The 2015 In Review Contest [Reviews: 74]

The Element of Power by kylekrack

After having a ominous dream, the main character wakes up to find a strange book lying on the floor of their house; he goes to his friend's house, since this friend apparently knows all about strange books of this nature (especially since he has three magic books just lying around for times like this). As is the norm for this type of game, these two are half of a group of chosen heroes, and that entails going around getting crystals to fight off a generic evil. The hero gets one of these aforementioned books; I went with the necromancer one, but as charbile mentioned there's no reason given as to why you can't just go out with all three. The plot goes forward with that sort of acceptance by the characters. Near the end you get a fish.

As said in the download description, this is very much a newbie game. The main character's really not that useful offensively, seeing as all his attacks are pathetic and cost MP to use while his friend starts out with 2 attacks a turn and eventually gets free elemental damage. The necromancer class, however, gets a pollen spell, which can easily be used to completely shut down anything that looks like it poses a threat. This is useful, as this game seems to have absolutely no middle ground between enemies that are of no threat whatsoever and enemies that have the capacity to kill characters in one shot.

Dungeon maps (and most of the maps that aren't just towns) are way too big for what's in them (read: not much). The one dungeon area that isn't sprawling suffers from the worst encounter rate I think I've seen, and the fact that it's also combined with a 'puzzle' (really just going to symbols on the four corners of the area, then going into whirlpools in the hopes the one you go into matches up with said symbol) doesn't help. Any dungeon that I resort to going through with the kill all enemies debug tool just ain't cool.
Worth mentioning is the temple at the end of each dungeon segment, which consists of a series of battles that ends with a boss... and then another, larger boss. First time that happened it honestly caught me off guard, even if the boss in question was a bit of a wimp in the end once I shut it down. I wouldn't say this sort of thing is the worst idea, since it provides a decent capstone to each segment of the game, but some way to back out of it (even if that would mean doing the whole thing over again) would have been nice.

Graphics are about what you can expect from a newbie game; pillow shading, flat backgrounds with scribbles for details, and generally mediocre graphics abound. The enemy graphics get marginally better by the final area, but not by much. The water tiles in the pier area are neat, though. Music's oddly chosen, with high-quality music jostling with MIDIs [most blatant in the opening area, where you go from something with ominous vocals, but have a midi for the battle theme and one of the default midis for a victory theme.

I liked the parts of it that were rompy; can't say the same for the parts I had to resort to debug keys for.

1. Paladin Traducer 2. The War on XMas
3. Fridge Racer 4. Devs Like Waffles
5. Charbile's Lovely Home 6. Ghost's Towns
7. Allu in the Demon's Cave 8. Return
9. Teekee 10. Martin Van Buren, Monster Slayer
11. The Element of Power
12. Lab Rat 13. Painted Space
14. Phlan 15. MrNintendo1's Michael Jackson Dancing
16. Linear Quest II 17. Time Twister

Finished my write-up on Fridge Racer. Was a lot longer than I thought it'd be and I think I got a little rambly. Oh well! I'll do better on the next one.

The Little Prince by vens

This is apparently a reinterpretation of the classic novel in video game format. I do feel I'd be better-equipped to review this were I to read the book, but there really isn't all that much here to review.
The game as-is is only 5-10 minutes long, at best; in that time, you wake up, say goodbye to a rose and talk to a king who claims power over everything but who really doesn't. One of the advertised features is the ability to wear different types of clothes; here, there your default clothes, a rainbow-color sweater (that you can't take off once you put it on), and a scarf. It'd be nice if this did something in the context of the overall game, since right now it doesn't actually do anything non-aesthetic.

Graphics are fine, if a bit reliant on the dither tool; the portraits have a neat eyes in shadow style going for them. Music is all piano stuff; fits the game fine, but I'm not too fond of how it switches from one piano song to a really similar sounding one when you talk to the flower (reading the author's tumblr gives me the impression they might be deaf, though, so that's not really a point I'll press).

Honestly, I'm not sure the video game format is really the best way to implement this, given that it's almost all talk at this point. A comic might work a bit better for this sort of thing. Sure, the text is good, but beyond walking around a bit and one puzzle that's at most 30 seconds long that's all there is here. Judging from what's on the author's tumblr, there might have been a tiny bit more work done on it since the demo was uploaded, but not really all that much. Maybe something will come of this.

There's some other minor stuff I could expand on - the warps on the prince's home asteroid only trigger on part of where they should (on the floor tile and not on the tile that includes a wall), the aforementioned inability to switch back to your default clothes, the fact that the one puzzle in the game was exactly the sort undertale was making fun of with its own tile puzzle, and the fact that the only point of decision apparently doesn't influence anything - but is there really that much point to doing so regarding such a short game?

The background Feenicks liked was from outer space. Though maybe not that particular image. Google and I agree it's from the Eagle Nebula, at least.

Guess that explains why it's the nicest looking thing in the game, then.

