platformers

Hopping and Bopping with NeonPlat 2

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Jayenkai of SoCoder has applied the Geometry Wars/Echoes retro deconstructionist mash-up mentality to the Bubble Bobble/Mario Bros. style hop-’n-bop single-screen platformer. Enter NeonPlat 2.

Color the white floors to make them tumble. Grab balls and toss them at enemies, then grab the power-ups that float away. It’s all familiar grammar, mixing a bit of City Connection and Snow Bros. Yet the game has such character and verve and immediacy; it takes those mechanics and digests them to make a frothy, fun party game with a sort of a Nintendo DS flavor.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Teppoman 2 Jumps ‘n Sneaks ‘n Runs ‘n Guns

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Ikiki, an artist new to me yet well-known in some circles (and hugely active between 1999 and 2005), has reappeared from the woodwork to deliver one new major and one minor opus: respectively, Teppoman 2 and Nozumou.

Both games have sort of a covert SNK flavor to them, which comes across slightly in the design and greatly in the soundscape. The music and effects often have a King of Fighters feel, and with its mix of shooting, platforming, and humor Teppoman 2 will call to mind Metal Slug. Yet something about the game also also reminds me of P.O.W.: Prisoners of War — maybe the sounds, or how you recover weapons from enemies, or the limited ammo.

Anyway, Teppoman 2 brings a new perspective to the run-’n-gun by combining some advanced platformer elements and a slight stealth component.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Daray Manning’s Baggage

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Undoubtedly Rockford Illinois’ premiere indie game developer, Manning betrays his Cactus/biggt heritage, as well as a touch of Eugene Jarvis, in his skewed-n-crackly platformer study Baggage. The game is one of those hardcore S&M things, where you die a dozen times just to work out how to get past an obstacle. The generous aspect is that modern indie convention of infinite lives and just trying again without a pause. Yet the game does a good job of instilling a certain dread, both though its difficulty and through its presentation.

Just about every line could use a carpenter’s level, resulting an a dissonant Dutch angle effect. Likewise, every solid surface is filled with an ever-changing static and the background (and sometimes the foreground) is filled with an ominous orange fog. Your character is tiny; the levels are comparably large on the screen. Each has a sort of strange, one-straw-short-of-familiar shape to it. Ostensibly helpful text scrolls across the screen, though it spends more time taunting or giving inane protips or generally being bleak.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Bits and Pieces aspires for brain food

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David R. Lorentz has reinvented the Action 52 zombie-on-a-pogo-stick game Bits and Pieces as a… well, sort of a monster hell platformer. You play as an amorphous bodiless glob of protein, described as a head but presumably more like a brain, who wobbles and bounces through patterned fields of monsters in search of glutamate.

The action switches up from level to level, as the game introduces unexpected nuances to its apparently simple mechanics. For instance, tapping “jump” again the moment you bounce on an enemy results in a super bounce that can send you about the height of the screen, allowing some interesting vertical sequences that call to mind the ice beam segments in Metroid.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Composition Piece

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Today Theta Games, of Ceramic Shooter – Electronic Poem fame, released another poetic, music-related take on a familiar genre. As you start Composition Piece a blocky, distinctly indie-game, protagonist sits down at a much higher-resolution piano and, well, resolves to write a piano piece for a certain Qing Ge. The platforming action that follows, as described on the Theta Games website, serves as a metaphor for the creative process. You move to the right, avoid obstacles, smash through barriers, and seek input from your musical peers.

( 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 )

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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Wagging Your Arms Behind You… Love+ [Review]

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by [redacted]

Fred Wood’s Love is not a new game. He first contrived and released it in 2008, as an undergrad sample project. Over the last couple of years he has tweaked and fiddled with the engine and design, first opening up the game to aspiring artists with Love Custom; a stabler version of the engine that came with less music and only the one sample level. It was meant as an empty box, you see, for the end user to fill — rather like Nifflas’ FiNCK.

And then fairly recently, there’s the game’s final incarnation, Love+. The engine is again tweaked, and the levels and music are fewer yet richer than in the original Love. As this is the newest version, and indeed the only version that Fred Wood still supports, I mean to give it the bulk of the focus here.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )