TBA 2
(TBA 2 is one of the few games I've played a substantial amount of without there being a badge for it. Actually, if I were sticking to schedule I would have written this review a while ago, but I missed it before for that reason. Fortunately, the timing works out well, for reasons you'll see at the end of the review.)
TBA 2 (which is also called TBA++ in some of its documentation; I don't know which is the preferred title, so I'm using what Kongregate calls it) is a one-button game -- all you ever have to do is press Space. The trick, of course, is pressing Space at the right time.
You have a playing field with a bunch of ports, and when you press Space, the ball will launch from its current port in some direction, and hopefully land in another port. The goal in each level is to reach the red exit port. Some ports just sit there, and indeed to beat the easiest levels all you have to do is hit Space repeatedly. However, most of the ports do something -- rotate, move back and forth, move around a track, etc. -- so getting your timing right is tricky. Each level also has a par time (dying does nothing particularly bad to you; you just restart and the timer keeps running) set as a target to beat, as well as a star you can collect; collecting stars allows you to unlock new worlds.
Simply beating a level is very easy; getting the stars and beating the par scores requires a bit more effort, but is not terribly hard by all means. There are some additional achievements which require some more careful play (for instance, beat all levels in a world without dying), which means that the game will remain interesting for a little while longer, but it's still not a long game by any stretch of the imagination. Still, it's entertaining for a little while. TBA 2 is another jmtb02 production, which means lots of stars and sparkles in the graphics. The music is very good (somewhat reminiscent of Super Monkey Ball), the backgrounds are very nice, and the sound effects are decent.
Now, it's time for me to rant a little. Like GemCraft (and many other games I've reviewed here), TBA 2 is distributed (produced? sponsored? I'm not quite sure what the right word is here) by Armor Games. Armor Games sponsors a lot of quality games, but recently they've started making it so that when their games appear on other sites, one feature is removed. This is presumably to encourage people to play games on their site instead, but it's incredibly frustrating to me to have to choose between getting badges and experiencing all of the content in the game (and I will choose the former, but I am annoyed by it). In GemCraft, this is just one skill, and not a particularly important skill, so it's no big loss. But in TBA 2, one (possibly two? it's unclear) entire areas are removed in the Kongregate version, which means that some of the achievements it's not even possible for me to get (this is also, allegedly, part or possibly all of the reason that it doesn't have badges on Kongregate). I find this very unsatisfying, and hope that this practice doesn't continue to persist.
Anyway, with that rant off of my chest, like I said, TBA 2 is not a particularly deep or challenging game, but it is a well-put-together game which should provide entertainment for a little while.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
GemCraft
GemCraft is, at its base, Just Another Tower Defense game, but it's so pretty and well-executed that it manages to remain interesting for longer than you might expect.
The basic layout of GemCraft should be familiar to anyone who's ever played a tower defense game. There's a path, with plenty of twists and turns, and enemies walk along the path. The object is to destroy them before they reach the end of the path by building various defensive structures. Now, one interesting twist to GemCraft is that these structures aren't fixed. Well, you build towers along the sides of the path, and those are stationary; but, by themselves, the towers don't do anything. You create gems and put those in the towers, and then they can fire on enemies. You can also throw gems as bombs directly as enemies; I tend to prefer using my gems towers, but there are apparently some people who use strategies which involve almost exclusively throwing gems (which makes it quite a different kind of game, I suppose).
As befits its fantasy nature, there's no cash in the game; rather, your currency is mana. You gain mana both over time and by killing enemies; summoning gems is, naturally, the main way of spending mana, though you can also build more towers (you generally start out with a few, but you may wish to place your towers more strategically) or moats along the path to slow down enemies. One other unusual feature of GemCraft is that, as you might expect, various types of gems have various special abilities (eight in all), which correspond to eight possible gem colors, but when you create a gem, you don't get to pick the color -- it's randomly chosen. This can be a source of great frustration. (However, in a typical map, only a subset of the eight possible colors is available -- all eight appear only in the epic boss levels.) You can also combine gems to create more powerful gems -- you can create gems of levels 1 through 6 (with ever-increasing costs, naturally), but you can also combine two level n gems to create a level n+1 gem. Combining gems of two different colors yields a dual gem, which has some of the special powers of both, but these tend to be slightly weaker than a pure gem of the same grade. (You can similarly create tricolor gems or gems with even more combinations, but these are even more strongly disfavored.) Trying to combine two gems of different grades will just yield another gem with the higher grade of the two combined, so there's usually not much point.
As in many tower defense games, though, the real strategy comes in managing your money supply. You have one spell, Mana Pool, which increases your mana total and mana gain rate; thus, it is essentially equivalent to interest in a normal money-based game. Not casting enough Mana Pools is the prime cause of defeat for beginning players -- if you don't do it enough in the early part of a map, you'll never have enough mana to build the more powerful gems you'll need in the later part of the map. Conversely, if you do well enough in the beginning, often you'll find yourself swimming in mana by the end of the map, so that the later waves are a cakewalk. If enemies reach the end of the path, some amount of mana is deducted and they return to the beginning; if you should run out, you lose that map. This usually happens only due to carelessness, or due to the epic bosses.
The game is huge -- there are a total of 48 maps, including 5 epic boss levels and 8 hidden levels, which are revealed by getting a "glowing frame" on other maps (obtained by attaining a sufficiently high score). The overall layout is not entirely linear, so you don't have to play all of the levels, although you of course have to beat the epic boss levels. Being a completionist (and since you need to beat them all to get the hidden levels, which are required for the last badge), I naturally played them all anyway, which took a fair amount of time. Each individual map has somewhere between 8 and 50 waves (following the normal pattern of normal creatures interspersed with the occasional boss wave), with typical maps probably being somewhere around 30. Fortunately, each wave is relatively short; 20 creatures is a pretty large wave, and even non-boss waves can have as few as 3 creatures, so an individual map goes by pretty quickly. The game does a good job of avoiding the dead time which plagues games of this genre; you can quickly send new waves if you've already defeated the existing one, and you can also speed up time if things are going slowly in general, so you don't have that much time sitting around twiddling your thumbs.
As you clear maps, your wizard gains experience, which can in turn be used to improve skills which help various aspects of your gemcraftery. This brings me to the first complaint about the game: the difficulty is very uneven. The first few levels are very easy, and you don't really need to develop much strategy or learn much about careful play, and then you hit the first epic boss, which is quite difficult. You'll need to become much more proficient at carefully managing your mana (and much more aggressive in using Mana Pool) in order to beat it. (Looking at the comments, I'm far from the only person who hit a difficulty jump at the first epic boss.) Then, once you've developed your proficiency, the game goes back to being pretty easy (although no longer completely trivial), until your wizard accumulates enough experience that you can reach the really high-level skills, at which point the game becomes embarassingly easy. After I reached that point, the rest of the game was more time-consuming and not challenging at all, so I wish the designers had found a way to alleviate this boredom somewhat (possibly by not making the high-level skills so powerful to begin with). My second complaint is somewhat more trivial: with eight colors, it's of course going to be hard to keep them all distinct, but still, that's no excuse for having two of the colors be "lime" and "green", which are nearly indistinguishable to my eye. The blue and purple also look awfully similar, and it's very easy to get confused in the heat of battle.
The presentation of the game is absolutely gorgeous -- the graphics are excellent, and the sound is also well-done. (There is no background music, however.) But what really makes this game stand out is the attention to the interface -- buttons make a little click when you highlight them, tabs slide out, information is always easily accessible; it's very well put together and makes it feel like a much more professional game.
Overall, this game felt a little longer than it needed to be (especially since the final ending was a little anticlimactic), but it's definitely a game that's worth playing. Even though it's an old formula, this is so expertly executed that you can have a fun time playing it.
GemCraft is, at its base, Just Another Tower Defense game, but it's so pretty and well-executed that it manages to remain interesting for longer than you might expect.
The basic layout of GemCraft should be familiar to anyone who's ever played a tower defense game. There's a path, with plenty of twists and turns, and enemies walk along the path. The object is to destroy them before they reach the end of the path by building various defensive structures. Now, one interesting twist to GemCraft is that these structures aren't fixed. Well, you build towers along the sides of the path, and those are stationary; but, by themselves, the towers don't do anything. You create gems and put those in the towers, and then they can fire on enemies. You can also throw gems as bombs directly as enemies; I tend to prefer using my gems towers, but there are apparently some people who use strategies which involve almost exclusively throwing gems (which makes it quite a different kind of game, I suppose).
As befits its fantasy nature, there's no cash in the game; rather, your currency is mana. You gain mana both over time and by killing enemies; summoning gems is, naturally, the main way of spending mana, though you can also build more towers (you generally start out with a few, but you may wish to place your towers more strategically) or moats along the path to slow down enemies. One other unusual feature of GemCraft is that, as you might expect, various types of gems have various special abilities (eight in all), which correspond to eight possible gem colors, but when you create a gem, you don't get to pick the color -- it's randomly chosen. This can be a source of great frustration. (However, in a typical map, only a subset of the eight possible colors is available -- all eight appear only in the epic boss levels.) You can also combine gems to create more powerful gems -- you can create gems of levels 1 through 6 (with ever-increasing costs, naturally), but you can also combine two level n gems to create a level n+1 gem. Combining gems of two different colors yields a dual gem, which has some of the special powers of both, but these tend to be slightly weaker than a pure gem of the same grade. (You can similarly create tricolor gems or gems with even more combinations, but these are even more strongly disfavored.) Trying to combine two gems of different grades will just yield another gem with the higher grade of the two combined, so there's usually not much point.
As in many tower defense games, though, the real strategy comes in managing your money supply. You have one spell, Mana Pool, which increases your mana total and mana gain rate; thus, it is essentially equivalent to interest in a normal money-based game. Not casting enough Mana Pools is the prime cause of defeat for beginning players -- if you don't do it enough in the early part of a map, you'll never have enough mana to build the more powerful gems you'll need in the later part of the map. Conversely, if you do well enough in the beginning, often you'll find yourself swimming in mana by the end of the map, so that the later waves are a cakewalk. If enemies reach the end of the path, some amount of mana is deducted and they return to the beginning; if you should run out, you lose that map. This usually happens only due to carelessness, or due to the epic bosses.
The game is huge -- there are a total of 48 maps, including 5 epic boss levels and 8 hidden levels, which are revealed by getting a "glowing frame" on other maps (obtained by attaining a sufficiently high score). The overall layout is not entirely linear, so you don't have to play all of the levels, although you of course have to beat the epic boss levels. Being a completionist (and since you need to beat them all to get the hidden levels, which are required for the last badge), I naturally played them all anyway, which took a fair amount of time. Each individual map has somewhere between 8 and 50 waves (following the normal pattern of normal creatures interspersed with the occasional boss wave), with typical maps probably being somewhere around 30. Fortunately, each wave is relatively short; 20 creatures is a pretty large wave, and even non-boss waves can have as few as 3 creatures, so an individual map goes by pretty quickly. The game does a good job of avoiding the dead time which plagues games of this genre; you can quickly send new waves if you've already defeated the existing one, and you can also speed up time if things are going slowly in general, so you don't have that much time sitting around twiddling your thumbs.
As you clear maps, your wizard gains experience, which can in turn be used to improve skills which help various aspects of your gemcraftery. This brings me to the first complaint about the game: the difficulty is very uneven. The first few levels are very easy, and you don't really need to develop much strategy or learn much about careful play, and then you hit the first epic boss, which is quite difficult. You'll need to become much more proficient at carefully managing your mana (and much more aggressive in using Mana Pool) in order to beat it. (Looking at the comments, I'm far from the only person who hit a difficulty jump at the first epic boss.) Then, once you've developed your proficiency, the game goes back to being pretty easy (although no longer completely trivial), until your wizard accumulates enough experience that you can reach the really high-level skills, at which point the game becomes embarassingly easy. After I reached that point, the rest of the game was more time-consuming and not challenging at all, so I wish the designers had found a way to alleviate this boredom somewhat (possibly by not making the high-level skills so powerful to begin with). My second complaint is somewhat more trivial: with eight colors, it's of course going to be hard to keep them all distinct, but still, that's no excuse for having two of the colors be "lime" and "green", which are nearly indistinguishable to my eye. The blue and purple also look awfully similar, and it's very easy to get confused in the heat of battle.
