Monthly Archives: June 2010

Hydorah: Retro Face, Progressive Brain

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The first thing you’ll think of when you see Spanish developer Locomalito’s Hydorah, and the way you’ll probably see it described, is a Gradius tribute game. After you spend a few minutes with it, you’ll realize it feels more like Darius — the power-ups and weapon types, the progress map, the look of the shield, the wide and narrow playfield.

The save system is curious, and at first feels like it comes from the SNES era. Again that’s deceptive, as it’s a rather progressive mechanism. You have a total of three chances to save, that you can spend between any two levels in the game. So there’s a sort of self-pacing reminiscent of some recent console shooters like Ikaruga or Gradius V, that gradually offer more lives and more credits, the more hours you put in — except it’s more organic. As your skills improve, you can play further without saving, allowing you to conserve your save points for longer and gradually allowing you to expand your range.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Time Warp Tickers gets you flicking and kicking

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The Brazilian artist Melly has released a provisionally complete version of his Action 52 Owns game jam entry, Time Warp Tickers.

As with many of its game jam brethren, Melly’s game takes the basic premise of its namesake, and a few visual and audio themes, and fleshes them out with modern mechanics and design sensibilities. In this case you play as a tiny cat in a finger mech, strolling through a surreal chessboard landscape, flicking enemies into each other and into background objects with your mech’s “legs”. Charge the flicks for a stronger result. The game also includes some time warp elements: hold both buttons to slow things down and give yourself room to maneuver.

Time Warp Tickers is both visually and aurally gorgeous, filled with rather neat mechanisms and design ideas, and is a rather clever example of deconstruction. It manages both to pay tribute to the themes of the game that inspired it and to use those themes as a starting place to do its own thing entirely.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Mike Perrucci

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by [redacted]

Most of the Game-Maker material I know, I’ve known about since high school. When the program was new, there was a thriving development community. When RSD stopped supporting Game-Maker, interest dwindled, the community dissipated, and it became difficult to find any mention of the program. Occasionally, though, I run into a developer who missed the wider loop and just kept on developing in private. The most productive of these isolated cases is also one of the more talented Game-Maker artists of all, Mike “Mazeguy” Perrucci.

Although Perrucci’s two finished games are an apparently simple overhead-view game and its sequel, there’s much more going on than you catch at a glance. For one, the guy never repeats himself. Never mind between games; within each game, no two levels are remotely similar. Typically each stage can boast not just distinct backgrounds and enemies but different mechanics and often a slightly different character sprite, with different animations and abilities to suit the level’s theme.

Where these games really excel are in their creative use of background animations and monster birthing — two of the most powerful, yet least exploited, Game-Maker traits. Between the two, there’s almost no end of effects that you can fake — as aptly demonstrated in Perrucci’s second game.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Spelunking into the Past

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by [redacted]

The last few days I’ve been fussing over Derek Yu’s Spelunky. I know that it’s been around for a while; it’s just one of those things I never got around to. I downloaded it, and then got distracted. Time moved on, and there was always something else to pay attention to. As often happens, I’m rather disappointed that I didn’t jump in sooner — and also glad it’s new to me now, with all the endorphin rush you get from that kind of new relationship.

I’m sure the game has been discussed to death, so I don’t intend to labor the point. For context, the game is a Roguelike platformer released for PC about a year and a half ago. By Roguelike, I mean it randomly generates its levels and fills them with both traps and treasure. Until you know the game inside out and can make an effort to beat it, the point of playing is to see how deep you can go, and how much you can achieve, before dying. The random level layout means the game is infinitely replayable. The easy death means that you’ll be restarting often.

The game is basically an attempt to rehabilitate, or reenvision, Tim Martin’s Spelunker, an early PC game mostly known for its NES port. Although on the face of it the game seems really neat — a tale of exploration and adventure and treasure hunting in the deep places of the Earth — Spelunker is nearly impossible to play, in that the controls are a bit awkward and nearly everything that you can do will kill you. Even falling from slightly over the height of your character spells death. It’s ridiculous, and has gained the game a sort of cult reputation for its perceived sadism.

You can see the thought processes; Roguelikes are difficult and arbitrary, yet within an addictive framework. Spelunker is difficult and arbitrary, and no fun at all. Why not combine the discipline of the one and the premise of the other, and create the game that Spelunker might have been? Good thinking, too, as Spelunky is rather marvelous and instantly claimed a place amongst the most respected of indie games.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Jason Boyer cuts loose with Fuzz Power

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“The barbers have finally found Fuzzy, but this time, he’s fighting back!”

