News You Can Bruise for 2004 September 19

(4) Sun Sep 19 2004 09:24 PST Scroungeup Game Roundup: I'm busy doing other stuff, but I have a bunch of game reviews lying around so I figured I'd turn them into a Roundup for you, my discerning readers. What is it you discern, anyway?

• Widelands looks like a lot of fun, but it's a clone of another game and one of the things they cloned is that you can't figure out what's going on without looking at the manual. Tooltips are essential to any real-time strategy game.
• From the makers of Dead Mobsters (see Game Roundup passim) comes Egg Blaster, a solitaire Bomberman clone in which you are a chicken who lays exploding eggs. Isn't there a joke along those lines? Also includes two-player Bomberman destruction goodness. Better play than Dead Mobsters, but still the unhealthy obsession with only letting me have one damage-dealing item on the screen at at time. Note: not open source (actually Dead Mobsters is probably also not open source).
• From the same namespace as Egg Blaster comes Alien Blaster, another entry in the hold-down-the-fire-key ship fighting genre. Lets you play as the small fast ship or the big tough ship. The two subgenres of this game are the anachronism-ridden WWII game and the futuristic spaceship game. This game cleverly fuses the two by putting spaceships in pitched battle over the islands of the Pacific. Only has two levels, after which You WIN ! ! ! The perfect length for a Game Roundup reviewer, but you might crave more alien blasting action. In that case, there's Arcade mode, which is futuristic spaceship all the way. There's also a two-player cooperative-mode. Pretty solid, with nice powerups like the "Kick-Ass Rocket".
• Netrok is a very fast-paced and surreal platform game. Has a cackling Zorak sample when you lose, but the ideas in the game are a lot better than the game mechanics. Kind of reminds me of Karnov for some control-related reason I can't put my finger on.
• SuperTux: in the hilarious demo mode, a fat little penguin goes across the board systematically missing every chance to get points. Nice pentatonic jazz intro song. Nice generic NES storyline, too.

  Okay, this is almost exactly like the Mario games, which makes sense because the Tux character has been spread even thinner over more even games than the Mario one, so why not start enroaching on the latter's turf?. It's got the same power-ups and the same enemies. The third level of SuperTux is nearly identical to the first level of Mario 1. Graphically the enemies look more like Mega Man robots, but it's pretty obvious who in Mario-land they correspond to. The fire flower power-up sound is a great gargling noise. All the music is really good.

  Oh, you know how a lot of games have numbers that float up indicating how many points you got for something? I somehow got one of those that said zero points. That's the best floating-point joke since "Jack Flash: Mutiny of the Things", a Duke Nukem parody in which everything was worth one point and wherever you went you were surrounded by floating 1s.

  I don't know what it is but the levels seem really repetitive. Okay, Mario-style green pipes started showing up. That's a sign that it's time to end the review. Oh, it's got that dang icicle too, the one that waits til you're right underneath it and then quivers a bit and falls on you. One of the few non-Mario imports.

• Auto-Nethack: Big disappointment. You think it'll be like Autorogue or the Angband Borg, but it's just a port of Nethack to autoconf. There seems to be a big trend towards writing Nethack utilities that aren't as cool as they sound (cf. Emacs Nethack or whatever it was called).
• Pac's New Adventures looks like Pacman, but it feels more like Crystal Castles, one of the most underrated old-time arcade games. It's got unconventional board layouts and the graphics are not too bad. A good first effort, especially when you take into account that it's only 80K. My only complaint: it runs way too slow, especially on a CC-like board that's packed with a huge grid of tasty energy dots.
• I Have No Tomatoes: makes you install the unfree fmod library, then doesn't work with your sound card, then goes to a blank screen right after "Loading" and won't do anything. Sorry, I Have No Tomatoes, but all the cool screenshots and silly ideas in the world won't save you if I can't even get the game to run.
• Crossfire was one of the games on my first computer. When I say that I mean that one of my father's co-workers put a bunch of games on the computer for me, thus starting me on my lifetime of disregard for intellectual property (I always want to write "intellectual popery"). I lost all those games when I foolishly took apart the 20-megabyte hard drive they lived on, and they probably wouldn't run on a modern computer anyway. But they're gradually being remade, which is great.

  My only complaint is that this Crossfire is not exactly like the version I played. It seems harder (maybe my reflexes are slower), and the graphics aren't as cool (the enemies are different colored blobs instead of menacing robot-looking things). Minor complaints. It's good to have this game back. My current high score: 430. I like the music even though it's kind of just generic electronic music, which actually explains why I don't like electronic music much: I'm listening to it, yet I'm not playing a video game. Such tragic oversight!