Okay so the title of the review is a bit antagonistic.  At least, it might seem that way to the game’s developer.  I might normally be inclined to change it to put the most positive spin on the game, but this is exactly how I felt while playing the game.  I want to let you know up front that I only played it for 8 or more hours but didn’t complete it.  In B.E.E.P. by Big Fat Alien Games, you play a little robot named B.E.E.P. which stands for Built Exploration Extra-solar Planets.  Actually you play a bunch of them as you undoubtedly will die many, many times.  The game is essentially a physics-based puzzle-platformer (say that “five-times-fast”).  If this is your cup-of-tea then read on.

So the story is basically in the future the earth sends out un-manned exploratory vessels, to harvest some anti-matter (or something like that).  They fill these ships with BEEP’s these little robots that can carry stuff with a anti-grav gun, has thrusters to help him jump, and even has a refillable weapon to defend themselves.  You have to use all of these to collect antimatter in each planet.

The main problem with this game to me is some pieces of anti-matter are in such a difficult place that it takes me hours to get to it.  Some places you have to travel down one path, on one side, move the nugget out of the way, and then go all the way back (of which there are hazards along the way) to retrieve it.  Then is the amount of checkpoints.  Too few for me.  I might get to the anti-matter move it where it’s supposed to go, and then get almost all the way back and die on one difficult part.  Also the few jumping puzzles that this game has are also frustrating.  Since you use your thrusters to sort of slow your descent in your jumps you tend to over-jump or under-jump.  There was also some pieces of antimatter which would be in a really difficult to reach place, where you might have to build some advanced ladder of objects in the game in order to reach it, but since it was in water or on some odd angle you’d keep falling and it would take a couple of hours just to reach it even if you weren’t dying all the time.  This makes it a challenge for me to want to finish this game.

Also frustrating was the reload system.  When you used up all your bullets you have to right click on the robot to reload, which is problematic when you’re trying to stop from getting shot.  There are other things which give me a pass on this game.  For instance one of the selling points was that you could explore the galaxy by moving your little ship around a map of planets (the over-world of the game).  Some of the levels are locked which suggested that you could go elsewhere, complete some other part of the game and come back once you’ve unlocked the levels.  Unfortunately, you basically have to unlock the levels in order.  (Each planet is divided into two sets of levels, so you have to basically find all nuggets in one set of levels before getting to the other half of the planet, before you can go to any other planets).  This is not really a problem other than how it’s presented.  You think you can play in a more non-linear fashion, but really it doesn’t work out that way.  Also a minor niggle is the fact you have to install Desura to play the game, and have to run it from Desura.  Desura, if you don’t know, is a downloader/game manager sort of like STEAM.

A small note about the graphics.  A review of the game I read claimed the graphics are like flash-game graphics.  To this I say for the most part that’s true, except it’s higher resolution than most vector-based flash games.  The graphics are adequate but they’re nothing special.  They don’t really pop, and the color scheme makes it look a little bit more bland.

The music, and sound are “ok”.  Which is probably the best thing I can say about this game.

If you like hair-pulling I would say play it, otherwise pass.

You can try the demo here.

The Snakes of Avalon has been described as weird.  Is it weird?  Well, yes — and no.  In Snakes you play a guy who is perpetually drunk.  What happens along the way may be weird by normal standards but in an alcohol-induced daze, not so much.  There’s a murder plot, or maybe there’s not.  You’ll have to decide…

In The Snakes of Avalon you play a man who is so drunk that even the bartender doesn’t like him (even if he is his best customer).  You think you overhear a a man and a woman plotting the murder of the woman’s husband in one of your drunken stupors.  You also feel it’s necessary to prevent this.  At one level there is the main plot of trying to thwart the murder, and then you have this other level, which has something to do with your parents. I won’t mention anymore about the subplot so you can experience it for yourself, but I will tell you it does involve a time machine.  The two stories are along the same lines and that makes it somewhat interesting.

The weirdness comes from all the different, seemingly illogical elements that come into play.  You’ve got good and bad consciences in the form of a moose-head and a talking fish, a zombie-skeleton moose, a time machine, and a bizarre puzzle involving light bulbs.  It’s pure madness, but there is a method to the madness within the story.  Yet it all fits because it’s all within the main characters imagination while drunk.  It just fits rather oddly. 

The game-play is pretty standard point-and-click fare and it’s pretty easy for anyone to get around the interface. You interact by left clicking, and examine items by right clicking. In order to get around “Ye Olde Pixel Hunt” the cursor will highlight when it’s over an object that can be interacted with.

The visuals in this drunken diversion look like they were drawn by some deranged 10-year-old. Yet, the perspective-poor backgrounds, and the limited animations, coupled with the idea of being so drunk you hallucinate promotes a certain synergy that wouldn’t exist in other games with these kinds of visuals. The crude graphics just work.

