelve.
Ouf, that’s become quite a wall of text already and yet it’s lacking any kind of structure and completeness. And let me make this clear: Clonk is not an especially complex game that takes years to get into or anything. Over the years it has become very accessible, most notably offering various control schemes.
Like I said, Clonk Endeavour, the second-to-last game in the series, is freeware and very similiar to the most recent release. Clonk Rage, the latest title, is shareware and can be bought for roughly 23$ (or, more precisely, 15€).
I considered writing a two-word review for this game: “fart jetpack.”
But hey, there’s a lot more I’d like to say about Puzzle Farter, like how I enjoy how deep and rich the farts in the game sound, how much they made me chuckle, and how great the character designs are. How easily Pet Tomato (another great company name, by the way) could have made the main character a fat guy with a beer gut rather than a cute, nerdy fish-head boy with a Hawaiian T-shirt on. Fun game.
Click here for an interview with one of the creators.
Touch My Pixel sent me this preview of a Scarygirl Flash game they’re working on. It looks like fairly standard platforming action, but boy, is it pretty! Love those underwater levels, natch.
Apparently it’s impossible to be a webcomic in the 21st century without having your own video game to go along with it. The newest in this growing breed is the game from Least I Could Do which is an entirely awesome comic based around the adventures of Rayne Summers as he teaches us about life, laughter, sex, trying to become pope, adopting street urchins to build you pidgeon launching catapaults and of course, x%xing a bicycle.
It’s still VERY early stages, as you’ll see from the animations above, and apparently it’ll be an old school action-platformer whilst being a strong parody of the original Super Mario Bros. I’m a little cautious about it myself, as it is much too early to really say how it’ll turn out. Of course, that’s where you guys can come in! The author ‘Ryan Sohmer’ is currently looking for people with video game/flash programming experience to help out on the project, so if you feel up to it just hit up the forum and fire him off an email. Who knows, you may just save Christmas.
UPDATE: Apparently I missed out that a Looking for Group is also in the making and the same request for help applies to that too. So you no longer have to choose between sex and elves. Good times…
There’s definitely some kind of dinosaur revival going on here! Thanks to MisterX for letting us know that the full version of Raptor 2 is out, except it’s now called Sixty Five Million and One BC. The original Raptor was well-regarded in the Game Maker community for its nice graphics, humorous storyline, and technical achievements. In the game you played a sassy velociraptor sent out to rescue some raptor eggs that were stolen by pterodactyls.
Sixty Five Million and One BC is very similar, but looks and plays even better. Your raptor has more moves now, but retains the same great dino feel that he had in the first game… kind of dexterous and ungainly at the same. This time you’re trying to build a machine to save the planet from an incoming meteor, and the narrative provides plenty of opportunities for tongue-in-cheek jokes, breaking of the fourth wall, and occasional pop culture references.
The game’s not without its flaws, however – there are spots where trying to finesse a big dinosaur can be a pain, especially when there are all manner of little beasties trying to hurt you and knock you off of trees. And the graphics, while better than Raptor’s, are still much too brown/bland-looking for my taste. I would have much preferred a more colorful prehistoric world to romp around in. Ah, well!
The full version of the game is roughly 4 times the size of the demo, and is going for twenty dinosaur eggs ($20).
Pixeljam, the creators of Gamma Bros. and the Ratmaze games, have released Dino Run, the latest in their series of low-resolution Flash titles! The basic premise is that you are a little dinosaur escaping extinction! Run, run (and jump), as fast as you can to the end of each level before the “Wall of Doom” engulfs you.
This game’s a real charmer. Each of the 7 levels is meticulously rendered in beautiful lo-fi, with lots of little details that you will probably be too busy running past to notice. Along the way you’ll get to snack on birds, lizards, and fish, grab rides with pterodactyls, and discover lots of alternate passageways and secret nooks. Other dinosaurs that are fleeing the destruction will hinder you, help you, or just plain die at the hands of crashing meteors and other dangers – the entire atmosphere is kind of dreadful, in a really cute way.
There are quite a few extra features, like dino DNA upgrades, unlockable speedrun levels, various difficulty settings, and even a multiplayer online mode that lets you race against other dinos. A small donation will get you a Dino Run Bonus Package which lets you customize your dino’s look, among other things. Do eet – this game is really cool!
