News You Can Bruise for 2005 June 2 (entry 1)

Thu Jun 02 2005 21:37 PST Game Roundup: The Antirevenge: I'm actually not terribly clear on this concept of "antirevenge", but I do know a few things about games and the rounding up thereof, as I shall demonstrate. Incidentally, my fancy new graphics card has graphics acceleration, so I should now be able to review a bunch of games (like Kenta Cho's magnificent space shooters, each of which redefines the genre) that have been stacking up because previously my only review of them could have been "too slow".

• There's a whole genre of games I never knew about before: Slime Volleyball. First invented by computer science students at the University of Western Australia, it has spawned a Roguelike number of variants. All the variants are fun to play, mainly because you're controlling these awesome slime characters. Very good character design here. Iconic.
• Lost Labyrinth of previous Game Roundup fame has lost its Unix branch, but the developers have put a lot of new features into the Windows version and the game is much more playable now, assuming you have Windoze, as the kids call it, though probably not the kids in this part of the timeline. I think it's still too hard, but there's not so much near-instant-death as previously.
• crosssum lets you solve those number puzzles that take place in crossword grids. Not the Sudoku which became popular in the UK between the time I wrote that sentence and the time I wrote this one, and which indeed made me have to write this clarifying sentence.
• In these times of crisis we must find ways to reduce our dependence on foreign games. This is why more and more game makers are producing explanation-efficient ludemic hybrids. Torrent combines SameGnome and Tetris: you must click on adjacent blocks of color to remove them, to avoid the blocks from reaching the top of the screen. Now I can use words on something else!
• Like Batalhao, a fun little Brazillian tank game in which your tank has to protect the city from other tanks. The other tanks will try to blow up your pizza parlor and your hospital, with no regard for the relative strategic values of those locations. In fact I think the city in this game is the town where Encyclopedia Brown lives, which was always being described in terms of the buildings within the city limits (two delicatessens, a synagogue, etc.). This game has some tactical element missing that if present would make it a great game; as it is it's just a good game.
• It had to happen: 3D Minesweeper. The only question is, why? On that soul-searching note, I end this Game Roundup. My antivengeance is complete!