IGF

Despite the generic name, S.H.M.U.P. is not a generic shmup. A finalist at the Chinese IGF, it is indeed a horizontally-scrolling shmup, but with some unusual characteristics.

Killing enemies gives you points you can use to upgrade, a common trope, but upgrades persist the next time you play under the same username, even if you've died. Indeed, it's designed so that you will almost certainly lose the first time you play, but that over time (a few hours of gameplay, at any rate) you will build up enough to be able to persist and triumph even through the higher, and more difficult, levels.

Control is entirely with the mouse; your cluster of ships follow the mouse pointer around. Right-click launches missiles, of which you have a limited supply. There's a boss at the end of each level, but these are not all that impressive.

Behind you are a cluster of squares that you can think of as akin either to the cities of Space Invaders or the points you must protect in a tower-defense game. Ships you fail to kill as they scroll by reduce them, and you can lose either by losing them all or losing all your ships.

However, at higher levels, enemies self-organize into impressive opposing formations -- sometimes taking advantage of combined arms, with defensive ships protecting high-fire but more vulnerable ones, sometimes organizing into megaships, in the fashion of amoebas forming into the cells of a multicellular monstrosity.

Gameplay is not, however, particularly challenging from a traditional shmup perspective; at worst, you simply die a lot, build up points to buy upgrades, and eventually triumph even with a fairly minimal twitch-action skill set. There would seem to be a bit of a casual game influence in this.

High scores can be posted to your Twitter feed, something I haven't seen before.

In general, it is neither the most visually beautiful shmup, in a genre known for its weird psychedelic beauty, nor the most challenging game of its type, but there are some interesting design ideas here.

A 2010 IGF finalist for Excellence in Design, Cogs is a combination of sliding puzzles with mechanical puzzles. You know what sliding puzzles are, even if you don't immediately grok the term: There those stupid little things consisting of plastic squares arranged in a grid with one space left out. You slide the squares around to make a picture. Like a 2-D Rubik's cube, with none of the algorithmic complexity of the cube.

Cogs adds mechanical puzzles; some squares have gears on them. Somewhere on the puzzle is a rotating gear, and you have to slide your gears around to do something -- sometimes simply to get a target gear to rotate, sometimes something more complicated, like arranging gears with hammers on them to strike bells in a particular sequence. Sequencing then becomes a major challenge, because you have to arrange the gears in such a way that the hammers are poised to strike at the right moment, and in the right way. In addition, some puzzle are arranged over the surface of a 3D object, which you can rotate with the right mouse button.

Envirobear is funny, and the kind of game we'd definitely have featured even if it weren't an IGF finalist, but the fact that it is an IGF finalist is rather odd; it's amusing, but slight, and surely there are other, better freeware games from 2009. Worth plaything, though -- it's a five-minute game.

Rocketbirds Revolution is a 2010 IGF Finalist in the Audio and Visual Arts category. It has a totally kickass intro Flash sequence of the protagonist (the "Cock of War") in a jetpack dogfight against three penguins, with appropriately Blue Oyster Cultish-music; the game itself is a fairly conventional platform shooter.

Farbs, developer of the must-play ROM Check Fail, brought this game to IGF China and took no prisoners. It was an award well-earned, as this is pure awesomeness distilled into a Flash shmup. ROM Check Fail remixed 8-bit classics in a novel way, and his latest outing also splices in other influences. Captain Forever takes the shmup core and melds it with RPG progression and modular Lego construction. The end result is an interesting beast of a game that places emphasis on player-generated content. Even if you don't dig Asteroids or R-Type you should definitely give this a go.

Osmos is a game that you are designed to like. Sure, it's designed for you to like it, but you are also designed to like this game. And by designed, I mean intentionally by a vengeful Christian god, not in a stochastic evolutionary sense. This game, with its celestial motes harmonizing around the vacuum, slurping each other up, mirrors the precise neurological feedback loops of brain cells congealing electrical signal spikes. The very chemistry of fun is embedded into these floating dynamics, and it's a floating world. You might as well become huge.

