Digital Versatile Discs: 4/8–4/14
I record every game I play and I post them weekly. Here are links to one, two, and three, four, five, and six.
Actually, these aren’t DVDs, they’re videogames! I’m tired of writing “Games I played” over and over, so now there’s this stupid title. Hooray.
Free games
Borb the Birb by Ludonaut
A perfect lil’ pick-me-up. Highly recommended and kissable!
The Devil’s Asshole by anna anthropy
A tiny Twine story… I mean, it’s really short, don’t resist it, you can’t help but be intrigued by the title just like myself, don’t even pretend to feel otherwise.
I can’t believe Paiva is making another of these car videogames by Pedro Paiva
Another game that’ll take less than 4 minutes, this time in Bitsy. Please do yourself a favour and read this fantstic article about Paiva.
The Iceburg by Tom Brinton
An incredible Bitsy adventure with an excellent use of perspective, environment-shifting, and storytelling.
NL by ompu co
I’ve been wanting spaces like this to exist for so long, and I feel so lucky to play this. Wow. I really wish I could experience this in person.
Simple Block Observing Game by ncrecc
Spoilers~
This was made for Glorious Trainwrecks’ 7 Day Unlucky Jam. SBOG is a variation off the included puzzle template game thingy Simple Block Pushing Game (found in the Puzzlescript editor), except this time, you just watch the characters and boxes move around by themselves randomly until success occurs.
When I started this at 9:42ish A.M., I thought it’d be done after I finished eating pancakes with my new neighbors. I ended up going with one of them to the nearby book fair, followed by a spontaneous visit to the Model Train Show—a 2.5-hour visit! I then remembered I needed to visit my friend as ceramic-pipe-vendor at Saturday Market, so I took the bus right from the fairgrounds. After I helped him pack up a couple hours later, I met my other friend to play at the Game Pub straight away to play Tekken 7 and Nidhogg (with beer!), eventually moseying on over to my place. That was right before 9pm and this game was STILL GOING:
The goal is for the orange boxes to be on top of the darkblue targets on the same exact frame, so the probability of that happening is extremely low. However, because it’s a randomized game, it could have been theoretically completed in a matter of seconds… but I was definitely not so fortunate. Oh well.
TouretteQuest by larsiusprime
First things first—I tried this because of the story behind it. I don’t have the patience for Procedural Death Labyrinths with turn-based RPG elements at all (low attention span), so I didn’t play it very long because of that very reason. I’d probably love it otherwise.
Gamasutra is an excellent website and I sometimes read it even though I don’t really consider myself a developer—I just make digital interactive stuff. I dig reading behind-the-scenes-type stuff, which the site provides aplenty. Some articles are too technical for me to understand, but others can have a delightful human element to them. This one caught my eye, because I know so little about Tourette’s Syndrome and I’m interested in how others navigate the world through their particular challenges.
Again, I’m posting this mostly because it’s such an interesting story, and I’d encourage you to play it if you enjoy this type of game at any capacity.
Waddleball by eggnog
This is a series of cute lil’ games starring a cute lil’ ducky-poo. Such fun graphics and animations! I preferred to play the games one-at-a-time instead of trying to master one over and over, but maybe that’s not the most effective way of improving… oh well! :P
Wombatstuff
Okay, so I saw this thread on Twitter:
Wombatstuff made a game per month in 2017, so I decided to check them all out at once…
Note: This section is kinda spoilery in the sense that most of these games are much better experienced without knowing about them beforehand, so skip to the Mobile Game section if you want to play these yourself.
- Pampgun: Swipe some keys on your keyboard to reload your shotgun. Click mouse to shoot. But you also have to click the mouse to move, so it’s a bit of strategy with shooting and movement. I couldn’t play much because you shoot little beasties and that was a bit sad for me. T_____T
- Mouve: Your character and sight move in a mirrored way in relation to each other via mouse input. It’s easy to adapt to it, but in a panic, that all goes out the window (at least for me).
- Salamis: Rotate to reload your pizza! This one is great because the learning curve feels just right.
- Shit 2: A platformer that is actually the main quest, even though I anticipated it being the side quest. Uh, that’s awkward to say, but true. Anyways, you only need the left and right cursor keys to complete it… yes, it’s incredible.
- Squidward: It’s a quite lovely adventure game that uses rotation and counter-rotation for navigation. I love, love, love this one!
- Selectorium: A platformer, but with the added puzzle element of selecting which action you can use in addition to the standard left/right/jump. Quite rewarding!
- not really tennis: Sort-of squash, but… I don’t know a wee more charming? For some reason, I don’t have the words for it, but it’s quite enjoyable.
- Shit: It’s a last-minute game, but… well, it spawned Shit 2 (and 3!) later on!
- Rudash: Sort-of different controls, but not too much. Just a nice, difficult run-n-gun! The good and bad characters are so neat in this!
- Znake: Snake with a mouse. It is what it is, and more difficult than it seems.
- Therrain: I don’t know if this was part of the game-per-month thing necessarily, but it was in the thread, so I played it anyways. Great music and nature-harming fun.
Running out of Power Inc. is a story-based platformer. It’s a really nice piece, although a couple platforming sections feel a bit too difficult—if you don’t have pixel-perfect timing on a couple of the jumps, you won’t be able to experience the entire story. I did fine, but not everyone might be able to succeed. Oh well.
The reason I am giving this game its own little section is because it made me wonder why there aren’t any simple browser-based platformer editor…? The graphics here are so simple that it feels like it could have been made in the platformer eqiuvalent of Bitsy. Of course, there’s the incredible atmospheric Knytt Stories (+), but that requires Windows.
If I had the coding chops/will to learn everything to make that work, I definitely would. It’d probably be like Pico-8, but instead of having to code anything, you could just edit using a GUI and change parameters like jumping physics, text appearing on screen, enemies, etc. I have no idea how difficult that would be, especially since I don’t know much about making engines or limits of browser-based tools.
I’ve actually had this idea for awhile, but this reignited my desire to wish for something that doesn’t exist… yet?
Done is game 12 of 12. I think this is the type of thing more developers ought to do—little projects that are quite personal. I love vulnerability in art/games/etc. because of the human connection, plus the hope that it’ll help more people open up about their experiences. We’re not islands!
Mobile game
GOLFINITY by Nimblebit LLC
It’s unbelievable how cool these courses are for there being so many! I think they’re procedurally generated, but in any case, they’re nifty! The only trouble is that perspective can be a bit woozy, seeing at this is presented in a orthographic isometric perspective… and you only have the close-up and zoomed-out view, no rotation.
Still, it’s a great game for going big potty… I’ve been playing it for months. See the screenshot: Hole 447 with +588 strokes. Yeah, I’m not great at it, but I also don’t give a shit, because whacking the ball all over the place is way more fun than attempting precision.
Paid game
DeadCore by 5 Bits Games
A speedrunning-type non-violent FPS. Sure, there are enemies, but you only temporarily disable them before they attack you. And their attacks only push you away, no actual harm done!
It’s quite a difficult game with floaty physics and heaps of space to travel through. The movement of DeadCore is such a joy: double-jumps, launch pads, and the purple gravity-switching boxes (picture above). It’ll cause some cussing, sure, but the completion of every level feels more like a victory than a relief.
Also continued playing Desert Golfing, N++, Doom 3, Lowglow.
