[This is a guest article by PerrinAshcroft. If you’d like to contribute a guest article to TIGSource, go here.]
Digital: A Love Story is a free to download interactive story by Christine Love available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The game is set in 1988 and you begin the game with a threadbare interface closely resembling the Amiga’s workbench. To progress through the game you must use your modem to dial into bulletin board systems (BBS), make friends and enemies, download utilities, hack into protected system and commit phone fraud to make long distance calls. The game has a wonderful retro feel that’s going to tug strings of nostalgia for anyone who built up astronomical phone bills dialling into BBSs back before the internet became so widespread.
Parallels can be drawn to Introversion’s Uplink but Digital is very much its own experience. While Uplink was driven by the game elements of upgrading your deck and breaking into systems in a cool cyberpunk-esque world, Digital keeps its focus on characters and storytelling and draws instead from the unglamorous nerdy reality of the pre-internet digital world. The tools at your disposals are primitive, but are interactive enough that it doesn’t just feel like passive story.
I don’t want to elaborate too much on the content of the story as finding that out is what makes this game worth playing, but the story is really well structured and paced taking you through quite an emotional three-act tale in only a few hours. While the primary story is a fairly serious affair, Christine is smart enough to include humorous side plots such as getting into arguments with Star Trek nerds, a level of attention to detail that keeps the world interesting.
On a technical level I was very impressed once I realised the game was built with Ren’Py, a python based tool for building Japanese style visual novels. The game has been customised to the point where it’s unrecognisable from most projects build using those authoring tools. The interface is slick, the graphics are retro in a perfectly fitting manner and it includes a fantastic ambient soundtrack.
A game like this is unlikely to appeal to everyone, heavily story driven games are not to everyone’s tastes. But for those of you willing to spend a few hours, working slowly through an intriguing piece of interactive narrative there is a lot to enjoy about this title. I considered nit picking at a few minor issues but it seemed silly when for the most part this is a game with a specific purpose in mind and it executes it brilliantly. Ultimately for me, when the ending finally came it was a truly emotional moment where I just didn’t want to let go but knew I had to.
REDDER is a game by Anna Anthropy / Auntie Pixelante, with music by Amon26. It’s an exploration platformer focused around an alternating green/red block switch mechanic, similar to the mechanic used in the third pendent dungeon in the SNES classic A Link to the Past.
I found the colors very nice (even though the backgrounds are often just gradients, there’s a lot that can be done with just gradients of color), and the exploration of a fairly large world excellent. In a few ways the game resembles VVVVVV, but only in basic structure: a world of screen-sized rooms, numerous checkpoints, things to collect, but is more non-linear, slower-paced, and not as focused on challenge (you won’t die very often if you’re decent at platformers).
I’ve played through many of her other games (When Pig’s Fly, Calamity Annie, Mighty Jill Off, Invader), and so far this one’s by far my favorite; maybe you guys will agree.
Posted by Lorne Whiting
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:48:00 GMT
Blendo Games (the creator behind the very stylish and classy Gravity Bone) released Flotilla a little over a week ago.
Flotilla is a space exploration game where you go from star to star flirting with danger and talking to bull-slavers and cat-pirates and various other terrestrial animals piloting space ships, killing and getting killed by many of them.
The meat of the game is the turn-based spaceship combat. Turns take place simultaneously, so you have to really think about what your enemies are going to do, especially since each ship has a bunch of invulnerable armor plating that you have to circumvent. You can control the orientation of your ships, and there are a few movement options that let you trade speed for firepower and vice-versa, so it’s really a battle of lining up your ships so that you’re ships are flanking or can otherwise hurt the enemy, while making sure their shots can’t get past your armor.
It’s an incredibly satisfying system with a lot of depth, and the demo will make you cry and wish you had $10 when it ends. Or, y’know, you do and you can buy the game and everybody wins.
Posted by Alex Macqueen
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:47:00 GMT
“Mouse click on gerbils to shoot them, get scores, youre winning, YOU ARE WINNING FOREVER”
Let’s Win Forever is the latest creation of Amon26, from whom sprang the wonderful Au Sable series and a number of other short, humorous titles. In Let’s Win Forever, the player aims their crosshair at the members of a large crowd of colourful gerbils. Shooting them results in their gaining jetpacks and a seemingly arbitrary number being added to the player’s score. There’s not really any objective or purpose to the game, but that’s okay since it allows you to WIN FOREVER (!). The music is quite brilliant, as always with Amon’s work. If you enjoy this, it’s also worth checking out the more experimental Let’s Win Everything.
Download Let’s Win Forever here; get Amon26 merchandise (including art-books and a CD of Au Sable/AOOFAD) here.
Sleep Is Death is the next game from Jason Rohrer, who’s best known for creating Passage. You can pre-order SID now for $9 or purchase it for $14 when it comes out on April 16th. It’s described as “a storytelling game for two players”. You can find out more about the game by clicking through this fun slideshow.
