Mini-Reviews Part 8

Shore Seige! - This was a decent game, sort of an active defense style, like Pillage the Village... only very different. You can purchase upgrades of the various abilities you have, and the various creatures that attack your beached ship require different attacks to repel them. Also have some nice one time items you can purchase. The defense is active, select weapons, and wield them against the approaching enemies. There is a nice balance between spending money to repair your ship, and thus win the game, or spending it to increase your ability to survive.

Monsters Den Book of Dread - Dungeon crawler, with a nice little tactical setup. It's quite a difficult game, big emphasis on inventory and equiping the right items, and experience building and skill selection. Not one of my favorite titles, but interesting.

Bonus:

Hedgehog Launch - One of my favorite games. It's simple in essence, launch the hedgehog into the air, and move him with his rockets to hit the various jump platforms and money pickups. Then upgrade him with more rocket fuel, higher and stronger launcher, more rocket power, extra rocket boosts, parachutes, radar, and goggles if you like. The goal, to get him into space in as few days as you can. This game is easy to pick up and a lot of fun. There can be a lot of luck involved, especially when you run out of rocket fuel and move into uncontrolled descent. The game rewards planning even here though, if you run out, while moving fast to one side or the other, you're likely to hit a lot more platforms. The bonus system is interesting, awarding getting coin pickups and hitting platforms, with multipliers for maximum height reached, and running time of the launch.

Mini-Reviews Part 7

I now return with the continuation of these reviews.

Endice - This is an interesting puzzle game. You are given a set of dice on a grid, each die has a number on it, indicating the number of moves it can make, and each grid has target areas which must all be filled by the dice when it has NO moves left. This becomes interesting because the dice can 'push' each other, and it isn't always clear which dice need to end up in which target, also since all the dice have to be out of moves, there are some even-odd issues that pop up. Even if you have enough moves, you might not have the right number of moves.

Turkey Fling - This is a fun game, it's in the spirit of a number of games of it's type, launch the thing, and maximize height and/or distance. This game is nice in the amount of skill you can play it with. Compared to some of the previous games of this type I've played, it's very good. It's simplistic in execution, you launch, and then flap, expending energy which you refill by grabbing corn in the air. It lacks the depth of a game like Hedgehog Launch, in that it has no day 2, each play is a single isolated event.

Update:

Codex of Alchemical Engineering - I've played this game some more now, and I think I can safely recommend it. It's a little difficult for me to progress in at first, until I realized that you could extend and retract the grabbers. After that, it was a lot of fun. Very much for the programmer, or logical minded person, sort of reminiscent of stack-up, only with a large number of robots interactiing with the environment at once and receiving different programs.

Bonus:

Super Stacker 2 & Perfect Balance - I played these recently, at roughly the same time, and it's appropriate to discuss them together because they are very similar games. Both games have the premise of stacking up a set of blocks and making them balance, Super Stacker has a more chaotic feel to it, and the blocks have more personality, and are generally more fun to mess around with. Perfect Balance has a much more exacting feel, the blocks are mostly tetris piece - like, and the patterns you might use to get them all balanced on screen at once are rather complex. Perfect Balance in a way feels like a successor to 99 bricks because of the general theme of balancing tetris-like pieces, although it is much more complex and doesn't strictly limit itself to them. I prefer Super Stacker 2, for its more fun and casual approach to the idea, to me Perfect Balance feels too much like real work by comparison.

Game Mini-Reviews Continued (Part 6!)

River Raid - A clone of the classic shooting game, this game won the Scion driving creativity contest, even though it was basically completely lacking in creativity. It has some nice additional features like an internal achievement system of sorts, but other than that it's just some poor gameplay with very little going for it compared to the other games which won prizes.

Dreams - It's funny I would reach this going back through the reports just now. I just recently replayed Dreams for the card and achievement that were added to it. Dreams is a find the difference game with a very striking art style, and dynamic differences. In essence in every stage of Dreams there is a base image and a number of overlay images which can be added to each picture, or not. Therefore any given stage will often have new differences from the last time you saw it. Common differences are tatoos, freckles and such on people, as well as necklaces, and bracelets. Motion lines, other detail lines or shapes; random scrawling on things like walls, furniture, or notebooks; color changes, and the addition of small elements like cats, birds, mushrooms, whatever.

It's interesting that even if there are only 10 binary choices for the base picture, (2^10) and then from that base picture, 10 choose 6 (210) possible difference pictures, each level would have over 200,000 different ways of displaying, and I expect there are well over 10 choices on some levels... In practice though, after playing through a few times you're likely to have seen all the differences you're shown, even if the pictures themselves aren't exactly the same. I believe the game called 6 differences or something did this too, but maybe to a lesser extent.

