Rhythm

Cactus gets finished making a vegetable smoothie, he then takes out the trash and wraps a Christmas present for his mother. He thinks, "I have half an hour until my girlfriend comes over, what should I do with my time." He decides to surf the blogs where he notices that Kokoromi is having another contest so he checks his watch, shrugs his shoulders and makes a triptastic, shader-loaded, splendiferous little joygasm, composes an audio track for it, sneezes, and then hears his girlfriend buzz the door.

Simply entitled Gamma 4, Cactus's latest is an exercise in baroque minimalism, that is, the game uses one button (per contest rules), is fairly simple to play, and yet the sync of the music and the shiny, electric visual effects make it feel like a parade. Who would have thought that a game about dancing swastikas (originally a symbol of love) would be so upbeat and poppy? The game is being distributed only with donations, he can't release it for free until March per contest rules, so I'll tease you with some details. You have four symmetrical vectors that leave a trace, if they crash into a wall or a red beam they'll all explode, there are shiny boxes that you must collide with, collide with all of them to move to the next level, press space to change the vectors 45 degrees. Basic stuff, and once you play through the levels the game burns pretty fast, but the real sheen here is Cactus's expert use of the GameMaker engine's visual tool-set, the quadrangular symmetry, and of course, the burn effect where past traces layer onto the blackness of the background. This is the style the man is known for, and he delivers once again. For an outside observer, the game appears to be a procedural visualizer, like an interactive version of Electric Sheep, for the player you tend to focus your eye on one quadrant, I focused my eye on the upper-left, which on decompiling the game turned out to be the basis, the rest of the screen is extrapolated procedurally.

This game is worth the price of $whatever-you-want-to-pay. I dontated $5, which is the sweet spot for "premium" iPhone games, according to a lecture I attended, and this should most definitely be ported to iPhone. Cactus envy is trite but that doesn't stop me from feeling it.

Everyday Shooter is the ultimate genre orgy. We see a lot of stuff that subverts or explores the mechanical design space of a specific genre, particularly in the realm of shmups, but this here is the king crab of shoot-em-ups, the Kermit the Frog of shmuppery.

Cactus! Cactus! You wicked alchemist, you mercurial son of a bitch! You're too fucking good!

This is a shmup made in 12 hours that can be played in a minute. It's the latest in a long series of shmups made by this prickly, lone genius that takes a tired genre and deconstructs it with the delicate care of a surgeon back by generous morphine. Have you ever tried morphine? I worked at a hospital one summer... that first minute, its like this game.

Student Showcase Winner, 2007 Independent Games Festival

In Opera Slinger, you sing opera--into a microphone. It's a quasi-beat matching game, but your score depends on hitting the right notes as well as singing them at the right times; before you play, you choose the male (tenor) or female (alto) role. Your "opponent" is controlled by the AI, and the game's conceit is that you are competing with him or her for the regard and adoration of the audience--which changes more in your direction the more accurately you sing.

2005 IGF Winner for Excellence in Audio

Global Defense Network is, uh, a rhythm shooter. If that's possible. That is, as fast-paced electronic music plays, you shoot various objects whizzing about the screen--as you might in a shooting gallery, except that there are a wide variety of potential targets that behave quite differently. As you play, you unlock new levels, with new music, new targets, and new weapons for you to use.