Right now you can get a little game called Waking Mars for $1.99 over at GOG (or $2.00 over at Steam). This is a steal. I’ve talked about this game before and I recommend reading that article for a good overview.
Basically it’s sort of a puzzle game and sort of a platformer and sort of Metroidvania but mostly it’s about exploration and being relaxed.
TLDR: GET IT ON GOG or GET IT ON STEAM or GET IT ON THE ITUNES STORE. Not even kidding you guys: this is a good one.
I’m sure most everyone has heard by now, but Flappy Bird has been removed from sale, so while those of us who already have it on our phone can continue to play it, for everyone else the titular creature has flapped into the sunset.
Do not fret, however! The guy behind games like Super Hexagon and VVVVVV has us covered with a flash game that makes Flappy Bird look like Fisher Price’s My First Difficulty Level.
Presenting Maverick Bird.
If you score higher than about ten I’m pretty sure you’re a legend.*
Have at it! You’ll probably be playing for a while as this game comes complete with Robot Unicorn Attack Syndrome (aka you won’t stop playing until the catchy song is done).
* EDIT: I have surpassed ten and been informed that some of my friends have done likewise. I’m bumping the new score-to-beat up to 20. Mister Adequate has 31. ARE YOU A BAD ENOUGH DUDE?
In this post I am actually going to live up to the blog namesake a bit and talk about an Android game. You have probably played it, and if you haven’t played it, you have probably heard of it.
I am, of course, talking about Flappy Bird.
It is the dumbest game ever. It involves tapping the screen to guide a bird through some obstacles. You get one point for every obstacle you successfully negotiate and you go until you lose. That’s it.
So why can’t I stop playing it? No, really?
Have any of you fallen prey to this game? What other really stupid games can you not stop playing?
Hello friends! Of course, when Pike and I resolve to get the blog going again, we both fall deathly ill and can barely rouse ourselves from bed that exact week! Still, I have largely recovered so here we go with a little blog post!
Here’s what you do: Go to Google Images and type in “atari breakout”. As you will soon see the screen will morph into that precise game, using the images for the blocks! Breakout is one of my very favorite classic games, one I’ve always adored, and it provides a really useful launching off point to show how very very simple systems can still make a very engaging and deep game. If you’re not familiar with Breakout, well, here’s your chance to get acquainted with it – though you might want to hold off if you’re in the middle of an important project ;)
That’s what Breakout looked like in the beginning and very little has changed. Those colored bars across the top consisted of a number of ‘bricks’, and you use the paddle to hit the ball up towards them, with the objective of breaking every brick. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well it is. But marrying such a simple concept with such a sense of satisfaction is the genius that makes Breakout such a great game – all you’re doing is breaking bricks to clear the screen. You’re not fighting wars like in Hearts of Iron, you’re not shooting mans like in Call of Duty, you’re not going fast like Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed – you’re just breaking some bricks. You’d wonder how it can be so fun and addictive. But that simplicity might be the very reason for it. Anyone can figure out the conceit of Breakout within a few seconds of watching or playing. There’s nothing extraneous to it, not even graphically in the beginning, it’s what you might call a very ‘pure’ game. And when you managed to breakthrough the bricks and get your ball to bounce along the ceiling and the top row? Well, that’s one of the more satisfying experiences in gaming, simple as it might be.
Breakout is a stellar example not just of how videogames began but of what makes them special. With a very simple premise, controls that are simply “left” and “right”, and almost nothing in the way of aesthetics, it’s not something that modern gamers, used to all kinds of razzmatazz and particles and trillions of polygons on Lara Croft’s breasts, might immediately see the value in, but it’s about as pure as a game gets. You’ve got your objective and the means to achieve it, and the only enemy is your own mistakes. It’s pure gameplay, nothing else. That’s something maybe some developers could do with a gentle reminder of in this day and age.
Lovely readers, if you have a moment I invite you to click here and spend 10 or 15 minutes playing this gem of a game. It’s first-person Pac-Man. This sounds straightforward at first, but augmented with eerie music and ghosts that materialize out of the darkness or pop around corners when you least expect it, it quickly becomes an experience you probably weren’t expecting when you read the word “Pac-Man”.
Mister Adequate and myself couldn’t help but somewhat whimsically wonder what the gaming landscape would have been like if the first Pac-Man had been less cute and more spooky. Survival horror: survival horror everywhere!
Recently, a game called Waking Mars went on Steam sale for a steal (and it still is on sale, by the way!) Because it had “Mars” in the title, I decided to snap it up. This, my friends, was a very wise decision. This game is more than worth the $2.50 I forked over for it. Basically, this is how you make a casual game.
