Posted by Guest Reviewer
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:08:00 GMT
[This is a guest review by anosou. If you’re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]
Square Off is an Xbox Live Indie Games title from Australian developer Gnomic Studios. An arcade-style shooter with a distinct cartoon art style, Square Off is one of the better games available from Microsoft’s indie platform. Why? Here’s why:
The concept of Square Off is rather simple really. You play as a little genetically-engineered square made from a mad professor’s brain cell and some alien DNA and your job is to wipe out the ongoing alien invasion. In practice this translates to a twin stick shooter with some twists. You control your little square (equipped with an adorable jetpack) with the right stick, aim with the left stick and shoot with the right trigger. During gameplay you can pick up an assortment of wondrous little powerups including a shotgun, a triple-barrel gun, bombs and a rocket launcher. The gameplay is very smooth and responsive, as it should be in a shooter, and the controls are simple yet functional.
In the main mode, the one where you fend off previously-mentioned aliens, the game is split into 6 stages. These generally take the form of a few rooms connected by smaller corridors and they’re all positively swarming with aliens. Again the gameplay is very basic but enjoyable – shoot the alien spawn and destroy the motherships and you move on to the next level. It’s actually quite unforgiving at times for the lonely player. If you can’t keep up with the alien spawn rate you can easily find yourself trapped in a narrow corridor unable to get through because your standard gun can’t keep up with the rate of alien spawns. A small design flaw but it’s uncommon during the game if you’re playing on a decent level.
What makes Square Off stand out are mainly two things. First and foremost it’s the focus on multiplayer. The main game (although a bit short) can and should be played with a friend or three. This makes the sometimes unforgiving levels both more fair and more enjoyable. Even the classic co-op “THAT POWERUP WAS MINE YOU IDIOT!” is there and I’m loving every second of it. This also takes care of the difficulty one might encounter when playing alone, it’s clearly designed around multiplayer play. There’s also a Death Match mode with three different gameplay options: To The Death, Frag Race and Time Limit. Going head to head with a few good friends in your couch makes for quite the killing fest.
The other thing that makes Square Off stand out is the delicious art style. Clearly inspired by The Behemoth’s games, the cartoon style with the thick lines and great attention to facial expressions works very well. There’s hardly anything to complain about here, this is definitely one of the better looking games on XBLIG. The sound and music almost reaches the same level too. The sound effects work perfectly with the game and the dramatic music gives the game a tongue-in-cheek serious tone.
Square Off does have some small issues though. The first and arguably biggest is the lack of online multiplayer. While this is uncommon for XBLIG titles in general, it would’ve taken this particular game to the next level. Other than that there could’ve been more variation when it comes to the enemies, most of them are of the same type (and look) and just keeps chasing you. To be completely fair these are minor things when you look at the whole package. Square Off is one of the better games on XBLIG and for 240MS (3 PUNY EARTH DOLLARS) you can’t go wrong with this. If you have friends to play with that is.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:44:00 GMT
[This is a guest article by Shade Jackrabbit. If you’re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]
Recently Team Effigy released the final version of their adventure game The Marionette. After three years of development it is now playable, and it is quite interesting. Taking the role of Martin, a struggling sculptor in the big city, you begin by simply opening a letter. Soon you are transported into a surreal mystery of ghosts and the past, which you must solve if you ever want to get back home.
It’s a great-looking game for one, deciding to go with a painted look as opposed to photographic or pixelized. The soundtrack is really good as well, and apparently you can get a copy of it if you send in a donation. The game has been self-rated as 16+ due to content, as there’s some very violent imagery as well as more mature themes. It’s also a bit of a downer so I don’t recommend playing it if you want to have a really fun time.
Still, it has a really good story, so this is a definite play for you adventure fans out there.
Here’s the first official trailer for Tyler Glaiel and Jon Schubbe’s Closure, which is coming to the PC and Mac (and possibly other platforms) in 2011. The game is up for 3 IGF awards this year: Excellence in Audio, Technical Excellence, and Nuovo.
I realize I haven’t posted anything about cactus’s Tuning, a psychedelic platform game. Tuning has been nominated for the Nuovo Award at this year’s IGF and has won an award at Indiecade for “Sublime Experience”.
Finally, here’s an old trailer for an abandoned game by Joakim “konjak” Sandberg, the esteemed creator of Chalk and Noitu Love 2. Mina of the Pirates is a Metroidvania that was much-anticipated in the Klik community back in the day (we’re talkin’ circa 2003), and was apparently quite close to becoming a finished game before it got canned. Well, never say never, because here it is! Thanks, Joakim, for releasing this bit of indie gaming history into the wild.