The presentation of the game is absolutely gorgeous -- the graphics are excellent, and the sound is also well-done. (There is no background music, however.) But what really makes this game stand out is the attention to the interface -- buttons make a little click when you highlight them, tabs slide out, information is always easily accessible; it's very well put together and makes it feel like a much more professional game.
Overall, this game felt a little longer than it needed to be (especially since the final ending was a little anticlimactic), but it's definitely a game that's worth playing. Even though it's an old formula, this is so expertly executed that you can have a fun time playing it.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Hedgehog Launch
Hedgehog Launch is a very simple game -- you have a hedgehog, and using a rubber band launcher, you launch him into the air. While he's in the air, you can maneuver him from side to side using a rocket pack (but you have a limited amount of fuel; once it runs out, you're just dead weight). Your goal is to build a rubber band and launcher so powerful, you can launch your hedgehog into space (where "space" is defined as approximately 4500 feet high). And how do you do that? Well, conveniently, the air into which you're launching the hedgehog isn't like the air around my place -- it's filled with coins which you can collect for money (there are three denominations, 25 cents, 1 dollar, and 5 dollars), and also filled with launchpads which not only give you a cash boost (1, 5, or 10 dollars) but also propel you higher into the air. Your amount of money for a round is determined by the amount of cash collected times a bonus for your highest elevation reached times a bonus for your time of flight. These multiplicative bonuses mean that in later rounds, when your launcher is already pretty good, collecting even a relatively modest amount of money can lead to huge amounts of swag. This money you can use to build various upgrades to your setup; not only can you improve your launcher, but you can fit your hedgehog with a parachute, radar, goggles, or booster rocket, or improve his maneuvering rockets.
Naturally, there's a very strong positive feedback component in the game, in that making money makes making more money easier. And indeed, the one constant complaints in the comments is that reaching space in 5 days (which is the prerequisite for the hard badge) is very heavily dependent on luck on the first day -- if you happen to hit a couple of the yellow 10-dollar launchpads, your odds are a lot better, and (especially on the first day, where you don't have much gear on your hedgehog) whether or not you hit those launchpads is pretty much a matter of luck, since their location is entirely random. This complaint is true; sometimes, especially in the early days, you'll just end up with a terrible launch and end up wasting a day, and there's not much you can do about it other than try again. Still, the game is hardly boring, so as long as you're not worrying too much about the badge, it's not a big deal.
Being a jmtb02 production, the game is very flashy; the sound effects are good, the music is very entertaining and breezy, and the graphics are full of stars and sparkles. Overall, this is a cute little game; because of the randomess, it's not High Strategy or anything like that, but it's an entertaining little diversion for a little while.
Hedgehog Launch is a very simple game -- you have a hedgehog, and using a rubber band launcher, you launch him into the air. While he's in the air, you can maneuver him from side to side using a rocket pack (but you have a limited amount of fuel; once it runs out, you're just dead weight). Your goal is to build a rubber band and launcher so powerful, you can launch your hedgehog into space (where "space" is defined as approximately 4500 feet high). And how do you do that? Well, conveniently, the air into which you're launching the hedgehog isn't like the air around my place -- it's filled with coins which you can collect for money (there are three denominations, 25 cents, 1 dollar, and 5 dollars), and also filled with launchpads which not only give you a cash boost (1, 5, or 10 dollars) but also propel you higher into the air. Your amount of money for a round is determined by the amount of cash collected times a bonus for your highest elevation reached times a bonus for your time of flight. These multiplicative bonuses mean that in later rounds, when your launcher is already pretty good, collecting even a relatively modest amount of money can lead to huge amounts of swag. This money you can use to build various upgrades to your setup; not only can you improve your launcher, but you can fit your hedgehog with a parachute, radar, goggles, or booster rocket, or improve his maneuvering rockets.
Naturally, there's a very strong positive feedback component in the game, in that making money makes making more money easier. And indeed, the one constant complaints in the comments is that reaching space in 5 days (which is the prerequisite for the hard badge) is very heavily dependent on luck on the first day -- if you happen to hit a couple of the yellow 10-dollar launchpads, your odds are a lot better, and (especially on the first day, where you don't have much gear on your hedgehog) whether or not you hit those launchpads is pretty much a matter of luck, since their location is entirely random. This complaint is true; sometimes, especially in the early days, you'll just end up with a terrible launch and end up wasting a day, and there's not much you can do about it other than try again. Still, the game is hardly boring, so as long as you're not worrying too much about the badge, it's not a big deal.
Being a jmtb02 production, the game is very flashy; the sound effects are good, the music is very entertaining and breezy, and the graphics are full of stars and sparkles. Overall, this is a cute little game; because of the randomess, it's not High Strategy or anything like that, but it's an entertaining little diversion for a little while.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Dino Run
Dino Run is a perfect example of how to create a game with lots of interesting content that will keep you playing for a long while around a very simple gameplay concept. It's also where I earned my very first (and to date only) Impossible badge, so you can tell I liked it enough to stick it through all the way to the end.
The basic concept is based around an entertaining, if scientifically dubious, thought: what if the dinosaurs had been able to outrun the wall of lava kicked up by the asteroid impact? Maybe they would have been able to survive then! So your goal is, quite simply, to run as fast as you possibly can, over hills, through valleys, and with all sorts of obstacles running the gamut from annoying to irritating. (If this reminds you of Danger Swamps, I'm not surprised, but rest assured that this is a vastly better game.) Should you stumble and slow down, fiery doom awaits you, but if you make it to the end of the level, you'll find sanctuary in a cave (or, if you manage to beat challenge mode in the highest difficulty level, a spaceship, but perhaps I shouldn't give that part away...). You're not the only creature running for its survival, though; there are hundreds of other dinosaurs, nearly all of which are also trying to similarly escape their fate, some smaller, which you can eat, some bigger, which get in your way, and some faster, which you can hitch a ride on. There are also pterodactyls flying overhead, which you can grab onto to fly above the fray for a short period of time, but beware the wrong-way pterodactyls, which give the legendary unbeatable(?) pterodactyl a run for its money as the most annoying video game pterodactyl.
The game offers a wide variety of game modes. In challenge mode, you run through a course of 7 levels, beginning with a bright, sunny field and ending in a scorched, blacked, magma-filled Apocalypse level. You can gain more lives by collecting eggs (and hence saving more members of your species), but should you run out, it's game over. There are also "speedruns", which are really just single levels, usually with one feature that makes them stand out (for instance, a large valley, or lots of pterodactyls). Interestingly, no level will be the same twice -- each is randomly generated. It seems that the map is generated from a certain fixed set of chunks of terrain, some which may be large and some which may be small, and certain large features are likely to appear in certain levels, but nothing is guaranteed. For instance, there's a large waterfall that usually shows up in Level 4 of the challenge mode, but it could show up anywhere in the level, and it might not show up at all. This means that practicing a speedrun, while helpful to some degree, won't really help you learn the course (though you can learn to recognize signs of some of the larger terrain features, and some of the chunks are pretty large, so learning them can be useful).
There are four difficulty levels, but starting out on the hardest ("Insane") is literally impossible. Your dinosaur starts out puny and slow; in order to be able to handle the harder difficulty levels, you have to increase his power (just like tuning your car in Gran Turismo, for instance). This is accomplished by collecting DNA, which can either be obtained by collecting eggs, munching critters, or accomplishing various milestones. These milestones represent various degrees of achievement, and often reward you with hefty chunks of DNA or bones (which are used to unlock additional content). Some of these milestones are awarded for various difficult stunts (e.g., "doomsurfing", or staying just barely ahead of the wall of doom, for a given amount of time), while others are awarded for cumulative achivements (e.g. saving a certain number of eggs total). The latter can be kind of frustrating at the end of the game when you're trying to reach all of the milestones -- after finally beating the challenge mode and all of the speedruns on Insane, I still had to go through and collect more eggs and eat more birds. You'd think I'd have already proved I could do that.
The presentation is suitably retro -- the art is very pixelated and 8-bit, and the music similarly so. The sound effects are not bad; the music (as is so often the case) gets a little repetitive, but there are enough different themes to prevent it from being totally boring. The interface is a little odd (sometimes relying on the keyboard and sometimes on the mouse), but when you're playing it's all keyboard. There are also lots of cute little touches -- for instance, you unlock additional colors as you progress through the game, which allows you to customize your dinosaur; donating also gives you access to various amusing hats your dinosaur can wear.
Dino Run provided hours of enthralling gameplay for me, because it has such a large source of generally interesting challenges. While it is by no means an easy game, you'll get better as you play, and there's quite a feeling of accomplishment for making it through to the end, whether it's your first time surviving or your first time on Insane mode. Overall, it's a thoroughly enjoyable game.
Dino Run is a perfect example of how to create a game with lots of interesting content that will keep you playing for a long while around a very simple gameplay concept. It's also where I earned my very first (and to date only) Impossible badge, so you can tell I liked it enough to stick it through all the way to the end.
The basic concept is based around an entertaining, if scientifically dubious, thought: what if the dinosaurs had been able to outrun the wall of lava kicked up by the asteroid impact? Maybe they would have been able to survive then! So your goal is, quite simply, to run as fast as you possibly can, over hills, through valleys, and with all sorts of obstacles running the gamut from annoying to irritating. (If this reminds you of Danger Swamps, I'm not surprised, but rest assured that this is a vastly better game.) Should you stumble and slow down, fiery doom awaits you, but if you make it to the end of the level, you'll find sanctuary in a cave (or, if you manage to beat challenge mode in the highest difficulty level, a spaceship, but perhaps I shouldn't give that part away...). You're not the only creature running for its survival, though; there are hundreds of other dinosaurs, nearly all of which are also trying to similarly escape their fate, some smaller, which you can eat, some bigger, which get in your way, and some faster, which you can hitch a ride on. There are also pterodactyls flying overhead, which you can grab onto to fly above the fray for a short period of time, but beware the wrong-way pterodactyls, which give the legendary unbeatable(?) pterodactyl a run for its money as the most annoying video game pterodactyl.
The game offers a wide variety of game modes. In challenge mode, you run through a course of 7 levels, beginning with a bright, sunny field and ending in a scorched, blacked, magma-filled Apocalypse level. You can gain more lives by collecting eggs (and hence saving more members of your species), but should you run out, it's game over. There are also "speedruns", which are really just single levels, usually with one feature that makes them stand out (for instance, a large valley, or lots of pterodactyls). Interestingly, no level will be the same twice -- each is randomly generated. It seems that the map is generated from a certain fixed set of chunks of terrain, some which may be large and some which may be small, and certain large features are likely to appear in certain levels, but nothing is guaranteed. For instance, there's a large waterfall that usually shows up in Level 4 of the challenge mode, but it could show up anywhere in the level, and it might not show up at all. This means that practicing a speedrun, while helpful to some degree, won't really help you learn the course (though you can learn to recognize signs of some of the larger terrain features, and some of the chunks are pretty large, so learning them can be useful).
There are four difficulty levels, but starting out on the hardest ("Insane") is literally impossible. Your dinosaur starts out puny and slow; in order to be able to handle the harder difficulty levels, you have to increase his power (just like tuning your car in Gran Turismo, for instance). This is accomplished by collecting DNA, which can either be obtained by collecting eggs, munching critters, or accomplishing various milestones. These milestones represent various degrees of achievement, and often reward you with hefty chunks of DNA or bones (which are used to unlock additional content). Some of these milestones are awarded for various difficult stunts (e.g., "doomsurfing", or staying just barely ahead of the wall of doom, for a given amount of time), while others are awarded for cumulative achivements (e.g. saving a certain number of eggs total). The latter can be kind of frustrating at the end of the game when you're trying to reach all of the milestones -- after finally beating the challenge mode and all of the speedruns on Insane, I still had to go through and collect more eggs and eat more birds. You'd think I'd have already proved I could do that.
The presentation is suitably retro -- the art is very pixelated and 8-bit, and the music similarly so. The sound effects are not bad; the music (as is so often the case) gets a little repetitive, but there are enough different themes to prevent it from being totally boring. The interface is a little odd (sometimes relying on the keyboard and sometimes on the mouse), but when you're playing it's all keyboard. There are also lots of cute little touches -- for instance, you unlock additional colors as you progress through the game, which allows you to customize your dinosaur; donating also gives you access to various amusing hats your dinosaur can wear.
