Indie Games - Mostly Reward, A Little Regret

I've been playing and enjoying a few independent titles over the last month or so, and I've had the chance to talk about them a bit on podcasts and with friends but I really haven't made any mention of them here, so that ought to change.  I'm not going to try to "review" any of these, as I don't feel I've put enough time into them for that, but (with one partial exception which I'll explain when I come to it) I feel confident in saying that I feel I've gotten my money's worth out of all of them, and if they sound interesting to you I wouldn't hesitate to recommend trying them out - especially if there's a free demo, of course.

Plain Sight

This one was recommended to me by Chris Remo of the Idle Thumbs podcast via his Twitter feed, and I'm glad it was because I probably wouldn't have given it a look if all I'd had to go on was the screenshots on Steam.

It's a game about robot ninjas.  Specifically, it's a game about robot ninjas in space.  Very specifically, it's a game about kamikaze robot ninjas in space.  If you're somehow still not sold on the premise, the basics are these:  It controls like Mario Galaxy, except that you can cling to walls and you target-lock your enemies to rush at them in any direction, including through the air.

The WASD keys and the spacebar control your running around and jumping, while the left mouse button locks onto a target and then charges and releases an attack.  Right mouse button blocks.  Shift makes you drop quickly towards the nearest solid surface.  There's a little more, but that's the core.  Every time you get a kill, you gather energy.  The energy makes you physically larger, and hence an easier target, but it also allows you to make a bigger explosion when you self-destruct, potentially taking out more opponents.

The hook is, you can only score points by self-destructing, so if someone kills you before you do that, that energy goes to waste.  It's frantic, and silly, and I've had a blast with it in time I've given it.  If you'd like to see what it looks like in motion, here's a gameplay video (it starts with a tutorial, skip ahead to about 3:00 for more gameplay footage):

Sadly there's still no demo yet as far as I know, but the $10 asking price is very reasonable, and if you have 3 friends who are interested, they'll sell you 4 for $30.  You should be aware that while it does have a practice mode, it's definitely designed to be a multiplayer experience;  there's no single-player campaign or anything like that.

Flotilla

I went into this one not knowing whether I would end up giving credit for it to the Immortal Machines podcast I co-host, or blaming them, since I picked it up and played it entirely to be able to talk about it during our most recent, space-themed episode.  Happily, it's an excellent title I'm glad to own, so credit it is.

Years ago, I bought a game called Strange Adventures in Infinite Space.  (It appears that the game is actually now free to download at that link, if you decide after reading about it that you'd like to try it for yourself.)  SAIS put you in the role of a starship captain, and gave you an overhead map of a randomized galaxy, and a set number of turns in which to explore it.  On your adventures, you would encounter aliens both helpful and hostile, find upgrades for your ship, trade in mysterious cargo, and, if you were very lucky, achieve fame and fortune.  It was a rather simple formula, and designed to be played quickly and repeatedly - good for a lunch hour or a lazy evening chasing your previous high score.

Flotilla is cast from the same mold, but places an emphasis on battle that SAIS didn't have, using a fully 3D combat engine that resembles nothing so much as a turn-based Homeworld, which for many will be a happy reference indeed.  The combat is simple in design - attack from below and behind, defend from the front whenever possible - but satisfyingly deep in execution, and like the aforementioned SAIS, the whole thing is built to be played quickly and often.  The randomized adventure map has less options than my memory tells me the older game had, but the much more fleshed out combat makes up for it in my mind.  Flotilla has a demo, so you've got no reason not to give it a try, if it looks or sounds appealing.

Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West

Sadly, this is the "regret" part of the post, but not because I don't enjoy the game.  On the contrary, the time I've spent actually playing Lead and Gold has been extremely fun.  I love westerns in general as a rule - it's a terribly underused genre in videogames - and this one captures a lot of the atmosphere very well.  No, the problems here aren't with theme or gameplay, so let me talk about those a bit before I get to complaining.

Lead and Gold plays out a little bit like a 3rd person Team Fortress 2 in the Old West.  Players choose from four classes - gunslinger, trapper, deputy, and "blaster" - each with its own weapons loadout and skill set.  The classic team split of red vs. blue takes place, and then the teams set to shootin' it out through various game modes.  As you'd expect, there are deathmatch maps, maps that amount to being capture the flag (robbing sacks of gold), and objective-based maps where one team defends points on the map and the other assaults them.  All basic - though enjoyable - stuff.

