Rocks – Can you smell what the rocks are cookin’?

June 2nd, 2009

June02 Obviously rocks can’t cook, I mean, they have absolutely no utensils.  You could cook some rocks though.  Well it wouldn’t make for a tasty meal, but you could toast them with laser fire!  You know.  Beep…… Boop…… Beep……. Boop……. Jing-jing-jing. Beep… Boop… Beep… Boop… Jing-jing. Do-de-do-de-do-de-do-de-do.  Beep. Boop. Beep. Boop. Jing-jing-jing. Pash!  Next ship.  Okay so the beeps and boops is the music or background ambient sound, the jing-jing is the sound of the laser fire, the do-de-do is that little flying saucer that comes out for extra bonus points, and the “Pash” is the sound of your ultimate demise.  Okay so it’s hard to faithfully reproduce the sounds of Asteroids in text, but I did the best I could, did I not?  Asteroids one of the founding fathers of games.  Well I guess it’s not a person, so it wouldn’t be a founding father exactly.  Part of the bedrock of games.  Or something.  Rocks by Ooeyug.  Is generally an Asteroids clone.  Of course shooting rocks isn’t the only thing you can do in it.

What I think of it:  It’s great, the graphics, and sounds (and the few musical snippets) are frosting.  It also has a few things inspired by games like Geometry Wars.  It’s fun, but with a warning.  It is EXTREMELY challenging.  My butt got handed to me quite early.

So read on, all you rock blasting fanatics!

Read the rest of this entry »

Evacuation by jsb

May 31st, 2009

MiniReview7SS Well this was a no brainer.  The ADVANCING WALL OF DOOM in jsb’s Evacuation for the Ludum Dare 48 hour competition number 14 was just that.  It is a wall of doom that just keeps bouncing.  All the villagers are idiots, until you come show them the way.  Move your guy around with WASD keys, and round them up by going toward them.  A little exclamation mark appears above their heads and they follow you.  If they get too close to the wall a frowny happens, and when that happens you better round them up quick or they become pancakes.  Little tiny pancakes.  Once you get them near a bunker they turn to smiley faces (above their heads) and they automatically go into the bunker.  I only played the game briefly, and there were 300 people to rescue, but you could only let 10 die before the game was over.  So I don’t know if there was more than that one level, if you could call it a level.  Oh yeah if you get a powerup you can hit ‘E’ to use it.  Spacebar is supposed to show you where your little guy is.  This game is so simple even a 5-year-old could play it.  And yet not easy to master.  Got to hand it to the author for making it so simple to play.  A good pick-up and play game.  The graphics are neat.  It’s overhead view so there was no need to make everything so detailed.  It was almost impressionistic but still pleasant to look at.  There was only sound a crushing down of the wall coming down every so often, and a few beeps when, well i don’t know, not sure if it was guys going into bunkers or just being aware that I was there showing the way.  In any case, give it a shot.  Click the name after the actual umm name, of the game, to get it.

Name: Evacuation

Developer: jsb

(xblig) Orbyx – The Orbyxal mystery tour is here to take you away…

May 28th, 2009

May28 What happens when you take shiny balls, magical symbols, interesting combos, and large numbers?  Probably the lottery, but in this case I’m talking about the XBLCG (Xbox 360) game Orbyx by HemiGames.  Orbyx is a combination of Pachinko and Pinball.  I don’t really know how to say this, so I’ll just come right out with it.  Orbyx is a Peggle clone.  What is Peggle?  Peggle is a game by Popcap Games where you shoot a ball from a canon mounted on top of the screen to hit pegs in order to gain points.  To advance to the next level you have to remove certain colors of pegs.  In Peggle’s case it’s the orange ones, in Orbyx’s case it’s the golden ones.

What I think of it: Other than the obvious clonage, it’s a slick, well presented, game, and good as an alternative if colorful magical unicorns and cute animals isn’t your thing.  It’s not that original, but the game still seems like a good value, considering Peggle is about 10 dollars (800 microsoft points) verses Orbyx’s 5 dollars (400 msp).  Read more when you click, uhh, read more.

Read the rest of this entry »