window explosion!

So I was playing the demo for World of Goo and got to the 'mysterious button' which is clearly meant to launch a buy page.

It did.

But it didn't end the demo, or even switch the focus out of the demo.

So by the time I finally got sick of clicking in confusion and manually exited the game, THEY WERE EVERYWHERE!

Critical thinking is the key to success!

I am a cheater. I do have a guide to the Professor Layton puzzles, and I'm not ashamed to resort to it. I do use in-game hints, but if the in-game hint seems to be way behind the level of thinking I've gotten to, I tend to suspect I've either GOT the answer but made a mistake in calculations or that I'm missing something so obvious that no hint will point it out. One or two puzzles I don't think are entirely fair but this way I'm not bogged down long enough to get annoyed at it. If I'm not making progress, I'm willing to cheat to move on. If I'm getting there, I'll keep poking at it.

... Slider puzzles, I hate. I'm not going to sit and fool with pieces of a picture being slid around.

score

Relatives did manage to find me a copy of Professor Layton that wasn't stupidly overpriced :)

Owlboy

Not out yet, but cool 2d-graphics platform-type thing

the jitterbug

Princess Debut's trace-pattern-to-music system is extremely unclear about how well you're doing. It's quite easy to intentionally-or-accidentally slide your stylus WAY off the path in completely the wrong direction and back on quickly and still score a 'Great!' It is equally easy to score an 'OK' or even a 'Bad' with absolutely no clue of what you did wrong. If you do get a 'Bad' there will be a split second at the END where the ball-trail displays redmarks in the vague section of the trail where you did something wrong, but it doesn't indicate what you actually DID, so if as far as you know you were right, you won't be any more enlightened.

If they left a trail behind where you actually dragged your stylus, then at least you could see what you'd done and figure out how to improve. (Particle-stars spawn around your stylus as you move, but they don't stay there.)

Also, this is a tough game to play when you have a dreadful cold and your eyes and nose may suddenly rebel!

RPG PDF sale

Because of the licensing nonsense, some producers need to stop selling their 3e/OGL stuff in order to sell 4e stuff. So, there's a final sale on til the end of the year.

http://goodmangames.rpgnow.com/index.php?filters=0_0_1120

I dunno how good any of this stuff is, but there's certainly a lot of dungeons to smash through.

dancing tee hee

The young-looking blond boy is sort of cute, but he's a brat and puts worms in things! And the pinkish-haired prince is way cooler... And I said a few nice words to the blond and it was really EASY to get him to be my partner and it all happened so fast I couldn't disappoint him by saying no... and now I have them both at 99% Love and fighting over me! Whatever shall I do?

*giggle*

Eternal Eden

A classic console-style RPG long in the making, with lovely pixelart backdrops.



You can download the demo RIGHT HERE to check it out.

So far I've only played the very beginning, which is a simple poke-poke-poke tutorial even if you select no-tutorial (if you did select tutorial, you get more explicit instructions about what keys to press and how to detect hidden items, but you still have to jump through the same set of hoops.) Walk, find items, hit repetitive basic monsters, fight a rigged battle against an unbeatable boss, then finally wake up in the 'real' game.

I'll have more comments later.

here's a cool idea

draw your own levels on paper and import them? Sort of...

http://www.ratloop.com/mightier

game-baking

http://www.antairgames.com/blog/the-great-indie-bake-off-2008/

Some prizes, but mostly just a wacky advertising method, I expect.

With this and that earlier post on cupcakes, do I need a 'Game Food' tag? :)

someone else's disaster

From looking at the trailer for Delgo the movie bomb, I suspect they should have just cycled it all into a videogame instead. Can't tell if the movie writing is all completely uninspired, but the trailer certainly isn't very interesting, nor are the fairy-graphics all that convincing.

As an adventure game, though, it probably would have been salvageable.

Oh well, it's *still* probably better than the awful Dragonlance animation.

solitaire... with a plot?

According to Gamezebo, anyway.

Not enough to make me want to play Solitaire, though.

missing the obvious

from DSFanboy's announcement of Sands of Desctruction:

It's a game about trying not to save the world, in which you battle by talking! All they need in order to totally break JRPG tradition is to put a very friendly, outgoing person in the lead who remembers his childhood just fine.

I think you mean her. A lead character who is female and whose hair is not spiky in the least. :) (Is what is needed to break tradition, that is, rather than is what is in the game.)

hinterland unsteamed

Well, nobody told me like I asked, but apparently Hinterland is available in other places now, including Greenhouse. So I suppose I'll check out the demo...

spoOoOoOoOky

I am impressed by the sheer CHEESINESS of 'Redrum'. The BFG site describes it as "an intense psychological murder mystery intended for mature audiences". Hah! EVERYTHING is dripping lurid green goo. There's no subtlety at all, it's all FLASHING SCARY SPOOKY OOO! This isn't a bad thing exactly, but I can't stop laughing. It is not for adults, it is for easily amused teenagers.