Where the game differentiates itself is in what it calls "synergies" - in addition to having their own weapons and skills, each class grants a specific bonus to their teammates as long as they stick together.  The gunslinger, who can "fan" his pistol for very rapid shots, makes his teammates more accurate.  The trapper (read: sniper) increases their percentage chance of a critical hit.  The deputy can "mark" enemies for his teammates to see even through walls, and grants his teammates' weapons extra damage. And the "blaster" can chuck explosives and increases the defense of his nearby comrades.  It's a subtle system, but like most good game design choices it rewards the player for playing the game well.  Stick together and divide up the class roles logically, and you'll have a huge advantage over a team made of all snipers who just find a camping spot and try to pick you off.

So, a good theme, pretty graphics, solid gameplay and a bunch of game modes - what's not to like?  That sadly, almost nobody is playing it.  Lead and Gold released without the support for dedicated servers (a weakness not shared by Plain Sight, which I never had any trouble finding opponents in), and it seems to have absolutely killed the community.  I tried to play a couple of nights ago and according to the server browser, 20 people were playing.  Split across 3 servers.  I tried to join one and couldn't connect, then played a couple rounds on another before the hosting player quit and we all got dumped.  After that there were less than 10 people playing, and I gave up.

Browsing the Steam forums for Lead and Gold reveals that pretty much everyone is complaining about the same thing - the peer to peer hosting system is so unreliable that nobody wants to play the game.  The developer, Fatshark, claims that dedicated servers are in testing and should be released "soon", so hopefully the situation will improve, maybe with a nice Steam sale and a demo to drive interest levels back up once things are fixed.  For now, though, I can't in good conscience recommend picking this up.  Which makes me sad, because it's really a neat game at a good price, if only you could play it.  If things change in the future, I'll make a post here saying so.

That's it for now.  There's a game called Frozen Synapse that I'm itching to try, but I haven't yet.  If I get the chance to, odds are I'll be talking about that soon.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 41: Action Fist

For this week's installment of Free and Worth Every Penny, we have something of a throwback, and I don't think I'll have to sell you too hard on it, because it kind of sells itself.  It's the story of a man who has his scarf stolen.  Also his girl and his dog, but that's incidental;  nobody ever - ever - gets away with stealing a man's scarf.  This is the story of...

Action Fist is everything you love - and hate - about classic 8- and 16-bit scrolling shooters.  It's swarms of enemies pouring in from all directions.  It's switching weapons on the fly and powering them up to be unreasonable killing machines.  It's a vehicle level where you somehow stand up on the vehicle while still driving it.  It's bosses so big they can't fit on screen.  It's climbing up the side of a rocket, while that rocket flies into space.  It's completely absurd and completely great.  Allow me to step back for a moment and let the game speak for itself:

Yeah.  It's like that.

Developer Beau Blythe of Teknopants.com has added some refinements to the traditional formula, or in some cases culled from other genres and later games to enhance the experience.  A wall jump and double jump assist your platforming escapades, while color-coded enemies match up to color-coded weapons that will do more damage to them.  There are three colors, and you can carry only two weapons, so you'll have to make decisions on the fly as to which ones will help you most.

For the most part, though, the mechanics are exactly what you expect them to be if you grew up on Contra, Mega Man, and Metal Slug.  Where the game earns its place among those giants, in my mind, is in the aesthetics.  Every level is lovingly crafted and the backgrounds, while simple, differentiate the levels nicely.  Animations are well done, with some excellent explosions, especially in the memorable boss battles, where truly massive creatures and machines test your pattern-matching and precision.  And the entire experience is supplemented with excellent music by Beau's brother Austin;  I felt right at home wasting baddies to the retro score the whole time.

And make no mistake, it's not a short experience.  While not approaching the depth or breadth of something like Cave Story, Action Fist still ran quite a bit longer than I expected it to.  The length isn't oppressive, though, as each level is split up generously into checkpoints that prevent you having to replay too much of the level when you die (and oh, will you ever die).  Pretty much every level also has at least one "Oh $#!t" moment where you simply rush forward praying for that next checkpoint, especially in the final levels, but with only a few exceptions, they never felt too unfair.

