The Chronicles of Brute Hardcastle, The Exiled (kinda), and The Fantastic Adventures of Francis McKrispi

What inspired me to write 3 reviews before noon, you ask?  Well, the fact that I was inert the past two days has something to do with it, but as we all know by now, my lack of motivation knows no bounds.  No, the real reason I'm giving you this splendid 3-for-1 deal is that each of these games lasted no longer than 5 minutes before I ragequit.  Let's get this party started.

Brute Hardcastle is my favorite kind of game to review, even though it makes for very uninteresting reading.  It's the kind of game where one or two flaws dominate the experience so intensely that nothing else matters.  Firstly, the movement speed is a joke.  Seriously, nobody could have playtested this game and figured "yeah, he walks about fast enough." What's worse is that this game is ostensibly a beat 'em up, so the slow movement speed doesn't even complement the gameplay.  Slow movement speed can be effective when used correctly, like in the last minutes of Mass Effect 3, but when the game expects you to believe that you're in the heat of battle and you're cruising along city streets at about 2 miles per day, there's a serious problem.

The other big issue is the level design.  I try to be polite in these reviews, but I can't pull my punches here.  This is some of the laziest and unthoughtful level design I've seen on this list.  It's a relatively expansive city built on a grid, like Manhattan, but there's nothing in it! Coupled with the slow movement speed, this means you're going to be spending a lot of time strolling casually down the sidewalk wishing that there was something to do.

You know what?  I really wanted to have fun with this game.  I did!  That's because it uses a fight mechanic that, for a long time, I've been saying would make a game very fun to play.  You control the trajectory of your fists with the mouse.  I love that they included this, but even that is executed so sloppily that it's just borderline broken.  This game fails to impress.  Moving on.

The Exiled is one of those NOT_REAL_EXE things.  I don't know what to do about that.

Francis McKrispi, or, as it's otherwise called, Bacon, is a charming little platforming hack-n-slasher wherein you are a strip of bacon with a butter knife on a mission to destroy all eggs.  This is my least favorite game to review because there is no outstanding mechanic whatsoever.  It's just "a game" rather than "the game that" or "the game with."  Get what I'm saying?

Bacon is the only game in this post that I might review if you're bored enough that you think cracking like a bazillion eggs is going to be entertaining.  I do love the aesthetic, though.  It's got enough quirk to make me smirk, but it does smell a but of rotten eggs trying too hard to be witty, which, especially to a cynic like me, is a death sentence for any piece of art because it shows how unwitty the creators actually were.

Man, I was a jerk today.  Oh well.  Such is life.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay cruel.

Links
Brute Slowcastle: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=499
The Exiled EXE: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=603
Yummy Pig Meat: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=18527

The Busted Android

First off, right out of the gate, this game's development gets the award for most creative and hilarious name I've yet encountered: "Victorious Secret."

Brilliant.

You know what's not brilliant, though?  making the left and right directional buttons do the exact same thing.  Seriosuly.  The Busted Android is a freerunning game of sorts, kind of like Roger Fastman but without the ability to spew bullets literally everywhere.

Sometimes a gameplay feature will stick out to me so much that I stop caring about the rest.  I don't care so much that the art style could be mimicked by anyone with Inkscape and three spare minutes.  I don't care so much that when the game doesn't decide to throw you into an enclosed space, the game can actually induce quite a sense of flow.

Really, all I care about is the fact that holding left can cause you to rocket to the right, and holding right can cause you to rocket to the left.  The way it "works" is that both the left and right buttons give you a boost in whatever direction you're facing.  You switch directions when you hit a wall.  It feels very unnatural and is quite difficult to learn.

And that's basically it.  This one fails to impress.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay busted

Links
The Perfectly Functional Android: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26018

Thanatos and The Bowling Ninja

Thanatos advertises itself as having "an emphasis on balanced and tactical gameplay."  I, still recovering from my bad experience with Super Street Fighter 4, was intrigued and delighted by this proposition.  Then, I booted it up, and found a low-grade version of Super Smash Bros. Brawl....Hhhnnggg-

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the latter two games, it's just that I don't think they are either particularly balanced or tactical, and I was looking forward to a game less about spamming hadokens and more about outwitting your opponent on the battlefield.  Thanatos does not deliver in that aspect. 

The game experience is most similar to those old-style cartoon fight scenes where the characters involved just sort of dissolve into a cloud of dust and moving fists.  Here's how you play Thanatos: spam special attack ad nauseam, repeat.  Between the smoke clouds and tiny characters, good luck following anything that's happening.