You play a mote, an amoeba-type entity, that gets bigger when it contacts smaller entities and smaller when it contacts bigger entities. You can propel yourself by shooting off a tiny portion of your mass with a single mouse-click. Like the cthonic god of Paul Czege's tabletop RPG, Acts of Evil who turns out to be a single powerful microbe predating billions of smaller microbes in antediluvian seas, you are trying to get huge. It's a primal deal, survival of the fittest (or is it fattest? Just going by the current geopolitical benchmark. I mean, what is Thanksgiving about anyway?). Like corporations merging and aquiring until they turn into a bloated parasite like Activision Blizzard, like accounts ripping each other off over a stock exchange, like posturing teenagers drinking beer and licking each others faces, this is evolution or some grotesque approximation. But unlike the cluster-fuck we call reality, this game has charm, it's pure, it's serene. Zen meets billiards meets libido. It's like splitting a doobie with the unbearable lightness of being.

Aesthetically the game is a knock-out, Eddy's background is in "technical art" which is a catch-all to describe everything from light filters to shaders to procedural animation, and this game has all that stuff. I'm a 2d purist and for this scale of a team, you would probably not get such a fine sense of awe, contiguity and most importantly, shininess if they tried to make a 3d take on the same concept. The music tracks all have a kind of groovy Brian Eno feel, like Spore was going for, and its generic qualities are offset by the absolute appropriateness of the genre to this gameplay. One commenter on TIGSource, (which I believe stands for "Trolls In Games Source", Rinku actually banned the word "pretentious" from being posted in comments there) had noted that like the holocaust or the dramas of homosexuals being Oscar bait, amorphous floating blobs with a physics engine are IGF Award Bait. I reckon that troll had a point, and after all, what are trolls for besides brewing regeneration potions from samples of their nanotech-like skin? However I have to defend it, this game is as cohesive as the congealed lipid/water complexes that populate it, its aesthetic is beautifully understated, it's the music of the spheres reconciled with the rhythms of evolutionary biology.

The gameplay in the demo, linked here, gives you the basic gist, the gentle hook, but the variations in the full version are sublime in their nuance. I know this review is getting way to laudatory, so lets break it down in practical terms. You've got three threads of gameplay: ambient settings where you have to puzzle your way from speck-hood to being the biggest, contest levels where you have to rush to become bigger before the already larger motes dominate the field, and physics oriented levels where you have to snipe orbits and other tomfoolery. Each has a different bent and subdivides into mechanical variations, and whats best, the structure is non-linear, so if you're looking for fiero you'll find it, it you want to chillax with some paidic puzzle-solving at a slow pace, as I do, you can just park yourself on that. The alt-Z key allows you to reconfigure the level in a randomized fashion, so maybe we are talking more evolutionary stochasticism here rather than divine intervention, but the replay you get from that is worth the price of admission. My main criticism, and this is a minor one, is that you have to push alt-r to restart or alt-z to scramble, for an otherwise mouse-based game the mapping of complex keyboard inputs to these purposes is unwieldy.

Whether you're a high powered business mote or a lowly student mote, you will enjoy this game and find it soothing from your daily struggles with all the other motes in your local petri dish. And maybe, just maybe, you'll become more humble from the exercise, because after all, does it really matter if you're 100 or 1000 times bigger than the average mote? You're still just an amoeba in the sea.

To an extent Aaaaa! (to give it its short name) is typical of all of Dejobaan's output, such that it might be worth covering all of their games with an article (The Wonderful End of the World has already been mentioned here). This is their latest offering, though, and their slickest.

The game was inspired by a level designer showing the team YouTube videos of base jumping, prompting them to say 'we should totally make a game of that' (this story is told far more amusingly within the demo of the game). The purity of concept comes through in the final game, which is straightforward in its simplicity, takes ten seconds to learn, and provides the awesome rush of one perfect activity, perfectly rendered.