This isn't the largest boss by a long shot.

I should warn you that there were occasional moments where the game got controller-smashingly difficult - I won't lie, the final boss nearly had me rage-quitting several times before I powered my way through.  (You remember Dr. Wily, right?  How every time he's dead, he's not dead?  It's one of those.)  But the charming ending and credits sequence were suitable rewards for my efforts, and I certainly came away from the whole thing happy that I spent the time.  Multiple difficulty levels allow you to turn down the heat, too, if things get too rough.  The game also features a co-op mode which sadly I didn't get to try, but if any of you do, please chime in and let me know how it is.  I have to imagine it only gets better when shared.  Which, of course, is why I'm sharing it with you.

Action Fist is...

• unashamedly, gloriously over the top.
• filled with affection for the side-scrolling action genre.
• one of the most technically competent freeware games of its sort I've played in a long time.
• a game you should not miss.

The game is Windows only, under 10MB in size, and can be downloaded right over here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.

The Promised PAX Wrap-Up Post.

Sorry it's more than a little late, I suppose it got lost in the shuffle a bit when I got back from Boston.  To recap the stuff that's already out there in case you missed it (or in case I didn't link it yet, which is true for a couple of these things):

• Here's a preview of Civilization V  that I wrote after getting a closed-door demo.
• I also wrote a piece about InstantAction.com, and the pretty cool direction they're trying to take web-based gaming.
• I recorded two miniature podcast episodes with the guys from Immortal Machines; they can be listened to here and here.
• I talked to Realtime Worlds about their upcoming multiplayer game APB - that video is here.  I'm also now in that beta, though the NDA prevents me from saying anything else about it at the moment.
• We got sort of ambushed by a very friendly lady from Becker College, and talked to them about learning to make videogames, though the audio for that turned out... not good.
• If you didn't read it already, please take the time to read about Of Dice And Men, which was for me the best surprise of the show.

Video of the interviews I did with Firaxis about Civ V and with InstantAction are also at the above links, if you're interested.  I promised to mention something I left out when writing up the Civ V preview:  the game will now include AI-controlled "city states", essentially NPC nations that never grow beyond the size of a city and its surrounding areas.  These city-states can be allied with, warred with, protected, abandoned to enemies, conquered, etc, and while unfortunately nothing much was shown about them in the demo (part of the reason I left it out), it sounds like a very cool addition to the gameplay.

Beyond that... well, to be perfectly honest there isn't that much to say.  If you don't feel like listening to the podcast episodes, they can be summed up by saying that nVidia's 3D tech really failed to impress me, as did ATI's 6-monitor "eyeFinity" setup (six monitors? ...seriously?), and that while indie games had a very respectable showing on the floor (I'm looking forward to playing more of Joe Danger, Shank, Monday Night Combat, and Slam Bolt Scrappers), major publishers really weren't there with a significant presence, especially compared to what I saw at PAX in Seattle.  Blizzard and Nintendo essentially didn't show up at all (Nintendo had a phone booth-sized display with a few DSi's), and a lot of other publishers were there with games that were already released or the demos of which we'd already played.  The only big-name unreleased game I played was Mafia II, and while I'll give it another chance later, it didn't demo very well on the show floor at all.

Our interview with Perfect World unfortunately never happened - essentially, they bailed on us - and the crowds prohibited me from checking out Red Dead Redemption and Crackdown 2, both of which I was curious about.  Honestly, I have to echo the criticism of a lot of other folks who have written about it and say that the size of the venue was a problem.  There was essentially no chance of getting into a popular panel unless you were willing to wait several hours in line, and the whole thing in general just felt... well, rushed.  That might have had something to do with suddenly having responsibilities there, though, as opposed to just being a gamer at PAX.  I'm told they'll be moving to a larger space next year.

I don't want to paint it as a negative experience on the whole;  it absolutely wasn't.  In addition to the stuff I wrote about and talked about above, I got to meet and chat briefly with Jeff Green, whose GFW Radio podcast was one of the shows that got me wanting to start podcasting and whose signed poster from their live "reunion show" at last year's PAX I have up on my wall.