I understand that my opinion on Brawl and Street Fighter doesn't exactly coincide with the popular opinion, so take what I say about Thanatos, which appears to have combined the worst aspects of both, with a grain of salt, but I can't recommend it.

Moving on, The Bowling Ninja...

for all my banging of the "DigiPen <3 Ikaruga" drum, I do have to admit that there are a few games on this list that try to get away from that stereotype.  For example, The Bowling Ninja is Ikaruga in reverse!  Seriously, I'm not stretching this point just to be funny; if I tell you that a game is about destroying things with projectiles based on their color and that the color of the projectile must coincide with the color of the object, what do you think of?  Now add in the fact that projectiles tend to quickly fill up the screen, and you've got a pretty good match.

Anyway, you are a ninja with an unlimited supply of bowling balls of four different colors.  You throw those bowling balls at other ninjas, who are destroyed if hit with a bowling ball that matches their color.  This is an interesting concept, at least, but the game design seems rather self-destructive.  The bowling balls can bounce off walls, and when they do, they turn from colored to grey, and grey bowling balls can one-shot any incoming enemy, so rather than strategically placing your shots like the designers ostensibly planned, you end up just spamming balls and spinning in a circle until every threat around you dies.

So yeah, this may be fun for a few minutes, but just pressing the same buttons over and over can get really stale really fast, so the game is not helped by the fact that each level does nothing but introduce a greater quantity of enemies you must defeat to move on.  I wouldn't necessarily call the game overly frustrating, but it does a terrible job of motivating the player to continue.

So, today we had two games with relatively similar pros and cons:  graphical style that resembles the dooldes of a bored 4th grader (though I can't really blame them, each coming out more than 6 years ago), repetitive and boring gameplay, and a failure to impart a feeling of agency onto the player.  These games aren't terrible, but they're at least below average compared to the others on the list.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay scribbled

Links

Overused Greek Word: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=517

The Beginning of The end of Creative Naming: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=455

TerryTori K9 and Tetragrams

TerryTori K9 is an exclusively 2-player game, so I wasn't able to play it to its fullest extent.  The only thing I can really comment on is the concept.  Two dogs move around a map in real time to control territories.  Those territories earn points per second for their owner, and the first to reach a certain number of points wins.

It seems like it could make for a really fun game.  You can choose a certain special move before the match starts, each with effects like "prevent your opponent from taking your territory" or "stun your opponent," etc.  They seem balanced enough to make the game enjoyable and tense.  Of course, you'll have to play it with a friend to find out.

Tetragrams, on the other hand, is a one-player game, and a damn fine one at that.  As its name sort of alludes to, the game is based heavily off Tetris, but is original enough for me to call it an homage rather than a rip-off.  The idea is that there are certain polygonal shapes outlined on the board.  Other shapes come in through a conveyor belt, and you have to place them so that the outlined shapes get filled in.

The big seller here is that the game is absolutely frantic.  I, of course, forewent the tutorial, and was thoroughly confused by the time the "game over" screen reared its ugly head.  There are so many different things going on at once...so much for the player to consider; yet somehow, it never gets so overwhelming that it becomes frustrating.  Like a phoenix rising from the ashes (by the way, if anyone can guess what I was just foreshadowing, I will personal mail you a cookie of your choosing), I kept coming back stronger than before every time I lost.  The difficulty curve is perfect and each loss only motivated me to keep trying to master the controls.

This is my favorite kind of game: simple, yet perfectly designed.  I didn't come across a single flaw in its design (though, in fairness, that might just be because I wasn't able to play far enough to find one).  For that, this game gets my seal of approval.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay strategic.

Links
Woof Woof Piddle Piddle: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24635
Even More Shape-Related Death than Super Hexagon: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25000

Temporal Power Racing and Terra

Alright, so maybe I overreacted earlier.  Yeah, the addition of 14 new games so close to the end of the year kinda screwed me up, but not THAT much.  My schedule is relatively unchanged, though I'm going to have to do these "double the games, half the quality" type reviews more often.

Anyways, let's talk about these games quickly, because I'm tired and really looking forward to hitting the hay.

Temporal Power Racing is your standard F-Zero clone, so if you're into that kind of game, then yay for you.  I found something you should totally try out.  For the rest of us, though...eh.  The game isn't poorly designed, but it seems a lot more frustrating than it has to be.

The basic setup is decent enough.  The levels are littered with red and blue patches.  You swap between red and blue by hitting the "z" button, and depending on what color you are when you go over a patch, you will either get a speed boost or be slowed to a near stop.  It's one of those ideas that sounds pretty bad on paper, after all, it's just adding an unnecessary step to the racing, but it actually works out to be pretty fun, though it does nothing to alleviate the stereotype that DigiPen students approach gamemaking as "How can we remake Ikaruga today?"