Now if only Ben Berntsen would release Chaos Gate, all the old Klikkers would be satisfied…
ChevyRay has created a new 2d Flash game library called FlashPunk (v0.73).
FlashPunk is a free ActionScript library designed for developing 2D Flash games. Its goal is to provide you with a fast, clean framework for prototyping and developing games; this means most of the dirty work – reliable framerate, sprite rendering/animation, player input, and collision detection (to name a few) – has been covered with a set of base classes and functions for your ease of use. This gives you more time and energy to concentrate on the design and testing of your game.
It’s important to note that FlashPunk is targeted towards the development of games with 2D raster/bitmap graphics, as opposed to vector graphics. It can manage thousands of animated bitmap sprites on-screen at a time without slowing, a lot faster than Flash normally could, because it operates under the assumption that your game primarily uses bitmapped graphics.
The library is released as an alternative to Adam Saltsman’s Flixel framework, which is also geared towards 2d, sprite-based Flash games. You can read a list of differences between the two libraries here, in ChevyRay’s announcement thread.
The video above depicts a game that ChevyRay is creating using his engine, called Fight! Mechanical Shooting Device. The graphics are by Pietepiet. Jumper creator and RunMan: Race Around the World co-creator Matt Thorson has also announced that Jumper 4 will be developed in FlashPunk.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:52:00 GMT
[This is a guest review by anosou of an XBLIG game.]
Leave Home is a procedural, scrolling, score attack shooter. This basically means that the “levels” take shape depending on how you play. You can simply describe it as “do good = more stuff” but there’s a bit more to it than that. The smoothness of how the levels change is admirable – during my first couple of playthroughs I didn’t realize it got progressively harder the better I was playing. When I started learning the enemy and bullet patterns, thus scoring more points, I began to see the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between a good and a bad playthrough. For example I reached an area in the third stage I had never seen before when I had racked up some massive points, it was quite the revelation. There is much more under the hood than just “more points = more enemies” and it’s incredibly satisfying to explore this.
At heart Leave Home is a scrolling shooter with a lot of what comes with the genre. Luckily Hermitgames has worked on these before (Fren-zE for example) and knows exactly how it’s done. There are plenty of nods toward established games in the genre but the game still manages to feel fresh. The side-scrolling first level has a distinct Gradius-flavor, even similar enemy patterns. The fourth level feels like a nod towards Treasure’s Ikaruga and a late part of level 3 is pretty much an homage to Jeff Minter’s unreleased Unity project for GameCube. The two bosses you face at the end are very challenging and brings a definite bullet hell flavor to the game. Overall Leave Home feels like one big love letter to the shmup masters but because of the procedural nature it manages to keep it interesting. One of the more original gameplay elements is the ability to split shots with the right trigger, nothing fancy but it gives you a lot of extra control over how you play since the game lacks power-ups.
Leave Home is a fixed length game which essentially means a session will always take the same amount of time to complete. The beauty of this score attack mode of play is how it’s evolved in Leave Home as a result of the dynamic levels. If you do very good on level 3 for example you get to new parts of level 3 faster and these places generally have more possibilities to rack up a good score. The different ways you can play through a session, even though they’re all the same length, are staggering because of how the different stages change depending on how you do. If only XBLIG supported Leaderboards like XBLA does.. this would be the game to compete in.
Oh hey, did I mention that this game takes Rez and makes tough love to it to produce it’s graphics? The future-retro (yes, future-retro) flavor really makes the game pop out of the screen. Things explode into bursts of glowing particles and the clean cut shapes and black background work as great contrast to this light show. The music isn’t half bad either. Distorted squeaky acid basslines, glittering crunchy pads, Roland drum machines and other goodies go very well with the visuals and change seamlessly between levels.
The game is available for Xbox Live Indie Games for 240MS (roughly three puny earth dollars) and there’s a free demo to go with that too so I urge you to take a look.
FOR ONE WEEK ONLY, pre-order Overgrowth and Natural Selection both for just $40 (normally $70). Pre-ordering will give you access to early builds and tech. You’ll also be supporting two great, fully-independent 3d game developers – all the money goes directly to them.
People who have already pre-ordered Overgrowth or NS can still participate – you get the other game for free!
By the way, John… regarding the pink beard thing… can we get a promise that the carpet will also match the drapes?
I hope everyone’s enjoying the holidays! Here are some videos for you:
Here’s a great “making of” video for Anthony Flack’s Cletus Clay. The development looks like it’s going strong – check out the website for more updates, including a new action-packed trailer.
I was definitely surprised and excited to hear that Andy Schatz is working on Monaco, a 4-player co-op stealth game! Andy, who’s best known for his “Venture” series of educational wildlife games, discusses his creative shift on his blog.