Dino Run provided hours of enthralling gameplay for me, because it has such a large source of generally interesting challenges. While it is by no means an easy game, you'll get better as you play, and there's quite a feeling of accomplishment for making it through to the end, whether it's your first time surviving or your first time on Insane mode. Overall, it's a thoroughly enjoyable game.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Music Catch
Music Catch isn't a game so much as it is a Flash relaxation device. The gameplay, such as it is, is very simple: a piano piece plays, and as it plays, shapes will appear from a continuously rotating line on screen. You move your mouse to catch the shapes with your own shape. Yellow shapes will increase your score multiplier and make your own shape larger, making it easier to catch more shapes both good and bad; red shapes will decrease the multiplier. Purple shapes activate "purple power", which draws all non-red shapes towards your shape for a limited amount of time. And, well, that's about it. You play for the length of the song, and then see what your score is.
The music is a pretty little piece, although the number of comments saying something like "I don't normally like classical music, but this is the best ever!" makes me despair a little, since there definitely is a lot better out there. Still, it's a lot better than your typical Flash game music. The graphics are pretty and colorful, albeit not particularly fancy. As a game, it's not perfect -- some times, you might get lucky and get a lot of yellows and purples early, which helps to bring up your overall score a lot. Also, while each yellow increases your multiplier by 1, a red can cut your total multiplier in half, which can be awfully frustrating, especially in the late game when your multiplier has gotten very large.
Anyway, that's mostly nitpicking; overall, this game is quite successful in providing a lovely interlude from the more stressful, action-packed games on Kongregate.
Music Catch isn't a game so much as it is a Flash relaxation device. The gameplay, such as it is, is very simple: a piano piece plays, and as it plays, shapes will appear from a continuously rotating line on screen. You move your mouse to catch the shapes with your own shape. Yellow shapes will increase your score multiplier and make your own shape larger, making it easier to catch more shapes both good and bad; red shapes will decrease the multiplier. Purple shapes activate "purple power", which draws all non-red shapes towards your shape for a limited amount of time. And, well, that's about it. You play for the length of the song, and then see what your score is.
The music is a pretty little piece, although the number of comments saying something like "I don't normally like classical music, but this is the best ever!" makes me despair a little, since there definitely is a lot better out there. Still, it's a lot better than your typical Flash game music. The graphics are pretty and colorful, albeit not particularly fancy. As a game, it's not perfect -- some times, you might get lucky and get a lot of yellows and purples early, which helps to bring up your overall score a lot. Also, while each yellow increases your multiplier by 1, a red can cut your total multiplier in half, which can be awfully frustrating, especially in the late game when your multiplier has gotten very large.
Anyway, that's mostly nitpicking; overall, this game is quite successful in providing a lovely interlude from the more stressful, action-packed games on Kongregate.
Monday, July 14, 2008
PlanetDefender
What do you get when you cross Missile Command with tower defense? Hopefully, a better game than PlanetDefender. PlanetDefender tries to vary the tried-and-true tower defense formula somewhat, but unfortunately the game that results is somewhat less interesting than the sum of its parts.
Like a tower defense game, you face a number of waves of malignant, increasingly powerful enemy ships bent on wreaking destruction on your peaceful planet, and you have to build various things to blast them out of the sky before they can do too much damage. However, unlike your typical tower defense game, the enemy ships can and will shoot back at you. They can either damage (and possibly even destroy) your defensive structures, or kill your population, which is bad news, because your population is your tax base. Unlike your typical tower defense game, where you get money for every enemy killed, here you get money over time based on your current population. In turn, you can build the usual array of weaponry, economic centers (which increase the money gain from your population), or bunkers to protect your population, as well as research some additional technologies.
Now, on to the flaws of the game. First of all, there's no strategy (at least none that I can see) to placing your units, unlike in a typical tower defense game. You just place them somewhere on the planet and they shoot at the enemy. This takes out one rather large chunk of strategy. Secondly, the pacing of the game is terrible. At the beginning of the game, you end up waiting for very long periods of time for enough money to accumulate in order to buy the next thing you want to buy. (This is, to a greater or lesser extent, an issue in any tower defense game, but PlanetDefender does not do a good job regulating the pace.) At the end of the game, when everything is maximally upgraded, you also just end up sitting around twiddling your thumbs while watching the alien fleets bravely float into the meat grinder. Thirdly, the interface is really annoying -- when your mouse isn't over the planet, all of your buildings fade away, presumably so you can see -- well, it's not actually clear what the purpose of this is. I suppose you can enjoy the majestic beauty of Earth's oceans and clouds, but this feature doesn't bring any useful information to your fingertips; in fact, it takes it away.
But the most unforgivable sin is very simple. As I mentioned earlier, a key to building a successful tower defense game is feedback -- the player needs to be able to understand what's working and what's not working, so he can adjust his strategy accordingly. PlanetDefender provides almost none of that -- you can't look at the enemy ships' health bars, so you have no idea how close you may or may not be to destroying them. You also can't see where on the planet you're taking the most damage, which might be useful if you were thinking of, say, placing one of those fortified bunkers. The only thing you can see is if your defensive structures are taking damage, since there's a little bar which gradually increases (not that it's at all clear to the novice player what that bar is). Even here, though, when a structure gets destroyed, there's no notification, so if your notice happens to be elsewhere on the battlefield, you can be blissfully unaware that a key component of your defenses has suddenly disappeared (though if this happens, you're screwed anyway, in all likelihood).
PlanetDefender also exhibits the hump in difficulty common to tower defense games. That is, since your income is dependent on your population, if you make a mistake which causes more of your population to die, then you have less income, which means you'll be able to build fewer defensive structures, which means more of your population to die, etc. That is, there's a strong positive feedback. As a result, small improvements in skill can result in large differences in the outcome. Like I said, this is common to many tower defense games (especially those with interest), but it seems to be especially problematic in PlanetDefender.
The graphics are decent, although small; the music gets boring fast, and the sound effects are nothing special. Overall, I was very glad to finish this game and get the badge, and was annoyed that it took as long as it did.
What do you get when you cross Missile Command with tower defense? Hopefully, a better game than PlanetDefender. PlanetDefender tries to vary the tried-and-true tower defense formula somewhat, but unfortunately the game that results is somewhat less interesting than the sum of its parts.
Like a tower defense game, you face a number of waves of malignant, increasingly powerful enemy ships bent on wreaking destruction on your peaceful planet, and you have to build various things to blast them out of the sky before they can do too much damage. However, unlike your typical tower defense game, the enemy ships can and will shoot back at you. They can either damage (and possibly even destroy) your defensive structures, or kill your population, which is bad news, because your population is your tax base. Unlike your typical tower defense game, where you get money for every enemy killed, here you get money over time based on your current population. In turn, you can build the usual array of weaponry, economic centers (which increase the money gain from your population), or bunkers to protect your population, as well as research some additional technologies.
Now, on to the flaws of the game. First of all, there's no strategy (at least none that I can see) to placing your units, unlike in a typical tower defense game. You just place them somewhere on the planet and they shoot at the enemy. This takes out one rather large chunk of strategy. Secondly, the pacing of the game is terrible. At the beginning of the game, you end up waiting for very long periods of time for enough money to accumulate in order to buy the next thing you want to buy. (This is, to a greater or lesser extent, an issue in any tower defense game, but PlanetDefender does not do a good job regulating the pace.) At the end of the game, when everything is maximally upgraded, you also just end up sitting around twiddling your thumbs while watching the alien fleets bravely float into the meat grinder. Thirdly, the interface is really annoying -- when your mouse isn't over the planet, all of your buildings fade away, presumably so you can see -- well, it's not actually clear what the purpose of this is. I suppose you can enjoy the majestic beauty of Earth's oceans and clouds, but this feature doesn't bring any useful information to your fingertips; in fact, it takes it away.
But the most unforgivable sin is very simple. As I mentioned earlier, a key to building a successful tower defense game is feedback -- the player needs to be able to understand what's working and what's not working, so he can adjust his strategy accordingly. PlanetDefender provides almost none of that -- you can't look at the enemy ships' health bars, so you have no idea how close you may or may not be to destroying them. You also can't see where on the planet you're taking the most damage, which might be useful if you were thinking of, say, placing one of those fortified bunkers. The only thing you can see is if your defensive structures are taking damage, since there's a little bar which gradually increases (not that it's at all clear to the novice player what that bar is). Even here, though, when a structure gets destroyed, there's no notification, so if your notice happens to be elsewhere on the battlefield, you can be blissfully unaware that a key component of your defenses has suddenly disappeared (though if this happens, you're screwed anyway, in all likelihood).
PlanetDefender also exhibits the hump in difficulty common to tower defense games. That is, since your income is dependent on your population, if you make a mistake which causes more of your population to die, then you have less income, which means you'll be able to build fewer defensive structures, which means more of your population to die, etc. That is, there's a strong positive feedback. As a result, small improvements in skill can result in large differences in the outcome. Like I said, this is common to many tower defense games (especially those with interest), but it seems to be especially problematic in PlanetDefender.
The graphics are decent, although small; the music gets boring fast, and the sound effects are nothing special. Overall, I was very glad to finish this game and get the badge, and was annoyed that it took as long as it did.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Castle Crashing "The Beard"
Like Newgrounds Rumble, I don't quite understand why this game is on Kongregate. OK, it doesn't announce its origin right in its title, but the whole thing is essentially an extended Newgrounds joke -- apparently, Tom Fulp (the creator of Newgrounds) took a vow not to shave his beard until he finished his newest game, and so in this game, you have to battle a fearsomely enbearded Fulp for, uh, some reason.
The gameplay itself is like any boss fight from any 2-D platformer: you're tiny, and have a small weapon (which gradually powers up as the battle goes on), and Fulp is huge and has a wide variety of devastating attacks; defeating him requires learning his attack patterns and reacting accordingly, along with some degree of dexterity.
The presentation is high-quality: the art, sound, and music are all above-average, and the programming in the game is very solid. Still, there's just not much game here, and if you're not one to appreciate the joke, you won't get much value from that source, either. It's a fun little tidbit, though.
Like Newgrounds Rumble, I don't quite understand why this game is on Kongregate. OK, it doesn't announce its origin right in its title, but the whole thing is essentially an extended Newgrounds joke -- apparently, Tom Fulp (the creator of Newgrounds) took a vow not to shave his beard until he finished his newest game, and so in this game, you have to battle a fearsomely enbearded Fulp for, uh, some reason.
The gameplay itself is like any boss fight from any 2-D platformer: you're tiny, and have a small weapon (which gradually powers up as the battle goes on), and Fulp is huge and has a wide variety of devastating attacks; defeating him requires learning his attack patterns and reacting accordingly, along with some degree of dexterity.
The presentation is high-quality: the art, sound, and music are all above-average, and the programming in the game is very solid. Still, there's just not much game here, and if you're not one to appreciate the joke, you won't get much value from that source, either. It's a fun little tidbit, though.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
LightSprites
LightSprites describes itself as kind of like "It's a Small World" on crack, and this is actually a pretty accurate description.
The basic concept behind LightSprites is very simple: colored targets pop up, and at the top of the screen you have a slingshot, which you can use to sling one or more colored balls at the targets. (You can select the color of the balls using either a key or from a menu in the corner.) Usually, the targets pop up in groups of three or four, and usually all of the targets in a single group are the same color, but this isn't always the case. If you hit a target with a correctly colored ball, a little figure comes out and dances around happily. Alas, should you hit a target with an incorrectly colored ball, a little figure will come out and dance around for about a second before some kind of terrible fate befalls him. This happens quite frequently, since often you'll set up a nice shot for one target and then suddenly another target of a different color will pop up. In normal mode, you just have a fixed number of targets, while in challenge mode, successfully getting targets will increase your energy, which gradually decreases over time (and also with an incorrect target); if it runs out, you lose. In both cases, the number of possible colors for the targets increases as the game goes on.
