Cloudphobia – are you afraid of clouds?

Almost every sci-fi anime about huge robots (and underage lolitas piloting them, but I digress) features a scene where the robot is manouevering wildly between hundreds of rockets flying in space, smoke trails tracing curvy lines behind them. I have sometimes asked myself a question – why hasn’t this become a motive of a videogame just yet? Wouldn’t it be cool to dodge myriads of rockets and fire kabongazillions of bullets in the sky balet?

If you ever had similar thoughts, here is your game: Cloudphobia is a classical 2D shoot’em up like the ones we used to get in the good old times, featuring giant robots and anime schoolgirls. Note: my first connotation when seeing the title was the vision of someone who totally hates Final Fantasy VII and its main protagonist.

As for the game itself, there are a few interesting twists to it – player cannot allow enemies to pass them and slip through, as they can damage the mothership, there are markers showing were the enemies will arrive and there are missions in which you pilot a robot that carries a sword instead of the gun. Yes, giant robot with a sword – quite neat, eh? Where Cloudphobia got me, however, was in the level where player is guiding their robot between hundreds of missiles swirling around. Sure, the gameplay is essentially a 2D affair, but the beautiful animated background gives the game some depth and sense of scale. Also, it’s damn pretty in movement, as you can see in the video below:

You can also see a more anime-ish trailer here. Once done, go check the game homepage: there is a two-level demo begging to be downloaded and since Cloudphobia is available in digital distribution, it’s easy to buy a full game immediately after trying.

[Found via AVClub]

Harpooned

I love Japan, I really do. But despite many things that make it great, Japan also has its dark sides. One of these rather dreadful things is the Japanese approach towards whaling. I wouldn’t be mentioning it here on Barts News (this is principally a game blog after all), were it not for Conor O’Kane, a man who has chosen a rather unusual media channel to draw people’s attention to the issue: he made a PC game about it.

Called Harpooned, the game is in fact a clever satire disguised as your average shoot’em up game. Player controls a whaling ship, killing whales and collecting their meat, while taking care not too shoot protesters. All this is accompanied by sarcastic messages such as “scientific bonus” taking a jab at Japanese explanation that this cruelty takes place just for scientific purposes.

As player progresses through the game, more whales get harvested for scientific research and fewer of them remain in the sea. The comments between the game levels will be saying things like “Our research shows that there are less and less whales in the area – we must kill more of them to find out why it is so” until finally there won’t be nothing in the cold waters but scientific vessel and icebergs…

Average player will be able to complete the game in couple of minutes, but it is not really so much a game but rather a statement disguised as a game, a way of drawing attention to the real-life problem. Therefore I couldn’t really say that its brevity is a handicap, on the contrary – average player will be able to reach the end of the game before they get bored and witness the empty cold sea themselves. I think this was intentional in order to make an impression on the player – it certainly worked in my case.

It’s also worth noticing that the production values are high for an indie game made by one man – from pretty graphics, through blood effects, to sad music, everything is polished and carries a sense of style. There also is an online score board for the best whalers scientists.

Download the game at Harpooned website (there is also a Mac version available) and if you can’t spare five to ten minutes to complete it, at least have a look at the trailer below:

Now, will anyone make a similar game for Taji dolphins?

Double portion of LSD Pong

The title says it all – today I would like to share with you two versions of the classic Pong game that both look as if their respective creators enjoyed experimenting with LSD a little too much.

I found the first remake while reading my daily portion of Exophase. It is not so much a full game yet, but a tech demo showcasing what can be done with the new PSP game engine by A_Nub. The chances are that it will soon become a regular game with cool graphical effects. If you have a PSP, download it from the release thread – static screens don’t fully show how trippy this game is. If author adds pulsating plasma background, people will get high by just playing it.

Speaking of plasma, watching Gnarly Pong in action made me recall equally trippy game for PC called Plasma Pong and I have realised that unfortunately I never mentioned it here on Barts News. Essentially, the game is good, old Pong with added fluid dynamics and funky visual effects. It is quite fun to play in short bursts.

While googling for more information, I found out that the notice on author’s page suggests that Atari was unhappy with him using their trademark. On a positive note, though, author promises a new title to make up for that and the original game can be still found in many places over the internet, for example here.

You owe it to yourself to read more detailed review here and see Plasma Pong in action in this video, because similarly to Gnarly Pong the beauty of the game manifests itself best in motion.

[via Exophase]

(I fell in love with) the Majesty of Colors

Have you ever dreamt that you were a gargantuan creature dwelling deep in the cold darkness of the ocean’s bottom, reaching to the light above with your myriad of tentacles, observing these little warm creatures of flesh, maybe catching one of them and drawing down to the murky depths below?…

What? No, me neither, just asking.

Yet apparently some of us have this kind of dreams and take this matter one step further, creating a game that allows player to control such a creature. That’s what “(I fell in love with) the Majesty of Colors” is all about – the process of discovery and interaction through three eyes of tentacled sea monster, all in delightfully retro graphics.

Note: I like retro visuals, but I am not too keen on pixel art abuse – just because it’s easier to make blocky pixelated sprites doesn’t mean the game is going to look good. Sometimes, however, pixel art really does become art (in real word, too, on rare occasions) and as a result right now I can’t imagine “Majesty of Colors” in any other graphical form.

I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of finding out how the game works, so I will not elaborate further on the gameplay itself. Remember, it’s up to you to discover how to play it and what to do, and the outcome will vary depending on that.

This touches the subject I want to tackle in more detail here on Barts News one day, as well as exploit myself: games are an excellent medium to tell a story that has visual appeal, builds ambience in a cinematic sense and has one advantage over movies and TV – player interaction and multiple variants. Traditional storytelling cannot give you what games can – influence over story itself, pushing heroes to act more to our liking, ultimately achieving different endings in functioon of player’s choices.

“(I fell in love with) the Majesty of Colors” is but a short little game, but it does exactly that – presents different story arch and ending based on player’s decision. As simple and limited as it is gameplay-wise and story-wise, it has an original concept, innovative idea of playing, multiple endings and one or two brilliant moments, my favourite one being the opening, when a little baloon makes the creature see colors.

Go ahead and play it, the experience will be worth it. And if you are an aspiring game creator, read wonderfully detailed post mortem on GameSetWatch to see how the author made it happen.

Another Geometry Wars PSP clone found!

The title says it all – just when I have completed the post on Geometry Wars clones, I have stumbled upon another one. It would have fit perfectly in the previous note on the subject, but I have decided not to edit it too much, adding a new note instead.

To put it short, Polygun Wars (I wonder if the pun is intended) might not be excellent, but it’s very good. The gameplay is well done and graphically it is almost spot on, featuring even cool animated background that gets distorted as bullets fly over it, just like in the original. Please give it a try, just be sure to download the most recent version, because what I tried at first was looking like this:

while the last revision looks (and plays) much better:

Also, I have found that my idea of comparing Geometry Wars clones for PSP was not that original, as Jackal Bytes has actually done something similar long time ago.

I guess this sometimes happens.

Geometry Wars clones for PSP

I believe that everyone who calls themselves a gamer knows what Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is. If not, hand off you gamer licence and go educate yourself. While there exists a PC port available on Steam, it arrived long time after the original hit Xbox360. In the meantime a bunch of clones were created for PC to make PC users’ life a bit less miserable. The best one was undoubtedly Grid Wars. Even though the author got amicably threatened with a lawsuit and took it down from his page, the game can still be downloaded from here or from here (includes a really big and detailed review). End of the story.

But what about PSP? Do we have any Geometry Wars ports available? A-ha! Let us leave calm PC waters and venture into uncharted PSP homebrew territory.

There actually exist three clones of Geometry Wars that exist for the PSP. None of them does actually reach the level of the original or even Grid Wars, but they provide some entertainment, are free and allow us to see how different people implemented the same gaming idea each in their own way.

Geometry Wars Portable

The first clone is the on that in my opinion gets the closest to the original. It does not even try to hide which game it is ripping off – titled Geometry Wars Portable, it is precisely what the name suggests, an attempt to make a portable version of our favourite geometrical shooter. Gameplay is far less polished than the game it is mimicking and graphics are suffering from lack of anti-aliasing, but GWP is fun enough to spend some time furiously shooting and it resembles Geometry Wars the most. Download it here.

Trigonometry Wars

The second clone does not look to spectacular, but is a relatively faithful rendition. Oddly enough, despite being more similar to the original gameplay-wise, its dark and less flashy visuals make it slightly less fun to play – an important lesson to all game developers out there. While graphics might not be all that counts, it also contributes to the fun factor. Download the game here.

Vector Infector

The third clone is barely related to the original and gives you idea what could have happened if the creators of Geometry Wars were on acid. Sprites are the same and there is shooting involved, but it has more to do with one of the levels of Everyday Shooter than Geometry Wars itself. Also, this game is using copyrighted music (Andy Hunter “Wonders of You”) – shame on you, game author. It’s one thing to copy an idea, but it’s another thing to steal music. You can download the game here if you really must.

On the closing note, it is worth a mention that the original remains head and shoulders above its impostors. There is more to the game than just geometrical retro graphics, flashy special effects and simple shooting rules. The case study of Geometry Wars versus its lookalikes clearly goes to show that balancing game mechanics is not an easy task and out of the crowd of its clones, only one of them gets relatively close (Grid Wars). It still remains noticeably different despite a good deal of work put into mimicking the gameplay and allowing for further customisation.

So don’t be fooled into thinking that you can have the cookie for free – the games I have listed here will give you a portable substitute to amuse you for a quarter or two and the PC clone will give you close enough experience, but if you really want to feel the retro charm of Geometry Wars, you will have to cough up and buy it – with the price tag of 3.99USD you have no excuse not to.

EDIT: I have just found yet another Geometry Wars clone for PSP – read more about it here.

Free game, free music – with bonus Beagles

I love free things, games and music and I adore Beagles. So this post fuses quite a lot of good things in one, namely a game appropriately called Rescue the Beagles.

It all started with me browsing lists of best free indie games of 2008 (available here). I have ambivalent feelings toward free games, since in general the vast majority of them sucks. Being a cheapskate from the third world country, however, I still occasionally dig into the piles of poo and every now and then dig out a little jewel, such as Every Extend, N or Gnome Carnage for example. I still prefer to go through the lists that someone already sorted for me, lazy bastard that I am.

This time there were not that many titles I cared enough to try, much less play for more than five minutes – nevertheless Rescue the Beagles managed to catch my attention, hold it and provide enough fun not only to play but also to write a post about it, so you can appreciate it as well.

The game, created for procedurally generated content games TIG competition, revolves around, you’re right, rescuing the Beagles (hey, you’re still a great crowd!). There’s some story, if you really must, but the objective is simple – catch all the stray dogs before evil scientists get them.

I like almost everything in Rescue the Beagles, excellent choice of colours, randomly generated levels, minimalist sound effects, sweet retro pixel art, catchy background tune. The only thing I pretty much hate about it is the difficulty level – the game is unforgiving in truly 8-bit spirit. That or I have grown too old for arcade games.

Below you can watch someone playing the game to get an idea what it is all about:

As a cherry on top this cake, the stylish retro soundtrack is totally free. There’s the initiative of creating database of free indie games music and tunes from Rescue the Beagles is one of (so far rather few) game soundtracks available.

Download game music here and the game itself here, you can also check other games by Nenad Jalsovec.

Many passengers of Nostromo

If you have been following this blog for a while, you probably noticed that I don’t really have a thing for online flash games. During last three years I have just recommended two of them: N (note to self – write about N and N+ soon) and Flash Element Tower Defence, so it comes as a bit of a surprise that I will now recommend the third one.