The original Fuzz Power seemed like it wanted to be a low-rent answer to Hudson’s Adventure Island or Wonder Boy. Inspired by the Action 52 Owns game jam, Jables’s Adventure designer Jason Boyer reinvented the game into a short yet transcendent tale of a wild man’s battle against a deranged cult of barbers.

I’m going to again stress how short the game is: it’s only three brief levels and a boss. Yet the mechanics are deep enough, and the world that Boyer has painted is rich enough, to sustain a much broader design. Consider the game as it stands only a taste.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Clear the room with Easyname’s Beeps and Blips

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Taking a different tack from the other Action 52 Owns game jam entries, Easyname’s Beeps and Blips remake goes even more retro in presentation even as it considerably ages up the design.

The game almost looks like it’s running in text mode, and yet for a top-down shooter it’s rather sophisticated. To move to the next room, you clear the screen of enemies. There are two buttons: shoot, and lock your aim. You can move and shoot in eight directions. Touch a purple orb to gain an “option” (in Gradius terms) and increase your firepower. I’m not sure if there’s a limit; you can certainly collect at least three of them. When you’re injured, you lose an “option” and your firepower decreases. When you lose all your energy, you die and start over from the last threshold you passed.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Curt Kling’s Mash Man stomps on your heartstrings

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Now here’s an interesting one. Bravehorse designer Curt Kling’s entry into the Action 52 Owns game jam is a contemplative remake of the under-achieving side-scroller Mash Man. As Kling commented: “We tried to take the mood of the original game and expand on it, since it doesn’t really have any kind of unique gameplay elements to use.”

That’s an understatement. In the original game you pretty much walk to the right and jump on enemies with your enormous feet — provided you can get around the collision problems. And eventually you’ll get hit and you’ll die. As a game, it’s a bit depressing and futile. Which is what Kling seemed to read into it as well.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Sink your teeth into Guilherme Martins’ Bubblegirl Rozy

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Continuing with the occasionally lovely Action 52 Owns game jam entries, Guilherme Martins has contributed a lush, completely reenvisioned take on game #23, Bubblegum Rosy, adopting little but the theme — an action platformer about a girl who blows bubbles — and a few visual touches, and extrapolating that into a sturdy, whimsical game of his own creation.

You play as a little girl with a double jump and fluttery hair that slows her descent. To defend yourself, you blow bubbles; different flavors of gum give you different bubble patterns. Your goal is to climb into a large bubble at the end of the level, and drift off to the next screen. For some reason you rescue young men along the way, who then appear on the title screen once you’ve collected them.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Get your hooks into Arthur Lee’s Streemerz

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Streemerz: Super Strength Emergency Squad-Zeta is Enough Plumbers co-designer Arthur Lee’s own submission to his Action 52 Owns game jam, a project to remake each of the games in the infamous Action 52 multicart to modern creative standards.

Much as Miles Drummond took inspiration from an obscure Game Boy game as a starting place to flesh out his entry, Arthur Lee has processed the awkward original through a Capcom filter to create something both modern and familiar.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Two: Brick-A-Break

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By [redacted]

Though Pong, which we covered last time, opened the window to a new world, that world was a void. You had some basic physical rules, and you had a packet of information bouncing around in a box.

The bulk of communication was supplied by a second player. Pong exists in a weird medium that offers the player the vaguest hint of another reality — a persistent, active set of laws that react upon the player’s every stimulus — then anchors that experience back in reality. It’s sort of like shaking hands through a curtain of water.

You pass through, and get a fleeting sense of, this alternative medium. That’s nice, and it gives you a sense of the basic laws of water. But compare to snorkeling along a coral reef, and the whole alien world that water opens up by virtue of those laws.

For about four years, no one significantly built on Pong. You saw things like four-player Pong, and Pong with two paddles, and a vertically-oriented Pong that passed itself off as a Volleyball sim.

Atari did experiment a bit with Gran Trak 10 and Tank!, but somehow it took until 1976 for Bushnell and Bristow to hit on a one-player version of Pong. And that pretty much was the missing piece that gave us two distinct schools of design, the home PC, and thereby the information revolution that allows a person to research articles such as this.

As these things go, Breakout was pretty well-named.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )