Metroidvania

Mark Johns considers this his best work. There's a reason for that. Standard Bits is pure. It's the first kiss under the desk in Kindergarten. It's jumping off a fifty-foot cliff into a river while blown. It's an attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. It's the subtle, asexual infatuation you had with The Secret Of Mana's level designs when you were four.

Space Barnacle was created for the TIGSource B-Game design contest (a reference to B-Movies). The history of the game's production is pretty interesting, you can read about it here.

The first thing I noticed was that this isn't a bad action platformer. Especially its controls: I had just the day before played the demo of Jasper's Journeys, which was very hard for me to control, so this felt wonderful in comparison. Jumping, walking around, shooting, it reacted instantly and felt right. I think that the main pleasure of a lot of games is just controlling the character, in the Nintendo 64 Zelda games I remember just moving Link around slowly, climbing things, and it felt good. Some games just feel good to control for me, and Space Barnacle is one.