Well, isn't this narcissistic? They literally reviewed the game in the title! All things considered, it's a pretty generous review too. I would call it more of a slightly amusing time; and there wasn't much flipping either. Just a few aggravated grunts followed by relieved sighs.
A Flipping Good Time is a 2D platformer which blurs the line between floor and ceiling. There's honestly not a whole lot to say about it. You jump around, collect fireflies (because hey, they're shiny), and avoid big shards of crystal that, for some reason, make a blunt, smacking sound when you run into them rather than a squelch.
The game feel is good. Damn good. it feels gratifying to collect the fireflies, and pulling off a long sequence of difficult jumps is very rewarding. Really the only complaint I have is that I wish checkpoints were a little more frequent, because the flow that this game induces very well is hindered by having to repeat the beginning of a long section of a particular levels multiple times.
The difficulty is spot on, the music is amusing, the aesthetics are pleasing...It's just a good game. Not great, but good. After all, the levels are a bit samey and the powerups are infrequent enough that you may forget they're even there.
If you'll excuse the education pun, it seems like the makers of this game were really doing their homework. They know how to make a fun game. It's certainly not the next big thing. It doesn't bring anything new to the table, but it's still amusing and I suggest any platformer enthusiasts in my audience download it real quick and give it a shot. This game gets my seal of approval.
Until next time, fellow gamers.
links
Le Game: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24624
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
0xCELERATOR
Welp, this is not a fun year so far...
0xCELERATOR is a game produced by then freshmen at Digipen, but you already knew that if you clicked on the link at the bottom of this page like a good little internet troll.
Quick disclaimer before we begin: I don't claim to be an expert in game design. All I have is my 17 years of experience playing and loving the medium. I only made one game in my life and it was a sub-par, text-based rpg that I don't even have on my hard drive anymore. The team who made this has nothing but my utmost respect because I couldn't make a game like 0xCELERATOR if I tried...then again, after playing it, I'm not sure I'd want to.
The game starts off promisingly enough with the Digipen logo smoothly fading in and out before making way to a pleasing synthesizer loop along with the menu screen. In fact, the game's entire soundtrack is pretty good, if minimalistic.
To be fair, the whole game isn't terrible. It was just frustrating as all hell. Allow me to briefly describe my play experience.
I started the game and was immediately dropped into the action, which is good. I never like it when games feel the need to map out the functions of the buttons rather than simply designing the game well enough for the player to figure it out on their own. I then pressed the right arrow key for a while, occasionally pressing space to dodge treacherous 2-foot high jumps, and basically zoned out until my sprite burst into a million peices, accompanied by an explosion sound effect. This was either because I won the level or I died. 0xCELERATOR didn't feel obliged to distinguish the two events. Following this pattern, I worked my way swiftly through the levels before coming to a grey screen. the game had hidden itself behind a grey screen. I pressed buttons and heard sound effects, but with no video, and integral part of the VIDEO game was lost. So, I quit the game, started it up again and found that all my progress had been wiped.
let me go ahead and repeat that for you...
all my progress had been wiped.
This game requires you to beat it all in one go.
How is this considered acceptable? I appreciate that in the days of the NES, when gaming was a new thing and the hardware had severe limitations, such blunders were annoying but accepted like a relative who plays with their food at thanksgiving. 0xCELERATOR was made in 2012! Even that crappy text-based game I made a few years ago had a save feature, and it had a total playtime of about ten minutes!
On top of that one very noticeable flaw, the game feel isn't even that good. As I said before, all the player really does is hold the right arrow key and enjoy the spectacle, but the game's graphical style (which literally consists of nothing but colored lines) isn't much of a spectacle to behold. The controls have a sickening warm-up time to them, making the button presses feel more like polite suggestions than commands.
Then again, that's just my opinion. Why not click the link below and see for yourself? It's a small file, so your total experience from clicking "download" to finishing the game shouldn't last more than 10 minutes.
For a freshman project, I suppose it could have been a lot worse. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the triple-A world of gaming. Maybe this year will teach me to appreciate the work it takes to create a video game. After all, I'm sure the physics in 0xCELERATOR were fairly difficult to program.
Oh well, that's all for now. Frankly I wish I was more enthused about the rest of the year, but hey. Somewhere along this huge line of games, there has to be at least one other Nitronic Rush to make it all worth it.
As always, thanks for viewing. Keep gaming and stay beautiful.
links
0xCELERATOR: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26134
youtube page that I assume belongs to Macklin Guy, the art and level designer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00DxZNBP01o&list=UU3xnn_4T3UiC6pAY-Dv2--w&index=2
0xCELERATOR is a game produced by then freshmen at Digipen, but you already knew that if you clicked on the link at the bottom of this page like a good little internet troll.
Quick disclaimer before we begin: I don't claim to be an expert in game design. All I have is my 17 years of experience playing and loving the medium. I only made one game in my life and it was a sub-par, text-based rpg that I don't even have on my hard drive anymore. The team who made this has nothing but my utmost respect because I couldn't make a game like 0xCELERATOR if I tried...then again, after playing it, I'm not sure I'd want to.
The game starts off promisingly enough with the Digipen logo smoothly fading in and out before making way to a pleasing synthesizer loop along with the menu screen. In fact, the game's entire soundtrack is pretty good, if minimalistic.
To be fair, the whole game isn't terrible. It was just frustrating as all hell. Allow me to briefly describe my play experience.