Called Evacuation, this wonderful little gem puts player in command of a spaceship invaded by aliens, his job to open and close gates of different colours in order to vent aliens into space. Simple? Simple, yes, but brilliantly executed.

I should have opened the pink door…

Delightful graphics reminding me of 16-bit era, sweet music, cute sound effects – it’s all there. Add randomly generated levels (getting harder and harder along the way, but different each time) and you have a game that has eaten my precious work time more than I would admit to. There’s nothing more to write on the subject – Evacuation is totally awesome, just go and play it already!

Everyday Shooter versus Super Stardust Portable

Everyday Shooter (ES) and Super Stardust Portable (SSP) – these two shoot’em ups appeared recently on Playstation Store and I have tried them both, so here comes the inevitable comparison for all those unsure which one to buy.

If you have read what I had written on the second game (in short: yay! shooting!), you might suspect that I will be biased. Rightly so, I totally love it, but my preference should not influence the comparative evaluation brought to you by yours truly – or at least so I tell myself.

Origin:

- making its first appearance on PS3, Everyday Shooter was a strange indie game developed by Jonathan Mak that got picked up by Sony on Independent Games Festival and received generally warm welcome. It then got ported to PC and later on to PSP as well.

- a younger brother of Super Stardust HD, critically acclaimed old-school shooter with amazing graphics for the PS3, this is a PSP port of SSHD. Quick googling reveals that Super Stardust HD was a spiritual sequel to Super Stardust which itself was a sequel to Stardust and so we go back to good old Amiga days.

Graphics:

- strange shapes move and shoot other strange shapes, with strange shapes appearing in the background. It’s all pretty, colourful (although mostly in a toned-down mellow way) and varied, but too abstract for me. However, if you dig Kenta Cho’s shooters, there’s a strong chance you’ll like the art direction of ES as well. Lack of anti-aliasing is noticeable and there is some pixelisation.

Everyday Shooter

- the following words come to mind: classic, good-looking, sparkling, vibrant, colourful, futuristic, smooth. Oh yes, very smooth indeed, the framerate is excellent and never slows down, no matter how many particles, explosions, enemies and other things. It looks good on screens, but it looks incredibly well in motion.

Super Stardust Portable

Audio:

- soundtrack to ES consists of guitar chords, ambient sounds and other acoustic noises. If you enjoy boing boing PLINGGG bdoink! as your musical background, you’ll love it, otherwise it will get on your nerves quite easily. I should mention that the sounds in ES are tightly coupled with gameplay and visuals, so if you make a chain combo by destroying tens of enemies at once, you’ll be rewarded with a cascade of guitar chords.

- from the very first moment when you hear the bombastic introductory music making you feel like a space soldier just embarking on a mission to protect your home planet, the musical score is just spot-on and very fitting, even if number of tracks is limited. Excellent sound effects make shooting rocks and space-things very enjoyable and in many cases player can realise something is happening off the screen (enemy vessel approaching) just because of specific sound.

Gameplay:

- strange shapes move and shoot other strange shapes… sorry, I already wrote that. Each level has a theme to it not only in terms of graphics, but also in terms of enemy types and rules, to the point where some reviewers describe ES as a collection of minigames (which is totally wrong, in my opinion). These sets of rules are changing from level to level, and as you gain experience, you will gradually notice patterns that govern the behaviour of some more tricky enemies, patterns that can also evolve sometimes. I know this description is a bit fuzzy, but trust me, this game is a bit fuzzy as well.

- Asteroids on steroids pretty much sums it up. There are some tactics in SSP as well, such as knowing when to escape a circling swarm of enemies with a dash or how long to wait for a pick-up bonus in order for it to boost other weapon than it initially would, but the core gameplay is shooting A LOT and having eyes around your head in order not to hit something. Enemy types are mostly similar in behaviour, the variation coming from being forced to use different weapons on different enemy types. Switching between them in the heat of battle is really tricky.

