By John Walker on May 9th, 2011 at 2:39 pm.
This one’s a cutie. A side-scrolling physics platformer, in which you must negotiate levels with the goal of collecting materials for, well, further exploration. BEEP is a robot. Robots are cool, or cute. BEEP is not cool. He’s programmed to complete basic tasks, such as gather items, shoot baddies, and manipulate the environment. Thank goodness those are the things anyone needs to do in a physics platformer!
And it all works rather well. You control BEEP with the keyboard, and then independently control a mouse cursor that lets him aim, whether to shoot at something or use his tractor-beam-type-thing to move it around. Then you collect stuff. It’s all rather simple, really.
It’s quite primitive looking in places, especially the desert levels. Which at times is endearing, and at others looks a bit under-designed, really. I’d love to see more detail, especially on BEEP, who is a rather monotone grey. His eye animation is cute, reacting to his circumstances, and the whole game has a bold cartoon style that’s certainly not problematic. But at the same time, it could all really have done with more shading, a bit more finesse. There’s also a rather peculiar bug that’s plagued me a couple of times, where BEEP starts madly driving off to his doom at his own volition. Hopefully that’ll be fixed soon.
As with the adorable Tiny Bang Story I mentioned this morning, this is a very small indie team. This time it’s the first game from the excellently named Big Fat Alien. It was started by Kiaran Ritchie, a former LucasArts/BioWare employee who decided to go independent. But unlike Tiny Bang Story, Big Fat Alien have got the price for their game exactly right. $10/£6 is the ideal impulse fee for what’s a lengthy platformer.
Oh, and you can find out for free with the demo.
09/05/2011 at 14:44 qrter says:
Oh lord, you mentioned the price.. don’t mention the war!
09/05/2011 at 14:57 Corrupt_Tiki says:
fyi, the T-800 is also “programmed to complete basic tasks, such as gather items, shoot baddies, and manipulate the environment.”
09/05/2011 at 15:28 Xercies says:
Unfortunately it also has the programming to destroy all of humanity
09/05/2011 at 15:44 TillEulenspiegel says:
If you’re wondering, as I was, why the demo is 154MB, it’s largely because the audio alone is 115MB. They “compressed” everything as q10 ~500 kbps (!!!!!!!) Vorbis. Even the nerds agree that q5 (160-192kbps) is more than good enough.
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Recommended_Ogg_Vorbis
09/05/2011 at 16:08 LionsPhil says:
Yeah, uh, technical competence is not on the menu for these guys. From the Steam Store page:
That’s a bad thing they’re trying to make sound good. It’s the XP-onwards issue where rather than using your desktop refresh rate, fullscreen 3D apps by default get dropped by 75Hz for D3D and 60Hz for OGL (and there was one hell of a furor over that little anticompetative-looking split). 60Hz is headache-inducing for those who still like the picture quality of a good CRT and average at best for TFTs. What they basically mean is that they used OpenGL from scratch rather than building off of anyone’s existing work and didn’t work around this issue.
09/05/2011 at 17:16 Muzman says:
Sidescrolling…. Physics….. Plaformeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhss!!
09/05/2011 at 23:32 Deuteronomy says:
I love how crap like this gets coverage and Valve making even the slightest utterance causes you to lose control of all your bodily fluids and leave a shameful smear behind wherever you slide, but you ignore the BIS Arma 3 ARG.
Shame RPS. Shame!
14/05/2011 at 18:30 John Walker says:
Do shut up.
10/05/2011 at 01:09 MadTinkerer says:
I haven’t had a lot of time to play it yet, but this is a pretty good one. Kid-friendly, excellent simulated physics, okay puzzles (it’s no Portal 2 Challenge Rooms, but it’s not trying to be), and decent action.