It’s sort of a platformer, except you have a jetpack. And it’s sort of puzzle game, but none of the “puzzles” ever leave you frustrated. Basically the game is about exploring underground Martian caves, learning about (and growing and breeding) bizarre alien species, talking to your AI bro, and in general being comfy. Yes, this is a comfy game.
This isn’t a triple-A title by any means and the game is easy to pick up and learn but this by no means makes it shallow. You actually have an neat little story going on that keeps you interested throughout, and between this and the research you can do on various lifeforms (and the subsequent notes you can read), the game has a surprising amount of depth for what it is. Humor is here too, thanks to your AI companion, and so is a certain amount of thoughtfulness thanks to the main character. Speaking of the main character, he’s Chinese, and the only other human character in the game is a black woman. This isn’t made a big deal, it just… is, like any other normal thing, and I like how it’s done like that. It reminds me of Star Trek and it’s nice to see some variety in games.
Overall this is a fun and extremely relaxing romp through a mysterious and alien world and I really cannot stress how much of a steal the current sale price is. The game is also available for Mac, Linux, iPhone/iPad, Android, and probably an old toaster too, so you really don’t have an excuse not to snag this game. I mean, really, look at this and tell me this doesn’t make you want to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before:
Yeah, I thought so.
Buy it on Steam or at the website!
A small game which came out recently hit the headlines for a reason that wasn’t to do with the game itself so much as the game’s response to piracy. It’s pretty hilarious! But let’s have a word about the game itself before we get into that.
Game Dev Tycoon takes its cues from Game Dev Story, an iOS/Android game wherein you control a videogame development house with the intent of making money and great games. I’ve not played GDS but GDT is a very enjoyable little game that’s well worth the few bucks it costs to get – in fact it’s got one of the better money-to-time ratios of games I’ve recently shelled out for. The game starts you out in around 1980, working out of your garage, making games for the C64 era – you decide on the theme and genre, hopefully ones that go well together (Although I did once put out a Fashion RTS that sold surprisingly well) you choose various base options such as whether the game will be text based or 2D or what have you, and then you assign time to various aspects of development, so you can spend loads of time writing backstory at the expense of graphics. Then you watch your little girl or guy beaver away as the game gets made, and it gets sent out for review and release – your choices in development influence how well it does, and high review scores translate into high sales, and that means money – allowing you to invest that much more into your next game!
Where GDT triumphs is that it is constantly tantalizing you with some new aspect you can work with in your games. Your first few games will be very simple affairs but soon you’ll be able to knock together an engine that affords you more choices, better graphics and sound options, and so forth. New consoles will start to come out, loving parodies of real ones such as the Vintendo Super TES, and different systems tend to appreciate different genres and so on. Then you’ll move into a small office, which is where the game really opens up as you can hire new staff, train yourself and them, and start making bigger and better games. Ultimately you can create MMOs, put out your own consoles, invent a Steam-equivalent, and spend tens of millions on Triple-A games that take your team a year to make only to result in 5/10s across the board and imminent bankruptcy.
Indeed, the main failing I can point to in this game is that there’s just not enough of it, which is hardly fair to say of something made by a two-man outfit and is faint damnation anyway. But I do hope they think about an expansion pack or at least some more patches, just to increase your choices and options. Anyway as I said it’s an enjoyable little game and if you’ve got a few bucks and want something that doesn’t strain the brain but will keep you engaged for awhile, there’re worse choices than this.
Now, let’s talk about how I heard about the thing – as an indie game it’s obviously going to struggle to get much media attention, but a very clever little play on the devs’ part got it out there like whoa. See, the devs – brothers Patrick and Daniel Klug – were well aware they would suffer from piracy when this game hit the torrents, but rather than making a lot of bluster or seeking out an attackdog lawyer they did something subtler and cleverer. What they did is upload the thing to torrent sites themselves. Crazy, right? Well the thing is the version they uploaded played normally up to a point, but after awhile in-game you would start getting messages about how all your games are being pirated and you’d start losing money due to it no matter how good your games are. You wouldn’t be able to finish the game due to this, instead going into ignominious bankruptcy.
So, this is a pretty neat solution anyway because it’s essentially a fairly decently sized demo that might encourage a few purchases they wouldn’t otherwise get. The real comedy gold started when people on the forums began to complain about the pirates in-game, as apparently self-awareness is something some people utterly, totally lack. Perhaps the greatest line I’ve seen written is the simple, plaintive question, “I mean can I research DRM or something?” Beautiful. You can take a proper look at the whole story on the dev’s blog here if you’re interested, it’s well worth a read if you want a laugh!
