Phage Wars 2

Phage Wars 2 by Armor Games is a fun little flash game, though not a terribly difficult one.

Alabaster

Alabaster by John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, Emily Short, Adam Thornton,  and Ziv Wities is an almost-entirely conversation-driven interactive fiction game based on the tale of Snow White.

According to the teaser on the game’s web site: “The Queen has told you to return with her heart in a box. Snow White has made you promise to make other arrangements. Now that you’re alone in the forest, it’s hard to know which of the two women to trust. The Queen is certainly a witch — but her stepdaughter may be something even more horrible…”

Don’t Look Back

Don’t Look Back is a flash platform game, released 5 March 2009 by Terry Cavanagh. Mac and PC versions are also available.

Before I begin this review, I urge you to play the game. There are links there to the online and downloadable versions of the game. It only takes a few minutes, and much of the enjoyment will come from learning the story as it’s revealed. That warning given, I’ll not refrain from spoilers below.

The game opens with the player character standing at a grave. We are instructed that we may use the arrow keys to move, and, being the seasoned gamers that we are, we take that as an invitation to proceed to the right.

After a bit more instruction on the controls, we come to a cliff. There is no other option than to leap from the cliff, whatever the consequences may be. Fortunately, in typical platformer fashion, falling from a great height is no hindrance, and the game proceeds like any other platformer.

We eventually pick up a gun, and we have the usual jumps to make, spiders to kill, and falling spikes and other moving obstacles to dodge. Failure means that the screen is restarted, with no other consequence.

After a bit, though, we enter an area  that is dark–though the enemies can be seen, the walls and floors are hidden. This doesn’t make the puzzles that much harder, but it certainly adds to the atmosphere: walking through a dark, seemingly empty room, when sudden spiders start to drop from the sky just ahead of you; you try to run past only to be stopped by a hidden wall; now there’s no hope of dodging–they have you! And the screen restarts and you must try again.

The darkness doesn’t last forever, though, and the game continues. There are two bosses to face before we reach the deepest part of the cave, and they may be defeated in the usual way–dodge the attacks, exploit the weakness. Finally, after all this, we can see what was our goal in entering this place.

Here floats the ghost of a girl–undoubtedly, the ghost of the girl whose grave we stood before at the beginning of our quest. But the game does not end here; we must now escape the cave with the spirit following.

There remains one caveat, though: you must not look back. Should you turn to face the spirit of the girl, she will fade away like so much mist. And here it becomes clear what the title means, and just what story is being told. This is a close retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and our hero has journeyed into the underworld to retrieve the spirit of his beloved.

So, we make our way back out. The puzzles are different (since we take a different route), and are tailored to our new weakness (the inability to turn back). I found the above screen particularly heart-breaking, since I missed the jump for the ropes more than once, and had no choice but to turn back, consigning the spirit to her fate. Granted, the screen restarts, but being forced by my ineptitude to deliberately entrap the spirit in the underworld was a cruel punishment indeed for my failure.

Now, having faced all the trials both on the way into the cave and back out, and having resisted the temptation to look back on the face of our beloved, we reach familiar territory. For better or worse, the endgame is near, and we will see what reward we shall reap for our efforts.

Finally, we return to find… our hero, still standing before the grave. Moments later, both the spirit and the player character vanish, carried away by the winds, and the title screen returns. All this effort, everything was only imagined by the mourning hero–wishing that he could indeed journey to the underworld to save his beloved, though ultimately no more able than Orpheus to carry this out.

The revelation, without words, of this story–the hero’s motivation and intent, and the eventual resolution of the story–is very well done. As a platform game, Don’t Look Back is only average, but as a piece of storytelling it is really excellent. Everyone should absolutely spend the few minutes necessary to complete this game. The post on the author’s blog has links to each (identical) version of the game, so go there now and play it.

Gameplay: 6/10

The puzzles aren’t hard, but they’re well designed, and the controls are pretty good.

