So the time has been spent and all the games have been played. I got a little distracted in the middle, but I have finished them all and have everything ready to bear out for the reader. This is exciting, I know. Anyways, in case you forgot, I only played each game for 30 minutes max, and then had to come to a conclusion and now must rank them. For links to sites and download, check out the announcement page for the challenge.

Honestly, it’s really arbitrary and most of these games are worth checking out if you’re interested. It’s an exercise in stupidity and boredom, I know. But, it was fun, so who cares. I’ll be finishing or spending more time with many of these games, and that’s what counts most. And, for the most part you all get to look at pretty custom screen shots! For reference purposes, these games were played in alphabetical order.

#10: Cottage of Doom

I could only take 2 games of Cottage of Doom totaling about 12 minutes play time. I understand that it was made for the TIGSource B-Game Competition, but this game has shown up on other lists as an actual good game. I mean, it’s silly-fun and it is very steeped in B-level voice acting and writing (the female “lead” character is played by Microsoft’s Text-to-Speech program), but I can’t drag myself into playing this again. It’s really clunky to control, isn’t very accurate, and just plain not-fun. There’s too much going on and I don’t really feel like I have enough control over any of it. Piles of zombies are always something I love, and the concept is actually not too overplayed, to top this all off I actually really enjoy survival modes on games, but Cottage of Doom is just Bad.

#9: Poesysteme

Imagine if you will a world in where your cheap holiday gift of magnetic poetry came alive on your refrigerator and began to eat all your food and cannibalize itself while creating nonsensical words. Well, that’s Poesysteme. I don’t know what else to say. Little emoticons move around on a screen. You give them “names” or something which have breaks in them when entering (like, this.is.an.example) and then the “game” takes these words and breeds them and mixes them up. You need to keep these little things fed too. And… that’s it. I guess that this may be cute or funny (I tried it with better words than the one in the screenshots and even started to use sentences for names), but ultimately I just think that this is an interactive screensaver and a boring one to boot.

#8: Sauerbrauten

Ok, so perhaps this wasn’t a fantastic choice for the competition. This is less of a “game” and more a tech demo. The levels—if we can call them that—are barely strung together with some sort of “kill-em-all” story attached. I can’t really tell though, because it’s obvious that these levels only exist to get you to look around in the engine. Someone could honestly make a really fantastic game with the Cube 2 engine and there’s some real potential with what’s included in the game. But! It’s still not really a game proper.

There is one really awesome thing about this tech demo: the menu system. As you can see in the screen shot, when you open the menu it’s a free floating 3D object that works really well (most of the time). It’s one of those things that as soon as you see it you wonder why its never been done before. Anyways, this is worth a look, and if someone had some real initiative they could build a great game inside the engine, but what’s there can hardly be considered a “game”. Were this just an engine/technical item then the Cube 2 engine would have ranked higher than the game itself.

#7: Flipside

Flipside is a Half-Life 2/Source Engine modification, and a student project. It is perhaps the most impressive looking overhaul of the engine that I’ve seen, especially for non-commercial uses. Now, for as technically impressive and imaginative as this title is, it’s really poor in just about every other area. After thirty minutes with the game I was still constantly struggling with the controls. I knew what I should be doing and how to do it, but the avatar was not reacting properly to the input I was giving with my controller. On top of that, the hit detection is really awful making even a single enemy a most deadly encounter because you’re playing essentially playing Russian roulette with the AI.

The concept is very original and the design is really great. Everything in the game is drawn and pasted together perhaps by a child or an insane person. Clippings of arms and torsos are held together with brads that you can see the prong ends of when you flip over to the dark-side of the world. The bright-side of things doesn’t allow for combat but really bouncy jumping over clouds and bright suns. The dark-side seems to be where the dirty work goes on and enemies can be removed forcefully. It’s a strong aesthetic and a shame that it’s not stronger in other areas. The group that made this game needs to team up with someone, or some group, that really knows how to fine tune a game and make it much more playable than it currently is. Some non-frustrating level design would go a long way as well.

#6: Iwanaga

This game is interesting. Iwanaga unquestionably needs to be played with a controller and the JoyToKey program. Also, for whatever reason I could not get the fullscreen version of the game to work, so I had to find and download the windowed version (which is a shame because the window is so-o damn tiny).

My first play through was on the easy setting. It is honestly easy on this setting and leaves out a couple of the gameplay mechanics which gave me a poor impression. On easy the gameplay feels quite similar to Alien Soldier mixed with Sin & Punishment. It’s pretty obvious that the was inspired by Treasure as Iwanaga is laid out as a boss rush with small amounts of enemy killing to power-up in between. The visuals and a few of the score mechanics seem more to be borrowed more from Cave STGs though. All of this leads to the game ultimately feeling a bit uninspired (or perhaps too inspired) and a little overcomplicated. As a non-Japanese speaker/reader there’s also some mechanics which don’t make a lick of sense to me (there’s a number on the screen that, when empty, my life bar begins to drain and I don’t know exactly why). It was fun to play through on easy but quite short, and I don’t think that it’s as good as others have made it out to be. I plan to stick to the sources of influence rather than this one.

#5: La Mulana

Perhaps someone who said that I couldn’t get a good impression of this game w/in 30 minutes was correct. This is mainly because I got a bad impression of the game in that time. Well, OK, honestly my impressions are a bit mixed. This game carries over all the really awesome things about 8-bit platforming games, as well as many of the things that make it hard for me to pick these games up anymore. Like Faxanadu. I can’t really play that game for that long anymore because the combat and hit detection are so stiff and unforgiving. In La Mulana, things aren’t much different.

