Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Yeah, I ruin the Zombie theme of the day by posting this. OR DO I? It’s a castle defence game – which, of course, are normally zombie-themed – from the creator of full-on-mentalist Rogue-game Elona. It’s called Elona Shooter and it’s proper full-on-mentalist. The idea is basically an Operation Wolf (Or, really, Walker) clone mixed with a party-based RPG mixed with the aforementioned full-on mentalism. And… oh, watch these videos in a compare and contrast…
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Schizoslayer pointed this at this game from Casual Game compo. OneMrBean’s How My Grandfather Won The War is basically Nemesis as viewed through a children’s wall painting. By firing a paint splatter ahead of you, it removes anything hostile and instead shows something calmingly pacifistic. It’s really quite a beautiful effect. For me, that’s about it – for a game in the casual project, it doesn’t really have nearly enough restart points. Replaying the undemanding bits at the start of a level before you get a chance at the trickier parts hasn’t interested me since the Amiga days. Still – well worth a quick play. It is a beautiful effect.

Just a quickie before I disappear for the weekend. Soren “Civ 4″ Johnson has just tweeted about Small Worlds, saying “What a beautiful game. This is the next-gen Prince of Persia game I always wanted to play…”. I agree, and think you should play it without any further elaboration. It’s a magically-presented exploration game. Magical. That’s the world. Go lose yourself.

We get a lot of mail based around new webgame releases. A whole lot. So I don’t actually always go through them. This one, I did. Do you know why? Because it’s called “Bloodfield: The Meat City”. That’s videogame poetry, as far as I’m concerned. The game? Well, it’s very Zombie Shooter. Or Smash TV For our older readers. Or Robotron for our even older readers. Or on the Colosseum floor, with a gladius, being chased around by lions for our really old readers. In other words, an arena based shooter. Plus – because this is the late 00s – a whole mass of upgrading systems in a shop. It’s 2009 and the whole world has become Xenon II: Megablast.

While my heart wants to play Borderlands, my poorly head makes me play Atomic Super Boss. It’s actually a webgame port of the freeware Bullet Hell, but with a high score table. You with a boss, who moves through different attack patterns, randomly. You shoot him. The closer you are, the more points you get. Maximise score before he inevitably kills you. Videogame!

Hullo! Still me. I’ve eaten most of Kieron now, and we’re down to his increasingly manky looking torso. Well, I always like ribs, though they make my fingers messy. Lucky the room is covered in gore. He keeps on getting e-mails though, like one from Jack de Quidt who talks about BunniBunni, which has been all over the forum (Apparently. I don’t really know what a forum is. The last forum I was at was when I emerged in the centre of Rome around 101AD and went on a blood-curdling rampage. Ah, those were the days). Anyway, I decided to have a play.
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This splendid game, Clockwords, came to our attention via Dartt. It’s a free webgame involving furiously typing words to defeat mechanical spiders. You know the sort. The spiders are from your evil enemy who is determined to steal vital plans for your mysterious clockwork machine. This will not do!

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Except not as sexy as that sounds. There’s a webgame version of Plants Versus Zombies available. It features three game modes – 14 levels of Adventure, Endless Survival and Vasebreaker – with 12 plans and 6 zombie types. And a new zombie type. Crikey. The biggest problem for me it actually shares with the new game. I lost my save, so would have to play through all the tediously easy early adventure levels to get to the actually interesting challenge modes. But for newcomers to the game, it’s a fine place to newly come.

Crawl out of bed late to see Simon Parkin pointing this out before being very mean indeed to RPS, the bast. Anyway – The Deepening is basically the Beastie Boys’ old Sabotage video, but done as a mildly-NSFW choose your own adventure. It has one ending with basically the routine artist-comrade Jamie McKelvie and I do in front of other people at cons, which is always good to see. I quite like it. See what you think.

Oh, the humanity. More seriously, this is quite a fun experiment which Master Denby lobbed at me. The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab have made a pair of games. In terms of actual mechanics, they’re identical. But one – Woosh - uses purely abstract art and the other – Waker - uses a narrative story, with cut-scenes, voice-overs and an art style which supports its theme. From examining how the responses to the games differ “Researchers will study whether either the narrative or abstract form of the game is more effective in promoting student engagement with, and understanding of, the physics topics”. Which, as far as high concepts go, is a fun one – and it helps that both games are neat little platform puzzlers, and worth playing. Of course it also got me thinking…
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