The basic mechanic is that huge cuboids float in the air, spiralling downward toward a platform marked with a circle. You jump off the top cuboid and fall toward the platform, steering with WASD and mouselook. Just before you splatter painfully, you hit space to deploy a parachute, and then glide to a stop.

The freefall aspect of the game is the meat. At intense speeds (and with a kickass soundtrack) you plummet past these huge floating tower blocks, which rush up to meet you. Through fine manipulation you guide yourself safely past, but the thrill comes from upping your score - you want to stay as close to a building as possible whilst falling to gain 'hugs' worth a handful of points each, and to cut close to as many different buildings as possible to gain 'kisses' worth many points. Then, when last you fire your parachute, you need to control the wide turning circle of your glide to hit the landing zone, which throws in a little extra bit of finesse at the end of each level. Later on, new elements are added, like spectators who are either fans or unimpressed townsfolk. You use the left mousebutton to wave to fans and the right to flip off the complainers, for bonus points, but you have to get close enough to do it, and you don't want to hit the wrong one by mistake. Yet more mechanics are introduced after that, but each one is so elegantly simple, and the drip-feed of new stuff so well paced that there is no learning curve at all.

Essentially it's a game of two elements -- twitchy, fine manipulation play; clipping the buildings without breaking your bones, and path finding; plotting the best course to the landing platform to score as high as possible (do I plunge past that huge tower for loads of hugs, or do I cross the void, temporarily missing out on points, in order to tag the other towers for more high scoring kisses?). It's a great gameplay mix, and the execution is just so pure that the whole thing is one long thrill.

Having gone this far, it would be remiss of me not to mention the aesthetic. As you can probably deduce from the title, this is an offbeat game. The visuals are a trippy mix of neon-glaring translucency and drab grey skyscrapers, rushing past at high speed in a way reminiscent of Rez and similar. Then there's the text. There's not a bit of writing in the game which isn't snappy and amusing. The excessive and surreal tone might not please everyone, and I could see how it would put you off with its omnipresence if you were against it, but most will probably find themselves heartily amused. There's also a couple of great bits of sound work. First of all, over the title screen, the 'plot' of the game (yes, it has one, sorta), is explained by a female narrator, as if this were the beginning of a movie. Secondly, and perhaps reason to get the demo even if you own the full game, is a hilarious five minute monologue about the inception of the game, which plays over the 'buy this game' screen. (Said screen makes no effort to sell you on the game, either, but instead imparts odd trivia about mortality rates through history.)

The demo contains enough of the game to let you know exactly what you're getting, as well as to provide at least a couple of hours' play in its own right.

(All of Dejobaan's games seem to fit the same little niche as Aaaaa! and all are worth checking out. The oddball, vaguely quake-like Inago Rage is another to check out.)

Update: Aaaaa! is a 2010 IGF Finalist in the Excellence in Design category.

Amanita Design is well known form its delightful Samorost games, which are free; with Machinarium, they've basically taken the aesthetic of those games, produced a much larger one (about six hours of gameplay), and are offering it for sale, along with a playable Flash demo that's an excellent little game in its own right.

Update: Star Guard is a 2010 IGF finalist in the "excellence in design" category.

"Guide the spaceman through the castle and defeat the wizard" -- can't get any simpler than that. Do you need any more reason to blast your way through nine levels of old-school goodness? Didn't think so. Star Guard is a refined, minimalistic take on those 80s run-and-gun classics; like its predecessors, it focuses solely on fun and hits its mark (in the face with a laser beam, I might add.)

Update: Today I Die is an 2010 IGF finalist in the Nuovo Award category.

Last night I dreamed I was a Stone Age refugee swimming down a river to flee tribal genocide. This game is about the same process, how we reconstruct our daily reality every time we wake. This seemingly abstract idea is made whole with mouse-avoidance puzzles coupled with linguistic puzzles -- which we definitely don´t have enough of. The game is whimsical, a joy, fans of I Wish I Were The Moon will eat it up. However, as good as this is it is a failure.