I guess this is part of its charm that seems to have captured so many people’s attention. To me it’s just mildly annoying. Like, when for unknown reasons I whipped a block and it made lightening strike me. Or when I just entered a new area and an enemy will instantly knock me back into the previous screen. Or when I fall into some water and my life drains so quickly that I don’t get more than a single attempt to get out of it. I could go on, but something makes me want to keep playing the game just a little while longer to see if it balances out and starts to become more enjoyable and less frustrating. I don’t really understand a few things though (like how to read a map and how to save) which would probably be cleared up with just a little research or a manual, but whatever. It’s not horrible, but I expect that rose-colored glasses are what’s drawing so many people’s attention to this game.

#4: Dive

Dive was designed and submitted for the Gamma 256 … uh, party-project-thing. The concept and design are both simple and elegant. The task of the player is to dive. Due possibly to some freak aquatic accident this diver has sonar and can contact the friendly animals to give him more oxygen. The pink/red sea life is harmful, and they’re best avoided. The tone and atmosphere are both very strong and exceptionally subdued. The graphics are very iconic and the sound is simple with a throw back to 8-bit sound effects. The music is perhaps the most subtle and alluring part of the game: while at first the oceanic sound is quite at its regular interval the volume slowly grows louder until you feel it in your head. The weight of it all is very well placed and the game is well thought out for as simple as it is. Unfortunately there’s not much to it and it maintains a place as the first game I’ve actually completed in the 30 min time I’ve given myself for this competition (though, to it’s credit, this is part of the design. That’s not to say I wouldn’t love to see this concept taken further with perhaps different verbs for different levels).

#3: Sam & Max Episode 4: Abe Lincoln Must Die!

Well, a half hour probably wasn’t enough time for this one either. By the time that was up I’d heard some pretty decent voice-acting, some humorous lines, and gotten stuck on old adventure-game cliches. I’m not someone who detests adventure games or anything, it’s just that sometimes they have these really horrible habits of not pointing the player anywhere near the correct direction and force them to create some kind of telepathic link with the developers to figure out where to go next. Or, exhaust every possible combination of items and interaction, and if that fails searching everything for something missed via random pointing and clicking.

But, Sam and Max has more character and humor than many of those really bad games tend to have so I’d be willing to keep going on this one with some more time. Graphically the game is clean and accomplishes setting up a very cartoon-esque landscape and world. The interface is very simple  executed solely by point and click operation. I liked what I played, but wish that it had moved on from what I feel held back the genre in the first place.

#2: Akuchizoku

This game was developed by Cactus who is currently most famous for their game Clean Asia (which I happen to like a lot). Apparently they’ve made like five million games in two weeks or something: it’s a bit insane honestly. This one happens to be a horizontal shooter which starts the player out in some kind of option-ala-Gradius-ed-out Helicopter. There’s a story mode, but I didn’t get very far into it within the first half hour. The story that they do introduce you to is very bizarre and takes place in the future, in the past… kinda thing. It’s humorous and no less ridiculous than the kind of crap that use to go into games in the eras that the aesthetics of Akuchizoku are paying homage to.

So, shoot stuff through three levels and attempt to stop the Akuchizoku, some sort of Japanese terrorist outfit. This unit has some batshit insane engineers working for them because they have somehow melded organics and machines in an bass ackward kind of way. The opponent in the screen shot above isn’t even the most bizarre. The game also offers a free play mode which lets the player practice any of the three main levels. Not only are the levels challenging, and loaded with bosses, but they are fair and have a gradual learning curve. I can only piece together that the game allows you to loop it thrice with a different character each time: when in free play mode there’s an option for which character to select. Outside of Simpson-Yellow man, there’s a Skeletor looking thing, and a lady pilot. Each play quite uniquely and together make for a good game, honestly. I wanted to spend more than the initial half hour with it, but rules are rules. I will be going back and playing more of this.

#1: Dwarf Fortress (the graphical version thing was an excuse)

Ok, I think that I actually learned how to play the game this time. This was the game I picked to “feed my own indulgences and curiosities” and honestly it did. First off it should be mentioned that this game is stupidly ridiculous in its depth and scope. Second: I broke my rules here and spent more than a half hour on the game, but I have my excuses (mainly that I had to follow a tutorial for a while). Lastly, this is my third attempt at playing this game. But even so, I’ve barely seen the tip of the tip of the iceburg. Reading stories about this game, both from people playing it and about the development quirks, constantly piques my curiosities, but every other time I played this game I just felt like it hates me after about fifteen minutes of dicking around.

This game needs one of two things to be amazing and a bit more friendly. A) It needs a tutorial mode. Saying “hey here’s five million things to do and an honestly crappy starting build” is about the biggest turn off for me. And B) this game needs to have a few presets for starting Dwarf parties. I mean, seriously, the game practically wants you to fail. My experiences still lead me to believe that this game is created by someone who never ever wants anyone outside of those with a lot of free time to play it. But, I guess that the third time’s a charm, and I fell in love with it this time. I’ll be picking this back up later and perhaps with the non-graphical version. To attempt to capture what this game is about in just a few sentences or paragraph would be a fools errand, so take my word for it and give the game a fair shot if you have a good chunk of spare time to learn the basics in.