The audio is a bit of a mixed bag.  I enjoyed the music, and at times didn’t even notice it. Other times I remember thinking that this kind of game shouldn’t have quality music like this.  In fact, this is a good sign of the quality of the music since I tend to mostly remember the negative things about games rather than the positive ones.  It seemed to fit the game-play.  The sound effects were adequate as I don’t remember anything particularly noticeable or jarring  about them.  The voice acting was poor and sounded as if the developers were doing the voices themselves.  Luckily there wasn’t much voice acting to ruin an otherwise interesting game.

I think you should give this a shot because I believe the developer is trying to advance the storytelling aspects of the adventure game genre by layering two different stories that happen to co-exist quite nicely.  This game is available for Windows for free.  You can also download the soundtrack if you like it.

You can find it here – Snakes of Avalon in the AGS Archives

You can now play Minerbot, where your goal is to dig for ore, the rarer the ore, the higher the score.

Play it here.

I was going to write my normal review, that is what the game is about and whether or not I liked it. You know the obligatory “what’s in the box” stuff, which is what I normally do. And in fact I will do it this time as well, however, after hearing and reading a few things I decided to maybe provide a less shallow review. I decided this because of what the developer is trying to do. This week’s review is for Icarus, a side-scrolling platform role-playing game. The developer Justin Scott wanted to present a role-playing experience that is told through game play “instead of despite it”. Did he succeed? Well I will attempt to tell you that, even though my experience with RPGs are rather small. I want to tell you this up front so you can judge it based on your own experiences. I’m more of the adventure game persuasion (notably graphic adventures of the 80′s and early 90′s.) However adventure games share some aspects with RPGs which allows me to comment a bit. If this little fact doesn’t throw you off, then read on…

Click on any thumbnail to see the full sized version.

From my experience role-playing games share one main aspect with adventure games that is different from most other genres, and that is story. Sure we’ve seen in the last decade hybrids, and even first-person shooters that have a nice story component, but they aren’t strictly necessary to other genres. Quite the opposite for RPGs and adventures. You’re basically playing to tell a story. Typically RPG’s have a main quest and several side quests and maybe multiple endings. Most of the stories are generally told through dialog trees, especially the Japanese ones. (Although you can take that statement with a grain of salt because I have not played many Japanese rpgs.) Even adventure games are plagued with dialog tree puzzles. Some of the extraordinarily long, and some humorous additions, like The Secret of Monkey Island’s “Insult Sword Fighting”. Some people may like dialog trees, but I think the developer of Icarus (the game I’m reviewing today) not so much. His goal was to replace dialog trees with game play. And generally he has succeeded.

“Taking the role of a lowly beggar, Icarus, as he finds himself put in a position of great power and responsibility.” The story of Icarus is about the illegitimate son of a Duke, who is a beggar because of this fact. Icarus is the Duke’s only son. However because there are armies storming the kingdom the Duke has no choice but to send Icarus to the King to get some military assistance. So basically the game is about this, but is told through the game. In one level you start out by begging (by simply moving left or right and waiting in front of some characters). Then Icarus is summoned and he must go out on a quest to find an army. Here’s where the game play gets interesting. You can’t fight, but you have a guardian named Garret who will do the fighting for you. Essentially you hit a button to activate fighting mode and non-fighting mode. But there’s also another path you can take and that is, that Icarus can do some digging, so you can avoid baddies entirely if you so choose.

Your choices affect what the endings are, but I won’t place any spoilers here. Suffice it to say it’s a fun little game, and I do mean little. You can finish a game in about 15 minutes. He says 30 minutes of game play somewhere on his site but I played several times in the space of about that long. It’s very interesting how Garrett reacts when you kill regular citizens as in one part of the game you have a choice to go two ways. One way is to get coins to pay a ferry, which are only obtained by killing people (bad guys or good guys). The other is not to get enough coins for the ferry and having to go through the swamps. So if you end up killing regular citizens then Garret states how sad it is that you killed so many people. I want to give a small note here to the fact though, that I don’t remember what the result is of killing citizens other than the short cut-scene where Garret laments the fact. In fact this is going to segue into what’s wrong with this game. Actually it’s not so much what’s wrong with it, as what’s incomplete about it. The game is somewhat amusing, and I don’t really see anything actually wrong.