That guy on the left? He's a pretty cool guy. Yes, I'm a nerd.

I also got to talk with Luis Gigliotti - an executive producer at THQ who just released Metro 2033 - about what it was like to work so closely with Dmitry Glukhovsky, upon whose wildly popular Russian novel the game is based.  That was a really great chat and I'm hoping I can get him on the podcast for an interview sometime in the future.  The American Classic Arcade Museum had a room set up on the top floor with a bunch of classic arcade cabinets that was really fun to walk through, and right next door to that PAX had its traditional "console classics" room, where I got to play a few rounds of SNES Super Mario Kart with friends I almost never get to see.

So yeah, minor complaints and stolen iPhone notwithstanding, it was a great trip, and if you're a gamer that's never been to PAX, you should make a point to go.  I have little doubt that they'll fix up some of the quirks that arose during their first show in Boston next year, and if you can make it to Seattle, obviously that one's been running smoothly for years and I'm sure will continue to do so.  PAX really is like nothing else I've been to, and I certainly intend to go again, though I suspect cost will restrict me to the East Coast version, at least for the near future.

Oh, and speaking of cost, I did replace my iPhone.  Which is really not cheap to do at all.  Maybe I'll write about some iPhone games next, and see if that makes me feel any better about it.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 39: Tiny Castle

It's going to be a quick hit this week, guys, because I'm being run a little bit ragged at work and while I didn't want to leave you hanging, I also didn't have time to dig into anything terribly epic.  Lucky for me, though, I'm not being run as ragged as the knight you'll be controlling in this installment of Free and Worth Every Penny.  Ohhhhhh no.  That guy is having a really bad day.

Tiny Castle is a flash game by Nitrome, known for their pixel art and charmingly retro game design.  Their work shows up over on Bytejacker on a regular basis (FYI, if you don't watch Bytejacker... you should watch Bytejacker), and with good reason:  they make games that are usually easy to get into while providing a pretty high entertainment return on your time investment.

You'll take charge of a miniature knight, tasked with saving a damsel in distress from her imprisonment...  or at least, that's how it's presented to you.  She's trapped in a one-screen-high castle, and you need to make it to the top...  or at least, that's how it's presented to you.  I'm sure you're getting the idea:  Tiny Castle is all about turning the tables on you as you play, and they do a good job of re-using the map in clever ways to keep you on your toes as you fight and puzzle your way through.  It isn't a terribly long game, but it will probably take you longer than you initially assume it will based on your first few minutes with it.

This castle? It is full of lies.

Controls are tight and simple:  arrow keys to move and jump, spacebar to swing your sword around.  Enemies move based on simple patterns and frequently drop health refills when killed, so excessive combat difficulty shouldn't be a problem.  What was a problem for me was a little too much emphasis on making the player guess which action would allow them to proceed;  there were a couple of times when I definitely felt like Nitrome was padding the gameplay length by making me pick one of multiple directions to go with no guidance, and making me trek all the way back across the map if I guessed wrong.

In the end, though, that didn't keep me from finishing the game, and I'm glad it didn't.  There's a charming atmosphere to the whole thing, with enjoyable background music (I have it going in the background while I write this, in fact) and some really excellent, detailed animation that was a pleasure to watch while I played.  Having to figure the castle out anew each time it changed was a fun challenge, and the payoff at the end, while not exactly mind-blowing, at least earned the grin and chuckle that it was going for.

Tiny Castle is...

• perfectly suited to being a webgame;  plays well in a small box, done within a lunch hour.
• full of some really top-notch pixel art and animation.
• occasionally frustrating in a bad way, but never for long.
• ultimately a forgettable diversion, but a pleasant one.

It'll play anywhere Flash does (sorry, new iPad owners, but it wouldn't really work on a touch screen anyhow), and you can check it out right over here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 38: Devil's Tuning Fork

As a child, I was terrified of the dark.  This was a deeply serious affair for me, one that required a couple sessions with a child psychologist to work out;  for awhile, I absolutely could not be in a place without light without starting to panic.  My case was extreme, perhaps, but for most children some level of fear of the dark is common.  It is, after all, our first and most prevalent encounter with the unknown.  As soon as we learn that "if I can't see it, it can't see me" isn't true, we begin to fear that which we cannot see.

