Bastard World
I realise that in any other blog, this would be a really long pissing and whinging fest of epic proportions…but here at Gibber, we’re kinda special. Yes, my mum did tell me that an awful lot.
So, Bastard World then… yeah, its a game, sorry to disappoint.
Bastard World is a bare bones platformer, there’s absolutely nothing for you to collect, no grand tasks to complete - get from one side of the map to the other and thats yer lot. And truly, it is the most aptly named game since Cuntminge Simulator (I dreamt that one, didn’t I?), ok - since “Don’t Buy This” graced your budget racks.
Its not the prettiest game, all told - nor is it the most polished. But it is curiously addictive if a little flawed in places. Its also, on occasions, a complete and utter bastard and some of the level design may unleash the inner sailor in you. (Unless the inner sailor in you happens to be Captain Haddock, in which case you’ll say “Blistering Barnacles” or somesuch twaddle.).
A nice time waster indeed and you can’t really knock the price.
Kloonigames
Bill at The2Bears has just dropped a nod in the direction of Kloonigames blog, which is well worth checking out. The aim of the blog is to crank out an experimental game a month, made within a 7 day window and trying something new in the gameplay stakes each time. Which, personally, I think is totally nutso but also incredibly admirable.
There’s 3 games up at the moment to check out, all of which have a wonderful art style to them - whilst certainly not unique in looks, theres something nicely twisted and Monty Python meets Tim Burton about them. Very endearing indeed.
Should be interesting to see what comes from it over the next couple of months.
The post which captured my attention the most though, and really why I’m making a note here - is the wonderful postmortem for Slimey Petes Singles Bar, the second of the three games - entitled Slimey Petes Singles Bar; or what I learned from making a bad game with pretty graphics. I think its a lesson we all learn somewhere down the line (with or without the pretty graphics part, skill depending) and Petri Purho makes some great points in the “what went wrong” section that should be required reading to an awful lot of people out there, both Indie and Commercial developers alike.
He also makes a wonderful point with the closing lines of “I would even recommend doing a bad game as a learning experience. (Or atleast, you can do as I did and dub your bad games as learning experiences)”. I’ve made a ruck of bad games in the past, and curiously enough my pet project VI is spawned from a terrible game.
Mistakes are brilliant things, providing you actually try and learn from them and not find yourself destined to repeat them ad infinitum - sometimes though, the only way to learn is to find out what doesn’t work and bloody well not do it again.
Of course, if you’re too close to something to see that it doesn’t work…well, thats another story.
Neon Wars
Neon Wars is a deceptive little cookie of a game, from a cursory glance you’d be easily fooled into believing it to be your bog standard average Geometry Wars style clone, but people of Bizarre Creations, look away now there is nothing to see here. Yes, it may have those wonderful glowing vectors that you lay claim to creating, it may be *shock* an arena shooter, but in practice its quite, quite a different beast indeed and shares less in common with Huge Euge’s creations than most of the other games doing the rounds on these interwebs we call our digital home.
It could also, quite possibly, be Neon Wars biggest mistake. But more of that later.
Shooters instinct tells me, the first thing you do upon being presented with an arena shooter is to go and hunt out the dual stick options and calibrate your sticks, well, if I were you I wouldn’t waste your time because there is no such option in Neon Wars… and this is where the game sets itself apart from the crowd. Its not a dual stick shooter, in fact - aside from a bomb button which produces various different pretty and deadly particle effects - you don’t have to shoot at all. You see, Neon Wars isn’t really a shooter at all - it just looks like one. The core basis of Neon Wars I’d be happier calling a “dodge em up” and much to my surprise, it turned out pretty fun despite some early reservations about it.
The game has two main segments, the level based game and the main feature, the zone game and I must confess that I found the level challenges a bit dull, not coma inducing dull by any means, but certainly not enough to retain my interests for too long (plus I cleared through them all in no time whatsoever) whereas the zone segments were far more fun and its clearly obvious why this is the main section of the game pushed (and the one showcased in the demo I believe). Once I’d gotten over the initial “hang on, I don’t have to fire” culture shock I’d happily thrown away a few hours to the game and enjoyed it thoroughly…which is all I can ever really ask for from a game.
Now, the problem I believe Neon Wars may find itself up against is what Neon Wars is by design. Its use of heavy particle effects and general look will adhere it straight away to the shmup crowd whilst the control scheme will doubtlessly alienate a fair few of them (”A shooter where you don’t get to shoot? Pifff”) whilst attracting the more “casual” crowd…but will a particle blaze be what the casual crowd is after?
Of course, in an ideal world this shouldn’t even be an issue - Neon Wars is, after all, just a bloody game and you either like it or you don’t, but I’ve ranted about this not too long ago and won’t inflict that upon you twice in a week… but by placing itself on the fence in such a manner may well work against it in the long run. If the hardcore mob don’t want your game and the casual mob feel its too hardcore looking for them then the developers may find themselves hitting a wall faster than something fast that hits walls.
I guess the main thing you have to do with Neon Wars is to switch off any preconceptions of what you feel it should be and enjoy it for what it is, a nice, mindless piece of fun that burns your eyelids in a lovely manner. Wether its $20 worth of mindless fun, I’m still not too sure - but unlike the recently released Polarity (with its carefully chosen and slightly misleading review quotes), Neon Wars contains no time limits, no DRM and a full zone for you to play through so at no point are you being held hostage by Macrovision for your purchase. Which is a good thing indeed, never quite sure why Indie publishers feel the need to go in for such invasive copy protection schemes… but thats for another day and not for this review.