Shooter Game by BlurredVisionGames

Here you're some sort of blue guy with two guns and infinite ammo at your disposal against four machines of some description that bring forth an endless stream of what I'm going to call gelatinous cubes marked with Xs in their centers. Either you're allergic to the letter X or gelatinous cubes, because touching one ends the game immediately. As you defeat each machine, they all collectively realize their continued existences are on the line and start producing more and more enemies. All in all, a pretty good excuse for shooting excessive amounts of white squares at things.

Graphics work fine; they're in the same sorta scribbled down, top-down style as this guy's last game, but it's pretty obvious what everything does. Music, being a single somewhat wonky sounding piano song, maybe doesn't fit as well as it could. There's no sound effects to speak of; maybe one sound for hitting the generators and another for hitting the enemies would be nice, if only as an additional indicator to make you know what's being hit in the heat of battle.

The gameplay, although simple, is pulled off really well. You control your guy with the arrow keys and pick where he's shooting with the mouse. The guy actually rotates to where the mouse pointer is located, which is neat. All four generators have 999HP, which sounds like a lot before you realize that number can be taken down really quickly, were it not for all the enemies posing a threat to your continued existence. Said enemies are, like Giz mentioned, large enough to be a genuine navigational hazard but small enough to actually get around (until there's only one generator left and they inevitably box you in, the jerks), and they all move slow enough that it always felt like my fault for waltzing into them in an otherwise clear area. Even if the field's really simple, there's enough immediate (how do I position myself, which enemy should I shoot at first) and longer-term (how do I want to damage the generators) things to worry about that the three and change minutes that the game lasted on my actual winning run always felt a bit hectic.
There's a nice tradeoff between the added room destroying generators gives you and the extra enemies it brings out. I tried the 'destroy two generators, then whittle down the other two to destroy them at the same time' strategy but tended to flub it at the end; my winning run ended with me in the center whittling down all four generators to double-digit HP and then rapidly getting rid of them in succession. The final generator could barely get three enemies out before its destruction.


1. Paladin Traducer 2. The War on XMas
3. Fridge Racer 4. Shooter Game
5. Devs Like Waffles 6. Charbile's Lovely Home
7. Ghost's Towns 8. Allu in the Demon's Cave
9. Return 10. Teekee
11. Martin Van Buren, Monster Slayer 12. The Element of Power
13. Lab Rat 14. Painted Space
15. Phlan 16. MrNintendo1's Michael Jackson Dancing
16. Linear Quest II 17. Time Twister

1GAM: January - Discotheque by Taco Bot

This is one of the two(?) games with a time limit; unlike the other one, the reason for the time limit is song-based; the titular disco is playing one last song before closing for the night, and you, the player, can go around and talk to the rest of the patrons. You quickly learn that the main character's a heroin addict, and whose girlfriend has broken up with him because of that; in addition, he's also a habitual liar, if the dialogue choices that veer away from the drug use are to be brought into this. Once the three and change minutes are up, the disco closes, leaving you to get in your car and end the game.

With the topic and overall way this game is set up, pretty much everything lies in the production values and scene-setting: this game largely fails at both. It's the star wars prequel/kirby lands issue: it's hard to take the issues at hand seriously when everyone 1) has cartoonish proportions and 2) is so on the nose with the issue at hand. Three and a half minutes isn't a lot of time, sure, but there could have been slightly more of a leadup to the whole drug use thing.

But you don't even use the whole 3 and a half minutes effectively; if you read at a decent rate, you're going to be done with everything with ample time to spare... and do nothing. Again, maybe this would have worked if the game was much better at the whole tone thing, in which case that last bit of time would have let you wallow in the realization that the main character's a pretty lousy guy - but generic text boxes and dull maptiles don't get you there.

The Fly by Urkelbot666

I feel that I'm doing this thing a bit of a disservice by not having watched the original film, and also doing it a disservice by not actually playing through to the end of a 5-10 minute game, but like Giz I got hit by a script error and called it quits there.

Anyway, here you're Veronica, the former lover of the now beflied Seth Brundle, and your task it to blow up 6 teleporters so that the hulking abomination that was your boyfriend can't push you into one. Luckily for you, each one of them has a switch right next to it that lets you blow it up; unluckily for you, Brundle knows what you're up to and has parked himself in the general vicinity of each one, ready to try and amble into you once you get near the teleporter; luckily for you (again), he's also decided that throwing a loaded shotgun on the floor is a good idea, even if said shotgun can kill him in one shot.
And there's multiples of him, for whatever reason.

Brundle's house is a series of large, empty square rooms, forming a maze of sorts; I have to assume that on higher difficulties there would be maggots crawling around the place, but as-is all they serve as is filler in between the six rooms where stuff actually happens (...and a place for fly swatters to be placed around, I guess). Good job on duplicating the 2600's complete lack of scrolling, though.
I think I got 5 of the teleporters blown up before hitting a script error; some sort of counter for the ones you've blown up would have been nice - certainly more useful than the score.
It's a pretty neat emulation of a 2600 game; not sure if it'd be one of the better ones, given the degree to which the quality of them nosedived towards the end, but there's something here.

