Firefall

It’s not that Firefall is all that great, really. It’s more that this is the closest example I have to the kind of game that Game-Maker was designed to produce. In this case the enigmatic “Firefall Softwarez” clearly tried to clone Gauntlet, and wound up with something rather different. What has always impressed me about this game is the rather nifty Deluxe Paint-derived visuals. Granted they’re hit and miss, but some of the monster design and most of the item and background tile design is rather grand.

Firefall feels like a first, experimental effort by a legitimately talented designer employing a very early version of the Game-Maker package and not yet used to the tools at hand. It was also one of the first Game-Maker games I found by another designer, so for that reason it has always stuck in my head — perhaps a little more solidly than it might otherwise. I can’t really justify it.