Take the promo picture, for instance.



You'll see this cute fairy, and then her eyes will SNAP OPEN! SCARY! And then her FLESH WILL DISAPPEAR! SCARY! And then the LIGHTS WILL FLICKER! SCARY! And so on. It reminds me slightly of the style Limbo of the Lost was actually trying to achieve behind all their thievery. (although this is more consistent and not, afaik, stolen). It's a child's haunted house, full of images so over the top that you can't possibly be frightened by them, unless you actually are a small child and then, yes, this will scare the living daylights out of you.

On the plus side, it honestly does have a plot. With reading! In-character reading to do between every level! Almost like a proper adventure!

... I think the cheesiness is rubbing off on me, I keep using too many !!!s!

why I import

A family member wants a Christmas list off me. So I go to look and see what's available for the DS in the UK... and boggle. I love this system, I can come up with a whole pile of games I'd like to have for it. None of them are available.

(Well, technically, Professor Layton is listed on amazon.co.uk - for sixty pounds minimum. Which is just people being silly for Christmas, the game can be bought for a reasonable price elsewhere.)

But most of them just aren't on sale in Europe. Some will be, eventually. Others will never bother. And all of them will cost an awful lot more, bought here.

Azada

So, I've been playing through the second Azada game, picked up for cheap on gameclub credits because it's not the sort of thing I'd normally buy.

It clearly is an adventure game... there's not really that much difference between this and something like Samorost.

But the self-contained books help contribute to a general lack-of-plot feeling. Sure, there is an over-arching plot, something about collecting cards to find and drive out an evil spirit, but it's clearly meaningless and just a framing for "solve all these books". Each book has a little bit of story in it (based on famous stories) but since there's no carryover from one book to another, there's no real development. (And if you've read the famous stories, you may boggle a bit at the way the game interprets those plots.)

That sense that something is lacking, despite all the bells and whistles, impels me to keep playing faster and faster, searching for the elusive sense of meaning. Surely the next bit will be really exciting, right? (No, not really. It will be cute and empty, just like everthing else.)

It's not a bad game. It's just surprising to, at last, see the vast difference between this kind of adventure and the visual novel, no matter how many puzzles the VN adds.

DS meets text adventure?

From DS Fanboy:

5th Cell (Drawn to Life, Lock's Quest, radness) just revealed their newest game to IGN. Like the last two, it's for the best platform evar (the DS). Also, similar to the previous works, it involves creating elements of the world. But this new game, Scribblenauts, might be the most ambitious.

To solve the puzzle-based levels in Scribblenauts, you write a noun. And then the named item appears. According to 5th Cell creative director Jeremiah Slaczka, there won't be any limit to what you can create. "People won't write half the things that exist in this game because they're so obscure, he told IGN." The team created a data-entry program to streamline the process of adding metadata to objects, and they've been scouring encyclopedias for months.

(okay, it's not really a textadv, it's all properties-based stuff. there's more info in this interview here.)

time is but a fleeting...

The Gamespot review of the new King's Bounty makes it sound like fun, but I haven't even found the time to buy/play Sacred yet!

Indie Game of the Year....

Awards are starting at Game Tunnel, although the first is sports which doesn't interest me much. Stay tuned for all the results!

under the wire

Finally managed to 'beat' the last bonus level of Forgotten Lands, but by doing another of those "winning and losing at the exact same second" things.

(strategy - demolish academy, replace with guild. have merchants early on to build gold, replace with leaders when possible.)

what, again?

Looks like there's another Japanese figure skating DS game! Called "Princess on Ice" - yes, that IS actually what the katakana say, as best as I can read it, but not to be confused with the other Princess on Ice which was made by the french.

And that's not even counting Yume no White Quartet, which is the sequel to the KuruKuru Princess game which was brought over as Imagine Figure Skater.

(my collection of figure skating games also has links for buying stuff, should one so desire.)

your kink is ok

I'm not personally into 3D space combat games, but if you are, take a look at the list of stuff to play.

Mainstream Publishers don't WANT you to buy PC games

... at least that's the best one can tell from stuff like this account of trying to make GTA work on a PC.

Don't put up with it.

Don't buy stuff from mainstream publishers.

Buy from indies. There are plenty of games out there. And they'll be cheaper AND less annoying. :)

news with bite

Review for Vampyre Story, which I promise I'm at least making vague plans to buy, but the holiday season gets so complicated...