Sprout by kylekrack

This is a game chronicling some guy's use of some other guy's water pipe that they never turned off to save themselves from starvation. Apparently the whole lack of usable farmland issue has been a problem for decades, raising the question of how the guy's survived this long, but details.

This is a very small 'use item X at place Y' type game. The game automatically uses the relevant items for you, which I'm a bit divided on; half of the puzzle portion of this genre comes from knowing where to use items, and in a game like this where it's fairly obvious how/where things need to be used such automatic item usage takes away that. Your overall goal becomes to plant four three flower pots - hence the name of the game - with a potato and also 2 other types of seeds; the first's really easy to find, but the other two require a puzzle or two to solve before they pop up. I picked up a lot of the items before seeing the things they were meant to be used on, neutering a lot of the 'ah, so this is what you use on that' feeling, but in a game this short I guess it's unavoidable.

Most of the game (beyond the really neat-looking first screen) takes place in a grid of screens; on each, there's an element of a puzzle; either something that gets you item(s) or something that requires the use of items on them. The player character moves at a nice pace, at a speed of 5 instead of 4, and that works for a game like this. All of the items you get are shown up on the top of the screen; some UI up there would've been nice, but it's not the end of the world. All the items float up there in a pretty neat way (even if it is just the regular move slice command).

There's a really good sense of place I got from this, if that makes any sense; kylekrack's graphic style really plays well with the worn-down nature of the setting, and the single music piece used throughout really make the game feel fairly desolate. Sound effects are the defaults; some are less fitting than others [the one that plays when the key appears being the main offender to me].

This was really, really short - 5 minutes, at most - but it was a very nice 5 minutes.

Lordy, this is the most I've written about something in ages.

You said about what I expected you would, and I respect that. But the comment on the music is wrong. I actually paid a lot of money for the majority of the tracks (well, a lot for a startup Indie dev). I only used a handful of tracks the way you suggested I did.

Either way, I appreciate the play through.

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Cornbread Chemist

After a long delay, Bad Boy is reviewed!

Had no idea what I wanted to say about this so I just pissed something out. You can tell I wasn't feeling good because I didn't make any jokes about the theme song to COPS.


EDIT:

Waffles too

Giz, you perfectly summarized my own feelings about Devs Like Waffles



Hehehe :)

The Noodle Within by Mogri

"MogMoogle: The Noodle Within - A terrible crime rocks a small town and the cops seriously can't figure it out at all. When a mysterious stranger comes to town with a device that allows you to go up inside someone's mind, a rookie cop jumps at the chance to play the hero. Unfortunately he ends up connecting his brain not to a suspect, but to his very own lunch: An over-sized bowl of noodles."

It's not a mysterious stranger who brings the device, I honestly can't remember what the exact reason this funky device had to be used, and the connection happens due to a lot of people saying something noodle-related at once - but it's close enough.

The 'rookie' cop is transported to a world where everyone is various types of pasta; a pig, who had been transported to the same place 20 years ago, seemingly gives him a ticket out of this world: find love. You spend your days working odd jobs for cash, and slowly raise up your 3 main stats (physique, charm, and intellect) while becoming friends (and potentially more) with the inhabitants of the city. It's a really silly spin on the whole romantic genre, and I mean that in the best way possible.

Unfortunately, it's also incredibly buggy. Giz mentioned a whole bunch in his review, but to sum up a few: some of the text spends way more time on screen than it should be spending, time doesn't seem to actually pass when doing jobs, the pastas doesn't recognize their own names (perhaps it's in the pronunciation), and the one time I bought an outfit it didn't cost anything, showed up in the menu, but didn't actually switch to the outfit in question.

I have to assume there's an ending of some description; I did get some actual romance points with the wheel pasta one time, so I was getting somewhere, at the very least. I liked all the random-seeming events; they gave a lot of life to the various types of pasta that popped up. Again, it's a really silly, charming game; unfortunately I have a horrible short-term memory and no experience in the art of romance, so I'd vastly prefer to wait until the bugs are ironed out.

@kylekrack
i like the design of that hero sprite. thanks for showing me what i missed

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reviews have been entertaining. have learned more and will share in form of more reviews. maybe.

what it ultimately comes down to is everyone here, myself included, have missed the point of making games. what brought us to choose this fate.

no, it's not that. don't you dare say it. am looking at you. you know who. and yes, it's a broad statement. we sometimes remember, it sometimes shows.

it's easy to miss and forget about, getting caught up in other things. we've played games we've enjoyed. there are games we want to play, but won't exist unless we push ourselves to make them. games we want to play more of, but there won't be any more unless some indie superstar goes for it. it's something i don't see often. maybe you really want to play these things you make? i understand it's a learning process, most games are contest challenges, experimental, artsy, jokes, prototypes, first-tries, etc.

making something that becomes a huge deal is hard, sure, but also pretty easy if you put your heart and soul into it. what's the last ohr game you've played that had a soul?