Metroidvania

My favorite pick out of the recent Ludum Dare was Broken Cave Robot. You have a limited amount to time to navigate a space closed off by black walls, darkness, and a thatch of illogical spaces that cause it to wrap around. You must, I imagine, get all the jewels, and it's really hard. There's no exit, instead you must master the information pattern of how there is no exit. You have to draw your own map and trace paths, remembering which route was the most efficient. I bet if you get all the jewels the illogical spaces turn into an actual exit, but I haven't been able to pull it off yet.

In this world of alienations, in this age of sorrow, we could call do worse than to call a Glumbuster. Lovingly crafted in Game Maker, this game is the apex of four years of work by an individual whose only goal is to reduce the amount of mental anguish in this world, primarily through the game, and then via donations to a children´s foundation that the game solicits.

I played this thing while listening to Bromst.

Sad Moon Mission is the latest rapid product of the Poppenkast, everyone's favorite launch pad for Scandinavian retro games done in a minimalist style in less than a day. I could have made this in Game Maker in about two hours, it took JW 75 minutes, and yet it's totally dank.

"Too bad we haven't evolved into birds yet..."

I hear that.

Human beings generally assume that other brains just aren't ticking the same home-brewed quality of consciousness that we experience individually. This is true of our perception of animals and other human beings. Maybe some species actually possess acute intelligence, but they just don't speak our language. Like velociraptors -- they're hunters you know.

65,000,001 BC is a platform adventure where you play a raptor with certified ninja skills on a quest to save the world from meteoric doom. Unlike Dino Run it takes an exploratory pace with a dose of tongue-in-cheek writing, allowing you to experience raptor-hood not as a primal hunter racing for survival, but as an intelligent problem-solver saving the world with calculated method. The controls give a sense of Metroid: Redesign garnished with a taste of The Lost Vikings, not quite perfect but smooth enough once you sail through the first areas. The flow is supreme, like a slit eye focusing keenly.

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.