pixelatron

Pixels from the past: Toki

mark@pixelatron — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:04:07 +0000

Oh gawd, Toki. My main memories of this are playing it on some seedy city centre arcade, on a machine that only let you have two minutes per coin. Two minutes with Toki is nowhere near enough to figure out why Toki exists or what it wants from you. It’s a shooty platformer, yes. But with a fireball-spitting monkey. And zombie monkeys. And monkeys piloting giant floating aztec-style temples with boxing gloves on the bottom. Toki is slow, and it helps you find out exactly how many unfairly-placed deadly exploding stalacmites one game can squeeze in (answer: lots) — but it’s got something, it really has. And to prove it, there’s a sparkled-up version coming for Xbox Live and WiiWare, so this is the ideal time to monkey around with the original. Play Toki (in-browser, Java)

Crop Defenders

mark@pixelatron — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:01:48 +0000

You know the world’s running out of twists on the Tower Defence concept when you get a game where bazooka-carrying birds are protecting a vegetable garden from bunnies. But it’s that odd twist that makes Rob Scherer’s Crop Defenders kinda pretty much all right. Things are so much more interesting when your ‘grenade tower’ is actually a parrot indiscriminately chucking explosive barrels all over the shop — especially when, satisfyingly, there’s very little attempt to cutesify everything up. The RSPCA would probably be appalled, but even they must want the terrifying shadowy lake-monsters to be killed with maximum brutality. The game’s one flaw — and it’s a big one — is asking you to direct your birds’ fire, which means that when the feathers start flying and explosions are exploding at ten a second, it’s impossible to work out what the hell is going on. Still. Pretty good. Play Crop Defenders (Flash)

Fat Slice

mark@pixelatron — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:12:01 +0000

Aaron Neugebauer of Chew On Glass is your new best friend. And then your most hated arch-nemesis. And then your best friend again and possibly something more. Because his new game Fat Slice is great, then really annoying, then pretty special and funny. It’s a neat concept: swoosh your mouse to slice chunks off an on-screen shape — the catch being you can only do it when all the bouncing balls are grouped together on one side or the other. Challenging, satisfying… until it turns into a lot of waiting, endlessly, for balls to move into the right place and burning your eyeballs through staring. But THEN, just when you think it’s done, it has a few cute tricks up its sleeve. Give it a go. Play Fat Slice (Flash)

Little Wheel

mark@pixelatron — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:45:21 +0000

Created in Slovakia by OneClickDog, Little Wheel is a lovely little thing. The aim’s to restore the electricity to a switched-off robot planet. It’s technically a point-and-click adventure, but only in the way that, say, a car park pay-and-display machine is a point-and-click adventure — the puzzles aren’t really puzzles, and clickable things have big throbbing ‘click me!’ circles over them. But that’s fine, because Little Wheel’s world of silhouette and sunset is a joy to behold. It’s far too short, inevitably, and it’s nearly scuppered by a terrible ‘puzzle’ near the end. But it’s very affecting, and it reminds me a bit of Wall-E. Play Little Wheel (Flash)

A Day Out West

mark@pixelatron — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:15:36 +0000

Oh dear. Now I feel even worse for not liking all the hard work that’s gone into The Pretender. Because the game you see above was thrown together in 97 minutes. It’s A Day Out West, it’s by Legendary Creations, and it was put together for the latest 2-hour game development competition on The Poppenkast. All you have to do is jump over cactii, wiggle about in mid-air, and shoot rivals who have seemingly exchanged their horses for trampolines. But who isn’t a sucker for games with giganto-pixels like this? And there’s something massively satisfying about catching those flying cowboys in mid-arc. It gives you a little glimpse into how clay pigeon shooters feel. Clay pigeon shooters on horses. Play A Day Out West (download, Windows)

The Pretender - Part One

mark@pixelatron — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:41:49 +0000

Hmm. I try to be nice, I really do. But the first part of The Pretender by Launching Pad Games just doesn’t seem to justify the attention it’s getting. It’s one of those puzzle-games-in-a-platformer thingies. You play some sort of Victorian conjuror who opens up a magic portal and has to rescue his trapped audience members from an alternate universe or something. And people complain about stories with plumbers and princesses, eh? In visuals, and music, and atmosphere, The Pretender has the desperation to be Braid written all over it. And the puzzles — which, inexplicably, mainly involve the conjuror transforming into The Incredible Hulk to push rocks about — aren’t quite as clever or compulsive as they think they are. I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that people want to like this because the main character wears a top hat. Play The Pretender - Part One (Flash)

Spacetacular Voyage

mark@pixelatron — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:24:53 +0000

Wait, come back! Spacetacular Voyage by Sash MacKinnon might be cursed with a teeth-clenchingly awful name. And some equally bad puns, eg “It’s a sine”. BUT it plays a blinder. Your spaceship’s just a glorified mouse cursor, and to survive you have to dodge, push past or blast through a waterfall of falling geometric shapes. It just works, and it’s not short on ideas: one minute you’re using brute force to wade through a hailstorm of clonking great balls, the next you’re negotiating a twisting path of innocent-looking squares. One of the few games of late that has the decency to weave physics into its play, rather than half-heartedly sellotape some gravity algorithms to its head and saunter off for a coffee and biscuit. I like it. Play Spacetacular Voyage (Flash)

Pixels from the past: R.C. Pro-Am

mark@pixelatron — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:08:42 +0000

What to do about the relative lack of decent browser-based racing games? Either sit and shake your head ruefully until it falls of. Or play R.C. Pro-Am — the 1988 NES game from Banjo-Tooie boys Rare that’s still one of the best racers in racertown. Race surprisingly fast for 20-year-old technology! Skid around with satisfying just-rightness! Aim rockets at dastardly cheat-happy rival racers! And realise that with that happy little between-circuit screen of medals and cups, Rare invented Achievements about 2 decades before the fates intended. Play R.C. Pro-Am (in-browser, Java)

Tokimeki Kikoriaru

mark@pixelatron — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:40:01 +0000

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up silly microgames. Yoshio Ishii’s Tokimeki Kikoriaru lasts approximately three-and-a-half seconds. But I can’t help but love the little thing. That’s about all I can say. Viel Spaβ, as they say in Germany. Play Tokimeki Kikoriaru (Flash)

The Chaser

mark@pixelatron — Sun, 31 May 2009 18:11:32 +0000

What exactly is The Chaser all about? Creator Conor Carpenter fashioned it from brain and fingers in just 12 hours, and claims it’s designed to “induce a state of mind and mood”. Here’s how it does it: by making you chase some poor dude through a forest, seemingly forever. It’s tougher than it looks — as the speed ramps up, one carelessly-strewn rock can send you spinning like a dog in tail-chase mode. And it’s weirder than it looks — why does the chasee occasionally grow to about ten times his normal size, and why do clouds suddenly start appearing on the ground? The Chaser is simple, compelling — and comes with music you’ll be humming in your grave. Play The Chaser (Windows download)

Update: oh, it’s one of those games.