News You Can Bruise for 2007 November 12 (entry 0)

Mon Nov 12 2007 20:39 Better Know A Game Roundup: What better way to spend a holiday than by cleaning up my games-to-be-rounded-up directory?

• Duckmaze is too much maze and not enough duck. There's a pretty servicable duck on the title screen, but the duck in the game looks like Pac-Man. Wall-pushing mechanism is isomorphic to Sokoban.
• Scum of the Universe: Galaga with a trading component. Great idea, but the Galaga component is really aggravating. There's a quest, moral ambiguity, etc. but getting to phase 2 of the quest requires playing about 100 not-terribly-difficult levels of Galaga. I don't have the patience, mon.
• Cultivation is a lovely "social simulation" where you try to grow and harvest plants while getting along with your neighbors and occasionally mating with them to produce the next generation. Unfortunately it's kind of depressing, because your neighbors inevitably manufacture some spat over someone sleeping with someone else, and start poisoning the soil making agriculture impossible. Then there's a race-against-time aspect reminiscent of a bad SF novel, where you've got to get off the planet before the world is destroyed by society's insoluble problems. I don't know if this was the intention.
• The Goonies: 20th Anniversary Edition is a decent-looking remake of the first Konami Goonies game in the style of the second, much more popular game. As Sloth, of "love Chunk" fame, you run around gathering keys and freeing the Goonies while evading terrible enemies such as drops of water and the stalactites those drops of water eventually form. Actually I've never seen a game in which stalactite formation was a mechanic. Prove me wrong, Internet.
• Can't get Polybius to work in WINE, but I wanted to mention it just because of the backstory.
• Save Scummer is a satirical Roguelike from the author of Powder and Letter Hunt. Uh, it looks like I never reviewed Letter Hunt.
• So! Letter Hunt is a Roguelike where you get power-ups by killing monsters in an order that spells out words. Recommended.
• While I'm at it, Jeff Lait's other roguelike, You Only Live Once has the great character name of Farmer Amy and appears to have some relationship to the Powder universe. It also has the sort of plot more usually associated with interactive fiction than with roguelike games.
• Remember Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid? Now there's Blob Wars: Blob And Conquer, the 3D game with the same graphics and sense of blob blood 'n' guts. I was doing pretty well for a 3D game until I encountered the bane of my existence: 3D platforms I had to jump on. Oversensitive controls sent many a blob plummeting into the acid lake. Your mileage may vary in the direction opposite mine.
• From blobs to slimes. I found Slime Forest in my Game Roundup directory and thought it was that pseudo-RPG game that teaches you katakana. Then I played it for a while and it was just a regular pseudo-RPG. Then I was ambushed by some slimes and it turned out to be a katakana tutor after all. So, kind of slow playing. Not sure why that surprised me.
• I hate Manic Miner! There, I said it. The Marmite of video games still exerts a nostalgic hold on Britons, but it's a terrible game. It's extremely crude run-and-jump that rewards only after school repetition and endless pixel-scale memorization. Plus, for a long time before I played Jet Set Willy I read "Jet Pack Willy" and assumed there was a jetpack in the game. The truth could not be further from the truth.

  However, I do enjoy the totally random enemies, so I won't feel terribly bad about pointing you to the MM-like Chaos Caverns over at Dan's Remakes. The gameplay is smoother, which makes the game a bit easier.