By Quintin Smith on August 6th, 2010 at 1:21 pm.
I’m a little late to this party- about a year and a half late, to be exact- but I’ve just noticed Jim’s favourite indie developer, Jonathan ‘Cactus’ Söderström, has on his site a collection of 17 of his games, all zipped up and accessible through a fancy menu, under the name of Cactus Arcade. I think this is awesome, and if you’ve yet to experience the first-person arthouse headtrips that are Mondo Medical or Mondo Agency then you should download the thing right away. It’s right at the top of the Games section. Ooh- and in case you missed it, here’s the interview Jim did with Cactus last year.
As someone who’s always been vaguely interested in Cactus, but intimidated by the raw indieness and not known where to begin, this seems like a good starting point.
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I just got blown to pieces in Stench Mechanics. I assume the other two endings are the good ones.
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Cactus’ stuff is always interesting. I don’t necessarily enjoy myself. But always interesting.
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Teknozombie in particular – an “unfinished” game – was strangely creepy.
http://cactusquid.blogspot.com/2008/12/some-old-games-i-never-finished.html
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Psychosomnium is a particular favourite.
It’s a 2D platformer where the rules constantly change, just to fuck with you.
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I’d recommend SeizureDome and Shotgun Ninja for anyone who (like me) has no skillz.
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UltraMission (one of his latest ones, probably not included in the arcade) is quite good in a similar way.
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I will try some Cactus. One way… or another.
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Now this is old, much like John.
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I wish there were more Mondo games. What is a natives? Is it worth many moneys?
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And Cactus Arcade 2.0 should be out anytime now! With a different set of games, including unreleased ones.
My favourites are Block On! and Stench Mechanics. Both also fit into the ‘I have no skillz but I can have fun with these’ category. Block On! is an extremely inventive platformer where you create the levels yourself. Sorta like Crayon Physics, in a way. Very, very adorable and cactus made it in just 3 hours.
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Hrm, this crashes like mad on my machine (Vista, 64-bit). Some – most, even – of the games won’t start, throwing up scripting errors or other weirdness.
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Yes, same here. Must be a x64 thing. Shame, but Shotgun Ninja, the Mondo games and SeizureDome are spectacular.
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Some of the games were made in an older version of game maker that doesn’t work on Vista/7. There’s a program you can download that will patch the games to work on your system. You’ll have to Google for it, but that’s how I got all the games in the arcade to work for me.
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Oh Max, you mean spirited fellow, mentioning the cure but not where to find it.
Yeah, so have the same problems on Vista 32. Lazyweb it for me, guys!
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http://wiki.yoyogames.com/index.php/Making_games_work_under_Windows_Vista
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That’s one of the most horrible websites I’ve seen in a long time. I don’t know if it can even be excused for clearly being intentionally bad.
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coincidentally cactus recently announced he was producing cactus arcade 2 within the next few days
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I am getting this just as soon as I finish Aquaria (too many games on the go, have to be disciplined!). I’ve been very intrigued by Cactus since an ‘Art Games’ article in PC Gamer that mentioned the Mondos, written by a certain RPSer…
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I wish more indie authors would package their stuff into neat anthologies like this, it makes delving into stuff I wouldn’t otherwise have patience for more palatable.
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Some of the best games ever live on that site, yup. It’s about time RPS noticed them. Perhaps a colorfully written play-through of some of the more brok-I mean, eccentric ones is in order.
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