Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Prolific indie games madman Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström has posted a bunch of unfinished game projects on his blog, and they’re all worth a look, if just as ideas. Teknozombie is actually particularly disturbing, which is a theme I enjoy in all Cactus’ work. If you’re unfamiliar with his stuff then check out our tagged stories, or head over to his site. Alternatively keep an eye on his Lo-Fi minds joint project with Ville Krumlinde over here.

This will be interesting news for a limited audience, but it made me stand on the balcony and sing: Cactus and Villek from the awesome ZGameEditor are joining forces to create an indie development house, Lo-Fi Minds. No project details yet, but I’m expecting great things from the bloke who created some of my favourite indie projects of the last year. I’ll see if I can catch up with him at GDC. Oh yes, I’m off to that big development conference in The West, so wave and say hello if you see me there.

One-man game production line Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström has released another two games. First there’s the bizarre static shooter SeizureDome, where you have to avoid being pushed out of the ring by heavy but slow moving Sumo wrestlers, or light but fast-moving naked women. You have a gun, and must gib them to avoid failure. (Söderström could hardly be more different to the other Cactus Game Design.)

Then there’s Shotgun Ninja, which is your basic 2D platform ninja game, where the martial artist in question is armed with a shotgun. Yeah, have fun.

My favourite indie games developer, Jonatan “Cactus” Söderström, has been receiving a good deal of attention lately. And it’s hardly surprising, because his weird, short games are appearing regularly and each have something unique about them. For games developed often in just a few days they’re remarkable achievements. This is the kind of chap I’d like to see get a little bit more money and some time to work on something beefier.
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I was just about to do some proper work when I thought this: “Perhaps there’s a room for a blog post looking at indie games that could potentially be the germ of a commercial idea; games that are as Narbacular Drop is to Portal.” Hmm. That does sound better than doing any proper paid work, I must admit.
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Via Indygamer, I see that Cactus Software have a new game out. It’s a scrolling shooter, and a little less imaginative than some of their previous games, but it nevertheless errs on the side of excellent esoterica. The visuals mix retro-polygonal abstract techno shooter stuff with, well, Cyrillic text and celluloid film-grain processing. I also like that you can turn the subtitles to the (presumably Russian?) text on and off. There’s a direct download link here.

Press enter during the game for instructions – and you’ll need to read them as the mixture of charge shot and shield controls make this a tricky but focusing shmup. Having ignored the instructions and guessed at the keys, it took me maybe four goes to clear the first couple of sections. But who ever reads those things, eh?

MSOIDS is a version of Asteroids with garish hand-scribbled art. Apparently made in four hours by messing about in MS paint and adding the results to a simple vector thinger, it makes an exceptionally tricky, eye-wincing version of the game. The madly scribbled explosions make it a special kind of bastard to get a hi-score at, but hey, you can press spacebar for new colour schemes.

Far more interesting, and developed in a mere seventy two hours by the same folk, is the nightmarish and crude puzzle FPS Mondo Medicals. The levels are “impossible” in that Escher way, and are a challenge to get past without becoming disorientated. Backtracking and going against intuition is key to defeating these spatial puzzles. (Why don’t more games have spatial puzzles. And why aren’t there more pure-puzzle FPS games? Eternal questions.) There’s also an alarming pixellated horror theme, with a TV-faced man yelling about cancer, and some screaming maw thing motionless in a room. It’s… unique.