I started the game and was immediately dropped into the action, which is good. I never like it when games feel the need to map out the functions of the buttons rather than simply designing the game well enough for the player to figure it out on their own. I then pressed the right arrow key for a while, occasionally pressing space to dodge treacherous 2-foot high jumps, and basically zoned out until my sprite burst into a million peices, accompanied by an explosion sound effect. This was either because I won the level or I died. 0xCELERATOR didn't feel obliged to distinguish the two events. Following this pattern, I worked my way swiftly through the levels before coming to a grey screen. the game had hidden itself behind a grey screen. I pressed buttons and heard sound effects, but with no video, and integral part of the VIDEO game was lost. So, I quit the game, started it up again and found that all my progress had been wiped.
let me go ahead and repeat that for you...
all my progress had been wiped.
This game requires you to beat it all in one go.
How is this considered acceptable? I appreciate that in the days of the NES, when gaming was a new thing and the hardware had severe limitations, such blunders were annoying but accepted like a relative who plays with their food at thanksgiving. 0xCELERATOR was made in 2012! Even that crappy text-based game I made a few years ago had a save feature, and it had a total playtime of about ten minutes!
On top of that one very noticeable flaw, the game feel isn't even that good. As I said before, all the player really does is hold the right arrow key and enjoy the spectacle, but the game's graphical style (which literally consists of nothing but colored lines) isn't much of a spectacle to behold. The controls have a sickening warm-up time to them, making the button presses feel more like polite suggestions than commands.
Then again, that's just my opinion. Why not click the link below and see for yourself? It's a small file, so your total experience from clicking "download" to finishing the game shouldn't last more than 10 minutes.
For a freshman project, I suppose it could have been a lot worse. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the triple-A world of gaming. Maybe this year will teach me to appreciate the work it takes to create a video game. After all, I'm sure the physics in 0xCELERATOR were fairly difficult to program.
Oh well, that's all for now. Frankly I wish I was more enthused about the rest of the year, but hey. Somewhere along this huge line of games, there has to be at least one other Nitronic Rush to make it all worth it.
As always, thanks for viewing. Keep gaming and stay beautiful.
links
0xCELERATOR: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26134
youtube page that I assume belongs to Macklin Guy, the art and level designer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00DxZNBP01o&list=UU3xnn_4T3UiC6pAY-Dv2--w&index=2
And So It Begins...
Happy 2013, ladies and gentlemen! What better way to kick off the new year than to play FIVE HUNDRED VIDEO GAMES
*ahem*
Alright, time to back up. A while back I watched this movie called Julie and Julia. You know, the one about the woman who tried to cook her way through Julia Child's food encyclopedia in a year.
Flash forward to a month or two later. My buddies and I were killing time in the cafeteria before school, as per usual, when I suddenly had a mini-epiphany. See, I'm one of those people who gets really worked up over video games. As in really worked up. My father is a film professor, and something he passed on to me, in addition to balding and bad joints, is the tendency to look at everything very analytically. Video games are my favorite things to analyze for many reasons. Just go to extra-credits.net if you want to know why.
Anyway, back to my mini-epiphany. A friend of mine, who shares with me a love for both video games and indie stuff, showed me this game called Nitronic Rush. It's an arcade-style racing game made by the folks over at Digipen (for those who don't know, Digipen is a college which focuses primarily on the creation of video games). I'll review Nitronic Rush in detail later, but let's just say it got me interested enough in the Digipen Game Gallery (link: https://www.digipen.edu/gallery/games/) to embark on my own version of Julie and Julia. This year, I will attempt to play and review my way through the entire Digipen Game Gallery. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll get a movie made about me where Meryl Streep plays James Portnow or something.
There are, at time of writing, 414 games on this gallery. However, based on the trends in the release schedule, the 2012-2013 academic year will pull in anywhere from a hundred to two hundred more games. Playing through all of them isn't going to be easy for a high school junior like myself, especially considering I'm balancing a ton of other projects like writing a screenplay, looking for a job and playing the lead in a school play. But my love for games knows no bounds, nor does my love for the internet-dwelling creatures who may soon become my audience.
And so, without further ado, let's get this show on the road. I'll be reviewing these things in alphabetical order, so the first game on my list is 0xCELERATOR. This should be a fun year...
*ahem*
Alright, time to back up. A while back I watched this movie called Julie and Julia. You know, the one about the woman who tried to cook her way through Julia Child's food encyclopedia in a year.
Flash forward to a month or two later. My buddies and I were killing time in the cafeteria before school, as per usual, when I suddenly had a mini-epiphany. See, I'm one of those people who gets really worked up over video games. As in really worked up. My father is a film professor, and something he passed on to me, in addition to balding and bad joints, is the tendency to look at everything very analytically. Video games are my favorite things to analyze for many reasons. Just go to extra-credits.net if you want to know why.
Anyway, back to my mini-epiphany. A friend of mine, who shares with me a love for both video games and indie stuff, showed me this game called Nitronic Rush. It's an arcade-style racing game made by the folks over at Digipen (for those who don't know, Digipen is a college which focuses primarily on the creation of video games). I'll review Nitronic Rush in detail later, but let's just say it got me interested enough in the Digipen Game Gallery (link: https://www.digipen.edu/gallery/games/) to embark on my own version of Julie and Julia. This year, I will attempt to play and review my way through the entire Digipen Game Gallery. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll get a movie made about me where Meryl Streep plays James Portnow or something.
There are, at time of writing, 414 games on this gallery. However, based on the trends in the release schedule, the 2012-2013 academic year will pull in anywhere from a hundred to two hundred more games. Playing through all of them isn't going to be easy for a high school junior like myself, especially considering I'm balancing a ton of other projects like writing a screenplay, looking for a job and playing the lead in a school play. But my love for games knows no bounds, nor does my love for the internet-dwelling creatures who may soon become my audience.
And so, without further ado, let's get this show on the road. I'll be reviewing these things in alphabetical order, so the first game on my list is 0xCELERATOR. This should be a fun year...
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