Posted by Guest Reviewer
Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:43:00 GMT
[This is a guest review and interview by Fuzz.]
“I don’t remember my line…
Snow snowball dreams ghosts white ele (elegy) stripes…
Talk with eyeball in the bed…
Mental station…
I passionately like how helicopter flies under the eye nerve…
Undercarriage of the airplane, which looks like the blood vessels…
Am I not healthy?
On the aviation field planes fly away one by one…
This story of the broken equilibrium is about a guy, who was in the psychward, but once flew away…
My art does not suck…”
Space Spy is a puzzle game by Vasily Zotov, the creator of Quite Soulless. It is a series of 5 vignettes set in and around the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. What starts off with a seemingly innocuous shot of keys dropping into the sewers escalates into an adventure of epic scale featuring the hypnotization of police officers, 8-sided eyeballs in psychiatric wards, a romance between an actress and a yeti, and the destruction of a courtroom by a fascist with a rocket launcher. And all the while the crazy director Canavati is watching you…
The graphics can hardly be considered “good” by any stretch of the imagination, but they are fascinating in an eerie, surreal sort of way. An IGF judge described Zotov’s art style as “so amazingly complex and interesting that it’s almost ‘folk art’”. The models and backgrounds are obviously very amateur, but they have a certain charm and atmosphere to them which would just not be quite the same if they were more polished.
The gameplay primarily consists of puzzles involving various objects being pushed to certain coordinates on a grid. The solutions are often quite obscure, but the developer includes a walkthrough for each level within the game so there’s no need to fret about how to complete a particular section. The lack of sound and extremely slow movement were the only real barriers to my enjoyment of this wonderfully insane creation, but neither of those are major problems. Those who must consistently be absorbing sounds can just listen to their own music, and slow movement, while annoying, didn’t particularly bother me.
Vasily Zotov released his magnum opus, Quite Soulless, about a year ago as shareware, but this game is free. You can view the trailer here and play the game online or offline here.
Hit the jump for an interview with the creator, Vasily Zotov:
In Positech’s Gratuitous Space Battles you design ships, place them, give them vague orders, and then… watch. At that point, the battle is out of your control – as the big man with the plan, you merely watch your cruisers, frigates, and fighters duke it out to the last crew member. If you lose, you go back and redesign either your ships or your placement of them. If you win, you gain honor that can be used to buy new ships, components, and even alien races to play.
Watching the battles can be quite enjoyable – the graphics are gorgeous and do a great job of capturing the look and sound of any epic space melee I’ve ever seen on television or the movies. Giant cruisers crawl slowly across the screen but are armed with powerful weapons and shields, while tiny fighters dart around them going pew pew! By the end of each battle space is littered with the burning wreckage of destroyed ships.
But even though they look and sound good, the battles in GSB are really lacking the impetus of the ones in the movies. Mostly because there’s no context to the fighting, not even the thinnest story or briefest of mission briefings before each battle. Comm-chatter displayed at the top of the screen is funny but very repetitive – and besides, it’s just text. Where’s the heated exchange on the viewscreen before the battle begins? Or the cadet in uniform nervously awaiting your orders? These are neat space battles, but it’s hardly a space opera, and as such, I didn’t have a lot of incentive to see the next level.
The other problem I had was that the strategy felt shallow to me. Most of my battles ended up in a giant ball of ships in the middle of the screen – pretty, but uninteresting. Also, even though there are dozens of ship types, weapons, shields, engines, and other components, many of them are simply upgrades of each other, or have barely noticeable differences. Ultimately, it’s easy to find a winning strategy through trial-and-error. “Oh, their fighters nailed me that time – I’ll add some of my own fighters, or I’ll add anti-fighter guns.” “Their shields are strong, I’ll go for strong shield penetration.” Find the antidote, and win. Harder difficulty? Add more ships. It worked for me.
I very much enjoy the idea behind Gratuitous Space Battles – that you spend a lot of time setting up and then just watching a marvelous space battle unfold. And I liked tinkering with ship designs. The fact that it’s so easily moddable is awesome, too. But in my opinion the game is suffering from what a lot of casual games suffer from – it lacks depth.
Dungeon is a game by a powerful tag-team: Mr. Podunkian (of The Underside fame) and cactus (of dozens of games per year fame). To quote Zarathustra in the forums: “a horribly hard platformer with bad graphics? This is indie people”
My favorite part of the game was the room titles, which I think were a great way of adding an interesting background story to a game without dialogue. It’s a short game, took me about 10 minutes to get to the end, while playing in a window and having a conversation with two people at once (one of them Podunkian). A good indie game snack.
“Dungeon is a tragic platformer about what can happen in a
castle, and how it affects people like you and me.” -cactus
EDIT: cactus has an update for us!
Sorry about the radio silence, we felt it was necessary to let this experiment live its own life for a while.
Thomas “T.V.” van der Velden’s Harmony is a new FPS made with the ZDoom game engine. It is 8 years in the making. 8 years… wow, that is some dedication!
The game features original graphics and music. The monsters in the game were modeled from clay figures that the author rigged with wires so that they could be animated. Overall, Harmony looks fairly drab, but the character designs certainly lend it a unique and creepy look. The music is pretty good, too – I especially like the track that’s all drums.
It’s a challenging FPS that hearkens to the early days of shareware – there’s no jumping or swimming here (there is mouse-aiming, though)! Unfortunately, the weapon selection is not as interesting as the monsters, and you’ll mostly be playing with variants of the standard Doom line-up. But the level design is good – 11 large (and I do mean large) maps make you backtrack a lot, but are intuitive and have lots of shortcuts and secrets. The item placement feels right to me, too – ammo is valuable but not too scarce.