You can find an alternate view on Neon Wars over at Bills excellent site: The2Bears and with thanks to Rich of Reflected/Blitwise for firing over a copy to go under the Gibber microscope.
PixelShips Retro
What do you get if you cross Pokemon with Defender? Pokender? Defemon? A little yellow twat being blown to smithereens? Hmm, maybe some of the above, but you also get Pixelships Retro, the sequel to … well, Pixelships obviously.
Pixelships Retro is a concept that looks great on paper, a wraparound scrolling shooter where the aim is to clear off the goals presented to you each level, be that collecting the correct amount of coins, destroying x amount of enemy ships before the time limit ends in order to spawn a boss ship that you destroy, then get the ability to play.
Each boss ship has different qualities and brings its own pro’s and con’s to the table - some may move slower, some have firepower which diminishes in strength faster than others and so on and so forth. The more levels you clear off, the more ships available to you and the more you have chance to juggle the balance in your favour - each ship also has its own experience levels enabling you to upgrade the current ship as it hits the top of the experience scale.
So, indeed - a fairly solid and reasonable concept behind the whole game. Shame its not so wonderful in practice.
Its by no means a bad game or a poorly coded game… its just dull to play.
The enemy patterns are bland - they swoop around the screen occasionally arcing when within range of your ship, maybe doubling back if you’re lucky, firing out the odd bullet (which due to all the ships you pilot having energy levels, you can take huge amounts of hits from and still continue). So there’s next to no threat level at all. Even when you progress through the boss ships the patterns remain so similar as to not really ever be enough to retain interest for long. The collecting ships does add a little more “umph” to it, but for the most part - its only ones obsessive compulsive nature that could possibly drive anyone to “catch ‘em all”.
Its something that appears to be a reasonably common theme amongst some shooters, and especially rearing its head within the shareware market more than it should… whereas the absolute focus should lie in good enemy design, wave structures and/or threat balancing and risk/reward… so many of them take the base concept of “well, we’ve got a player and umm…lets throw a few enemies in without really thinking too hard about structuring their behaviour” that you wonder sometimes if half the people writing these games have ever played and enjoyed a shooter in their lives.
And the graphics? Pixelships Retro appears to run with the principle of only having the barest minimum of effort employed in the graphics department and then passing them off as old skool. Whereas I may have railed against the gameplay of Gamma Bros, they nailed the retro stylings down to an absolute tee with absolutely luscious sprites that show PixelShips Retro up at every turn.
The sound is nicely done, although having only been able to try the demo version out I appear to be stuck with an incredibly limited selection of music (possibly only the one track, but that might just be that it all blurs into one - so don’t quote me on that) - either way, there’s no Hubbard style epics to be found here but what is there is competent enough, if nothing special in the grand scheme of things
It all adds up to one major problem the game suffers - if it were a true retro game it would have been thrown out for a few quid on Mastertronic or Firebird - a nice distraction of a game, but never anything with much in the way of longevity. At $12.95 for the full version I’m not entirely convinced that any of the extra content on offer for upgrading from the demo justifies the price tag. When there’s a world of excellent shooters out there which either cost less, or cost nothing at all bar the time to download them, why cough up for something that barely scrapes its way out of the idea’s camp?
What could have been something a bit special has ended up as a husk of a game that feels like its trying to eek more playtime out of you with the collection mechanism rather than encouraging you to get bigger, better and more ships to control and use to blow seven shades of holy shit out of everything.
And we all know, that in a shooter - its the blowing shit out of things that matters.
Quantized Blaze
A tad late to the party, with Quantized Blaze having already been covered by The2Bears way back in April and somehow managing to let it pass me by, until Tim over at indygamer.blogspot.com dropped this post a few days ago and reminded me of its existence.
By the same developer as the utterly mentalist NomltestFS and the superbly stylish Invisible Vision, keim, comes a game that shows that a little bit of additive blending goes a long way. With the action taking place on an eternally scrolling chequer board with flames bursting down from the top of the screen and interweaving lines forming patterns across the screen, even if the game isn’t for you - its sure to provide at the very least a wonderful visual treat.
Like NomltestFS, Quantized Blaze is essentially a play on the Space Invaders style dragged by the little green tentacles into the 21st century, the enemies move across the chequerboard spitting bullets in a variety of patterns - with the patterns getting increasingly complex as you progress through the ranks. What begins as bullets dropping down in a straight line and heading in your direction soon becomes a barrage of formations for you to duck and dive between.
To encourage more aggressive playing, when you destroy the flames barely visible items are spewed out from the explosions for you to collect. The further towards the bottom of the screen you lie, the more difficult it becomes to get a good stock of items. Your ship also comes packed with the obligatory supply of smart bombs - best to keep a hold of them wherever possible though, you’ll find yourself needing them when the going gets tougher later on.
Whilst the game is incredibly straightforward, the whole visual style has a very odd effect on my eyes after a while - its rare a game makes me go cross eyed whilst nipping inbetween bullet patterns, but the slight perspective of Quantized Blaze means I have to relax that little bit more to get into the zone with it. Luckily this is helped along the way by a fantastic use of sound - spot FX are kept to a bare minimum but the tune trips away nicely in the foreground helping you drift into the right state of mind.
Very enjoyable and frantic, without getting too stressful - and as Tim recommends, definitely not one for keyboard play. Pack your pad or stick for this beauty.
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