Darkwind: War on Wheels is a physics-based, turn-based, squad-based vehicular combat MMORPG with a real world timescale and detailed economic simulation. And as improbable as that sounds, it’s apparently quite real. Shaun (udm on the forums) writes:
You create a gang, and the main goal is just to survive. Do whatever it takes – trade, race, banditry, fight etc. My favourite aspect of the game still has to be racing, mainly because my gang’s roots are too firmly ground into races. Think of the tabletop game Car Wars having sex with EVE Online, then doing a threesome with Autoduel and Auto Assault, and finally making out with Football Manager. You get to do trading and other miscellaneous activities which I haven’t explored yet via the web browser. When a battle takes place, you launch the in-game client, and you fight in turn-based 3D.
But let me elaborate more on my favourite part of the game, since it’s also my most familiar, and hopefully it will excite more people – the races. Races and deathraces are held on a regular hourly basis, so there’s no shortage of races to take part in. The game is turn-based. You select the degree of turning, select the optimal speed, and end turn, and the cars will move according to how the players/AI choose. Sounds boring on paper, but the physics are so well executed in-game, it’s a thrill ride. I’m even willing to say that this feels even more intense than any real-time racing game I’ve played. It’s just… addiction at its best.
I know there’s bound to be disbelief, but this game is really amazing. You have to play it to believe it, and I urge you guys to try it.
I haven’t played Darkwind yet myself, but I’d be impressed if the game lived up to even half of what it claims to be on the website! I will point out that character permadeath and persistent NPC gangs are two of the game’s features. I just thought those sounded particularly interesting.
If you’re interested, you can try the game for free for an unlimited amount of time. Buying a subscription, however ($20 for 3 months, $34 for 6 months, $58 for 12 months), enables you to buy, sell, trade, and customize cars, own facilities, and participate in subscriber-only events, among other things. And if you subscribe now, your subscription is free until October 19th.
A while back we previewed a great indie co-op RPG, Wanderlust: Rebirth, shown here in a great tongue-in-cheek trailer (hooray for TIGSource citing!)
Recently, development for this project has picked back up, and an official demo has been released. The demo is a big update from the version we previewed, and now includes several new features.
3 Chapters
4 Bosses
Items to craft & collect
Dedicated Hosting options
New “Crawl” Game Mode: Where you can fight unlimited waves of enemies who increase in difficulty each level. After each level you get treasure and/or tokens for you and your team.
The team continues to work hard on the project, and I look forward to seeing the game reach completion.
The Exile games are RPGs in the Ultima style: make a party, crawl through an enormous world, gain stats, talk with people, kill thousands of monsters, and so on. Very addictive. They were later remade as the Avernum series, although some don’t like the remade games as much as the original ones (especially the remade graphics perspective).
My absolute favorite part of the game is how detailed the world is, how each NPC has custom text and feels like a real person, with their own lives and backgrounds. The story is written in third person, like a fantasy novel, which is odd for a game but works well here.
Jeff Vogel released the first Exile game back in 1995, making him one of the most classic indie developers still actively making games (he’s still releasing new ones, Geneforge 5 is the latest). The original shareware Exile trilogy was released between ‘95 and ‘97, and the free and open source Blades of Exile game (where users can create their own campaigns) was also released in ‘97.
Of the original three, the first one is a bit dated, so I actually recommend beginning with the second or third one, or with the free Blades of Exile, since the GUI and so on are much improved on over the first one. For instance, to ask a character about a specific thing involves clicking on a word in the second and third game, but manually typing that word out in the first game. Even the demos of the shareware ones are quite lengthy, and offer at least 10-20 hours of gameplay each.
These were some of the first indie games I ever played, they existed before the term ‘indie game’ was even commonly in use. One of my fondest game-related memories is, back on Windows 3.1, noticing that the graphics to Exile 2 and 3 were stored in simple .bmp format, and going into MS Paint and manually editing the appearance of a few of the character sprites, customizing them for my characters, such as replacing a staff with a sword, or recoloring red clothes to blue.
Egoboo is a dungeon-crawling action RPG first released in 1999 by Aaron Bishop. After his brother Ben convinced him to release it as open source, the game began to enjoy quite a bit of development thanks to a willing community. It’s had its ups and downs, but currently the game is being developed at a fairly steady rate. Though sometimes gaps between stable versions can be a bit long, the in-development beta version can be accessed through a subversion repository, which is updated any time a change is made.