There’s a single-stage demo for Locomalito’s Hydorah out. Thanks to Pixel Prospector for the news and video.
I check out Michal Marcinkowski’s blog pretty regularly. If you’re wondering how Link Dead is going – Michal and Sigvatr parted ways and Michal is using procedural graphics now. And actually, I think it looks pretty great!
Though there’s no demo available at the moment, the trailer does seem to be reason enough to be interested in this game. The basic idea appears to be that you use your ship in order to solve immediate puzzles in an attempt to accomplish your greater goal of collecting all the parts of your ship in order to return home. However, the more pieces of your ship you recollect the more you can alter the actual ship itself to better solve the puzzles. This could mean improving your score on earlier levels, or perhaps entirely alternate methods of solution through far more imaginative machinations.
The presentation appears to be pretty solid, with some nice looking ice effects and physics, and at less than $10 the overall package is rather tempting. Hopefully a demo is the next logical step from the developers, but I think the price point is quite well-pitched to my own curiosity so if nothing else I’ll hopefully have something more to say later on.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:42:00 GMT
[This is a guest review and interview by Fuzz.]
How does one begin to describe Dildo Tank? Is it a porn game? Is it a brilliant re-invisioning of the side-scrolling shooter? Is it a meditation on the eternal differences between man and woman? A philosophical treatise on stupidity versus wrong-headedness?
Dildo Tank is all of these things and more. The latest collaboration of Jazzuo and Amon26, it opens with an awe-inspiring duet between the two artists, culminating in the final, repeated lyric, “you are weak in the knees”. Here the option is presented to play the game in either normal or censored mode. If you click on censored, the vaginas will be blurred out, as part of an attempt by Jazzuo to make all his games family friendly, regardless of subject matter (see Boobza Sports for US Kids). Proceeding to the first story screen, we learn that a man named Joon has need of our pilot skills in order to help destroy the women with no heads, who are trying to destroy mankind. From here on, the goal is simple: shoot your nude adversaries with poison dildos in order for their vaginas to absorb the harmful chemicals contained within these phallic objects. The implementation, however, is rather difficult, as you will be forced to confront all manner of giant naked women, including ones with spiked boots, laser shooting vaginas, and drills for feet.
Jazzuo’s work may be crude, but it shows a keen eye for design. The stages are carefully constructed to gradually acclimate the player to greater and greater amounts of spikes and enemies. Technique is taught through accidental experience; every player is sure to notice soon enough that the feet of the women should be ridden upon in order to more easily target them and avoid the spikes. One section in particular forces the player to ride a horde of women across a field of lethal spikes, while still attempting to shoot them. The choice has to be made: should I kill the women right away, or allow them to carry me across this spike field? Each new type of enemy is first introduced as a boss, with more health than they would normally have. The whole experience feels as though it was intended to be exactly as it is.
The graphics, while sub-par, are charming, and it is obvious that a fair amount of work went into them. The music perfectly suits the atmosphere of the game and again showcases Amon26’s stellar compositional skills. Jazzuo’s sound effects, entirely composed of his own grunts and squeals, are exceptional. The story is revealed in small portions through intermission text, as the main character’s instant messenger communications with his friends or enemies. I was not able to learn of the conclusions made by the game, as I was incapacitated by a large woman with a metal thong covering her genitals, but what I did see impressed me, as it explored much more than would be expected for a game with such a premise.
The game is available for download here, while the trailer can be viewed here.
I think DrPetter’s Deflectorpool is pretty brilliant. It’s got a unique combination of mechanics, a well-balanced difficulty ramp, a great combo system that effectively employs risk/reward, and lots of ways to score. It’s also deceptively simple and looks/sounds nice, to boot. Players who enjoy mechanical games should really enjoy this one.
In the game you control a “bat” that’s dangling from the bottom of a paddle that’s floating in water. Colored balls drop from the top of the screen, and your bat will collect balls of its color for points. By holding down the mouse button you can bump a different-colored ball to change colors. If a ball drops off the bottom of the screen, the screen is pushed upwards – if the water goes past the top of the screen, you lose.
The fun comes from getting large combos, which becomes ever more risky as the balls begin to pile up on top of your paddle. You’ll inevitably find yourself juggling furiously trying to avoid changing colors until the last moment. At the bottom of the screen, friendly messages encourage (goad?) you to keep going and striving to reach 10, 20, or 30 balls.
DrPetter’s still best known for his tools like Sfxr and Musagi, but if he keeps this up he’ll soon be well known for his games as well. In my opinion, Deflectorpool is great.
