News You Can Bruise for 2006 July 10 (entry 1)

(1) Mon Jul 10 2006 23:25 A Game Divided Cannot Roundup:

• Overgod looks like one of the games that comes built into your Hitchhiker's Guide. It's a visually appealing 2D space shooter where you're free to move about the arena shooting at other ships. It's a lot of fun, but would be more fun if your ship weren't so slow to maneuver.
• Linux Shuttle Lander is a frustrating take on those frustrating "lunar lander" games (in fact, LSL author Thoma Raes also wrote one of those), where you have to land the fuel-less Space Shuttle. The viewfield is cleverly centered on the piece of the sky you just went through, so that you don't see the ground until a split second before you hit it. It doesn't end well. Let's hope the real Space Shuttle fares better. At least the game code is reentrant.
• Mega Mario, not to be confused with Molto Mario, is a clone of the Super Mario Bros. engine. Which one? Well, all of them, sort of. The graphics and sound are taken from the three NES games and the SNES Super Mario World, which gives a very weird effect. You haven't lived until you've seen SMW Mario stomp a SMB1 Goomba. Ironically, the Goomba has lived right up to that point. In what was surely the defining feature of this software project, Mega Mario features monochrome red blood spurting in precise arcs out of you and the creatures you stomp.

  The mechanics are kinda off: for instance, your Mario is just slightly too big which means that if you don't position yourself just right you'll punch two bricks instead of one. I don't generally make a big deal out of these little issues but c'mon, it's-a me, Mario! The Mario games are classics because of their polished, flexible gameplay. Anyway, the level design is the big problem here. It doesn't have the cleverness of any real Mario game. There are just mazes and coin bonanzas. I've seen the same thing in ZZT games and Rocks 'n' Diamonds boards.

  Speaking of games that rip off the Mario sprites, Super Mario PAC looks like fun but I can't play it because it's a Windows game. I think it's a game where Mario forms an organization to buy off Mushroom Kingdom politicians.

• On a very special Game Roundup, it's Pango: Mudbath, a pygame game by Python guy Moshe Zadka. You're a penguin and you wander around an unobstructed 2D field shooting at squares. Because squares are getting you down, man. Pretty good start on a game, but the name is too similar to the arcade classic Pengo.
• 304. This card game has not been modified.
• Paratim is a clone of an old DOS game called Paratrooper. Unfortunately, the original is totally superior in every respect except for the DOSsy circumstances of its birth. The original was a game that played the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor--not the Phantom of the Opera part but the part that sounds like a helicopter--and then tries to kill you with helicopters. This game can't live up to that.
• A while ago I rounded up a game called Tower of Doom, which it turned out had changed into a totally different game called Warp Rogue. Despite the promising name the game is not that good as a Roguelike. There's no exploring, only tactical combat and corpse-looting for the resale value. It does have a nice advancement system (you spend experience points on new abilities and improved attributes).
• And now what I hope to be a new feature of Game Roundup, Interactive Fiction Roundup. I haven't played any IF in years and I have lost track of the "scene" assuming it is the kind of thing that has a "scene" and not just a room with a description and geographically-defined exits. But the release of Inform 7 rekindled my interest, so I'm working to catch up on what people have done since, say, 2001. The results of my working will make it into future Game Roundups.

  And this one! Today we have Chris Klimas's Blue Chairs, a 2004 game that is kind of a modern version of IF chestnut A Fable. Fable was not even a real game, only part of a game, written by Stan Heller in 1985 to test out GAGS (game development precursor to AGT). Somehow it got included as one of the sample AGT games, which was a bad idea because from a game design perspective it's not good (even by AGT standards). I liked the writing though. You wandered around a landscape experiencing vignettes from your past.

  Anyway, the game I'm actually reviewing. Blue Chairs has all the good aspects of Fable, but it also has a real (surreal) plot, good NPC interaction, and really good descriptions. It mixes linear and nonlinear elements well, with many endings that are nonetheless easy to all see with a strategically placed saved game. It's also got this (spoiler), and the near perfect example of using characterization as a puzzle element.

Comments:

Posted by Brendan at Tue Jul 11 2006 06:53

Actually, Super Mario PAC is kind of the Mario Lunar Lander.