Posted by ithamore
Wed, 18 Oct 2006 01:52:00 GMT
From the Land of the Rising Sun
From the Land of the Rising Sun, comes Logic
2.5 (click on the HTTP… link to download), which is described as a "refreshing, soothing
3D action game." Since it’s more concerned with exploration and
discovery than consequences and survival, refreshing and soothing are good
descriptors but not completely defining. It’s also curious, challenging, and occasionally
frustrating.
It isn’t as easy to get into as fighting and STG dojin soft, but that’s part
of the appeal. And it’s not difficult simply because of the language barrier:
Logic’s creator says saving has been enabled because the game
is "hard to understand" or "incomprehensible." But a language barrier still exists: the in-game help directions are much easier to figure out when using a
keyboard than a joystick (since the joystick help includes even more Nihongo),
and whatever the Japanese text included in
the opening demo is supposed to mean continues to mock me.
To actually get into the game, it helps to know you need to pick up a plant
and hit Tab to enter it, and a level is selected by jumping
on one the maps and entering again with Tab. The three small plants
contain the same two levels, which are deceptively simple and seem to have little to
do in them. However, there are unlockable cards that grant new abilities or can be used
to change settings (from the strength of the wind to the size of the yellow
character and the number of creatures), and this is the core of Logic, since
saving only preserves card placement. From the start, all 30 cards are available
for use with the large plant’s quite altered versions of the levels.
Between the large plant and the introductory demonstration, you can get a
good sense for what is possible in the game, but firguring out the games how-to’s is the fun of it all.
Plus, the ability to adjust more than the difficulty, video, audio, and
other such generic settings is a nice addition.
As for negatives: Logic isn’t for the impatient or those in love with eye
candy (but at least the textures are very skinable, so the game can be modified to be softer on the eyes),
it doesn’t work nicely on all systems (it works perfectly on my P4/Nvidia
powered desktop, however, even after adjusting
the logic.ini, my weaker AMD64/ATI powered laptop still had issues with
the transparencies of the dust, clouds, fire, and spirits), and I haven’t yet been able to figured out how to completely unlock the swan.
Posted in Unique / Bizarre, Windows, Action / Arcade, Freeware, Doujin | 7 comments
Posted by Derek Yu
Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:21:00 GMT
The creator of Line Rider makes this declaration at the beginning of his game’s description:
“Its not a game, its a toy. What i mean is there is no goals to achive and there is no score.”
It’s an interesting distinction he’s making, but it’s not enough to prevent me from posting it on TIGSource. Which stands for The Independent Gaming Source, not The Independent Toy Source. That would be a different acronym…
You get what I’m saying here?
In any case, Line Rider is only beta and it’s pretty fun, if a bit unwieldy. Draw lines and have a little guy ride them. Ride them so dirty.
With a little imagination and determination, you could even come up with scenarios like this.
Posted in Unique / Bizarre, Browser Games, Casual | 13 comments
Posted by ithamore
Sun, 17 Sep 2006 18:43:00 GMT
The
Maze of Cheese (which won 2nd place last year at
Stanford’s annual student competition for their Intro to Computer Graphics)
is akin to collecting games such as PacMan and Katamari. But instead of
collecting, you must roll the jiggly Baron around to touch every yellow piece of
cheese and turn them blue as quickly as possible. The longer you take the more platforms, corridors, and stairs will grow into
structures similar to M. C. Escher’s
"Relativity" and
"House of Stairs" especially in higher levels.
The game play is simple (maybe too simple) and straight-forward, the Baron never dies, and the levels are infinite in number. It feels much like an Atari 2600 game re-envisioned for the 21st century.
Since no documentation is provided with the game, you might want to continue
reading if you don’t want to hunt for the controls. Movement is made possible by the arrow keys or with
W A S D, the space bar jumps, and
gravity is rotated 90 degrees forward with Tab
and Enter.
Other useful keys that
should be mentioned are R to reset the
Baron to his starting point, holding Ctrl
brings up a map, holding the left or right mouse button and dragging it
moves the camera, L skips the level, P pauses, the
scroll wheel rotates gravity forward and backward (rapid scrolling is useful
for "flying" through large mazes), the -
key flattens the Baron, and the = key
un-flattens him (the other keys: 1-6, H, M, `, and Esc). Flattenning the Baron and warping him around himself by jumping a few
times while rolling will make him mutate and grow into a hypercube-like form that
shows the Maze who’s cancerous.
I like the idea of having extra controls to experiment with and to discover
different ways to play a game. Mutating the Baron just a bit allows him to crawl
madly through large mazes that would take much longer to finish a piece of
cheese at a time, but it can also make him hard to control when he grows too much. What do you think of incorporating such non-traditional controls?
(Source: Slashdot)
Posted in Platformers, Unique / Bizarre, Windows, Competitions, Action / Arcade, Freeware | no comments
Posted by dessgeega
Sat, 26 Aug 2006 15:52:00 GMT
toribash is an ancient game of ragdoll physics-based combat.
rather than using a keyframe-based system like most 2D fighting games, the fighters in toribash are constructed of lots of joints that can all be tweaked individually. for example, to deliver a kick you need to contract your knee, extend your ankle, contract your hip, and then finally re-extend your knee to deliver the blow.
it’s rather complicated! but that’s why it’s turn-based. and the complex physics means a good player can do things like this. it can take a while for new players to learn, though—a good starting point is the tutorial movies on the game’s homepage. the official forums, too, are full of replays to study.
when you’ve mastered landing on your feet, you’ll probably want to attempt online play. the main servers are pretty high-traffic, but fun-motion (who reviewed the game recently) has set up a few more servers, with and without disqualification (when the fighter’s body touches the floor).
alternate title for this post was “the real rag-doll kung fu”.
Posted in Unique / Bizarre, Highly Recommended, Fighters, Linux, Windows, Physics, Freeware | Tags Hampa | 3 comments
