Sidescroller

In honor of Leap Day 2008, Anna Anthropy, editor of The Gamer's Quarter and hobbyist game developer, released Mighty Jill Off, a free, old-school, and delightfully subversive little PC game. Jill Off distills its gameplay down to a very simple and enjoyable level; press left and right to walk, press Z to jump, press Z mid-jump to stop your upward-momentum early, and mash Z repeatedly to hover. Jill Off also distills its theme and plot down to a very simple and enjoyable level; the titular chubby little dyke gimp (which I say in the nicest way possible) is climbing to the top of a tower simply because she's a submissive, and her greatest joy in life is when her dominatrix queen MAKES her climb to the top of the tower.

Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) said of Jets'n'Guns, "This game puts forth a level of 'America, Fuck Yeah!' excess that has not been seen since Total Carnage." Patrick Dugan calls it "the riff ripping explosionary wargasm shmup fans have been waiting for."

When you see the timer come on at thirty seconds, instead of the square minute the original gave to escape the doomed space colony, you know you aren't in fucking Kansas anymore. Then you touch down on Zebes, and you're not even in Oz. You're in a crazy, spawling nightmare landscape, a mad alteration of the Super Metroid ROM. This is a Bizarro world my friends, a place where items are strange and newly hidden, where pacing is made, not given, where wall jumps are expected for mere navigation. Then there's all the super-advanced moves, things not even composited from programmed moves of the original, but glitches, glitches, that you must use in order to get an energy tank, or another super missile.

There are plenty of amazing platform shooters out there. Metroid. Gunstar. Contra. None of these games can quite compare to Cave Story, though.

Released in late 2004, Cave Story harkens back to a simpler time. The graphics are 8-bit, and yet they manage to be beautiful. The music consists entirely of chiptunes, and yet it's some of the best composed video game music I've ever listened to. And the gameplay? Fantastic.

If ever a game deserved a second chance, it's Eric Chahi’s Another World. Something of an homage to Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia, at least in terms of similar gameplay and rotoscoped graphics, Another World offers both that game's precise platforming as well as an inviting science fiction landscape. Since its release in 1991 it has survived largely on its reputation as an old favorite of countless designers--but few gamers have heard of this classic Amiga title, and fewer still have played it, largely because of its limited distribution.

Yes, the basics of the gameplay derive from Defender--it's a sidescrolling shmup in which you can 'flip' your ship to move and fire either right or left, and enemies approach from both sides of the screen. But Alien Abduction features trippy late-80s graphics, excellent sound and music, 30 levels, and 3 gameplay modes.

Wik won three awards (including "Best Downloadable Game") at the 2005 Independent Games Festival, and deserved 'em. It's a long, clever little sidescrolling platformer--a genre that once dominated consoles but today is hard to find--with gameplay that centers on Wik's prehensile tongue.

Yes, tongue... Froglike, he can use it to eat bugs and other opponents, and he can use it to to latch onto things and swing by it.

Too bad there aren't more people in the 21st century who care about sidescrolling shooters....

One of the disadvantages in being a developer from a country where there isn't much of a development community and not a lot of connection to the modern market for games, is that you may well spend a lot of time, money, and effort developing a highly-polished game in the style of games you love--and then discover that publishers elsewhere aren't all that interested in your title because, well, it is so retro. Nobody makes them like that any more. And certainly not at this budget. And with these production values.

A sidescroller? Sorta; Steam Brigade's ultimate heritage is in games like Rescue Raiders. You and your opponent have bases at opposite sides of an area; you build units at your base, they move horizontally across the screen (which you have to scroll to see the full play area), and the ultimate objective is to take out the enemy base.

Old school gameplay, in other words but, well, very nicely implemented.

It's hard to evaluate Gumboy Crazy Adventures without comparison to games such as LocoRoco, Gish, Wik, and even Eets, as the similarities are apparent. Nonetheless, it stands on its own as a unique title, a refreshingly challenging yet quirky sidescroller set in a fanciful, fairy-tale world. Crazy Adventures indeed!