More of the same (part 5)

Sonny - Kong posted I had played Sonny, which I did for about a second (loaded up my old save to get a contest checkmark) so first lets cover what I remember of that. Sonny is actually a pretty good game, it has a very high rating on Kongregate (the very highest?) The play is simple enough, you have several 'classes' to choose from which effect your stat growth and equipable items (if I remember right.) The plot part of the game is quite good, but the bonus 4th zone drags with some very tricky battles which often require reseting your ability points each battle. It's one of the odd features of Sonny that although you spend points on skills and stats, your decisions are extremely temporary. This has the advantage from the designer that if there is any way to arrange the points you might be expected to have in order to win a battle, then that battle is winable. You won't ever be stuck because of the way you spend exp. This is actually kind of common now, which is a bit annoying really because it trivializes player choice and thus on a larger scale, decreases Investiture, the sense their interaction matters, definately a bad thing (see The Hallford Player Pyramid - Swords & Circuitry) The strategy elements in combat (and the preparation for combat in equiping your skill circle) is probably the strongest feature in Sonny, which is what makes the core gameplay itself interesting.

Kongai - Kongai is the Kongregate Collectable Card Game - You choose some cards as starters, and the rest are available to be earned in the occasional (roughly weekly?) card challenges on Kongregate, which require some level of achievement in a game in order to be earned. The game itself is pretty well designed, but it suffers from occasional odd combat circumstances and odd bugs, or otherwise just unexpected effects from combination of the various items and abilities. Kongregate also opened up cards for purchase with kreds(Kongregate's paid currency) once it implemented them, but if you stop by to do the challenges every week, it becomes increasingly less important. The strategy of using the cards in battle is quite challenging, but because of the multiplayer aspects and the switching of characters, there is often a lot of guesswork, and therefore luck during the actual play itself.

Majesty of Colors - This game is an art game of sorts. You interact with the environment as a sea monster of sorts, your actions determining how you are seen by the people around you. In the end it's a collect-the-endings style game. There's no real difficulty in accomplishing what you can do, just a matter of exploring your choices and their consequences. It has some real artistic merit, mostly in the plotting. The graphics actually hurts it a little, doing a poor job conveying the plot and emotion in comparison to the written story.

Kongregate Mini Reviews Continued (Pt. 4)

Well, Pyro showed up on my Facebook, but it's already covered in the bonuses, so I'll cover the next two in the list.

Aether - This is sort of an artistic game. All the graphics tend to be... well kind of washed out looking. There is some gameplay elements, mostly centered around finding various objects, and using a gravity system for the various planets and asteroids flying around in space. The mechanics of swinging on the rocks to get from place to place is pretty cool. The puzzle elements are pretty surreal... it's an interesting game you have to see for yourself.

SeppuKuties - Physics based action puzzler. This game is very good. It is a basic key and door puzzle game, except all action is driven by the physics engine. The kuties (a bunch of animal friends) are seeking out a new home and need to go through the dangerous environments while optionally collecting acorns to get to their new home. It is also possible for an animal to (quite cheerfully) commit seppuku, with the advantage that a death leaves behind a block you can use to help the remaining animals to safety. Like lemmings, the number of surviving carries over from one level to the next, unlike lemmings, only one is active and controlled at any time, and once one reaches the end, the rest move on to the next level as well, basically a sort of lives system. You can go back to previous stages at any time to recomplete them, reclaiming the lives lost on them.

Bonus:

Two Rooms - Quick addon, I meant to review this as well. I played this game on Kongregate to completion recently, it's an excellently designed puzzle game. The mechanics are fairly straightforward, and the level design is excellent. The basic idea is that you control two characters on either side of a divider, and by switching between them, you can find a way to the end of the stage. Unlike many puzzle games, there are several timing puzzles which coordinate actions between both of the characters you can control.

Kongregate Mini-Reviews Part 3

Here is the third in a series of blog posts, giving mini reviews of the games that show up on my Facebook Profile in particular, and any other games I feel like mentioning.

I Wish I Were the Moon - This 'game' is in a way an experiment in interactive storytelling in a limited sense. You move the characters (and sometimes other scene elements) within the world, in order to bring about different conclusions to the 'story'. Academically it's pretty interesting, but not so much as a game itself.