The original idea of Egoboo was to create a game like Nethack, but in real time and with 3D graphics. Although most of the gameplay resembles a typical ARPG, there are a lot of subtle aspects that are reminiscent of roguelikes (and Nethack in particular). There are quite a few strange secrets and “Easter eggs”; discovering a couple of these can even result in unlocking an extra class to play as in addition to the eight you can normally choose from.
To start the game, you must choose a class and beat a “starter module” before you can go out into the game’s main dungeons. These modules will help you become familiar with the specific abilities of the class you chose, and require you to apply strategies that will help you use your character more effectively in the future.
After you beat the starter module, you are ready to play through the main game. The main series of modules consists of seven dungeons (two of them are divided into two separate halves, so there are actually nine in total). Once you beat one, you will be able to play through the next, and you are always welcome to go back to modules you have already completed. There is also a small town that is available from the beginning and a larger city that is unlocked later on. You can visit these peaceful areas to purchase more gear. There are also a few NPCs who will send you on side quests, most of which will culminate in the discovery of rare and useful loot.
You can play through most of the game with up to four players (on the same machine) using the keyboard, mouse, and joysticks. The only exceptions to this are starter modules and a few side quest dungeons that are only available for one player. (Many of the modules that can only be played by one person do include AI-controlled companions, though.)
Most modules consist of playing through until you find a boss monster, then defeating it. The game isn’t all hack and slash, though; there are also puzzle elements every once in a while that make the game feel a little bit like something from the Zelda series.
Egoboo is still a little rough around the edges, and some people may be turned off by its graphics, which look a little like something from the N64 era. But beneath the questionable exterior lies a very charming game with unique style, solid gameplay, and a fair amount of depth. It’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re a fan of ARPGs or Zelda-esque adventures. Be on the look out for when the next version is released in a few days; it should have quite a bit of new content.
The Way by Lun is an episodic jRPG-style game in six parts, created in RPGMaker. The first episode was released in 2002, and the entire series took three and a half years to develop. Although very popular within that community, it’s lesser-known elsewhere.
The game involves a long search for a missing person, having many adventures on the way. It uses a few twists on the standard RPG formula, with a custom battle system and equipping auras (acquired from defeating bosses) instead of weapons and armor, and it has an interesting ability upgrade system. Interestingly, apparently the player can elect not to play the battles at all, and just go through the game for the story and exploration.
As Malefact goes into in his Let’s Play, if you don’t like the first episode very much, don’t be put off, since it’s widely considered the worst of the six: it gets better as it goes on. Unfortunately the game always uses mostly unoriginal graphics and music, which can distract from the game—this is the bane of most RPGMaker games. But if you can ignore that, this is one of the best games made in that engine.
Tower of the Sorcerer is an old (first released in 1998) game created by two indie developers in Japan, Oz and Kenichi. Although its site is still up (linked to above, charming 90s design and all, complete with an auto-playing midi), the download link doesn’t seem to work on it, but the one here does.
It may look like an RPG, but it’s actually more of a puzzle game. The video Let’s Play by Malefact will give you a feel for how it works. The game bears some resemblance to another game series, Deadly Rooms of Death, in particular DROD RPG (which Tower of the Sorcerer served as inspiration for), but is otherwise unique in its play experience.
It’s very addictive, it had me playing it most of today, and it’s extremely difficult—do save often because it’s very easy to get yourself into a situation where you can’t advance. The video Let’s Play does go through the entire game for those who may have trouble solving the game.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Tue, 26 May 2009 18:35:00 GMT
[This is a guest review by Craig Stern. Submit your own reviews to TIGSource here (forum membership required).]
Word has it that Blossomsoft has confirmed a sequel to its well-received indie RPG Eternal Eden, creatively named Eternal Eden 2.
The original Eternal Eden is a JRPG take on the Eden myth from (you guessed it) the Bible. Although a straightforward RPG Maker game in many respects, Eternal Eden stands out largely because it encourages player exploration. There are no randomized battles – you can walk around to your heart’s content without fear of being attacked, provided you’re nimble enough. Enemies are visible as clouds of smoke wandering somewhat aimlessly across each area. So long as you don’t walk into them, they will leave you alone. Additionally, items and loot are hidden in nooks and crannies all over the place, discoverable only by walking over them and pressing the space bar. The game informs you that it is essential to gather these in order to survive, and given how difficult some of the in-game battles are, I reckon that’s correct. Between avoiding enemies and searching for pick-ups, Eternal Eden occasionally feels more like a slow-paced game of Pac-Man than it does a JRPG. This is a good thing – it helps keep Eternal Eden from feeling too same-y. (The game does encourage you to fight monsters, however, via special treasure areas that open up only when you’ve cleared an area of enemies.)