The art and music is really the fun part of the game. The graphics are cute and fun to watch, and the music is nice and bouncy. The sound effects can be a little annoying, but they add a nice element to the game, too. Sadly, the game has the (common) flaw that it is much easier on slow computers. You wouldn't expect it to make that much of a difference, but it's actually a lot easier to react and line up your shot when things aren't going quite as quickly.
Overall, this is a cute little concept and a fun little game. In fact, it's one of those games which is just as much fun to play the wrong way (and watch your little people suffer various horrible fates) as the right way.
LightSprites describes itself as kind of like "It's a Small World" on crack, and this is actually a pretty accurate description.
The basic concept behind LightSprites is very simple: colored targets pop up, and at the top of the screen you have a slingshot, which you can use to sling one or more colored balls at the targets. (You can select the color of the balls using either a key or from a menu in the corner.) Usually, the targets pop up in groups of three or four, and usually all of the targets in a single group are the same color, but this isn't always the case. If you hit a target with a correctly colored ball, a little figure comes out and dances around happily. Alas, should you hit a target with an incorrectly colored ball, a little figure will come out and dance around for about a second before some kind of terrible fate befalls him. This happens quite frequently, since often you'll set up a nice shot for one target and then suddenly another target of a different color will pop up. In normal mode, you just have a fixed number of targets, while in challenge mode, successfully getting targets will increase your energy, which gradually decreases over time (and also with an incorrect target); if it runs out, you lose. In both cases, the number of possible colors for the targets increases as the game goes on.
The art and music is really the fun part of the game. The graphics are cute and fun to watch, and the music is nice and bouncy. The sound effects can be a little annoying, but they add a nice element to the game, too. Sadly, the game has the (common) flaw that it is much easier on slow computers. You wouldn't expect it to make that much of a difference, but it's actually a lot easier to react and line up your shot when things aren't going quite as quickly.
Overall, this is a cute little concept and a fun little game. In fact, it's one of those games which is just as much fun to play the wrong way (and watch your little people suffer various horrible fates) as the right way.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Campaign Game: General Election
As a big fan of President Elect, I naturally assumed Campaign Game would be something similar: you have to choose how to allocate your advertising budget, campaign appearances and so forth in critical states to give you the edge in electoral votes over your opponent. Imagine my surprise in discovering, then, that Campaign Game isn't really anything like that -- it's a pretty traditional turn-based strategy game, except that instead of elves and magicians, you have fundraisers and John McCain.
At the beginning of the game, you select three staff members; your staff can be either hatchetmen, operatives, spinmeisters, or fundraisers. Your candidate is also a unit on the board. (In the General Election game, you can only play Obama or McCain; apparently earlier versions allowed you to play with a wider range of candidates. I was rather disappointed that this feature got taken out; it would be nice to have a larger selection.) Anyway, as you move your units around the map, each unit has a "control radius" that flips control of nearby squares to your side. If you control all of the squares in a region, you take control of that region, and it provides a ready source of cash. Your units can also attack enemy units, which reduces their HP, or enemy regions, which reduces their control; if you totally defeat an enemy region, it reverts to neutral and has to be recaptured all over again. At the beginning of each turn, you get cash for each region you hold; since you need cash to power your units' special abilities (each unit has one unique ability, and your candidates have several), this can make a large difference. You can recruit new units to replace destroyed ones, but this takes a lot of cash.
Unfortunately, the AI is just not very good; beating the game, even on the hard difficulty, is not much of a challenge. The graphics are kind of cute, though the music (which is also one of the Monster's Den: Book of Dread battle themes) gets very repetitive after a while (it's fine in small doses, but having it playing throughout the whole game gets boring quick). The sound effects are decent, but nothing to write home about. There's also multiplayer, which I didn't try.
Anyway, while this isn't a bad strategy game, there's not really much which makes it particularly noteworthy, either. It's a fun play once or twice, but doesn't really have much lasting replay value.
As a big fan of President Elect, I naturally assumed Campaign Game would be something similar: you have to choose how to allocate your advertising budget, campaign appearances and so forth in critical states to give you the edge in electoral votes over your opponent. Imagine my surprise in discovering, then, that Campaign Game isn't really anything like that -- it's a pretty traditional turn-based strategy game, except that instead of elves and magicians, you have fundraisers and John McCain.
At the beginning of the game, you select three staff members; your staff can be either hatchetmen, operatives, spinmeisters, or fundraisers. Your candidate is also a unit on the board. (In the General Election game, you can only play Obama or McCain; apparently earlier versions allowed you to play with a wider range of candidates. I was rather disappointed that this feature got taken out; it would be nice to have a larger selection.) Anyway, as you move your units around the map, each unit has a "control radius" that flips control of nearby squares to your side. If you control all of the squares in a region, you take control of that region, and it provides a ready source of cash. Your units can also attack enemy units, which reduces their HP, or enemy regions, which reduces their control; if you totally defeat an enemy region, it reverts to neutral and has to be recaptured all over again. At the beginning of each turn, you get cash for each region you hold; since you need cash to power your units' special abilities (each unit has one unique ability, and your candidates have several), this can make a large difference. You can recruit new units to replace destroyed ones, but this takes a lot of cash.
Unfortunately, the AI is just not very good; beating the game, even on the hard difficulty, is not much of a challenge. The graphics are kind of cute, though the music (which is also one of the Monster's Den: Book of Dread battle themes) gets very repetitive after a while (it's fine in small doses, but having it playing throughout the whole game gets boring quick). The sound effects are decent, but nothing to write home about. There's also multiplayer, which I didn't try.
Anyway, while this isn't a bad strategy game, there's not really much which makes it particularly noteworthy, either. It's a fun play once or twice, but doesn't really have much lasting replay value.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Open Doors
Open Doors is a fairly straightforward Flash puzzle game -- not very heavy on frills and fancy things, but there's an interesting enough concept to keep you entertained throughout its 25 levels.
The puzzle is quite simple: you have to move your character (represented by a box) to the exit of each level. Each level is set on a square blueprint-like grid. There are, of course, walls and doors, the latter of which (as you might be able to guess from the title) are the main source of trickiness in solving the puzzles. The doors follow very simple rules -- each door has two possible positions. If you're directly in front of a door, there are two possibilities for how you can move it: if it opens away from you, you can walk through it, pushing the door to its other position. If it opens towards you, moving away from the door in the direction parallel to the door towards the hinge will pull it to its other position. This probably sounds more complicated than it actually is; once you try you'll pretty readily pick up the rules. It's possible for two doors to occupy the same edge, if they're hinged on opposite corners. If two (or three) doors are hinged on the same corner, then attempting to move one into the edge occupied by the other will cause the other door to also move. This can set up some pretty tricky chain reactions in later levels.
I'm going to go off on a seeming tangent here and talk about how much I hate Sokoban. Sokoban is probably my least favorite widespread puzzle game (unless you count Sudoku in that category, which I don't). Why, you ask? Because it requires so many layers of precise planning ahead. You do an incredibly long sequence of moves to get a bunch of stuff done, and then once you get to the end you realize that no, actually, you had to move that block one space left at the beginning, and so you have to start all over again. (And that assumes you can do everything perfectly every time! It's even more fun when you've finally figured out exactly what you need to do [for real this time], and then two-thirds of the way through your finger slips and you move that one box one square too far and you're completely screwed!) That's why I don't enjoy playing Sokoban -- the cost of failed experiments or wrong guesses is so punitively high. Anyway, around level 12 (I forget exactly where) Open Doors showed signs of drifting into that territory -- you would go one way, through a pretty complicated sequence of doors, and then you'd get to a point where you realized you actually had to go the other way and open one door first and then do all of the things you just did. This made me sad and afraid that the rest of the game would be a horrible slog. Much to my relief, however, it didn't continue to develop those tendencies -- the rest of the levels remained reasonable and manageable.
The blueprint graphic theme is a nice look, although it is pretty basic. There's no music, and the sound effects are also pretty simple. The game also falls prey to one of my pet peeves for puzzle games, in that it marches relentlessly onward -- once you've completed a level, you can't go back and look at it again (short of resetting the whole game). Beating all 25 levels unlocks a special new mode where you have the same puzzles but only a limited number of moves to solve them; since trial and error was my most popular method of solving, I suspect this would rapidly drive me crazy.
Anyway, this isn't a bad puzzle game, but there's not really anything special about it, either. It will definitely provide a challenge for a little bit, but there's better puzzle games out there.
Open Doors is a fairly straightforward Flash puzzle game -- not very heavy on frills and fancy things, but there's an interesting enough concept to keep you entertained throughout its 25 levels.
The puzzle is quite simple: you have to move your character (represented by a box) to the exit of each level. Each level is set on a square blueprint-like grid. There are, of course, walls and doors, the latter of which (as you might be able to guess from the title) are the main source of trickiness in solving the puzzles. The doors follow very simple rules -- each door has two possible positions. If you're directly in front of a door, there are two possibilities for how you can move it: if it opens away from you, you can walk through it, pushing the door to its other position. If it opens towards you, moving away from the door in the direction parallel to the door towards the hinge will pull it to its other position. This probably sounds more complicated than it actually is; once you try you'll pretty readily pick up the rules. It's possible for two doors to occupy the same edge, if they're hinged on opposite corners. If two (or three) doors are hinged on the same corner, then attempting to move one into the edge occupied by the other will cause the other door to also move. This can set up some pretty tricky chain reactions in later levels.
I'm going to go off on a seeming tangent here and talk about how much I hate Sokoban. Sokoban is probably my least favorite widespread puzzle game (unless you count Sudoku in that category, which I don't). Why, you ask? Because it requires so many layers of precise planning ahead. You do an incredibly long sequence of moves to get a bunch of stuff done, and then once you get to the end you realize that no, actually, you had to move that block one space left at the beginning, and so you have to start all over again. (And that assumes you can do everything perfectly every time! It's even more fun when you've finally figured out exactly what you need to do [for real this time], and then two-thirds of the way through your finger slips and you move that one box one square too far and you're completely screwed!) That's why I don't enjoy playing Sokoban -- the cost of failed experiments or wrong guesses is so punitively high. Anyway, around level 12 (I forget exactly where) Open Doors showed signs of drifting into that territory -- you would go one way, through a pretty complicated sequence of doors, and then you'd get to a point where you realized you actually had to go the other way and open one door first and then do all of the things you just did. This made me sad and afraid that the rest of the game would be a horrible slog. Much to my relief, however, it didn't continue to develop those tendencies -- the rest of the levels remained reasonable and manageable.
The blueprint graphic theme is a nice look, although it is pretty basic. There's no music, and the sound effects are also pretty simple. The game also falls prey to one of my pet peeves for puzzle games, in that it marches relentlessly onward -- once you've completed a level, you can't go back and look at it again (short of resetting the whole game). Beating all 25 levels unlocks a special new mode where you have the same puzzles but only a limited number of moves to solve them; since trial and error was my most popular method of solving, I suspect this would rapidly drive me crazy.
Anyway, this isn't a bad puzzle game, but there's not really anything special about it, either. It will definitely provide a challenge for a little bit, but there's better puzzle games out there.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Newgrounds Rumble
Newgrounds Rumble is a fairly straightforward brawler in the classic tradition. However, it doesn't seem to be particularly demanding of its players; while there probably are layers and layers of strategy, I was able to get through the game mostly just by mashing buttons (and some persistence in the more difficult challenges). I don't even know if the characters have special moves; though there are two only kinds of attack ("quick" and "fierce"), your characters do have different moves while in the air and you can put together some pretty impressive chains.
Overall, the game is well-crafted; there's a fair number of characters each with their own distinct personalities, and there's a wide variety of arenas. The game handles up to 4 players, and some of the challenge modes include both 2v2 and 1v3 play, which is nice. There's also a lot of game modes -- the obligatory "story" mode (which is pretty skeletal, both in story and length), challenge mode, ordinary versus mode, and an unlockable survival mode. The powerups available are pretty standard for a Super Smash Brothers-like setup.
There's a fair amount of different music in the game, and while none of it is great, it's all decent. The sound effects are pretty limited but not bad. But really, the most baffling thing about this game is simple -- why is it on Kongregate? The game is clearly packed full of Newgrounds in-jokes and references, and as someone who hasn't spent too much time on Newgrounds, most of these flew completely over my head. I'm sure it would be more entertaining for someone who knows all the backstory behind all of these characters and the various references in the game, but to me, it ends up as just another fighting game. Not a bad fighting game, mind you, but just not one which is interesting enough to keep me playing.
