PC

It's been a while since we've checked in on Mr. Venbrux, a fan favorite over here at PTT. His latest outing is a portmanteau of two of his previous works; it combines the dreamlike tone of Pazzon with the planetary-hopping gameplay of Frozzd. Since both games accomplished their respective aspects quite well this mash-up title doesn't feel as innovative as it should, but that's forgivable. The aesthetic here is wonderful, with soothing background music and an oblique art style. It's fairly short as well, but may require a second playthrough to reach the proper ending. No overwrought analysis this time around, but if you dug his previous work I'd advise you to check it out.

Semblante is a Global Game Jam entry from a team at the Catholic University of Paraná. As is typical with GGJ games, it's more of a prototype than a complete experience; just a single level.

What's notable about it is the atmospherics; darkness, an eerie soundscape, shadow enemies gliding in the depths. Periodically, there are overhead lights, and when you pass through the light, you glow for a time and can defeat enemies until the glow fades. Jumping atop them helps you not at all. Consequently, navigating the level is a combination of platforming and using the strategically placed lights to advantage.

Also, you can scream with the X key, but I don't believe this has a game effect.

Ostensibly, your character is named Jung, and you are exploring the recesses of your own mind.

You can see how a fuller treatment might be emotionally effective -- and certainly, the complexities of the human mind and its fears is a motif that lends itself to introducing additional gameplay elements over time.

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.

Sidescroller. You are a repulsive drooling green guy, chasing a woman. Cops chase you; space-bar to kill 'em, up-arrow to jump. If they get you, there's a brief interlude telling you you're restrained and jailed for one year, then back to the pursuit.

When you "get" the girl, you're on to the next level. Tougher cops. The woman's baby is now a girl. Difficulty ramps up by level, you're still obsessively chasing the couple. Songs about love and incest. A definite story (with, apparently, multiple endings, although I only played to one). Weird sound effects, difficulty getting to the bullet-hell level (though this is no shmup). Disturbing. Smoothly executed. Hard to play (though the designer claims there's dynamic difficulty adjustment).

This is actually, in its own odd way, quite a polished game. Quite funny, with an uneasy edge to it, like -- wait, that's not actually funny.

Worth a play, yes.

Kino One is a retro 80s arcade-style shmup, vertical-scrolling, with borrowings from the bullet-hell style and R-Type-like bosses. The 80s feel is reinforced by some nice flourishes; the start-game screen shows several arcade cabinets, and in addition to playing Kino One itself, you can select some of the other cabinets and play small Pac-Man and Arkanoid clones. Among the logos displayed during the start-up sequence is a Department of Justice logo along with a warning against drugs -- a common feature of early 80s arcade games.

Mental Repairs, Inc. is a pleasant, occasionally funny graphic adventure implemented in the Wintermute engine. The graphics are quite nicely done, in 3D, which is fairly impressive for a lone-man effort. It helps that the only people you talk to are machines, so the immobility of 3D faces in a fairly low-poly environment isn't a concern here.

It's been awhile since we heard from Agustin Fernandez a.k.a. "Tembac" - he's apparently suffered from what I call "developer's curse" where you spend so much time and energy making games for an employer that you lose all capacity to develop games for yourself, an afflication which only Rod Humble in his Vice Presidential focus could overcome, and that only for a couple of weekends. Since then he's been free, not in the since of "free beer" but in the since of "hey, I'm fucking free!". He brewed up a poppy dish for Gamma IV, and now he gives us the exegesis of 48 hours worth of jamming. Polygamic Pac-Man poses the question: "what if Pac-man was no mere glutton, but a sex fiend?"

Stéphane Bura is an eminent game designer, of both digital and tabletop games, as well as something of a game design theorist. His War and Peace is more of a thought experiment than a game; it is, he proclaims a "one-button Civilization". You make only one decision during play: to toggle between "peace" and "war."

The analogy is inexact; Harold, after all, lives on a blank page and everything in it he draws, including the environments he traverses. In Max and the Magic Marker, the levels of the world are pre-existing, and Max draws only to traverse them. Yet it seems clear where the game's inspiration comes from.

The mechanic of drawing for traversal is no longer novel, though it is fairly recent; but it's still a mechanic that hasn't been deeply explored, and Max comes up with quite a variety of puzzles in its demo. What perhaps is more novel is the children's book feel to the game; in addition to the debt owed Harold and the Purple Crayon, there's also a nod to Where the Wild Things Are. Max's quest is to capture a monster he drew, and when you stop time (with the spacebar) to draw over moving items, a crown appears on Max's head, much like the one the Wild Things use to crown that book's Max.

Xong is an odd and idiosyncratic munge of a Rogue-like, a level-based puzzle game, and an Arkanoid clone. It's Rogue-like, in that it's an ASCII graphics game with procedurally-generated levels, but the actual gameplay is puzzle solving with Breakout-like aspects.