Sun Jan 16 2005 20:17 PST Get Up, Stand Up, Come On, Put Game Roundup:
First, some updates from Game Roundups past. I played xdeathlord
some more and it's not me, it's it. It's not nearly as good a game as
xevil. It's just plain hard to play. So blah. Second, since its last mention two years ago Iter Vehemens ad Necum has in
true roguelike fashion gotten bigger and in true IVAN fashion gotten
weirder (and gorier), becoming simultaneously less and more frustrating. It remains in my opinion the most bizarre roguelike, the Yapok Sundria of roguelikes, if you will.
And now, new games. I'm very excited about this roundup; most of
the games here are really good. They're also for the most part pretty violent, which may or may not be a plus in your book. One of them isn't as violent as it needs to be, which won't satisfy anyone.
- Formido, not
to be confused with Formico, the game of floor-laying, is a game where
you are beseiged by countless large alien insects. The challenge is to
see how many you can blow up before your inevitable death. Fun but
kind of depressing, and with no illusions: your score is counted
directly in bug deaths, not using any sort of "point" system.
- As real-time strategy games go, NetPanzer is pretty
simple. There are only about eight types of unit, and scattered
factories that produce units for whoever owns them. No complicated
resource gathering, just "go over there and blow that up".
- Deadly Cobra tries to
make the snake game genre more interesting with the
obvious-in-retrospect step of making the energy pellets into helpless
humans. By itself this would be a welcome yet cosmetic change, but
once you've taken that step the next step is obvious: the people can
move around aimlessly to increase your chomping challenge. These
developers have come up with all kinds of great twists on the snake
game. PLUS they have the snake's tail feed into itself when the snake
dies, like I wanted in the KDE snake game. Could this be the ultimate snake game? Probably. And yet, it's a snake game. Let's move on.
- Marauder is a nice, simple
game where you fly a spaceship throughout the universe and blow up
other spaceships. Planets contain stores,
where you can buy weapons and sell cargo which you mainly steal off
the ships you blow up. (Hit enter when close to a planet to enter the store; I had to look in the source code to find this out.) Has comical effect when you crash into a planet and
it's like bumping into a wall. Thumbs up etc. Unfortunately there's no
win condition, so once you figure out the strategy you're addicted but there's nowhere to
go but to the next difficulty level.
- I looked out the window and what did I see? Ack-ack popping in the Apricots source tree. Apricots has a
great name and a great Amiga cartoonish look (it was originally
written for the Amiga and, like rfk, has followed its author to
Linux). In this game you fly a jet and blow up buildings for points,
all the while being chased by other planes with the same goal. Just don't blow up the civilian buildings (enumeration of civilian
buildings follows: huts, little suburban cottages, office towers).
In nuclear war there are no winners, only survivors; but in this
war there aren't even survivors. You and your opponents die a lot, which costs points, and then you end up having to fight dogfights to get enough points to meet the win condition, because the landscape has been reduced to rubble. It gives the impression of an air war conducted by people who don't know how to fly airplanes: a more accurate treatment of a theme first seen in Battlefield Earth.
Apricots has lots of fun touches: stealth bombers,
trees and different landscapes, persistent wreckage,
excellent physics system. It's hard to land, but it's fun to die. A game worthy of the "X Carnage" brand.
- Contrary to popular belief oki is not a
game where you have to move your family to central California. In
fact, in an early version all you could do was "run, jump, and
die". Well, it's a little further along now and you can also collect
coins. Coins are helpfully marked "C" and look like little copyright
symbols, which would make this game an excellent propaganda tool for
the intellectual property industry. The low-res, Game Boy-like
graphics mean it could be distributed over the mobile phones the kids
are using these days. Put on some simple DRM protection and it could
be a valuable opportunity to teach the younger set that the process of obtaining copyright clearance can be fun! I call it my new "Compliance Is Awesome" initiative.
- TechnoballZ is a
tricked-out Arkanoid game that has too many power-ups to be a real
challenge. Has between-level store for buying even more power-ups. Too many power-ups, not enough paddle-death!
- Gate 88 says "relive a
childhood daydream of deep space intergalactic battle", and it
delivers on that promise. It's a multiplayer space shooter/real-time
strategy game with vector-looking graphics that make it look like a
lost arcade game from the 80s. You build structures in space and then
defend them. Lots of fun. Not open source, but my "no non-open-source"
policy is mainly just an excuse not to have to evaluate
non-open-source games unless I want to. This one is really good.
- Atris is the
Tetris clone I've been waiting for for a long time: it's got ASCII art
customizable block patterns so you can play with shapes made out of more
than 4 blocks. Also has a twist where the units of the blocks can
be different colors; such a piece isn't cemented together very well
and will fall apart and settle when you drop it, in a pleasingly Tear
Down The Wall-like moment.
Closed source games are not eligible for the Palm d'Rassemblement
De Jeu (Des Jeux?), so Gate 88 is disqualified and the winner of this roundup is
Apricots, the chaotic death-from-above game with the classic Amiga lines. Runners-up: Marauder and Atris. The traditional limerick prize
celebrates the many non-enemy-initiated modes of death in Apricots:
When Pilot Mike tired of slaughter
Right into a fir tree he'd auger
It felt like a balm
To smash into a palm
And bliss to crash-land in the water
