etcetera

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.

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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.

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Miles Drummond’s Jigsaw

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So a while back Enough Plumbers co-designer Arthur Lee started up his Action 52 OWNS game jam, the object being to remake, to the best modern creative standards, each of the famously terrible games in the Action 52 multicart (origin of that Cheetahmen game that 2ch was ironically wild about a while back). To date, nine of the games have been remade. One of those, tackled by a certain Miles Drummond, is the poor man’s Nail ‘n’ Scale clone, Jigsaw.

Add some creative deconstruction, and the end result is a rather charming puzzle platformer that plays a bit like Sega’s QuackShot, enhanced with some annoying-to-me, perhaps engaging-to-others SNES-style switch-block puzzles. You’re a carpenter armed with a nail gun against an army of rogue carpentry tools; you navigate two enormous levels by scaling walls and breaking blocks with your nails. Note that you can only use three nails at a time, a limitation that opens up all manner of puzzle situations.

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Explore the Collective Consciousness with Farbs’ Playpen

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Rom Check Fail developer Farbs has unleashed on us all the Web-based communal adventure game creation game, Playpen.

The game presents you with a blocky point-and-click adventure interface; as you click around and explore, you will find your choices leading you down increasingly eccentric avenues — until suddenly you hit the edge of the world. Say you click on a path leading to a fountain, but there is no target page to the click. You are then dumped into a simple image editor, where you can paint the scene yourself and designate however many links you like, to however many other pages.

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FiNCK thrown into the Web

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As of yesterday, Within a Deep Forest and Knytt designer Nifflas has unleashed his briefly-awaited user-supported toss-’em-up, FiNCK. As reported earlier, the game’s abrupt announcement and release are due to an impulsive yet inspired development cycle, brought on by affection for the odd man out of the NES Marios.

FiNCK (”Fire Nuclear Crocodile Killer”; yes, it’s nonsense) has the same grab-and-toss mechanics as Super Mario Bros. 2 and a few other gems like Rescue Rangers, and Pastel’s much longer-coming Life+. Perhaps understandably enough, considering the free level editor and Nifflas’ existing fanbase, the game only comes with five (in effect) demonstration levels.

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Cactus’ Krebswelte updated

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IGF Nuovo Award winner and Space Fuck! designer Cactus has released an update of his older… well, maybe the best term is roguelike platformer, Krebswelte. In Krebswelte you jump and aim and shoot; every bit of the level geometry is destructible (though it slowly refills, to prevent you from painting yourself into a corner); few objects are helpful, though treasure allows you to buy weapon upgrades, all the better to destroy your world.

The levels are randomly generated; as in a roguelike the only constant is an increase in difficulty from level to level, and only a single life to die… sort of. Usually. There are a bunch of quirks that make exceptions to the rules, and they’re best found for yourself.

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David Shute’s Entanglement (tentative)

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Small Worlds is one of the best indie games of last year, and one of the simplest. It’s won some, been nominated some. Been discussed much.

With the appropriate praise in hand, David Shute has set himself to a couple of different follow-up projects: one a much larger, more ambitious piece; the other, a simpler project that might be taken as more of a direct follow-up, or a spiritual successor to Small Worlds. For a while, to avoid repeating himself, he meant to focus on the larger project, but then in late February or early March he had a revelation.

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Digging up the Dirt on Life+

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Life+ is a rather adorable little exploration platformer by Pastel. The game is long in development, and the development blog is updated only infrequently. The game is coming along well, though, is smooth and gorgeous, and incorporates several interesting ideas.

The main mechanic is a digging/pluck-and-throw mechanism rather like Super Mario Bros. 2, FiNCK, or Rescue Rangers — the difference being, you can rip up a clump of floor nearly anywhere. Some objects are heavier than others, and you’ll need to power-up before you can seize them. Once you’re holding something, you can toss it, bowl it, or lock onto an enemy and sling from anywhere.

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Preview: Super Mission Extreme

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Blastforce and Sword of Legends developer Deadheat has begun to leak information about his Mission Extreme sequel, Super Mission Extreme.

The original Mission Extreme is a crunchy platform shooter that manages to find its own style in favor of simply aping Contra or Metal Slug. There’s a certain exploration element, and death is no kind of a setback. The (well-composed) music doesn’t even skip, and the action doesn’t pause. You just start up again at the last checkpoint, and all your accomplishments remain accomplished.

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Steam Play Indie Pack

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Spring must be the season for indie game packages. Following the Humble Indie Bundle and Sleep is Death pay-what-you-want specials, and indeed Valve’s own free offer of Portal, Steam has a new package of five indie games for $20.00. Not quite as cheap, but still tidy compared with the $50.00 cover price for all five.

The Steam Play Indie Pack includes Broken Rules’ And Yet It Moves, Hassey Enterprises’ Galcon Fusion, Amanita Design’s Machinarium, Hemisphere Games’ Osmos, and (in case you haven’t already claimed it elsewhere) 2D Boy’s World of Goo.

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Poto & Cabenga Released

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Honeyslug‘s Gamma 4 presentation piece, Poto & Cabenga, has now gone public. If you’ve got trouble multitasking, maybe this is a good life tool. It’s a single-switch game, where you control two characters at once.

For Cabenga, hold the space bar to run and release it to jump. For Poto, hold the space bar to slow down and tap it to jump. You can imagine the complications that play out, as you collect objects, avoid stray hedgehogs, and collaborate between the two characters to solve problems. All with a single button. Now there’s overloading the functions for you.

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Daniel Remar’s Hero Core released

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New as of the Saturday before last: the sequel to Iji and Garden Gnome Challenge author Daniel Remar‘s own Hero, Hero Core. It’s a crunchy, deliberately old-fashioned game, apparently influenced in equal parts by Section-Z (the character movement), Zelda (the overall structure), and Blaster Master (the enemy movement, and some of the tone). I’d say Metroid, but that’s too easy and doesn’t seem accurate in this case.

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Fred Wood’s Love+ Updated

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Love is a splendid argument for minimal design. The entire playfield is only a handful of pixels. You walk, you jump, you set your respawn point (a nice compromise between quicksaves and lives). White objects probably hurt you; other colors probably don’t. That’s it. Yet the jazzy music, the crunchy mechanics, the feisty interface, the droll explanatory text, and the memorable level design paint the game as a classic.

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Messhof goes PVP with Raging Hadron

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Last Wednesday night, You Found the Grappling Hook! author Mark Essen unleashed the trailer for his upcoming No Quarter exhibition piece, Raging Hadron. Described as “a two player competitive game… that combines swashbuckling swordplay with 8-bit psychedelia”, the game comes off a bit like Jordan Mechner on an angry acid trip. Or to phrase it a little differently, Versus Prince of Karateka in Fractal Land.

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