Newgrounds Rumble is a fairly straightforward brawler in the classic tradition. However, it doesn't seem to be particularly demanding of its players; while there probably are layers and layers of strategy, I was able to get through the game mostly just by mashing buttons (and some persistence in the more difficult challenges). I don't even know if the characters have special moves; though there are two only kinds of attack ("quick" and "fierce"), your characters do have different moves while in the air and you can put together some pretty impressive chains.
Overall, the game is well-crafted; there's a fair number of characters each with their own distinct personalities, and there's a wide variety of arenas. The game handles up to 4 players, and some of the challenge modes include both 2v2 and 1v3 play, which is nice. There's also a lot of game modes -- the obligatory "story" mode (which is pretty skeletal, both in story and length), challenge mode, ordinary versus mode, and an unlockable survival mode. The powerups available are pretty standard for a Super Smash Brothers-like setup.
There's a fair amount of different music in the game, and while none of it is great, it's all decent. The sound effects are pretty limited but not bad. But really, the most baffling thing about this game is simple -- why is it on Kongregate? The game is clearly packed full of Newgrounds in-jokes and references, and as someone who hasn't spent too much time on Newgrounds, most of these flew completely over my head. I'm sure it would be more entertaining for someone who knows all the backstory behind all of these characters and the various references in the game, but to me, it ends up as just another fighting game. Not a bad fighting game, mind you, but just not one which is interesting enough to keep me playing.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
A three-parter for today!
ButtonHunt
ButtonHunt is a game with a very simple premise -- there are 30 levels. In each of them, there is a red button. You must push the button to advance to the next level. In some levels, this is as simple as locating the button and clicking it; in other levels, you have to solve various puzzles to reveal the button. None of the puzzles is particularly hard, so this shouldn't take you very long.
The sound effects are pretty minimal, and the drawing is not particularly great. But my one complaint is that the interface is not particularly consistent. Sometimes you have to click and drag objects, while sometimes you click to pick up an object and then you just have to move it. This can be pretty frustrating when it's obvious what you want to do but not at all obvious what you need to click to get it to happen. Also, sometimes when you've picked up an object, it's not at all clear how to put it down -- this was a source of frustration more than once. Most of the puzzles just require thought, but there are a few which require quick reflexes.
Overall, this was a cute little diversion, but really not challenging or interesting enough to be a great game.
ButtonHunt 2
ButtonHunt 2 is pretty much more of the same. 30 more levels, 30 more buttons. There's a timer now, to measure your overall progress, so you can have high scores. Overall the puzzles feel a little meatier, but the annoying interface problems are still present (though the problem of dropping things doesn't seem to be present in this one). The last puzzle is also extremely annoying, unless you look at the description which says to hold down the mouse button, which makes it somewhat less annoying. Like the first game, for each ten levels you complete, you unlock a small little secret.
ButtonHunt 3
ButtonHunt 3 is pretty much more of the same. By now, a lot of the puzzles will look pretty familiar; in fact, the notes admit that at least one of the puzzles is a direct remake of a puzzles from ButtonHunt 1, but even leaving this aside, there's a lot of concepts and ideas repeated from the first two. The game now tracks both your overall time and number of clicks, and you can receive achievements for meeting certain standards on both. There's also a very simple hint system, which I suppose is useful if you're having difficulty with a particular puzzle, although once again the difficulty level is pretty low. The interface is still as frustrating as ever -- sometimes you click, sometimes you click and move, sometimes you click and drag, and it's never clear which you need to use. (In one level, it even switches between "click and drag" and "click to pick up and then move" for the same object!) Thankfully, there are no reflex-based ones in this one.
Once again, this is kind of entertaining, but it's really pretty light fare.
ButtonHunt
ButtonHunt is a game with a very simple premise -- there are 30 levels. In each of them, there is a red button. You must push the button to advance to the next level. In some levels, this is as simple as locating the button and clicking it; in other levels, you have to solve various puzzles to reveal the button. None of the puzzles is particularly hard, so this shouldn't take you very long.
The sound effects are pretty minimal, and the drawing is not particularly great. But my one complaint is that the interface is not particularly consistent. Sometimes you have to click and drag objects, while sometimes you click to pick up an object and then you just have to move it. This can be pretty frustrating when it's obvious what you want to do but not at all obvious what you need to click to get it to happen. Also, sometimes when you've picked up an object, it's not at all clear how to put it down -- this was a source of frustration more than once. Most of the puzzles just require thought, but there are a few which require quick reflexes.
Overall, this was a cute little diversion, but really not challenging or interesting enough to be a great game.
ButtonHunt 2
ButtonHunt 2 is pretty much more of the same. 30 more levels, 30 more buttons. There's a timer now, to measure your overall progress, so you can have high scores. Overall the puzzles feel a little meatier, but the annoying interface problems are still present (though the problem of dropping things doesn't seem to be present in this one). The last puzzle is also extremely annoying, unless you look at the description which says to hold down the mouse button, which makes it somewhat less annoying. Like the first game, for each ten levels you complete, you unlock a small little secret.
ButtonHunt 3
ButtonHunt 3 is pretty much more of the same. By now, a lot of the puzzles will look pretty familiar; in fact, the notes admit that at least one of the puzzles is a direct remake of a puzzles from ButtonHunt 1, but even leaving this aside, there's a lot of concepts and ideas repeated from the first two. The game now tracks both your overall time and number of clicks, and you can receive achievements for meeting certain standards on both. There's also a very simple hint system, which I suppose is useful if you're having difficulty with a particular puzzle, although once again the difficulty level is pretty low. The interface is still as frustrating as ever -- sometimes you click, sometimes you click and move, sometimes you click and drag, and it's never clear which you need to use. (In one level, it even switches between "click and drag" and "click to pick up and then move" for the same object!) Thankfully, there are no reflex-based ones in this one.
Once again, this is kind of entertaining, but it's really pretty light fare.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Doeo
Well, let me put it this way: It will take me longer to write this review than it took me to play (and beat) Doeo for the first time. That should give you an idea of what kind of game Doeo is -- if you're looking for a complex, deep, or challenging game, go somewhere else! But if you want a fun, silly way to waste a few minutes (and I mean a few minutes), it'll do.
Anyway, the basic concept of Doeo is ridiculously simple, and if you enjoy Whack-a-Mole, you'll find it pretty familiar. Doeos will pop up, and you have to touch them with your mouse to -- catch them? destroy them? banish them? It's unclear. Anyway, you have 40 seconds to touch either 100 (on easy) or 200 (on hard) Doeos to proceed to the next level; after five levels, you'll battle the king. That's really all there is. Well, easy mode only features pink Doeos, while hard mode (to compensate for the higher total required) adds green Doeos, which are worth more points.
The design has a very Japanese aesthetic to it -- the art is cute and cartoony, and the background music is poppy and enjoyable, making this game a pleasure to play. Still, it's so simple that it just doesn't have much long-term value. I suppose younger players might find it more entertaining, but I can't imagine going back to play this over and over regardless of my age.
One note is that on a slower computer, I guess because there are a lot of Doeos on the screen, hard mode is embarassingly easy. However, the game is still not particularly difficult even on a fast computer; it just requires a few tries rather than one.
Well, let me put it this way: It will take me longer to write this review than it took me to play (and beat) Doeo for the first time. That should give you an idea of what kind of game Doeo is -- if you're looking for a complex, deep, or challenging game, go somewhere else! But if you want a fun, silly way to waste a few minutes (and I mean a few minutes), it'll do.
Anyway, the basic concept of Doeo is ridiculously simple, and if you enjoy Whack-a-Mole, you'll find it pretty familiar. Doeos will pop up, and you have to touch them with your mouse to -- catch them? destroy them? banish them? It's unclear. Anyway, you have 40 seconds to touch either 100 (on easy) or 200 (on hard) Doeos to proceed to the next level; after five levels, you'll battle the king. That's really all there is. Well, easy mode only features pink Doeos, while hard mode (to compensate for the higher total required) adds green Doeos, which are worth more points.
The design has a very Japanese aesthetic to it -- the art is cute and cartoony, and the background music is poppy and enjoyable, making this game a pleasure to play. Still, it's so simple that it just doesn't have much long-term value. I suppose younger players might find it more entertaining, but I can't imagine going back to play this over and over regardless of my age.
One note is that on a slower computer, I guess because there are a lot of Doeos on the screen, hard mode is embarassingly easy. However, the game is still not particularly difficult even on a fast computer; it just requires a few tries rather than one.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Ragdoll Invaders
Ragdoll Invaders is an extremely twitch-heavy game which manages to inject enough life into a relatively well-used concept to make for an entertaining experience.
The concept is pretty familiar, and pretty simple: Earth is being invaded by enemy ships, and you have to destroy them! To make it tricky, however, your character is a ragdoll that shoots bullets from its arms. You can't really control where each of the limbs points -- your movement only directly affects the head of the ragdoll -- so, while you're capable of shooting quite a few bullets, most of these will end up wildly off-target. Given some setup time, you can get a pretty good aim, but since you spend most of your time frantically dodging enemy shots, you'll rarely have this luxury. Meanwhile, the enemy ships are, as you might expect, horribly beweaponed, so you'll have to be quick to avoid being sliced in half by a laser, blown to pieces by a grenade, or killed where you stand (or, more likely, float) by some kind of energy ball. In fact, in an inversion of the way this type of game normally goes, you will probably die more times than the enemy -- the enemy ships are quite sturdy, and take quite a few shots to destroy (and the bosses even more than that), while one shot generally means that you're done for. (Your ragdoll can survive having an arm or a leg cut off, although losing an arm will correspondingly reduce your firepower, but most of the time you'll get killed outright when you take a hit -- the near-misses are less frequent.) Fortunately, extra lives are plentiful -- whenever you do blow up an enemy ship, it drops a heart which grants you can extra life, and the bosses give you multiple extra lives. (However, there's nothing more frustrating than killing an enemy ship and then in turn getting killed by one of its last shots, and watching the heart float past your dead corpse.)
There's only three types of enemy (plus the bosses), so the seven levels of the game basically consist of different permutations of increasing numbers of enemies that you face at one time. The bosses are also the same in appearance, although the weaponry that they field increases substantially over the course of the game. The sound effects are pretty basic, and the music, while thankfully long, is pretty mediocre techno.
Overall, the game is pretty challenging -- it'll definitely take you some practice before you get good enough to defeat all of the waves. Fortunately, since it is not too long overall (there's a total of 52 enemies, including all bosses), it's not too frustrating to get the hard badge, though it will require healthy doses of skill, luck, and fast reflexes.
Speaking of fast reflexes, however, brings me to the real problem with this game, which I alluded to in my last post -- the game is substantially easier on a slower computer. Ragdoll Invaders does push a lot of objects onto the screen, and even though it feels that each individual object shouldn't be that hard to deal with, you'll definitely notice the game beginning to lag on an older-model machine when there are a lot of objects around. I don't know if this is because the game itself is poorly coded, or just because Flash performance is poor when you're pushing a lot of objects; this seems to happen in a lot of games, but then again I'm willing to bet most of the code for these Flash games is not that great, so it's hard to say one way or the other. Anyway, playing on a slow computer can definitely give you those extra tenths of seconds that make the difference between victory and defeat.
Overall, this is a fun little entertainment, but they chose their length wisely; I don't think the basic formula could be stretched much farther without making this a very thin game. The speed issue is kind of a problem, but, as we'll see, it's hardly the only game on Kongregate with this problem to deal with.
Ragdoll Invaders is an extremely twitch-heavy game which manages to inject enough life into a relatively well-used concept to make for an entertaining experience.
