I don’t know if this game has a name or anything, but most places I go to just call it the Falling Sand Game. What it is is just a game where different types of a sand-like substance fall from the sky and you can draw other types of materials on the playfield to interact with it.
There’s really not any point to the game, other than to goof around and see how the stuff interacts with each other. Water causes the Plant material to grow, for instance.
Just fooling around with this game is oddly therapeutic. Even if you don’t have a goal in mind, it’s pretty relaxing to just goof around with. Don’t believe me? Go check it out!
I’ve mentioned this before, but most of the games on the Homestarrunner.com site are pretty forgettable, and hardly worth playing, but there are a few gems if you’re willing to look hard enough.
It would take me entirely too long to explain everything about this game but hitting a few highlights: This game is an homage/parody of the 8-bit games of my childhood. Days when games were ludicrously hard, poorly translated, easy to pick up and play, and often loads of fun.
The game is pretty simple, run to the goal, smash everything in your way, encounter a super-tough boss monster, repeat. Some of the stages change it up a little bit, but nothing too hard.
In fact, the only bad thing about this game (other than the unrelenting difficulty) is that the game has been out for a couple of years now and is still unfinished. In fact, it’s just missing the last level, which sticks in my craw… whatever that means.
Adult Swim, the late night ‘mature’ programming block on the Cartoon Network is putting out some… interesting games on their site of late. One such game is the Candy Mountain Massacre.
I’m not going to pretend to understand the story in this game, mostly because I didn’t bother reading it. But the gist of it seems to be that there are some cupcakes that live on Candy Mountain that are being held hostage by the native fauna, and you have to rescue them. At your disposal is a small but effective arsenal of weaponry including a machine gun and a rocket launcher.
The game is a whole lot like Quake, it’s fully 3D and essentially is just you running around and shooting anything that moves, collecting powerups, and trying to dodge incoming fire.
Despite what this game looks like, it contains some (fairly mild) profanity, and makes gratuitous use of blood and gore and is absolutely not, in any way, shape, or form, for the kiddies. If you’d like to get a taste of what the game’s like, there’s a video you can see here, but you’ve been warned.
I’m pretty blown away that this game can be run in your web browser, and if your computer is sufficiently powerful it doesn’t work half-bad. The game is really short, weighing in at a whopping 3 levels, though there is the promise of more levels coming at some point in the future. I found the normal difficulty to be a little more than I could handle, but was able to blow through easy mode without much of a problem. I’m not sure if the difficulty needs some adjustment or if my shooting game skill have deteriorated in the last few years. But I did get about a half-hour of fun out of it before I finished what game is there, which is a lot more than I typically get out of those silly little browser games.
On the surface, Diablo looks to be your typical hack-’n'-slash dungeon crawl. You take your character into a dungeon to kill the evil things within and come back out with loot. However the apparent simplicity is belied by the increasingly complicated story, which you slowly unravel as you plumb the depths of the dungeon.
I’m not going to pretend to fully understand the story of this game, but here are some highlights, which I’ll probably get completely wrong: Demon gets trapped in crystal → Demon wants out and manages to telepathically control priest → Priest kidnaps king’s son → king goes mad with grief → Possessed priest says that demons did it → Grief-addled king sends troops to find kidnapped son → Troops get slaughtered → One of the handful that survives realized that the king is off his nut, and kills him → king turns undead and enslaves the souls of the troops → king’s son becomes new vessel for spirit of lead deamon → then the game starts.
Now I’ll grant you that the bulk of the story happens before the game starts, but you don’t really know about it until you play through it, talk to the townsfolk, and read the books that are scattered about. You start out with the goal of exterminating the evil from the church.
You essentially just walk around the dungeons and look for stuff to kill. Along the way the things you bludgeon to death will drop money, armor, weapons, and miscellaneous items that you collect to use or to take back to town to sell. It’s all pretty straightforward. The only problem you’ll come across is this: about halfway through the game you’ll encounter some enemies that will hit you with a ranged attack (think bow and arrow). You walk toward them to put them in a world of pain, and they walk away from you to get away. Since you can’t speed up to come up with them, and if you’ve picked a melee class (no ranged attacks) like I did my first time through, you end up with a series of incredibly tedious low-speed chases.
Beyond that significant annoyance this game is pretty solid, and the almost completely nonsensical ending sets the stage for the sequel, which we’ll get into another day.
Flicky… Due to its presence on the Sega Smash Pack I assume that it was in at least one arcade at some point, but not in any that I’ve ever been in.
What is it? It’s a game about rescuing birds from cats. There are little yellow birds around the levels, and you have to go collect them. Once you do that they’ll follow you in a line. Lead them to the door and get points. You get more points if you have lots of birdlets following you. Problem is the cats. If the cats touch you, you=dead. If they touch the birdlets, your line is broken, and you have to go rerescue them. It’s almost easier to show how it’s played rather than tell so:
Honestly, I see games like this and I wonder how the industry survived long enough to make anything worth playing.