Eternal Eden is not without its flaws. It relies heavily on pre-packaged RPG Maker graphics, and the in-game writing is sometimes quite clumsy. For instance, while searching for someone you know near the beginning of the game, one of your companions helpfully suggests that you kill every monster in the area in order to make her appear. Why a person in the world of Eternal Eden (who, come to think of it, has never even seen monster-containing smoke clouds before) would think those two things are related, much less announce it aloud without prompting, is beyond me. Presumably, this dialog is in the game because no rational player would ever make that connection either.
In spite of its flaws, Eternal Eden is on the whole a well-produced game with some innovative features and an interesting premise. It seems that the sequel is going to have its share of twists as well. Blossomsoft has described the forthcoming EE2 thusly:
Eternal Eden 2 will focus on Japhee, a female protagonist who possess a mysterious clairvoyance gift. Thanks to her special ability, the player will be allowed to influence parts of the game by reading the future through special artifacts.
Influencing the course of future events by learning of them in advance could make for a really interesting gameplay mechanic. The way I imagine it, however, it would take some strong non-linear writing to make it interesting and non-gimmicky. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see how Blossomsoft makes it work. In the meantime, you can decide for yourself whether the original Eternal Eden is worth your $19.99 by downloading the demo, which lets you get as far into the game as you can in the span of an hour.
If you’ve never played the original game ‘Omar’s Oyster Outing,’ I could probably forgive you; screenshots of a single pixel being chased by similar single pixels don’t really convey a feeling of excitement. However, ‘OOO’ really was a great little time-waster. Your goal was simple: survive. This entailed killing zombies with a handful of weapons, managing ammo and other supplies, flying helicopters, and detonating the odd nuclear warhead. But if you missed this gem, no hard feelings.
Now, you really should have taken a look when we mentioned the sequel, ‘Omar’s Orthogonal Oyster Outing.’ Not only did it keep all of the tense, surprisingly in-depth gameplay from ‘OOO,’ but it added a whole new dimension, namely the third. There was something very neat aesthetically about the simplistic buildings and unusually high number of playgrounds. Also, the addition of stick-figure zombies with business ties was good stuff.
Well, this time I’m not even going to give you the chance to miss another of developer Charon’s ‘Omar’ games. In fact, I’m going to mention it while it’s still just a prototype. Go check out ‘Omar’s Oyster Outing 3D.’ It’s got all of the aesthetic charm of the second game, and I assume that Charon will be adding the gameplay characteristic of the series soon. Be sure to drop by, maybe play the first two again (or for the first time), let him know what you thought was best about both, and just be supportive in general. Or, maybe just chill with the zombies, but be ware: they have a dress code…
The weekend-long contest apparently revolved around trying to create a playable RPG in 48 Hours around the theme ‘LOFI’, allowing developers to interpret that anyway they want. GirlFlash decided to interpret it through gameplay, employing the supposed bare-minimum required of an RPG. The result is The Linear RPG, an incredibly simple RPG where very little happens. Run right, kill everything. If that fails, run left until you kill enough that you can keep running right and killing everything. The story is told in the background, as the player runs around on the foreground which is represented using a very stylish 3D-Effect. Most of the enjoyment I had through the game came from reading the tale in the back, which is about absurd as it is completely awesome. You’ll never see Alphabetti Spaghetti quite the same way again.
Overall it’s quite a sweet dig at JRPG’s, playing off stereotypes and cliche whilst simplifying the gameplay to an almost insulting degree and yet still maintaining an easily recognisable formula in even current generation mainstream titles. An awful lot of RPG’s rely upon their story to be the main distinguishing factor between themselves and other titles in a genre, and if nothing else this game effectively demonstrates what many RPGs are at their very core. So at the very least, thank you GirlFlash for reminding me just how much I hate the opening of Xenogears!
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:14:00 GMT
Bernie, one of my favorite freeware developers (take a look at TIGS history), is working on his first RPG. At least, I hope he is! There hasn’t been any news since it was announced, but, assuming he finishes it (as Bernie is wont to do), it will be “simple, colorful, and easygoing.” To contrast these dark times we live in.
The game is tentatively titled “Kitty RPG” as it stars the kitty from A Game With A Kitty, which seems to get linked to in any post that so much as mentions Bernie.
In case you missed it, you can find A Game With A Kitty here.