The concept is pretty familiar, and pretty simple: Earth is being invaded by enemy ships, and you have to destroy them! To make it tricky, however, your character is a ragdoll that shoots bullets from its arms. You can't really control where each of the limbs points -- your movement only directly affects the head of the ragdoll -- so, while you're capable of shooting quite a few bullets, most of these will end up wildly off-target. Given some setup time, you can get a pretty good aim, but since you spend most of your time frantically dodging enemy shots, you'll rarely have this luxury. Meanwhile, the enemy ships are, as you might expect, horribly beweaponed, so you'll have to be quick to avoid being sliced in half by a laser, blown to pieces by a grenade, or killed where you stand (or, more likely, float) by some kind of energy ball. In fact, in an inversion of the way this type of game normally goes, you will probably die more times than the enemy -- the enemy ships are quite sturdy, and take quite a few shots to destroy (and the bosses even more than that), while one shot generally means that you're done for. (Your ragdoll can survive having an arm or a leg cut off, although losing an arm will correspondingly reduce your firepower, but most of the time you'll get killed outright when you take a hit -- the near-misses are less frequent.) Fortunately, extra lives are plentiful -- whenever you do blow up an enemy ship, it drops a heart which grants you can extra life, and the bosses give you multiple extra lives. (However, there's nothing more frustrating than killing an enemy ship and then in turn getting killed by one of its last shots, and watching the heart float past your dead corpse.)
There's only three types of enemy (plus the bosses), so the seven levels of the game basically consist of different permutations of increasing numbers of enemies that you face at one time. The bosses are also the same in appearance, although the weaponry that they field increases substantially over the course of the game. The sound effects are pretty basic, and the music, while thankfully long, is pretty mediocre techno.
Overall, the game is pretty challenging -- it'll definitely take you some practice before you get good enough to defeat all of the waves. Fortunately, since it is not too long overall (there's a total of 52 enemies, including all bosses), it's not too frustrating to get the hard badge, though it will require healthy doses of skill, luck, and fast reflexes.
Speaking of fast reflexes, however, brings me to the real problem with this game, which I alluded to in my last post -- the game is substantially easier on a slower computer. Ragdoll Invaders does push a lot of objects onto the screen, and even though it feels that each individual object shouldn't be that hard to deal with, you'll definitely notice the game beginning to lag on an older-model machine when there are a lot of objects around. I don't know if this is because the game itself is poorly coded, or just because Flash performance is poor when you're pushing a lot of objects; this seems to happen in a lot of games, but then again I'm willing to bet most of the code for these Flash games is not that great, so it's hard to say one way or the other. Anyway, playing on a slow computer can definitely give you those extra tenths of seconds that make the difference between victory and defeat.
Overall, this is a fun little entertainment, but they chose their length wisely; I don't think the basic formula could be stretched much farther without making this a very thin game. The speed issue is kind of a problem, but, as we'll see, it's hardly the only game on Kongregate with this problem to deal with.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Red
Red is a very simple-seeming shooter, but there's enough interesting features about it to make it an entertaining game. Red is designed by Ivory, who also brought you 5 Differences and 6 Differences, and this shows in the aesthetic of the game -- while the design is very simple, it's also very pretty.
In any case, the basic gameplay is familiar to anyone who's played Missile Command or any similar game: you command a turret (located on Mars, hence the name of the game) as asteroids fall. You have to shoot the asteroids before they collide with your turret; if you get hit, it's game over. Your ammunition replenishes over time, so you can't fire continuously, but generally it's enough as long as you're reasonably careful. Of course, it has a tendency to run out just as you're in the thickest of things and need it most. (You can also fire more powerful shots, which naturally chew up a larger amount of ammo.)
The most interesting feature of Red is that shooting an asteroid doesn't destroy it; rather, it merely deflects it. So shooting is not just a matter of pointing your turret and blowing things up; you have to decide where it's best to hit the asteroid to push it out of your way with minimal effort. It rapidly becomes clear that gently deflecting the asteroids to one side is a much better approach than trying to completely push them back up off the top of the screen. Your bullets keep going after deflecting off an asteroid, too; you can set up some very satisfying sequences where, for instance, two asteroids are descending on you side by side, and by shooting between the two, your bullets can bounce back and forth and push them both apart so that they'll miss you.
There are a few powerups which drift by from time to time: shields, which protect your turret from one hit, although you can only have one at a time; a powerup which makes your shots much more powerful for a limited amount of time; and a powerup which adds additional turrets on the ground. These additional turrets fire randomly, and they tend to get destroyed pretty easily, so they're not really that useful (also, they have an irritating tendency to get created right in the path of an asteroid, so they often only last for a couple of seconds). Every so often, there's also a "boss" in the form of a very large asteroid which fills a large portion of the screen.
To add to the difficulty a bit, there's also wind which can (and will) blow your shots astray. The wind starts out light but can eventually pick up to the point where it can blow your shots all the way across the screen, so shooting at asteroids at one side of the screen may be difficult or impossible (however, one thing you quickly learn is that asteroids far away from the center of the screen should generally be ignored, as they don't pose a direct threat to you). Although you don't really notice the difficulty getting harder, when I was trying to get the badge (which requires surviving for 600 seconds) I always seemed to die somewhere in the 500-600 second range, so clearly the game does get more difficult as you go on.
As mentioned before, the graphic design is extremely simple but still pretty, and the background music is a nice song which adds an ethereal feeling to the proceedings. (It also -- and I can't stress the importance of this enough! -- is long enough that it doesn't repeat until after a while, which means you don't get immediately bored and/or irritated by it. Hooray!) That said, the 10 minutes that you have to survive for to get the badge will feel like a rather long time, especially given that not much changes while you're playing the game.
This brings me to my final point, which is only a minor irritation in Red, but will be a major issue in some of the upcoming games in the queue: the timer length is heavily dependent on the speed of your computer. For whatever reason, Red is apparently pretty resource-intensive, so if you're playing on a relatively weak computer, even if ten minutes have elapsed on your wall clock, the game may only think that you've been playing for six minutes (since the length of time in the game is presumably determined by the number of frames), so beware! If you're trying to get the badge on a slower computer, you'll have to survive for longer than you thought. This problem is amplified by the fact that the timer isn't displayed until the end of the game, so I strongly advise against dying just because you think you've reached your destination time. (The game will kill you soon enough anyway; no need to rush.) Anyway, this is kind of annoying, especially since it doesn't seem like Red should be that dependent on your computer speed.
Anyway, overall Red is a pretty game and you'll enjoy playing it for a while, but the fact that the game doesn't change all that much as you play means that its long-term value is pretty limited. Still, it's a fun badge to get.
Red is a very simple-seeming shooter, but there's enough interesting features about it to make it an entertaining game. Red is designed by Ivory, who also brought you 5 Differences and 6 Differences, and this shows in the aesthetic of the game -- while the design is very simple, it's also very pretty.
In any case, the basic gameplay is familiar to anyone who's played Missile Command or any similar game: you command a turret (located on Mars, hence the name of the game) as asteroids fall. You have to shoot the asteroids before they collide with your turret; if you get hit, it's game over. Your ammunition replenishes over time, so you can't fire continuously, but generally it's enough as long as you're reasonably careful. Of course, it has a tendency to run out just as you're in the thickest of things and need it most. (You can also fire more powerful shots, which naturally chew up a larger amount of ammo.)
The most interesting feature of Red is that shooting an asteroid doesn't destroy it; rather, it merely deflects it. So shooting is not just a matter of pointing your turret and blowing things up; you have to decide where it's best to hit the asteroid to push it out of your way with minimal effort. It rapidly becomes clear that gently deflecting the asteroids to one side is a much better approach than trying to completely push them back up off the top of the screen. Your bullets keep going after deflecting off an asteroid, too; you can set up some very satisfying sequences where, for instance, two asteroids are descending on you side by side, and by shooting between the two, your bullets can bounce back and forth and push them both apart so that they'll miss you.
There are a few powerups which drift by from time to time: shields, which protect your turret from one hit, although you can only have one at a time; a powerup which makes your shots much more powerful for a limited amount of time; and a powerup which adds additional turrets on the ground. These additional turrets fire randomly, and they tend to get destroyed pretty easily, so they're not really that useful (also, they have an irritating tendency to get created right in the path of an asteroid, so they often only last for a couple of seconds). Every so often, there's also a "boss" in the form of a very large asteroid which fills a large portion of the screen.
To add to the difficulty a bit, there's also wind which can (and will) blow your shots astray. The wind starts out light but can eventually pick up to the point where it can blow your shots all the way across the screen, so shooting at asteroids at one side of the screen may be difficult or impossible (however, one thing you quickly learn is that asteroids far away from the center of the screen should generally be ignored, as they don't pose a direct threat to you). Although you don't really notice the difficulty getting harder, when I was trying to get the badge (which requires surviving for 600 seconds) I always seemed to die somewhere in the 500-600 second range, so clearly the game does get more difficult as you go on.
As mentioned before, the graphic design is extremely simple but still pretty, and the background music is a nice song which adds an ethereal feeling to the proceedings. (It also -- and I can't stress the importance of this enough! -- is long enough that it doesn't repeat until after a while, which means you don't get immediately bored and/or irritated by it. Hooray!) That said, the 10 minutes that you have to survive for to get the badge will feel like a rather long time, especially given that not much changes while you're playing the game.
This brings me to my final point, which is only a minor irritation in Red, but will be a major issue in some of the upcoming games in the queue: the timer length is heavily dependent on the speed of your computer. For whatever reason, Red is apparently pretty resource-intensive, so if you're playing on a relatively weak computer, even if ten minutes have elapsed on your wall clock, the game may only think that you've been playing for six minutes (since the length of time in the game is presumably determined by the number of frames), so beware! If you're trying to get the badge on a slower computer, you'll have to survive for longer than you thought. This problem is amplified by the fact that the timer isn't displayed until the end of the game, so I strongly advise against dying just because you think you've reached your destination time. (The game will kill you soon enough anyway; no need to rush.) Anyway, this is kind of annoying, especially since it doesn't seem like Red should be that dependent on your computer speed.
Anyway, overall Red is a pretty game and you'll enjoy playing it for a while, but the fact that the game doesn't change all that much as you play means that its long-term value is pretty limited. Still, it's a fun badge to get.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Two short ones for today, but first a philosophical statement.
One of the things that appeals to me most about Kongregate is the badges give me something to shoot for. I tend to like finishing games, so a game in which the only goal is to get ever-higher high scores tends not to hold my interest for long, unless it's a really, really good game. (This makes me wonder if in college I did play more of those games because I had my roommates to compete against -- there was only a high score, but you could always shoot for your friends' scores. But now that I don't have that, I wonder if that's part of the reason I don't really play that type of game any more.) Anyway, the badges give me a certain target to shoot for. You may notice that I often say something like "After finishing this game, there wasn't really much reason to keep playing". This isn't perhaps as harsh a criticism as it may sound -- all it really means is that the game isn't a truly amazing game, and, to be honest, while I've found a lot of fun games on Kongregate, there are really none that were so excellent that I really wanted to keep playing them after finishing them; I'm perfectly happy to move on to the next game. The real test is if I still enjoy a game up until getting to the badge; there are more than a few games where I've had my fun but the badge was still far away. That is obviously not a good sign. Anyway, on to today's games:
WetDike
The rather unfortunately named WetDike is an implementation of Klondike (i.e., normal solitaire). That's pretty much all there is to say about it. The pack art is very distinctive and interesting, and there's also a jukebox which seems to generally be playing interesting music, so those are two advantages it has over Windows solitaire. On the other hand, you can only play the three cards at a time variant, which I tend to enjoy less than the one card at a time variant, and there's also a chat pane at the side (inside the game, that is, in addition to the standard Kongregate chat) which tends to be even less worthwhile than normal chat. So, overall, it's probably somewhat more enjoyable than regular old Windows solitaire, but it's still the same basic game.
Balance Balls 2
Balance Balls 2 is an extremely simple game. You have a large ball on a teeter-totter, and you have to tilt the teeter-totter to keep your ball from rolling off; this task is complicated by other balls of various sizes constantly falling onto the balance beam. There are also three powerups you can collect: one to make your ball bigger, one to make it smaller, and one which adds spikes which crush other balls. It's not actually clear whether it's a better strategy to have a larger or a smaller ball; larger balls are harder to move away from the center, but if your ball does end up out at the end of the beam, it'll be almost impossible to save it; conversely for small balls. The spikes are incontrovertibly good, however. Anyway, this was an entertaining game for a while, although earning the badge (which requires surviving for 120 seconds) proved to be quite challenging. The graphics are crisp and clean, the sound effects are pretty minimal, and the background music is not bad, although there is a strange gap in it periodically.