Yet another game in the After Dark Games collection was Hula Girl, a ridiculously simple game that wasn’t really much of anything. You, as the titular Hula Girl, must travel down a series of platforms that scroll up from the bottom of the screen. If you go off the screen in any direction, you lose a hoop. If you run into your nemesis, you lose a hoop. If you fill up your ‘yukometer’ by running into gross things you lose a hoop (you can run into nice things to empty your meter). Run out of hoops, and it’s game over.
Like most of the games in this collection, this one’s pretty forgettable, and dead easy. You get bonus hoops and nice items to empty your meter so often that even with the worst of reflexes you’ll be playing this one for a while without a whole lot of effort. There are better games in the package to waste time on.
I know I’m going to catch a lot of heat for this, but I’m going to get it out of the way up front. Final Fantasy VII is not the best game ever made. What is? I don’t know. I haven’t played them all, so I don’t feel qualified to make that declaration. What I do feel qualified to say is that this game isn’t the best Final Fantasy title, which would automatically disqualify it from being the best game ever made.
Now, I’m not trying to say that the game is bad, far from it. It’s a solid Final Fantasy experience with a few flaws that still bug me today. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The storyline of this game is ridiculously convoluted. It starts out with your character hired by some rebels to destroy a power reactor. It seems that a giant corporation is powering the technology that most civilized people use with the life force of the planet. Through a series of events we learn that the evil company has done more evil things, including weird experiments on humans with alien DNA. One of the experimentees goes a bit crazy and tries to destroy the world. Our protagonist, also an experimentee and reluctant leader, is inexorably drawn into the conflict and has to (*gasp*) save the world.
Believe me, I’ve only just barely touched the surface of this game. If you decide to play it, I’d recommend that you take notes, but without a large amount of luck (or a walkthrough) you’re going to miss out on a large chunk of the backstory. This is a pretty big flaw. For a game with a story as massively convoluted as this, a great deal of the backstory is only available in optional side quests. In fact, most of these quests are subtly hidden and if you don’t know where to look (or aren’t obsessively scouring the game) there’s a good chance you’re going to miss them. I suppose if you don’t really care about the storyline, or the huge amounts of exposition, or the hows and whys of your mission and the world at large then this won’t bother you much.
So why, then, do people adore this game as much as they do? I’m not sure. It could be that the main character is an angsty loner with an unrequited love. Or it could be that folks just like the guys with huge swords.
Or it could even be that they liked seeing the giant summonable monsters and the new-fangled cutscenes. Or, just maybe, people like confounding overblown storylines, so they can discuss the minutiae and try and unravel the mysteries.
Oh! What game in the Final Fantasy series do I think is better than this one? Final Fantasy 6. But that’s another entry for another day.
With the release of Portal eminent, I took a quick look at the game that spawned the idea, Narbacular Drop. Ridiculous name aside, this game is based on the concept of using portals. You have the ability to create a pair of portals, which can be entered in either direction, to solve the puzzles and move forward. Even though this isn’t much more than a game demo, I had a real hard time wrapping my brain around it. I don’t know that I’m fully able grasp the physics of a portal system just yet. Check out this video to see what I mean:
Yeah, sure, it looks cool. But my brain was fried after about an hour, and I didn’t even get to the end. Can I handle a full game made from the same general idea?
Signs point to ‘no’.
Get it here if you’re brave and you like free things.
Pontifex is can only barely be called a game. There are levels, sure, but that’s about all this thing has in common with a ‘game’.
So what is it? It’s a program for building bridges. You are presented with a river and a budget and have to construct a bridge that will not only span the gap, but also allow a train to be sent across it. Get the train across and you go to the next level.
It looks extremely tedious and boring, I know, but it’s really not. Getting to play with the physics engine and watching the car and the bridge fail in catastrophic new ways not only teaches a bit about bridge architecture (I know! Making a game fun and educational? Devious!) but is endlessly fascinating to watch.
It always amazes me to think what people will play when they’re both very poor and very bored. I was concurrently both of those things growing up, so I played pretty much anything I could get my hands on. Which kind of explains why I ended up playing Street Rod 2.
Street Rod 2 is a game about tricking out and racing muscle cars, two things that I have zero interest in. So you start out with some funds and a newspaper, and you have to use the funds to buy your starter car. Once you get it you tune up the engine, change out parts, and generally get your hands dirty tricking it out. Then, when you have the car done up to your liking, you cruise out to the local burger joint and wait on other folks to arrive. You can then challenge them to races for fun, for money, or for pink slips (pink slip = title to the car).
I futzed around with this game for a long time, but I had no idea what I was doing. I don’t know why one transmission is better than another, I don’t know what the difference between the carburetors is, or why someone would need one muffler over another, so the enjoyment I got out of this game was limited. If you’re a real gear-head, this game might be for you, I suppose.