This is kind of amazing: homebrew developer Sivak has just released Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril, a new NES (actual NES) Metroidvania that’s inspired by Kayin’s I Wanna Be the Guy and NES classics like Mega Man. It features 550 rooms, 30+ enemy types, and 8 bosses. There are 5 difficulty settings and a password system, too.
The cartridge, which is region-free and works on clone systems, can be purchased for $27. It comes with a full-color instruction manual and black dust sleeve.
Sivak has released a few other homebrew NES carts, I believe, although the only one I could find was Mystic Pillars, a Columns-like. Here’s a short interview that Screw Attack did with him earlier this month about Battle Kid.
Speaking of Mega Man, Cutman Mike (I really like that name!) is working on an FPS deathmatch based on the venerable Capcom series. Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch, which is being made using the Skulltag engine, will let you play as every single Robot Master from Mega Man 1 through 6 (48 in total) and use all of their abilities (Mega Man himself is also a playable character)! The game will be released some time in 2010 as a free standalone title.
Coptra is a new arena shoot ‘em up from Jan Willem Nijman, aka jwaap. Enemies and bullets move quickly in this game, making it very fast-paced. It’s simple, but the enemies and power-ups work really well together. I especially like how power-ups stack to create super-weapons.
If there’s one thing I’d change, I’d make the bomb its own unique-looking power-up. The bomb wipes out the entire screen and is the most strategical of all the weapons. Separating it from the rest would add some depth to the game and make it even more exciting.
If you plug in a dual-stick controller, you can use it to play Coptra (this game would kick ass on XBLIG). Press “B” in-game to toggle the gamepad settings until you find one that works with your controller. You can also turn off the scanlines by pressing “N”. I thought they looked cool, but I found it easier to play when they were off.
Posted by Alex Macqueen
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:33:00 GMT
“I WAS A TORTURE VICTIM BEFORE I STARTED TORTURE MYSELF”
Ah, Vasily Zotov, our constant purveyor of autobiographical, surrealist snippets of something-or-other. In preparation for his upcoming trial, which will determine whether or not he’ll be granted asylum in the U.S., he’s released the first chapter of his newest puzzle game, Refugee. It’s in the same vein as Space Spy, but with better music and bigger explosions. This one attempts to encapsulate his feelings on the corruption of power within Homeland Security, although there’s not much of that as of yet. You can expect more levels to be added in the coming weeks, provided that he comes out of his trial unscathed. Come for the “crazy juridicial prostitutes”, stay for the B-Game appeal of this absurd experience.
Let’s hope Thursday’s trial works out for Vasily; he seems a reasonable guy, if a bit out of the ordinary, and it appears that a return to Russia would do far more harm than good.
You can play Refugee here, while the trailer can be viewed here.
I just had my most exciting round of Desktop Dungeon. I went with a Halfling Thief as my character. Halflings can convert skill glyphs into health potions and thieves recover both health and mana from potions. I made an extra effort to slay high-level monsters early on for the experience boost, so when it was time to fight the boss (a powerful level 10 wizard named Aequitas who had a cool beard), I was a pretty respectable level 9. As a thief, my first attack always did 30% more damage, so I buffed myself and attacked, then tried my best to finish him off with a fireball skill. But GRRRRRR damn it, it wasn’t enough! We were both one hit away from dying, and I was out of mana and potions… a hopeless situation. I got ready to hit the “Retire” button and try again.
BUT WAIT! My buff skill! I almost forgot that I could convert the glyph into a potion. It provided just enough mana to launch the final fireball I needed to defeat Aequitas and unlock a new character class (Rogue) and a new monster (Gorgon). Very satisfying!
Rodain “Nandrew” Joubert, the creator of Desktop Dungeon, says his game was based on roguelikes like Crawl, but it plays more like a randomized puzzle game. For one thing, monsters in the game don’t move – they simply sit and wait for you to attack or ignore them – and their level and stats are displayed in plain view (in fact, pretty much all the information you need is). Also, the entire dungeon is just a single screen small, making it feel more like you’re exploring a chess board than the Mines of Moria.
Even at version 0.04, this is a crafty and addictive game – easy to play (mouse-only) with a surprising amount of variety and strategy in what is a relatively small number of races, classes, and skills (compared to most roguelikes). It goes by quickly, too – each game shouldn’t take more than 10-30 minutes, depending on how hard you’re thinking about it. And if the rough graphics bother you, you should take heart that the next version should allow you to use your own custom tileset (personally, I think they’re fun). Great entertainment – I can’t wait to play again.
Mark Pay has decided to release his RPGThe Spirit Engine 2 for free, citing poor sales as one of the primary reasons. Which is a shame, really, since it’s a lovely game and was a steal for $10, I thought (initially $18). You can read Mark’s announcement here.