One of the things that appeals to me most about Kongregate is the badges give me something to shoot for. I tend to like finishing games, so a game in which the only goal is to get ever-higher high scores tends not to hold my interest for long, unless it's a really, really good game. (This makes me wonder if in college I did play more of those games because I had my roommates to compete against -- there was only a high score, but you could always shoot for your friends' scores. But now that I don't have that, I wonder if that's part of the reason I don't really play that type of game any more.) Anyway, the badges give me a certain target to shoot for. You may notice that I often say something like "After finishing this game, there wasn't really much reason to keep playing". This isn't perhaps as harsh a criticism as it may sound -- all it really means is that the game isn't a truly amazing game, and, to be honest, while I've found a lot of fun games on Kongregate, there are really none that were so excellent that I really wanted to keep playing them after finishing them; I'm perfectly happy to move on to the next game. The real test is if I still enjoy a game up until getting to the badge; there are more than a few games where I've had my fun but the badge was still far away. That is obviously not a good sign. Anyway, on to today's games:
WetDike
The rather unfortunately named WetDike is an implementation of Klondike (i.e., normal solitaire). That's pretty much all there is to say about it. The pack art is very distinctive and interesting, and there's also a jukebox which seems to generally be playing interesting music, so those are two advantages it has over Windows solitaire. On the other hand, you can only play the three cards at a time variant, which I tend to enjoy less than the one card at a time variant, and there's also a chat pane at the side (inside the game, that is, in addition to the standard Kongregate chat) which tends to be even less worthwhile than normal chat. So, overall, it's probably somewhat more enjoyable than regular old Windows solitaire, but it's still the same basic game.
Balance Balls 2
Balance Balls 2 is an extremely simple game. You have a large ball on a teeter-totter, and you have to tilt the teeter-totter to keep your ball from rolling off; this task is complicated by other balls of various sizes constantly falling onto the balance beam. There are also three powerups you can collect: one to make your ball bigger, one to make it smaller, and one which adds spikes which crush other balls. It's not actually clear whether it's a better strategy to have a larger or a smaller ball; larger balls are harder to move away from the center, but if your ball does end up out at the end of the beam, it'll be almost impossible to save it; conversely for small balls. The spikes are incontrovertibly good, however. Anyway, this was an entertaining game for a while, although earning the badge (which requires surviving for 120 seconds) proved to be quite challenging. The graphics are crisp and clean, the sound effects are pretty minimal, and the background music is not bad, although there is a strange gap in it periodically.
Labels:
action,
Balance Balls 2,
card game,
Kongregate,
WetDike
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Today, I'm doing a whole four-part series, Understanding Games. Understanding Games is a series that, as the name implies, attempts to teach people the fundamentals of game design. As such, most of each part isn't really a game; it's some explaining along with some demonstration. Each part does include a small game which attempts to illustrate the principles discussed in the section.
Understanding Games: Episode 1
Episode 1, as you might expect, tackles some of the most fundamental parts of games: the need for rules of a game, the need for a player to exist who can influence the outcome of the game, and the abstraction present in a game and its implications. All of this is illustrated by using one of the simplest video games of all, Pong.
Understanding Games: Episode 2
Episode 2 talks about another very important part of games: a clear goal, so the player can understand what he or she should do and not do, the need for competition (either against another player, a computer opponent, or the game itself), and feedback so the player can tell how he or she is doing. Finally, the episode mentions the need for a challenge to match the skill level of the player. All of this is illustrated with a simple race game in which catching the correct-colored blocks speeds you up and incorrect blocks slow you down.
Understanding Games: Episode 3
Episode 3 is perhaps the weakest of the bunch. It talks about puzzle games, and begins by giving you a mildly interesting puzzle game to solve. Then, after you've finished solving it, it goes on to talk about it. The discussion consists of going through the player's thought process, but of course this is entirely pointless, since it's mostly just a recap of your own thought process as you were solving the puzzle yourself. There are some useful lessons here about the value of trial and error, but the presentation leaves something to be desired.
Understanding Games: Episode 4
Episode 4 is a little less general than the rest. It talks about player identification, the distinction between games where you control the characters and games where you are the characters, and how characters can be different, which affects strategy and identification. The game in this episode is a simple tag-like game, which is rather poorly designed -- very few games ever actually end up with a winner.
Overall, this is a fun little series, and it definitely does a good job explaining some very basic concepts. The pixel art is perfectly functional, and the music is kind of a nice touch. However, I wish it had tried to go into at least a little more depth -- I didn't feel like I ended up learning all that much in the end, just a few principles.
Understanding Games: Episode 1
Episode 1, as you might expect, tackles some of the most fundamental parts of games: the need for rules of a game, the need for a player to exist who can influence the outcome of the game, and the abstraction present in a game and its implications. All of this is illustrated by using one of the simplest video games of all, Pong.
Understanding Games: Episode 2
Episode 2 talks about another very important part of games: a clear goal, so the player can understand what he or she should do and not do, the need for competition (either against another player, a computer opponent, or the game itself), and feedback so the player can tell how he or she is doing. Finally, the episode mentions the need for a challenge to match the skill level of the player. All of this is illustrated with a simple race game in which catching the correct-colored blocks speeds you up and incorrect blocks slow you down.
Understanding Games: Episode 3
Episode 3 is perhaps the weakest of the bunch. It talks about puzzle games, and begins by giving you a mildly interesting puzzle game to solve. Then, after you've finished solving it, it goes on to talk about it. The discussion consists of going through the player's thought process, but of course this is entirely pointless, since it's mostly just a recap of your own thought process as you were solving the puzzle yourself. There are some useful lessons here about the value of trial and error, but the presentation leaves something to be desired.
Understanding Games: Episode 4
Episode 4 is a little less general than the rest. It talks about player identification, the distinction between games where you control the characters and games where you are the characters, and how characters can be different, which affects strategy and identification. The game in this episode is a simple tag-like game, which is rather poorly designed -- very few games ever actually end up with a winner.
Overall, this is a fun little series, and it definitely does a good job explaining some very basic concepts. The pixel art is perfectly functional, and the music is kind of a nice touch. However, I wish it had tried to go into at least a little more depth -- I didn't feel like I ended up learning all that much in the end, just a few principles.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
A techno twofer today; Kongregate's challenge for that week was these two games, which is why I played them. Overall it was a pretty easy challenge; most of the challenges are pretty easy, but this one probably took 15 minutes at most. So, as you can probably guess, these are short games.
ELEPHANT RAVE
(Sorry for the caps, but that's what the game calls itself. I'm not going to keep doing that, though, so don't worry.)
Elephant Rave is one of those games that makes you go "Oooooooookay". It's thoroughly random -- you control an elephant, which is trying to dodge various colored bars attacking you from the top of the screen (and later, hurdles which move across the bottom of the screen) while techno music plays. The entire game is maybe 20 seconds from the start of the action to the finish, although you're probably not going to beat it on your first try. The action is preceded by an extremely lengthy (but fortunately skippable) random rambling asking for more understanding of elephants (no, really). And...well, that's pretty much it. It's very random, very short, and fun for about 30 seconds. Fortunately, it doesn't ask much more of you than that. At least the music isn't bad.
- Music in Motion -
Music in Motion is another experimental music-based game, although it has less of the "something whipped up on a lark" feel of Elephant Rave and more of a feel of something self-consciously trying to be experimental, with all that implies.
Music in Motion consists of four minigames, each consisting of various events happening in time with the music (at least I guess that's what the intent is supposed to be, though really in practice you don't notice it except maybe at the beginning and end of levels). In "Run and Jump", you have to run and jump over blocks which appear from the ground. In "Falling Blocks", you have to dodge blocks falling from the top of the screen. In "Disco Disaster", you're on a large disco ball and have to dodge spikes of light which appear from its surface. Finally, the final boss shoots various projectiles at you, and you have to stomp him at the appropriate time to defeat him.
I can't really say whether this is a successful experiment or not -- if the point is to notice the synchrony of game and music, then it's not really, as, like I said, it doesn't really seem to be that noticeable. But as a game, it's not much fun -- the games just aren't that interesting, and they're aggravatingly hard (not helped by the fact that the controls seem to stick occasionally), so beating this will probably take a few tries. It's not even particularly clear what you have to do for the final boss, which, given the frustration it takes to get there, is completely unforgiveable. Fortunately, getting the badge still doesn't take that much time, but this is a game I'm more than glad to see the end of.
ELEPHANT RAVE
(Sorry for the caps, but that's what the game calls itself. I'm not going to keep doing that, though, so don't worry.)
Elephant Rave is one of those games that makes you go "Oooooooookay". It's thoroughly random -- you control an elephant, which is trying to dodge various colored bars attacking you from the top of the screen (and later, hurdles which move across the bottom of the screen) while techno music plays. The entire game is maybe 20 seconds from the start of the action to the finish, although you're probably not going to beat it on your first try. The action is preceded by an extremely lengthy (but fortunately skippable) random rambling asking for more understanding of elephants (no, really). And...well, that's pretty much it. It's very random, very short, and fun for about 30 seconds. Fortunately, it doesn't ask much more of you than that. At least the music isn't bad.
- Music in Motion -
Music in Motion is another experimental music-based game, although it has less of the "something whipped up on a lark" feel of Elephant Rave and more of a feel of something self-consciously trying to be experimental, with all that implies.
Music in Motion consists of four minigames, each consisting of various events happening in time with the music (at least I guess that's what the intent is supposed to be, though really in practice you don't notice it except maybe at the beginning and end of levels). In "Run and Jump", you have to run and jump over blocks which appear from the ground. In "Falling Blocks", you have to dodge blocks falling from the top of the screen. In "Disco Disaster", you're on a large disco ball and have to dodge spikes of light which appear from its surface. Finally, the final boss shoots various projectiles at you, and you have to stomp him at the appropriate time to defeat him.
I can't really say whether this is a successful experiment or not -- if the point is to notice the synchrony of game and music, then it's not really, as, like I said, it doesn't really seem to be that noticeable. But as a game, it's not much fun -- the games just aren't that interesting, and they're aggravatingly hard (not helped by the fact that the controls seem to stick occasionally), so beating this will probably take a few tries. It's not even particularly clear what you have to do for the final boss, which, given the frustration it takes to get there, is completely unforgiveable. Fortunately, getting the badge still doesn't take that much time, but this is a game I'm more than glad to see the end of.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Monster's Den: Book of Dread
Are you the type of person who enjoys pondering whether Runed Magesteel Plate Sabatons of Deftness or Soothing Planeforged Plate Sabatons of Discretion are the best sabatons for your level 11 cleric? If so, then Monster's Den: Book of Dread is the game for you! Book of Dread is a very old-school dungeon crawling RPG, and I mean that mostly positively, but it also has some downsides.
The basic formula is very standard -- you build a party of four characters, each of which can be one of 7 classes (warrior, cleric, rogue, ranger, mage, conjuror, and barbarian). You then take this party adventuring in a dungeon. Each level of the dungeon consists of a series of rooms, which may be empty, contain treasure, or contain monsters. The object in the level is to reach the exit to the next dungeon level; you can fight as many or as few of the monsters as you wish to accomplish the goal (more fights will bring you more stuff and more points, but of course have more chances to get you killed). Each level has one boss monster, which you get a nice point bonus and a rare piece of equipment for terminating. The fights are similarly pretty standard; you line up your party on a 3x2 grid on one side of the battlefield and the enemies do likewise, then you take turns acting. An action consists of picking a skill (attack, spell, etc.) and target. Turn order is determined by characters' quickness, making this a valuable stat to improve.
