Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘mr mayor tells your fortune recounts a story and offers you snacks’ and ‘tri.Attack()’
These games have nothing in common. Unless…?
‘mr mayor tells your fortune recounts a story and offers you snacks’ is an amazingly titled ‘regrettable’ game created during the Train Jam 2019. Featuring animations by Andrew Shouldice, writing by Kate Gray, music by Eric Billingsley, and sounds by Josie Brechner, players will be getting their fortune read by Mr Mayor himself before receiving a snack and a tangential story. Almost like the title… implied this. Shocking.
Players are introduced to the lovable mayor, who says that he’ll do a reading of the player’s future. From here, players will have three cards drawn for them, featuring hilariously strange illustrations of all sorts of animals, objects, and playing card effigies.
Each card will correspond to the reading, and the major will give a sweet fortune that is 100% legitimate to the player’s upcoming life. From here, however, he’ll get a tad distracted and go on a lovely tangent recounting a story of his own, before he shares a snack.
You might be wondering just what the heck this is, and I have no actual answer. It’s adorably silly, it has a mayor that spells words in ridiculous ways, and it has the funniest animations I’ve seen for a few pages. If that isn’t enough to make you want to experience ‘whatever this is’, then I’m sorry but I cannot help you. Go get your fortune read.
tri.Attack() is an arcade game created by Demmy Mangusso or DemmyDev, an indie dev in the USA, with assistance by Yukon Wainczak and music by Nick West. Players are a triangle, unique in shape and colour, as it fends off the hordes of other shapes using its super-powered boomerang body.
Playing similarly to a ‘twinstick shooter’, players will aim a crosshair with their mouse to where they want to shoot so that they can destroy the oncoming red shapes. Instead of shooting bullets, however, players are actually shooting their body at the enemies.
The white triangle becomes larger as it flies, leaving behind a shell of the player — anything this larger version of the self hits is destroyed. By ‘shooting’ again, players can drag themselves back at an increased speed, hence the boomerang-like behaviour. At any point if the shell is hit by an enemy, or if the body is whole, the player loses a life.
In all my time playing arcade games in this bundle, this is easily the first time I’ve seen such a spin on a tried and true mechanic. By having the ‘body’ act as the weapon, players have a third aspect to focus on, rather than the standard where to shoot and where not to stand; the path that the body will return from. Since the ‘shot body’ destroys any enemy it touches, the return is equally as important to keeping the ‘shell’ alive, so positioning becomes about how well the two are positioned in relation to each other.
It’s a brilliant idea, and it plays well into altering the arcade formula to make something new and exciting. There are more modes if you can get far enough, since in true arcade fashion the game goes until all three lives are lost. Since I’m bad at arcade games I couldn’t reach the other game modes, but I can tell you that even while being bad I was having a blast.
If you enjoy new spins on old ideas, this is a great game to try out.
