Iffermoon is the latest RPG from Scott Cawthon, also known as Scott Games. If you’ve played The Desolate Room and Legacy of Flan 4: Flan Rising, then you should rightly expect another very unique experience from Scott. Iffermoon is definitely very different from your average fantasy RPG.
It’s also by far Scott’s most ambitious project. Dinost is an extremely detailed world, both in conceptualization and realization. Moving around the gorgeous environments and interacting with its unusual denizens, I felt like I was someplace rich in history… and the large backdrops that extend far into the distance give the impression that the world is physically vast. I also really dig Scott’s 3d pre-rendered graphics, which remind me a bit of Hiroshi Yoshii.
Unlike the other games, which were viewed from a top-down perspective, Iffermoon is 2d side-scrolling. You can enter new areas either by walking off either the left or right side of the screen, or by taking some sort of transportation (hot air balloons, pipes, elevators, etc.). Battles, which are by and large are voluntary, happen in real-time, with party members moving and attacking automatically. You can, however, direct the battle by setting combat stances and using special moves that have various effects. Combining these moves is essential to winning in battle.
Unfortunately, Iffermoon suffers from fairly prodigious loading times during transitions between areas, menus, and battles (at least, on my rig). This is probably fallout from the enormous, high-resolution sprites on every level. There is also some tedium involved in gaining the necessary amount of “favor” with someone to enable them to join your party. These quests generally involve walking to some location, collecting X number of items, or killing X number of monsters.
But in my opinion, it’s a small price to pay to experience one of the few RPG worlds that feels genuinely unique from head to toe. And the relative open-endedness of the journey is quite refreshing, also.
Josh Whelchel wrote to inform me that you guys helped raise over $800 for his cancer drive. That’s wonderful news!
And there’s more: The Spirit Engine 2, the long-waited sequel to Mark Pay’s much-loved RPG, is slated for a July 30th release, as revealed by the teaser above. There are also two older videos (1|2) that demonstrate the game’s combat system.
TSE2 will not be freeware, like its predecessor, but the final price is unknown. For more info, head to the official website.
Larva Mortus is a new top-down action game from Rake in Grass, the creators of the well-loved indie shmup Jets n’ Guns. In the game you play an agent in an occult crime-fighting organization of sorts… in other words, you’re going to be slicing, shooting, and blowing up every manner of foul Goosebumps reject in your efforts to protect humanity from the supernatural.
The fighting takes place across various missions that you select from a map. Some are “key” to the storyline and and some aren’t. The structure of each type is the same, however – make your way through a series of randomly generated rooms until you achieve your goal, whether its clearing the area of monsters, destroying profane altars, rescuing civilians, or what have you.
Larva Mortus is fun, and it looks good, but it doesn’t quite live up to Crimsonland or Smash TV, which are the two games it most reminded me of (and both classics of the genre). The action isn’t quite frantic enough, the RPG elements are a bit too diluted, the maps are too simple… and the game’s never quite sure whether it’s supposed to be scary or campy. Or maybe it’s the simple fact that it’s not as fun as it should be to blow a zombie’s head off with a shotgun!
But try it for yourself if it sounds interesting. The demo caps the amount of experience you can get, which bars you from attempting the later story missions. The full game is $19.95.
Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is hitting online stores on May 21st, and to juice you up for the release the PA guys are doing a countdown, and releasing a page of a comic each day. If you’re interested, take a look at this very positive hands-on preview by Chris Kohler at Game|Life. The game’s also gotten some very mixed reviews by the mainstream press, according to Gabe.
Precipice will be the first game released via Penny Arcade/Hothead Studios’ new indie game website, Greenhouse. It will be released for Windows, Mac, and Linux simultaneously.
In Yume Nikki (or “Dream Diary”), you play a young girl who can delve into a bizarre, and sometimes extremely frightening, dreamworld in order to collect “effects” that can alter her appearance in the dream. Some of the effects also have abilities that can be used there. At (almost) any time, our heroine can wake herself up and return to her small, spartan apartment, where she can write in her diary (save), or play a simple minigame on the television.
I really like this game. The lack of dialogue or any “action” fills me with this strange sense of dread. I also like the contrast between the tiny apartment and the enormous dreamworld. And visually, the game really reminds me very much of Earthbound (especially Moonside!) and cactus, which is a pretty awesome and terrifying mix.