The real problem with the game is the car design.  Usually, in a racing game like F-Zero, where the different cars are afforded ranks for how well they turn, their max speed, acceleration, etc, the player can look at those ranks and interpret their car choice as "how do I want to win this race?  Do I want to blaze past the rest carelessly or do I want to carefully maneuver around my opponents, etc, etc, etc."  In this game, the question is "in which way would it be least frustrating to get absolutely piledriven into last place?"  I'm not saying the game is too hard, it's just that the fast carts all have terrible turning and the carts that allow you to stay on the track are too slow to be competitive.  This doesn't make for a challenge, it makes for frustration.

Still, though, the graphical style is interesting and the gameplay isn't terrible, so I'll still give it a reluctant recommendation.  Now, then, let's talk Terra.

Terra confused me quite a bit at first.  Firstly, there's no academic year listed next to it in the game gallery, leading me to believe that this game was conjured from some intemporal void that transcends time and space, like it's our gift from God or something.  Actually, the game displays the Valve logo upon startup, oddly enough, so I guess it is a gift from God...Well, if so, it's a shame God didn't keep the receipt.

Okay, that was too harsh.  Terra is actually not bad.  Some might find it pretty damn good.  The concept is original and creative:  tilt the world using RMB to manipulate your surroundings in order to get from point A to point B.  When it works, it's actually very fun.  I ragequit after the second level, however, because of how easy it is to kill yourself in this game.  One errant nudge could mean the difference between completing a puzzle and being squished against a wall, losing all your life in a matter of nanoseconds.

So yeah, the word of the day is "frustration," kiddies.  Try to avoid it at all costs.  These games didn't, and they suffered because of it.  I can recommend Terra for its polished and professional look and TPR for its interesting "Mortal Combat meets F-Zero 64" graphical style, but otherwise, I am largely unimpressed.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay rewarding

Links
Big Words, Little Cars: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=434
Overused Latin Word: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=23877

OH GOD NO HELP ME PLEASE GOD WHY

So I got home today from a particularly abysmal day of school, checked the DigiPen Game Gallery and....huh...something's not right...

...wait a minute...

...oh God...

...did they?...yes....yes they did....

They added 14 more games...

.............................please help me...

So yeah, in a tragically ironic twist of fate, my seeing that left me with infinitely less motivation than I had when I typed that ever fateful "Dig" into my address bar.  I'll try and get a review out tonight, but....damn.  I was already running way behind schedule.  I don't know how I'm going to deal with this...

Well...I've still got a month and a half.  Maybe a kindly old demon will appear to me and offer me some more motivation in exchange for the other half of my soul.  One can only hope...

Peace

Temple of the Water God

Presentation really goes a long way, doesn't it?  I'm playing a very obscure game on my phone (more on that later...dun dun dunnnnnn), and I swear it has the potential to be big... like, Temple Run big... if only it were presented a bit more cleanly.  Temple of the Water God understands this.  It went with a very simple mechanic and very simple level design, but presented that simple game as best as it possibly could.

My first and greatest "wow" moment when playing this game came to me close to the beginning, when the sun in the background gleamed gloriously at my character and its surroundings, illuminating them with an almost supra-professional polish.

And speaking of supra-professoinal, props to the guys who worked on the music and sound editing for this game.  It's nice to see that there are still people who take such seemingly insignificant parts of the game so seriously, and the effect is great in every sense of the word.

Now, let's talk gameplay.  The mechanics are sort of similar to Snowfall's, except not designed to piss you off.  You use one button to suck and another button to push...water, that is.  You use this water to transport yourself from one area to the next, with the help of sea turles, jellyfish, and sharks, all of whom must be manipulated in slightly different ways.

The mechanics bring their share of frustrations and triumphs, but honestly that's not the most interesting part.  Where the game really excels (other than the polish, of course), is in structure.  The game is the perfect length for a relaxed yet dedicated play session and features a fair difficulty curve.  In the game's climax, you're super powerful and you feel it. Yet, the game doesn't get easier as a result.  The game was simply designed around your newfound superpowers, allowing you to reap the rewards of your labor while remaining challenged.

Temple of the Water God is a game that you can learn from, which makes it worth a play in my book.  If you're starting out in game design and already have your mechanics and narrative planned out, but just need to know how to translate them into a well-rounded and well-polished experience, then this game has the answers for you.  That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay wet.

Links
In the Name of the Water: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26713