Wrap up:

- If you are some weird tree hugger, excuse me, I meant indie game lover or you simply happen to like abstract, quirky aesthetics, coupled with discovering strange rules while simultanously shooting , you will draw your perverted pleasures from Everyday Shooter. Weird visuals will flow in the rhythm of guitar chords and you will reach your gaming nirvana, although you might be as well indulging on LSD while playing a game of darts.

- If you are a retro gamer who remembers rapid fire buttons on Amiga joysticks or a die-hard shoot’em up fan, the odds are you’ll prefer Super Stardust Portable, a game in which the key to survival is mashing fire and littering space with myriads of bullets. Bright explosions, powerful music, shooting till you drop – if that’s what you are looking for, look no further.

A word of warning, too: if you played any of these games in their first incarnation (PC or PS3 one), you might find that there is nothing new here and be disappointed with lack of bonus content and/or control issues and/or limitations in presentation layer. If you are looking for some fix for those moments away from your PC/PS3 on the go, though, these titles may feel familiar enough to overlook their little shortcomings.

Also, I remember playing Everyday Shooter on my PC and being annoyed by its high difficulty level. No such feeling here, which probably means that it has been toned down somewhat for the PSP version. As for the difficulty of Super Stardust Portable, in December I actually got a cramp from playing the game too much and later injured my thumb. This goes to show both how frenetic and addictive it is.

So there you have it. Both games are great, but they are also very different. Which one is the best choice for you depends on your personal taste and kind of gameplay you prefer. In my case the winner was (and still is) Super Stardust Portable, but this is a very personal and subjective thing. I highly encourage you to give them both a try in order not to miss anything, but if you have just ten dollars in your pocket itching to be spent on downloadable title, then perhaps the above comparison will prove helpful.

Super Stardust Portable

I wanted to play the original Super Stardust from the moment it appeared, but didn’t have PS3, so I had to wait. Some time have passed and while I still don’t have PS3, Super Stardust was ported to PSP, adding Portable to its name. I was thrilled after seeing this trailer:

Now I finally got it and I can safely express my opinion: this thing rocks!

Super Stardust Portable has incredible fun factor that makes me feel like I went back in time and was discovering shoot’em up games in the nearby arcade lounge once again. I actually have never been very good with shmups and don’t recall finishing any of them without cheat codes – but SSD creates in me the long-forgotten feeling of “just one more retry” that I haven’t felt for ages.

In case of most shooters where player has limited lives and saving game is not possible (as opposed to modern FPSes), I get bored and overwhelmed by my clumsiness and difficulty level. Super Stardust Portable makes me swear, curse, cry and eventually go back to try again, as soon as my thumb stops hurting from beating on the fire buttons.

Penny Arcade had this strip on Megaman Effect and I feel quite similarly about Super Stardust, except that the game will not get you funny looks from other adults “oh, he’s playing kiddy stuff”. The music and sounds are rock solid, the main tune makes player feel like a space soldier embarking on a mission to kill aliens (check it here) and the in-game music is fast and catchy, with a retro feel to it. Framerate is silky smooth and action is frenetic without ever slipping into chaos. Wonderful balance of difficulty and gameplay mechanics coupled with excellent graphical presentation (my coworker saw the game and said “wow, I didn’t know PSP could do that”) are a deadly combo.

There are mentions of new gameplay modes and/or levels being released as downloadable content, unfortunately not for free. This would effectively increase the cost of the game. But perhaps we can look at this DLC thing as a bonus for those who love the game (with little extra charge), not as a nasty way of forcing player to pay for game in rates?… Even if not, remember that what I am writing about in this note is a basic version released on PSN – and I still am raving about it.

If you like shooters even in the slightest, then you owe it to yourself to give this game a try. At the cost of ten bucks you have no excuse not to. I played this game at work in the toilet, something that has not happened to me ever since Lumines – I think this goes to prove how addictive Super Stardust Porable is.