9 articles Tag windows

RotAKoko (Rotating Agent Koko)

September 25, 2010, 1 comment

RotAKoko by Rakugaki-Otoko is a real labour of love – a two year labour of love that’s emerged as a rotaty maze game that’s a shootery spin (hoho) on the Super Nintendo’s On The Ball / Cameltry, except its got cuteness and joy oozing out of its pores, and a brilliantly bewildering intro. Check this out:

See? Awesome.

The game itself can’t live up to that promise of that intro – you simply guide your ‘rotating agent’ around some probably over-complicated and under-populated mazes, grabbing coins as you go. There are some nice ideas later on – like darkness-shrouded levels you can light up by pelting bullets at enemy lightbulbs – and the odd tough boss level that ups the adrenaline a bit. The author is so sweetly concerned about all that spinning making you dizzy, he’s put a signed disclaimer on the loading screen.

“Please take a rest, ok? Keep yourself healthy.” My heart is exploding here.

Honestly, it’s not the greatest game you’ll ever play, but the sheer love that’s gone into it, the nostalgia-triggering innocent ’90s-ness of it all, the lovely music, the beautiful visuals… it makes me happy for so many reasons, I’m not sure 21st century mathematics has invented enough numbers to count them all up. Play RotAKoko (Windows, download)

Nudo

August 15, 2010, 0 comments

Thought I was clever, didn’t I, posting a link to this on TIGForums? Then realised the authors themselves had beaten me to it. I’ll get back into my hole.

Anyway, Nudo is well worth all the links and mentions it’s bound to rack up. Developers Ben Esposito and Manuel Pardo describe it as “a platformer on top of a Rubik’s Cube”. Apt description: you slide each screen’s rows and columns up, down, left and right until your man can leap his way to the treasure and the exit. It takes a while to get your head around, and it’s far from easy – but what I love is that the difficulty comes from puzzling out the solution rather than any pixel-perfect jumps or over-complicated chains of moves. As in all the best games, if the answer seems too fiddly to be fair, you need to go back to the question.

There are some real forehead-furrowing twists later on – and unlike a Rubik’s Cube, you can’t cheat by peeling off the colours and sticking them back on the other sides. Nice to see the colour scheme latching on to the latest Hollywood trends, too.

Play Nudo (Windows, download)

Radial Plus

August 11, 2010, 1 comment

Something Awful have been running a game development competition, but many of the entrants must have wept tears of pure wasted effort when Radial Plus was submitted. Sticking to the challenge’s theme – ‘You can’t…’ – developer Spatial (aka LSnK) has created a puzzle-shooter where you’re unable to hurt enemies with direct fire. Only wall-bounced shots are effective.

It’s a lovely little idea, but in Spatial’s hands it isn’t just that – it’s also hypnotizingly gorgeous for your eyes, and a rare treat for your ears. Listen to what happens when you emerge from an airlock into open space. Mmmm.

Unless you’re a master of angles – a pool-playing professional maybe, or a robot, or a professional pool-playing robot – things get quite hard surprisingly quickly. Keep ploughing on: there’s One Hell Of An Explosion™ waiting for you near the end.

An end which comes way too soon, by the way. Spatial, if you’re reading this: make more. Make more now. Play Radial Plus (Windows, download)

(All the other games – and having played them all so you don’t have to, I recommend Barrier, Huggy Raptor and You Can’t Eat Your Cake And Have It Too – are available from a single page on the Something Awful GameDev Challenge Wiki. Don’t forget to vote for your favourite.)


Bookmark and Share

A Day Out West

June 10, 2009, 3 comments

A Day Out West

Oh dear. Now I feel even worse for not liking all the hard work that’s gone into The Pretender. Because the game you see above was thrown together in 97 minutes. It’s A Day Out West, it’s by Legendary Creations, and it was put together for the latest 2-hour game development competition on The Poppenkast. All you have to do is jump over cactii, wiggle about in mid-air, and shoot rivals who have seemingly exchanged their horses for trampolines. But who isn’t a sucker for games with giganto-pixels like this? And there’s something massively satisfying about catching those flying cowboys in mid-arc. It gives you a little glimpse into how clay pigeon shooters feel. Clay pigeon shooters on horses. Play A Day Out West (download, Windows)

The Chaser

May 31, 2009, 2 comments

The ChaserWhat exactly is The Chaser all about? Creator Conor Carpenter fashioned it from brain and fingers in just 12 hours, and claims it’s designed to “induce a state of mind and mood”. Here’s how it does it: by making you chase some poor dude through a forest, seemingly forever. It’s tougher than it looks — as the speed ramps up, one carelessly-strewn rock can send you spinning like a dog in tail-chase mode. And it’s weirder than it looks — why does the chasee occasionally grow to about ten times his normal size, and why do clouds suddenly start appearing on the ground? The Chaser is simple, compelling — and comes with music you’ll be humming in your grave. Play The Chaser (Windows download)

Update: oh, it’s one of those games.