Tembac

Innovation From The Southern Cone

Type:
Free Download
Developer:
Agustin Perez Fernandez

Coming straight out of Buenos Aires, another indie auteur by the name of Agustin Fernandez a.k.a. "Tembac". Agustin's work encompasses genres, where he tends to take established mechanics and completely reconstructs the dynamic into a new mold. The other half of his work splatters into gleeful experimentation with music and visual stimulus. He aims consistently and squarely for the mid-hanging fruit, and he almost always gets it.

Avant Garde is a shooter similar in aesthetic and one mechanic to another game, Mondrian. This one has a bit more depth, and since Tembac works in Game Maker, it's probably obligatory that he'd do an expressionist shooter.

Legends of the Middle Ages is a puzzle game like Zuma meets Loopz. It's not particularly mind-blowing but has great depth, you'll find yourself drawing geometries tactically in tune with the timing and positioning of the tokens. The game could use a constraint on the number of non-contiguous angles involved in each shape, as it stands you can thread lines and rapidly dispatch tokens. However it's as polished as a casual game that would have sold pretty well in 2004, and it's free.

2 Minute RPG does what it says on the tin. There are no hit points or levels, no THAC0 or random variables. Combat is a moving sword you click at the right time. The name of the game here is in time management, you have an usual formal constrain, only 130 some turns, and certain actions (traversing swamps, exploring caves, fighting bosses) take more than one turn. Since you can't lose, you have nothing to lose, and it becomes a focus on optimization of activity. It doesn't deconstruct the aesthetics and psychological motives much, though the end is kind of poignant when you fail to achieve specific quests, and instead just slay dragons and take their gold.

Las Adventuras de un Pixel is a platformer where you play a pixel roaming a surreal world of cyber-stuffs. It sings of Mark John's Standard Bits meets Catcus' Psychosomnium. It suffers from a few control issues, but is otherwise quite lindo.

Milliones de Sonidos could be described as a dancing game played with a mouse. Randomly generated squares move around a space while your mouse cursor leads a smaller square around. The goal is to duck and jive through the squares, getting as close as possible without actually colliding with them. It's emergent rhythm and it works, the feedback loop in size and points only consummates the crazy loosening up your experience.

Full disclosure: this guy helped me solve some bugs I was experiencing on a Game Maker prototype.


1
2
3
4
5

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

2 Minute RPG

While I think the other games in this collection could use some more polish, 2 Minute RPG caught my attention. Interestingly, it actually doesn't use very many RPG conventions. There isn't any character progression, any story to speak of, and the gold you collect doesn't amount to anything more than a bragging right. I think your original experiences with RPG's make the game enjoyable. Right off of the bat you get to kill dragons (as opposed to the puny vermin of other games), and it's pretty cool to get a couple K's of gold in a couple minutes. You also have the chance to complete one of three quests within the short period of time, so it gives you a sense of accomplishment that usually doesn't come from 120 seconds of gameplay of an RPG. While it's a minor sense of accomplishment, it's worth checking out nonetheless.