In this week's installment of Free and Worth Every Penny, you cannot see anything.  At all.  Ever.

But you can hear.

I should explain a bit more.  Created over the course of six months by the DePaul Game Elites team from DePaul University's GameDev program, Devil's Tuning Fork was one of the winners of the 2010 IGF Student Showcase and explores "a new mode of perception through sound visualization."  The screen is not dark the entire time you're playing Devil's Tuning Fork, though most of it is dark an uncomfortable amount of the time.  The game's conceit is that your character has been rendered blind, and can only navigate through echolocation, sending out sound waves to find the boundaries and objects of his environment.  The visual representation is quite similar to that in Daredevil, if you were unfortunate enough to have seen that movie.  It's probably easier to show than to describe:

The very minimalist and somewhat contrived plot of the game tells you that children everywhere are falling into comas, their minds being held captive by some nefarious force, and that as one of these children you must rescue the others by collecting stuffed animals scattered around treacherous rooms.  These details serve very well to provide atmosphere (the voiceover work is appropriately creepy, and establishing your character as a child works the aforementioned fear of the dark angle quite well), but from a gameplay standpoint the proposition is simple:  You are trapped.  Escape.

Devil's Tuning Fork will probably remind you of Portal - or at least, it reminded me of Portal.  Luckily, the similarities felt like a happy coincidence rather than a heavy-handed reference or a lack of conceptual originality.  In both games, you must navigate deadly environments.  In both games, you have only a non-violent tool with which to do so (though in Portal the tool was occasionally used for violence, which does not happen here).  Both are puzzle games at their core, though they live in a first-person platformer shell.  Devil's Tuning Fork never plays for laughs, and has a much more consistently disquieting tone, but the gameplay is definitely cast from the same mold.

On that point, the mechanics of the Tuning Fork are not quite as mind-bending as those of the portal gun, but yield a surprisingly wide range of functions in the game.  The "primary fire", so to speak, sends out a sound wave in all directions, briefly illuminating your surroundings.  The right mouse button will emit a lower frequency sound, primarily useful for revealing the floor immediately around you - it can identify weakened floor areas which need to be avoided.  By charging up and then releasing a sound wave you concentrate its aim, directing it at a point to activate triggers in the room - ringing bells, reflecting sound off a mirror, etc.  You'll switch between these three functions constantly, monitoring and conquering your environment, but the Fork cannot be used indefinitely, and its recharge meter keeps you from ever escaping a distinct feeling of vulnerability.

Don't look d--too late, you looked down.

It's a very strange kind of tension, playing Devil's Tuning Fork - the game has no enemies, so nothing is coming for you if you just stand still.  But every step feels fraught with peril to some degree, because you only see your surroundings in flashes.  I became competent at the controls quickly, and you probably will too, but I never felt comfortable in the game.  I'm pretty sure I was never supposed to.

There are a couple of problems.  The movement controls occasionally feel a bit off, like I'm not sure how fast I can start or stop, which made getting on and off moving platforms a harrowing experience, especially when I couldn't see what I was doing all the time.  And the puzzles got a little less satisfying as I neared the end of the game;  there are really only a couple of different types, and it becomes a bit of a "spot the trigger" hunt in the last level.  Without the addition of more gameplay mechanics, I was ready for it to be over when it was.

But I'm still extremely glad I downloaded the game, and I strongly encourage you to do so as well.  If you were one of the people who tried Narbacular Drop before it became Portal and thought, "Man, these guys might really be on to something," you may find yourself with similar thoughts here.  The last time I saw a first person puzzler this refreshingly different was when The Unfinished Swan was making its way around the internet back in 2008, and...  well, that hasn't come out yet.  This has.

Devil's Tuning Fork is...

• a captivating premise, well executed.
• more than a little unsettling.
• about the right length, for what it has to offer.
• at least in some respects, something genuinely new.  How often do we get that?

The game is Windows only, and the download is just under 30MB.  Snag it here.  If you're interested in reading about how they made it, the team recently did a postmortem with GameCareerGuide.com which you can read here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there.