News You Can Bruise for 2006 June 26 (entry 1)

Mon Jun 26 2006 23:24 Nobody Expects The Game Roundup: But here it is.

• Flatland goes to war in Dangen, the geometric shoot-em-up. Minimalist Galaga-like sharpshooter action. Fun and elegant.
• Less elegant but more three-dimensional-looking is Triplex Invaders, featuring hot triplex action. Everything is rendered in real-time as big Dactyl Nightmare-style polygonal shapes. Cool Ghostbusters-like beam weapons add to the fun. Lousy projectile weapons subtract from the fun. Can this game achieve a fun surplus?
• Lämmerlinge is a fun Javascript game where you guide sheep around a board, feeding them flowers and preventing them from wandering off or drowning. Documentation is both in German and totally superfluous. Levels are password-protected: also superfluous since the passwords are right there in a supplimentary Javascript file.
• Deadly Rooms of Death is a fun shareware puzzle game with a video game sense of humor. This is not a sophisticated sense of humor, not an interactive fiction or Ealing Studios humor. Maybe a ZZT game humor. If you saw it in a sitcom it would be undistinguished, but so few video games these days have any sense of humor that DROD's juvenile antics are charming. DROD has lots of puzzle elements and scriptability that make it more enjoyable than Rocks 'n' Diamonds. Fun voice acting separates this game from free software games with no voice acting.
• Trackballs (Debian: trackballs) captures the sleek futuristic look of Marble Madness but seems really obsessed with narrow passageways for your marble to navigate, instead of the sweeping ski-slope wireframe mountains of the original. On the plus side, your marble can jump, and the game levels are scriptable with Guile. So make some levels that don't rely on split-second marble manipulation cause I don't do that. Oh, this game also has enemies that you can squash with your marble. Unfortunately this does not make your marble bigger a la Katamari Damacy.
• How's that crackpot scheme of yours to mine Mars for mercy and sell it back on Earth? Not going too well? Maybe you should have played the cautionary game Mars: Land of No Mercy. You'll find out that anything that lands on the surface of Mars can only move once and then has to wait for the opponent's move, which never comes. Basically the game is still in a very early stage. Nice realistic Mars graphics though.