Fighter

Paolo Pedercini is best known for excellent, and risky games like the McDonald's Video Game, which takes cruel aim at the international fast food purveyor, and Operation Pedopriest, which takes equally cruel aim at the Catholic Church's proclivity for whitewashing the child abuse of some of its prelates. Faith Fighter is his most recent title, and it would be, well, cruel of us not to review it, since we have written so admiringly of his previous efforts.

Faith Fighter is a classic Street Fighter-style game, in which you choose one of several characters and engage in fisticuffs with another, either a computer-controlled character, or another player whacking keys on the other side of the keyboard. As one might expect, each character has special moves that can be triggered by key combinations. Two falls out of three. What you expect, albeit in Flash, and free.

Sumotori Dreams is a) a goofy but minor little game that's fun to watch but not precisely fun to play, b) an impressive physics implementation in very tight form, c) an illustration of why the demoscene is still relevant: Take your pick.

Slamdance Guerilla Games Festival Finalist
IGF Finalist for Design Innovation

One phrase we love to use but don't often get to is: You have never seen a game like this before. Yea Toribash.

In Toribash, you control a jointed 3D model. You select a joint, and tell it how to move. When you've issued your instructions, you advance the game, one or more frames at a time--and when you want to change the motion of your character, you change the forces at various joints.

According to Kim Pallister, Microsoft's casual game guy, Bible Fight is "the most sacrilegious game ever."

It is a straightforward Streetfighter-style game, in which you and your opponent (either controlled by the computer or by someone else whanging on the other side of the keyboard) punch and kick each other until one or the other achieves victory.

As with other games of this style, there are a variety of characters, each of whom has his own combo moves that do extra damage, if you can hit the right key combination quickly enough.

Except that--the characters are Mary, Eve, Jesus, Moses, Noah, and Satan. And the special moves are things like Mary's Halo Toss, and Jesus's Loaves and Fishes.

Here's what's cool about Lugaru:

It features a hand-to-hand combat system controlled by a variety of mouse movements, that feels vastly more like kung-fu combat than any game that requires you to memorize huge lists of "combo" moves.

It's a fully 3D, action-adventure title, developed (originally for the Mac, forsooth) by a two-brother team with basically no funding--and still looks as good as, well, say, a high-end Playstation 1 title, which is a remarkable achievement under the circumstances.

While many games indeed contain sword-wielding characters, very few make even a cursory attempt actually to simulate the dynamics of sword-fighting, nor yet to impart a sense of how it actually feels to engage in swordplay.

That's what Determinance does. True, what it simulates is less the reality of fencing that the sort of over-the-top dramatic swordplay you'd expect in Highlander or a Hong Kong action flick, but hey, that's fun. What it does, and elegantly, is allow you to control sword motions, body positions, and arm positions with nothing but the mouse and its buttons.