So basically the bad is that it’s short… VERY SHORT. Like I said about 10-15 minutes of game play on the story mode. And there isn’t much variation to maybe justify finding all the endings. I thought the game was kind of interesting, but not fully realized. He should have put in more levels that directly branch off based on your actions. Right now the only two things you could do was either collect the coins to ride the ferry, or not collect enough and have to go through the wetlands. Also there was one side quest where I rescued some kid and got a coin. Maybe you have more in the game I just don’t know about, but for me there’s not enough variation to justify playing it over and over again. In fact eventually it will kind of get on your nerves, not the game itself, but the music. Before you think I’m bashing the music, I have to say the music is pretty well done chip-sounding music, as this is presented as a sort of retro-based game. But there is no time when the music stops, which is what kind of gets on your nerves if you play through more than once. I think it needed some breaks, but overall the music is done well enough. The graphics look almost programmer-ish that is they’re not that great, however the low-res style that’s used kind of masks this to a certain extent. The controls are very easy to use so there’s no complaints about the interface. There used to be no demo and the developer wanted you to pay for it, however after some advice from various sources he agreed to put in a demo. A quick note that there is an arcade mode which may extend replay-ability a bit, however once you’ve played that there’s nothing else to do because it doesn’t contain multiple levels it’s just a time-based “get all the treasure in this amount of time” game.

Is this worth paying money for. Before the demo I would have said maybe not, although I might would have just for the fact that the dev is building his game in true indie spirit. Now that there’s a demo, it’s only about 2 bucks to buy the full thing. (It’s actually a pay-what-you-want model, however because of processing the minimum is 1.75 USD) I didn’t see a lot of difference between the demo and the full version. You don’t get the arcade mode in the demo, and I guess you can’t save your game (which I don’t think I needed to do). In an email to me Justin Scott said “Icarus is partially an open letter to RPG developers to let them know how fed up I am with the way things currently are. I think one of the best outcomes possible for Icarus would be if other developers could take the core ideas and realize them to a fuller potential in their own creations.” I think this is one of the best reasons to buy the full version. It may not be that great of a game, but the ideas presented are good enough that they should be explored further. Probably the bounds of standard game-play need to be pushed a bit, and this seems like the proper way to do it. I personally don’t go for the “be controversial” tack to push the bounds of games, because all you’re doing is generally offending some types of people. This way trying to find new ways of playing a game and engaging the player more is rather noble, and I personally think that’s a goal worth pursuing.

You can find the game and more information here: ICARUS by Justin Scott

Just a final note, the music was pretty good even though I said it gets on your nerves after while. I want to qualify that statement too by saying any “chip” music (electronic music that sounds like it was made on an old game console)will get on your nerves if you listen to it for too long, so basically this wasn’t a complaint about the music so much as chip music in general. You can find a link to the musician’s home page through the Icarus web site.

I would like to say Happy Independence Day, or Happy July 4th to everyone here in the US!

Apparently the makers of the Halo franchise have just launched the first phase of what they are calling “Bungie Aerospace” which is they say was created to “help small, independent developers launch their mobile and social games.” I guess the idea is they might help with resources, community, q and a and the like. For more info check here at the Bungie Aerospace site, and here in the official press release

Organizers have officially opened submissions for the 2012 Independent Games Festival, being held at the Game Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco next March 5-9.

The Independent Games Festival is the longest-running and highest-profile independent video game festival, summit, and showcase, and is now accepting entries to its 14th annual edition, with deadlines in the Main and Student Showcase categories by October 17 and October 31 respectively, and finalists to be announced in January 2012.

More info: Here on the IGF website.

Joost van Dongen’s abstract racer Proun has been released. With pay-what-you-want pricing you could download the game for free then if you decide you like it you could pay later.

According to the FAQ “Proun is a strange racing game in a world of geometric objects and large coloured surfaces. You avoid obstacles by rotating around a cable in order to gain as much speed as possible. There is no up or down; there is only the cable to which you are attached.” Sound interesting?

Proun features:
-4 unlockable speeds, from relaxed to insanely fast
-2-4 player splitscreen
-Joystick support
-Online highscores
-Championship mode
-Race against ghosts of all your previous times
-3 regular tracks, 1 unlockable bonus track, and 1 bonus track for those who pay for the game
-Highly moddable: tools and documentation to create your own levels are included with the game

ApGames just finished their latest game Herofy. To celebrate this we are offering our old game Caelum for the price of a tweet until the 3rd of July.

Herofy is a match-3 puzzle adventure. Guide your hero or heroine through a series of dangerous dungeons, using your magical powers and your wits alike to reach the next door. As you make matches, your character falls along with the objects you’re matching. Can you get them to the exit? Collect coins, defeat monsters and save the kingdom!

* 100 challenging levels
* Rotatable playing field
* Two different level types – break all the marked tiles, or find the key!
* Eight different power-ups to buy and use
* Play as a hero or a heroine
* Watch out for the monsters!
* Timed and untimed game modes
* A new type of match-3 action!

Herofy launches on 28th June at just $6.99 from their website: ApGames
More information: HERE

Independent developer Rocket Bear Games has announced that its game Infested Planet is available for preorder and public testing. After preordering the game, players immediately get access to the beta for both PC and MAC. “Infested Planet is a tactical RTS, giving players the command of 5 soldiers and pitting them against a swarm of 100,000 aliens.”
Looks quite interesting.