An original and complete game based on the Doom engine doesn’t come around that often, and Harmony is an impressive effort, if somewhat rough around the edges. It’s definitely worth a look for fans of old FPS’s. Thanks, jute, for the tip.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:29:00 GMT
[This is a guest review by Guert.]
What if you could jump off a skyscraper, plummet down toward the ground at incredible speed, caress the buildings, and live to tell the tale? What if, while diving, you could give thumbs up to fans and flip off protestors? AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, the latest title from Dejobaan, is a skydiving stunt game staged in a futuristic universe. You step off the ledge of a skyscraper and, as you plunge through the floating buildings, you try to earn points by falling close to the structures, earning “kiss” and “hugs” bonuses. For extra points, you can crash through bonus plates, give thumbs up to your fans watching you jump and flip off those who don’t like the show.
The experience is fun and it’s quite satisfying to avoid the buildings and occasionally crash head first into them for a nice excruciating death. The game controls are difficult to get into but once you do, you can start performing some high-paying stunts. The game has a good dose of humor and doesn’t take itself too seriously. For example, the “grab” screen, where you can purchase the full version, has a funny narration that explains the role of pixies in the development of the game. However, some jokes seem funnier on paper. For instance, the game features a meditation video that allows you to meditate in front of your screen. It sounds funny when it’s said out loud but when you experience it in game, it just feels out of place. The visuals are good but sometimes feel amateurish, mostly because it features generic fonts and a few simple “photoshopped” pictures. The audio is also good and fits the game very well. The ergonomics, most notably the menu flow, could have been a bit more polished, but it’s not troublesome.
Aaaaa!!! is a fun game that would benefit of an extra layer of polish. The concept is fun and the experience is entertaining. You can grab the demo, as well as the full game, on Dejobaan’s official website. The demo features 9 levels, the meditation video, and a bunch of hint boxes that tell you fun facts about the game and skydiving. And for those wondering where they may have seen this game before, it’s one of this year’s IGF contestants.
Au Sable is a game by the maker of All of Our Friends Are Dead, Amon26, and appears to be at least a spiritual sequel to that game. Fans of the previous game might enjoy the new one. For those who didn’t play that one, they are both platformers which focus on delivering dark and creepy feelings.
There’s more variety than the first game, and the controls feel tighter, and the art is just as nice. My only complaint is that the mouse cursor is off by default and the only way to learn how to turn it on is in the ReadMe file (which I missed and played through the game with that difficulty).
Again, you can get a taste of the game from Ortoslon’s playthrough if you’re sleepy or unconvinced by this review.
Hammerfight came out unexpectedly on Steam this week. Formerly known as Hammerfall, the game is set in a unique fantasy world and puts you in control of a flying machine that can be equipped with various knives, swords, flails, hammers, axes, and guns. Use the mouse to fly and to fight – Hammerfight employs a physics engine to let you swing weapons using the motion of your machine.
This game is strong and very manly in an ancient sort of way, kind of like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. Because of the direct control you have over swinging your weapons, getting a solid hit in Hammerfall feels REALLY good, and you’ll be doing a lot of it during a variety of manly activities like hunting giant cave worms with a ball and chain or fighting for your life as a slave in the arena. After each battle, a victory screen will pronounce your glory and say things like “You are now known as Derek the Barbarian,” or “You are the Worm Slayer,” or something like that. Also, as you progress, you’ll get decked out with all manner of sweet flying machine armor, and have banners hanging off of you that flap around as you kick ass. It’s awesome.
When the game was still called Hammerfall there was a playable demo available. Hammerfight is still the same great experience, but with all the polish it needed to be a full commercial release. (For one thing, the English text has been cleaned up considerably, making the storyline much more easy to follow.) It’s just as gorgeous, detailed, fun, and challenging as it was before, just better.
Hammerfight is a masterpiece, and $9.99 is a bargain. Go grab it!
Sorry for that. Anyway as you should be aware Eufloria, previously ‘Dyson’, has been released on Steam, D2D and through the official site. If you didn’t know this then I’m afraid you’re simply not cool. However in reading this post you now DO know this, and have automatically been saved from an awkward moment of self-doubt and an accusing glare. It’s fine, no need to thank us, we’re just doing our job. If you really do want to show your gratitude then why not pick your favourite digital distributor and play one of the most elegant strategy titles of recent memory.
If you’re still on the edge, you can also play the demo to find out if nothing else just why we needed to tell you that you could.
Fatale is the latest mystical experiment from Tale of Tales. It’s inspired by Oscar Wilde’s interpretation of the biblical character Salome, although, in my opinion, knowledge of the story is not required to enjoy the game. I wasn’t familiar with it before I played.
I think the game captures the spirit of the story very well. I don’t think it’s meant to retell the story, per se, but to give it a certain added richness by letting you explore a few of the critical scenes in interesting ways. It’s worth mentioning that Takayoshi Sato (of Silent Hill fame) did the character design, which is perfect considering the sensual and macabre nature of Salome’s tale. Overall, the graphics and audio are quite good.
I enjoyed Fatale and came out of it thinking about its implications and intrigued by its source material. However, I still feel that it’s a good game that’s shy of great. For it to be great would require more detail in the simulation, which sometimes feels clunky and uninspired. Whereas these flaws might go unnoticed in the games of “seasoned gamers” (a phrase playfully cribbed from the website), in Fatale they really stand out for the simple fact that looking around and taking in the environment is the game’s primary focus.
Here are a couple of good-looking old-school 2d games coming from teams known for FPS’s:
Capsized is a platform game that’s reminiscent of Exile. Coming in 2010 to Steam and XBLA, from the creators of the multiplayer FPS Nexuiz.
Locomalito, best known for their chunky FPS 8-bit Killer, are working on Hydorah, a Gradius-style shmup. It will be released as freeware at some indeterminate date.