And now for a marginally-related rant. One of the things I enjoyed about the original Final Fantasy (to pick the first example that comes to mind) was that there was a very strong strategic component, not just a tactical component. By that, I mean that it's not enough to be able to win individual battles (which is what I'll call the "tactical" side). Rather, you had to be able to win a long series of battles without any rest or refueling (I'm thinking specifically about the Ice Cave here), which meant that merely being able to win a single battle was not sufficient -- you had to win a single battle while using as little of your resources (HP, spells, etc.) as possible. Over time in the Final Fantasy series, however, healing items (phoenix down, tiny houses, etc.) became more and more easily available and powerful, so that the strategic component practically disappeared. This left only the tactical component, but ordinary encounters couldn't be so powerful as to kill you (that would be really unfair, given the paucity of save points), so the game tended to consist of a boring slog through hundreds of normal encounters until you got to the one horribly difficult boss at the end of it all, which was the only place the game could really be tactically difficult. I found this not a particuarly welcome development, which is why I haven't played Final Fantasy in a while.
Anyway, as you can probably guess, strategic management plays a big role in Book of Dread. Ways to recover HP and MP (called "Power") and revive fallen party members between battles are extremely scarce -- each level has two healing shrines which restore you fully (but at a stiff cost in points), and if you've fully cleared the level above you, you can also return there once to rest for free. Other than that, you're limited to whatever potions you've managed to find in the treasure chests scattered about the dungeon. You're also quite restricted in your movement -- once you've gone down a level, you can never return to the previous level (except to rest as mentioned before). There is an item shop, but you can't visit it at any time; you need to find a portal scroll, and typically there's only one per level (some levels don't even have one at all). This makes the early levels very challenging. Unfortunately, every RPG I've seen which emphasizes strategy has a fatal flaw -- eventually your characters reach the point where they are able to regenerate enough HP and/or MP during combat that they can actually come out of a combat stronger than when they went in. At this point, the game becomes pretty easy. Fortunately, Book of Dread is well-balanced enough that if your only goal is to complete the campaign, that'll happen before you reach that point. But if you go for the 50,000 point badge, you'll reach that point long before you get to 50,000 points, making the game rather boring.
Speaking of points, the meter is always running. You gain points for exploring or clearing more of a level, and (as mentioned) killing enemy leaders. You lose points for using the aforementioned healing shrines, having a character die (even if he or she gets instantly revived!), and a really large penalty for having the whole party die (unless you have Hardcore mode on, in which case that ends the game). This brings me to the most old-school aspect of all of the game: there's no saving. Or, more precisely, there's saving all the time. Every time something happens in the game, it's instantly saved. So there's no going back to a previous save if something particularly bad happens to your party -- you're stuck with that result, whether you like it or not. I think that this adds a lot to the game, although it means that you do need to not be too careless with what you're doing! Note that while the game has points, it does not have XP in the traditional sense; you just gain a level every time you descend the stairs into a new dungeon level. Thus, there is no bonus (other than points and equipment) that you get from fighting more enemies. (This is probably also why you can't go back up in the dungeon; otherwise, you could just gain a level and then go back up to wipe the floor with the enemies there.)
Now, the downside of the old-school ethic is that a lot of content is programatically generated. Each dungeon level, for instance, is randomly generated. While this adds some variety to the game, and the random generator is good (no level that I've seen has any particular degeneracies), it also means that there's no really interesting elements in any dungeon level, either. Each dungeon level is also characterized by one of five different enemy types (undead, cultists, orcs, dwarves, and creatures), which can get pretty repetitive after a while. All of the equipment is similarly randomly generated (some random material combined with zero, one, or two random enchantments), which means that you'll be doing a lot of wading through equipment with names like I mentioned in the beginning. (There are some rare and unique items with more interesting names and properties, so it's not entirely monotony.) In any case, this means that equipment management, while a vital part of the game, can be rather tedious, especially if you're as careful about always optimizing as I am.
The game offers three different game modes. The Den of Corruption is the first, and is (apparently) a remake of the original Monster's Den. You fight your way through nine levels of the dungeon to encounter the Corruptor, a horrible monster with a few deadly tricks up his sleeve. After defeating the Corruptor, you can keep delving into the dungeon to score more points. The Den of Terror is slightly different -- each level of the dungeon now contains one Fearsower, an advance agent of the Dreadlord. Defeating nine Fearsowers allows you to travel to the Dreadlord's den and defeat him. Like the first, after defeating the Dreadlord you can keep exploring the dungeon. In practice, there's not terribly much difference between the two campaings, although the variety is welcome. There is also a survival mode, The Fall of Tellunos, where you fight an endless series of battles against successive waves of enemies with no interludes for equipping or healing.
The graphics are nicely done, although I wouldn't mind a little more choice in the character portraits. The sound effects are decent, and the background music is high quality, although (to repeat a very frequent complaint) the loop is a little short, so it will get a little repetitive after a while, although there are several different tunes it alternates among.
Overall, this is a very enjoyable experience, and does an excellent job making a very interesting and challenging RPG...at least for the first few levels. If you're trying to go to the very high levels, though, it doesn't hold up as well, so I would recommend sticking to just completing the basic campaigns.
Are you the type of person who enjoys pondering whether Runed Magesteel Plate Sabatons of Deftness or Soothing Planeforged Plate Sabatons of Discretion are the best sabatons for your level 11 cleric? If so, then Monster's Den: Book of Dread is the game for you! Book of Dread is a very old-school dungeon crawling RPG, and I mean that mostly positively, but it also has some downsides.
The basic formula is very standard -- you build a party of four characters, each of which can be one of 7 classes (warrior, cleric, rogue, ranger, mage, conjuror, and barbarian). You then take this party adventuring in a dungeon. Each level of the dungeon consists of a series of rooms, which may be empty, contain treasure, or contain monsters. The object in the level is to reach the exit to the next dungeon level; you can fight as many or as few of the monsters as you wish to accomplish the goal (more fights will bring you more stuff and more points, but of course have more chances to get you killed). Each level has one boss monster, which you get a nice point bonus and a rare piece of equipment for terminating. The fights are similarly pretty standard; you line up your party on a 3x2 grid on one side of the battlefield and the enemies do likewise, then you take turns acting. An action consists of picking a skill (attack, spell, etc.) and target. Turn order is determined by characters' quickness, making this a valuable stat to improve.
And now for a marginally-related rant. One of the things I enjoyed about the original Final Fantasy (to pick the first example that comes to mind) was that there was a very strong strategic component, not just a tactical component. By that, I mean that it's not enough to be able to win individual battles (which is what I'll call the "tactical" side). Rather, you had to be able to win a long series of battles without any rest or refueling (I'm thinking specifically about the Ice Cave here), which meant that merely being able to win a single battle was not sufficient -- you had to win a single battle while using as little of your resources (HP, spells, etc.) as possible. Over time in the Final Fantasy series, however, healing items (phoenix down, tiny houses, etc.) became more and more easily available and powerful, so that the strategic component practically disappeared. This left only the tactical component, but ordinary encounters couldn't be so powerful as to kill you (that would be really unfair, given the paucity of save points), so the game tended to consist of a boring slog through hundreds of normal encounters until you got to the one horribly difficult boss at the end of it all, which was the only place the game could really be tactically difficult. I found this not a particuarly welcome development, which is why I haven't played Final Fantasy in a while.
Anyway, as you can probably guess, strategic management plays a big role in Book of Dread. Ways to recover HP and MP (called "Power") and revive fallen party members between battles are extremely scarce -- each level has two healing shrines which restore you fully (but at a stiff cost in points), and if you've fully cleared the level above you, you can also return there once to rest for free. Other than that, you're limited to whatever potions you've managed to find in the treasure chests scattered about the dungeon. You're also quite restricted in your movement -- once you've gone down a level, you can never return to the previous level (except to rest as mentioned before). There is an item shop, but you can't visit it at any time; you need to find a portal scroll, and typically there's only one per level (some levels don't even have one at all). This makes the early levels very challenging. Unfortunately, every RPG I've seen which emphasizes strategy has a fatal flaw -- eventually your characters reach the point where they are able to regenerate enough HP and/or MP during combat that they can actually come out of a combat stronger than when they went in. At this point, the game becomes pretty easy. Fortunately, Book of Dread is well-balanced enough that if your only goal is to complete the campaign, that'll happen before you reach that point. But if you go for the 50,000 point badge, you'll reach that point long before you get to 50,000 points, making the game rather boring.
Speaking of points, the meter is always running. You gain points for exploring or clearing more of a level, and (as mentioned) killing enemy leaders. You lose points for using the aforementioned healing shrines, having a character die (even if he or she gets instantly revived!), and a really large penalty for having the whole party die (unless you have Hardcore mode on, in which case that ends the game). This brings me to the most old-school aspect of all of the game: there's no saving. Or, more precisely, there's saving all the time. Every time something happens in the game, it's instantly saved. So there's no going back to a previous save if something particularly bad happens to your party -- you're stuck with that result, whether you like it or not. I think that this adds a lot to the game, although it means that you do need to not be too careless with what you're doing! Note that while the game has points, it does not have XP in the traditional sense; you just gain a level every time you descend the stairs into a new dungeon level. Thus, there is no bonus (other than points and equipment) that you get from fighting more enemies. (This is probably also why you can't go back up in the dungeon; otherwise, you could just gain a level and then go back up to wipe the floor with the enemies there.)
Now, the downside of the old-school ethic is that a lot of content is programatically generated. Each dungeon level, for instance, is randomly generated. While this adds some variety to the game, and the random generator is good (no level that I've seen has any particular degeneracies), it also means that there's no really interesting elements in any dungeon level, either. Each dungeon level is also characterized by one of five different enemy types (undead, cultists, orcs, dwarves, and creatures), which can get pretty repetitive after a while. All of the equipment is similarly randomly generated (some random material combined with zero, one, or two random enchantments), which means that you'll be doing a lot of wading through equipment with names like I mentioned in the beginning. (There are some rare and unique items with more interesting names and properties, so it's not entirely monotony.) In any case, this means that equipment management, while a vital part of the game, can be rather tedious, especially if you're as careful about always optimizing as I am.
The game offers three different game modes. The Den of Corruption is the first, and is (apparently) a remake of the original Monster's Den. You fight your way through nine levels of the dungeon to encounter the Corruptor, a horrible monster with a few deadly tricks up his sleeve. After defeating the Corruptor, you can keep delving into the dungeon to score more points. The Den of Terror is slightly different -- each level of the dungeon now contains one Fearsower, an advance agent of the Dreadlord. Defeating nine Fearsowers allows you to travel to the Dreadlord's den and defeat him. Like the first, after defeating the Dreadlord you can keep exploring the dungeon. In practice, there's not terribly much difference between the two campaings, although the variety is welcome. There is also a survival mode, The Fall of Tellunos, where you fight an endless series of battles against successive waves of enemies with no interludes for equipping or healing.
The graphics are nicely done, although I wouldn't mind a little more choice in the character portraits. The sound effects are decent, and the background music is high quality, although (to repeat a very frequent complaint) the loop is a little short, so it will get a little repetitive after a while, although there are several different tunes it alternates among.
Overall, this is a very enjoyable experience, and does an excellent job making a very interesting and challenging RPG...at least for the first few levels. If you're trying to go to the very high levels, though, it doesn't hold up as well, so I would recommend sticking to just completing the basic campaigns.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Particles
It's hard to get a game much simpler than Particles. There's a playfield with a bunch of red balls bouncing around it, and you, the blue ball, have to avoid the red balls for as long as possible. As time goes on, more and more red balls get added, making your task more difficult.
The music is kind of nice (the opening reminds me of Greebles -- now there's a game I'd like to see remade) and the sound effects are crisp. The physics, while simple, is done correctly -- not all balls have the same velocity, so a nearby collision can suddenly propel an otherwise-innocuous ball toward you at high velocity, which can be quite startling.
Overall, this is well done for what it is, but it's a little too simple to remain interesting for long. Like many, many other games in this list, I played it long enough to get the badge and that was about it.
It's hard to get a game much simpler than Particles. There's a playfield with a bunch of red balls bouncing around it, and you, the blue ball, have to avoid the red balls for as long as possible. As time goes on, more and more red balls get added, making your task more difficult.
The music is kind of nice (the opening reminds me of Greebles -- now there's a game I'd like to see remade) and the sound effects are crisp. The physics, while simple, is done correctly -- not all balls have the same velocity, so a nearby collision can suddenly propel an otherwise-innocuous ball toward you at high velocity, which can be quite startling.
Overall, this is well done for what it is, but it's a little too simple to remain interesting for long. Like many, many other games in this list, I played it long enough to get the badge and that was about it.
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