With all the hubbub around Diablo 3 lately it’s probably been lost, but the Action RPG genre is actally a thriving one, with several exciting things on the way. I thought I’d quickly run through a few on the horizon in this post, so those of you who don’t already spend too much time hunting for loot can begin to do so!
First up we have Torchlight 2. The original Torchlight was a great little game, if lacking in a couple of areas, and the sequel looks likely to tidy up pretty much everything that was criticized to make for a great experience.
Next we’ll look at Grim Dawn. Grim Dawn is coming from Crate Entertainment, founded by folks from Iron Lore who worked on the fairly well-regarded Titan Quest. I’ve not played that myself but I got it in the Steam Sale so I will be giving it a look soon, but everything I’ve seen about Grim Dawn has me very very excited. Grim Dawn is also promising an open world where you can wander into trouble long before you’re prepared to deal with it, which sounds like a pretty promising angle to me, and the whole exploration side of things will hopefully be played up!
Taking a slightly different approach is the online-only Path of Exile, which gave us a truly glorious image of a skill tree I shall show you in a moment; it really puts Diablo 3 to shame. At any rate it’s another promising-looking ARPG on the way, and one whose funding through microtransactions looks to be backed up by people who have actually got a notion of why microtransactions cause some problems, and are trying to avoid them.
There are also people trying new things in the genre, such as Nyrthos, being made by some Czech czaps which is aiming to be playable in browsers and on iOS. At first I was skeptical about that, but upon reflection, if they can get the pacing down properly, that might just work – ten minutes of ripping through baddies on your lunch break or on the bus could actually be a whole lot of fun. We’ll have to wait and see!
So if you like sitting around all day clicking the mouse incessantly and weighing up whether your new Chastity Belt of Frustration +3 is better or worse than your Codpiece of the Equine King then it seems like there are going to be a heck of a spread of options in the coming months! Tell us in the comments what you’re excited for, and let us know if we’ve missed any!
From the makers of QWOP and GIRP comes CLOP, which has you doing the same ridiculous things but with a four-legged creature instead of a two-legged one.
The CLOP unicorn is marginally easier to control than the QWOP athlete, but despite that I’ve yet to get past the giant hill about a third of the way through the stage. Still, for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, this is an addictive little game that I keep playing anyway.
You can play CLOP right here if you want to check it out. Have fun and have a nice weekend!
[Insert bad joke about the Romneys’ dancing horse here]
I’n honestly not sure whether having that “2” after the “!” is sending my sperging into overdrive or is tickling my fancy, but there you have it. Good game though.
Well that was a short review.
Okay okay seriously though! I picked up the original OMD! in the Steam Sale recently and it was something I really fell in love with very rapidly. It’s not a complex game in principle; in fact the title pretty much sums it up. It’s a quasi tower-defense game, setting up traps and guardians like archers to prevent Orcs and their assorted allies from reaching the ‘Rift’. The twist is that you aren’t a detached overseer, you’re a character down in the trenches and you can run around fighting the Orcs yourself as well as having all the traps doing their thing.
It is, in short, the bastard love-child of Kagero: Deception II and Tower Defense. It’s from a small studio, and in a couple of ways this shows in the sequel, but overall they have made some very solid improvements to the game. There is an array of new traps and tools to use, the new Sorceress character has a rather different playstyle from the War Mage due to her charm ability, and there are of course new traps and levels. Perhaps my biggest negative mark against this game is the small number of the latter, but it is redeemed somewhat by both the Endless and Classic modes, the former containing some levels that aren’t in the story and the latter being levels from the first game that can be played now with all your new toys (though only if you own the first one).
It certainly doesn’t revolutionize the series, but it is a very solid sequel that I’ve already played even more than the original. Endless mode is especially compelling, and the new mix of traps, environmental hazards, and enemies means that although the game isn’t really difficult most of the time, getting 5-skull ratings on some levels requires some calculation and thinking on your part. Another change is that doing levels again nets you more skulls, so you’re not limited like you were in the first game, but it will still take some time to get everything up to where you want it, upgrades wise! (And the upgrades are far more involved this time around, replacing the Weavers entirely). A worthy sequel to a great game? That’s really all we can ask for!
Buy Orcs Must Die! 2 if you enjoy quick, fun blasts of cartoonish violence and one of the better protagonists of the medium in the form of the War Mage.
Oh and there’s co-op too if you’re one of those freakishly disposed people who has friends.