Kingdom of the Wind - This is a defense game similar to Epic War 2 in a sense, but it takes place in the air, with the enemies approaching from below. It's also more of a pure defense title, in that you win just by keeping your tower alive through the waves of enemies. It has a fairly intricate upgrade system, where you can not only purchase new units, but permanently improve the current units that you have. You can also buy the ability to place defense towers, upgrade those, increase starting mana, your castle strength and so on. Similar to Gemcraft it uses a mana system with a cap. It's less difficult than many other games, and with 8 levels, it's a lot shorter as well. The graphics and upgrade system are the highlights of the game, since the play is simply a matter of choosing a unit, and which side of your airbase it should come from.

Bonuses:

There are several other notable games which haven't appeared on my facebook profile I'd like to cover, so here are a few.

Pyro - Unlike the quite excellent old-school game of burning down important buildings, this game is about lighting torches via flaming balls of fire. Using an aiming system similar to old mini-golf games, you choose a direction and power with your mouse. The game also shows perfect guidelines of the projected path of your shot similar to Gravitee. Unlike golfing games, you don't play the ball from where it lies, more exactly, it lies off the bottom of the screen after every shot, also it's clearly made of rubber. For each level you have a certain number of balls to use to light all of the torches, either directly or through lighting and destroying nearby crates. On some levels you can get additional balls to use by touching them with your ball while bouncing around the screen. Some of these additional balls have special powers, like greatly extended guidelines, or a small size for getting into mini-corridors. This game uses gravity and it's bounce mechanics to excellent effect, and it's 'aced' system for lighting all torches in a minimal number of shots (usually 1) and the bonus levels this unlocks is a nice effect.

Maze Stopper 2 - This game is built loosely on the rules of build your own maze defense games like desktop tower defense. The enemies are moving toward a goal (in this case a flag) and you build objects to elongate the path they take and otherwise hinder their progress. This is as far as the similarity holds however. Instead of preventing them from reaching their goal by destroying them, you simply delay them as long as possible, while getting your character with the same goal to the goal (a flag) as soon as possible. This complicates things quite a bit, since your character occupies the same map, and uses the same shortest path following AI as the enemies. With the addition of slowdown pickups and speedup pickups, and the inability to remove the blocks you've placed (you can edit the ones you JUST placed if you place them in the paused mode) as well as the standard rule that you can't block them from the goal completely makes this a very interesting game. In addition there is a clever star system for ratings based on how much sooner you get to the flag than your nearest opponent.

Achievement Unlocked - This is a fun game(?) which pokes fun at the whole achievement mentality. There are no goals really inherent in the game, just a number of achievements, most of which are completely random. The new Kongregate version (which includes achievement badges for getting these achievements!) has a few different achievements than the original so that you need not leave the website to get all the achievements (which was giving some people issues in completing the game.) Some of the more ridiculous achievements you can earn include: getting 10, 20, ..., 90, 100% of the other achievements; Dying, 50, 100, 101 times; changing the quality, muting the sound, and so forth. Overall there are, I believe 100 achievements to be acquired. Give it a shot =]

Mini-Reviews Part 2

The Codex of Alchemical Engineering - I didn't get into this game too much, but the premise is simple enough, there is a respawning area with these round "element" balls, and you place robotic arms and special elemental modifiers around this map, and program the robotic arms to act in such a way that the goal for the level is met. It's part of this sort of "programming" type of games where you plan the route completely ahead of time, and watch the results. These can arguably be traced back at least as far as "Stack-Up" for the NES. There's another game of this sort featured on Kongregate some time ago called light-Bot but featuring a robot which must be programmed to turn on every square by standing on it.

Epic War 2 - This is one of those games where you wait for the timer to allow you to, and then spawn your units to defeat the enemy, spend xp to get new units and so on. This has some nice features, a manually controlled tower you can use to fire arrows directly at units, and an upgrade system. I didn't like the upgrade system however, since it unlocks upgrades you then have to buy during gameplay on each level to enable them, instead of direct improvements. This game has a mana system similar to gemcraft, in that you can spend mana to increase the amount of mana you can hold (and thus buy more expensive things) which also increases the speed at which you get mana, so you basically spam it just about as long as you can put off buying anything, then assemble an army all at once.

Bonus:

Vector Runner - This isn't on the Facebook list afaik, but I've been playing this a bit as well. I stumbled back onto this the other day, and have been trying to get the impossible challenge. The game premise is quite simple, you are moving inexorably forward, and have to dodge objects while picking up point bonuses, invincibility powerups and "shields" (a type of extra life capped at 3.) There are some points given just for staying alive, but so few that it doesn't end up really contributing to your score. The game is done with some type of basic perspective graphics using outlines of shapes, probably the most interesting aspect of the game is the control, which seems to use a type of acceleration system for movement, which makes the handling feel kind of loose, especially at higher speeds - which is most of the time.