Balloon Man

...another game featuring a dreamscape navigated by floating on a balloon. That game was made at the NYU Game Jam site, which I attended, of course, so naturally that's something I was exposed to. What I was struck by in "Lucid" was the visual metaphor they used-- not just floating on a balloon, but floating on a comic-strip style thought-balloon. Is there something so essentially dreamlike inherent in this shared gameplay of floating-- an activity more passive, perhaps a bit more freeing than flying? There has to be more to these games than mere coincidence.

It feels like both of these games approach the scrolling-shooter genre with a bit more honesty than most mainstream 'shmups, partially because you don't shoot anything-- the player can only really make lateral movement, while the game itself drives them forward, without stopping. You feel less empowered and more fragile from that, your enhanced awareness of your restricted movement, than from your vulnerability to nearly every single on-screen object.

There's a hypnotic quality to a game where you have limited agency and near-limitless weakness-- like an animal on the highway, frozen in the headlights of a speeding car. I only wish the controls were a little more polished to let you savor the mortal uncoiling a little longer.

For my comrades: http://globalgamejam.org/games/lucid-0

Fly Guy anyone?

I find Fly Guy way more enjoyable. This one here is boring to me.

I thought exactly the same. Fly Guy is a classic that should never be forgotten

What a piece of crap. I say that with the most objectivity I can muster.

Anyone else sick of these half-assed Flash things trying to pass off as games/art? Seriously, this is just a waste of time. Who made this, and why? This sucks, and as Bill Hicks put it "This isn't a matter of taste or perception, I can prove this on an Etch-A-Sketch".

Huh. I'd argue that this is actually the least "honest" approach. In a well-designed mainstream shmup, your "empowerment" through shooting is not a lie -- if you're good at it, you will progress further in the game, and if you're not, you won't. But that takes careful balance and testing, and the "Balloon Man" team couldn't do that in 48 hours. So instead they half-assed it, creating obstacles that suggest you could somehow fail at this game, but then making them so easy to avoid that you could probably "win" without touching the mouse more than once. There's no sense of fragility or danger at all.

("Lucid" offers at least the interesting strategic choice of whether to collect the blocks, thus extending the chain connecting you to your balloon and making control more difficult, or to forego them, presumably reducing your "score.")

They should have done what "Fly Guy" does, which is give up on the idea of "losing" entirely, and simply let you float up through the world (a much more "honest" approach). Unfortunately for them, and in contrast to the charming "Fly Guy," that kind of design would only have emphasized how bad their art and design is. Far from being hypnotic, I'm left staring at crudely-drawn houses and the giant blue borders that appear whenever I accidentally mouse too far to the left or the right. I didn't "savor" it.

This one's pretty bad all around.

...but I'm not as enraptured about "FlyGuy" as everyone else is. It's a cute little diversion, but altogether I'd compare it more to "Passage"-- a game-like program that allows you to control an avatar throughout an animated landscape and trigger different responses, but fails to be an actual game itself by incorporating any sense of challenge. "Balloon Man" does have challenge-- I only wish that the control scheme were easier to wrangle. "Lucid" is the better game, in my opinion, not only because they have the activity of collecting bricks, but also because of the more logical controls and the better level design.

Now, I'm really not sure what "FlyGuy" has to do with either of these games, besides the general theme of flying-- in "Balloon Man" and "Lucid", the computer automatically lifts the player, and you can only move left or right, while in "FlyGuy", you control every action. It doesn't share anything in common with 'shmups, where your range of control is limited and momentum constant-- which is the thing I found interesting in these games, your agency restricted by putting you in rails. Perhaps "honesty" wasn't quite the right word to use in regards to 'shmups in general, but the fact of the matter is, I think you could make a great shoot-em-up in which you can't actually shoot anything-- "1942" where you've run out of bullets-- and instead it becomes all about the agility you can exhibit within the controls.

"Balloon Man" and "Lucid" aren't quite there, sure-- but they did a good job of showing what you can do, at least for me.

This is the second 48 hour game in the last 2 days that is completely unplayable on my machine (off with her head being the first). The balloon goes to the left when I start and every now and then with some apparently random act, I can make it move 10px or so to the right. In 5 tries, I managed to reverse direction ONCE and it promptly pinned to the right side.

It's not like I have some whacked out machine config - I work for an interactive ad agency and use flash, silverlight and DHTML on FF, IE, chrome and safari daily.

Fly Guy is elegant, entertaining and ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS.

It's basically an Orisinal game, except the graphics aren't remotely as nice as Orisinal's, so half the joy's gone already.