Download the English version of the game here (42 Mb), via Rapidshare. The download includes the RPGMaker runtime, as well as instructions on how to configure your computer’s language support to play the game. It’s a fairly painless process.
Posted by Jordan Magnuson
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:45:00 GMT
Gladiator is a brilliant Action/RPG hybrid playable by up to four players on one keyboard. Yeah, the graphics are “old” (whatever that means). Yeah you’re going to need an attention span longer than the average casual gamer to get your team set up. So what. Period.
In my opinion this game is one of the best and most classic multiplayer on one keyboard games you will ever play. The game was originally released by Forgotten Sages for DOS in 1992, but has since been ported to your twenty-first century operating system courtesy of Snowstorm Entertainment. Check out the game and see why it has an average rating of 9 out of 10 at HOTU.
Download and more info at Snowstorm. Man, you don’t even have to pay for this!
It’s still quite early in development, but I have to mention Omar’s Orthogonal Oyster Outing, the follow-up to Omar’s first tremendous oyster outing. If only to support charon and get him even more juiced about finishing this bad boy. ‘Cause it’s that great.
The original game, which pitted Omar against a town full of zombies, was an enjoyable action RPG “lite,” that had a number of interesting mechanics, like searching/securing buildings and fighting infections. O^4 so far seems to be that game, but with totally sweet minimal 3d graphics that can be zoomed and panned (using the mouse or the numpad).
The controls at this point are a bit obtuse and require that you have roughly 3 hands – you move with the arrow keys and aim with the mouse, but to shoot, you have to press the Spacebar. ‘Enter’ will get you into buildings. You can see the rest of the controls (and edit them all) by opening up “oooo.gei” in Notepad. This is a good way to get the game running in a window, as well.
Alse, be aware that in certain “omigod zombies”-type situations, Omar may start “panicking,” in which case you will temporarily lose control of his movement!
Jesus, the things you can do with Multimedia Fusion now! Why, back in my day we had to walk five miles in the snow just to make an active object… grumble grumble!
The above video is a preview of the engine behind Project Rhapsody, an RPG that’s been in development for a few years now. While “ambitious RPG” + “unpaid development” + “years” can = “vaporware,” the team still seems active and updates are coming fairly regularly now. And it looks pretty fantastic!
Another reason why I’m so jonesed about the game is that they’ve got Snake (aka Imson) on board. You may remember him as the pixel artist behind Katamari Colossus, but he’s also a fantastic painter.
“Hit the jump,” as they say, for some awesome concept art he did for PR. Good luck, guys! Become legendary! We’re rooting for you!
Sometimes you just want a good, brainless dungeon crawl. Monsters’ Den lets you put together a party of four characters (chosen from the requisite fantasy classes: warrior, cleric, mage, ranger, rogue) and then head into the dank, randomly-generated dungeons of wherever to do battle with all manner of grisly monsters.
The game mechanics are very simple – just click around the map to explore new rooms, collect treasure, and engage the denizens of the dungeon. Combat is tactical in the sense that your party’s formation (set before each fight) determines who can hit or get hit by whom, but overall it’s pretty fluffy (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). After fighting, you get to collect the requisite loot, which is never in short supply when you throw in all the treasure chests lying around – after level one you’ll have a lion’s share of interesting weapons and armor.
So yeah, Monsters’ Den is just a really stripped down RPG, and it’s really pretty enjoyable as that. And the randomization, character creation, and various difficulty modes (with and without permadeath) give it quite a bit of replayability. I had a good time with it, okay!
EDIT: Apparently, the game is extremely similar to the more polished FastCrawl, which is downloadable shareware ($20). See comments.
Created by a shady Chinese tech company in the year 20XX, this unlicensed demake of Final Fantasy VII was actually released as a cartridge at some point (when, though?)! A play-by-play copy of the Playstation original in terms of plot, FF7 NES is apparently NOT a hack of another FF game, and is, on a technical level, somewhat of a marvel. Chinese hackers are amazing, aren’t they?
Head over here for a full write-up of the game, including nearly 150 screenshots.
And I’m guessing some of you are probably interested in playing the ROM. Well, follow the “Baidu” link in the article and you’ll get to it eventually, although apparently only “an extremely hacked-up version of VirtuaNESex supports the game through an ugly bank-switching mapper driver.” You have been warned.
Alternatively, you can just watch this YouTube video that shows some (pretty boring) gameplay from the demake.