Graphics: 8/10

The simplicity of the pixellated graphics is all part of the charm, and the monochrome red color scheme sets the mood nicely. The only complaint I have is that it wasn’t clear until after I retrieved the spirit and realized this was the tale of Orpheus that the dog was Cerberus, or that the final boss was Hades–the sprites weren’t identifiable. Of course, there’s only so much you can do with that resolution, and it was all made clear eventually, so only two point off.

Sound: 9/10

The music fits the game very well, and the sound effects are similarly well done. Cerberus’s growling was really frightening, and the sort of gasp/sigh when you look back and the spirit is swept away is very nice, too.

Story: 9/10

The story is very simple, and a classic. The revelation of the plot is very well done, and the ending, too, is good.

Personal Slant: 9/10

Total: 8.2/10

The platforming aspect could have done with better and more challenging puzzles, but the storytelling was right on. I had fun with the puzzles and the desire to see how it would all end kept me going, full of anticipation. Don’t Look Back is short, and well worth the time it takes to play.

Excitebike

Excitebike, released by Nintendo in November 1984 in Japan, and October 1985 in the US, is a classic racing game for the NES.

Two modes are available, Selection A and Selection B. In Selection A, you race against the clock, alone on any of five tracks.

You play the red motorcyclist, and must pass the required number of laps on each obstacle-strewn track before time runs out. If you fail to beat the third place time, you lose. Since you can select which track you want to play on, this isn’t such a big deal,though, and the early tracks are pretty easy.

The track consists of four lanes, which you can switch among with the up and down buttons. In addition to changing lanes, you have the choice of the slower or faster gear for your bike. The faster gear has an obvious advantage, but also a disadvantage: as you use the faster gear, your bike heats up, and if you keep it up too long, your bike will overheat, forcing you to wait on the sidelines until it cools off again. Using the slower gear will allow your bike to cool, as will running over arrows that appear on the track. As a result, much of the strategy involves knowing when to use the faster gear and when to take it slower. Use the right gear and avoid or manage the obstacles, and you shouldn’t have much trouble until the last two tracks.

In Selection B, you still must beat the clock but there’s an additional difficulty: other racers appear on the track.

The other racers don’t seem to be intelligent–they don’t seem to try to block you intentionally, but they do get in the way, and running into them can cause a crash, costing you precious seconds. This mode is a little more interesting than Selection A, because of the added difficulty, but play is basically the same. I’d suggest playing Selection A if you’re trying to get the best possible times, and Selection B if you just want to race.

In addition to the two play modes, there’s a design mode, which lets you select from the available obstacles to make your own track.

You can try to make some interesting tracks this way, and it’s a little amusing, but the inability to save means that it’s a bit of a waste to spend much time trying to make a really good track, since it’ll be gone when you power off the console. It’s not that there isn’t a save option–it’s right there on the menu, and will happily spend a few minutes claiming to save, but it’s intended for use with the Famicom Data Recorder, a cassette attachment which was never released outside of Japan. The rest of us are out of luck.

AI: 6/10

The computer-controlled racers provide a little extra challenge, and a little extra scenery, but it would have been nice if they were aggressive and tried to keep you from passing.

Gameplay: 8/10

The game controls smoothly, and it’s really quite fun. If it had more tracks and supported two players, it might get a perfect score. Even without these, Excitebike is an excellent racing game.

Graphics: 8/10

Ordinarily, I say you should never to anything 3D on the NES, but Excitebike pulls off the 3D obstacles very well–it’s easy to see how tall they are and what slope they’re at, which is the most important thing for this game. I can’t score this any higher, though, because the tracks are pretty bland, and the most variation we get on different tracks is a palette swap. Not bad, but they might have done a little more.

Sound: 4/5

I’m only counting this half since there’s no background music during the races, just sound effects. That said, what sound exists is not bad, but a little repetitive. Like Indy 500, the main sound we hear during the race is the constant roar of the engine. Unlike Indy 500, that is actually useful since you can tell how hot your bike is by the sound of the engine. It still gets a little old, but at least it’s functional.

Personal Slant: 10/10

Whatever shortcomings Excitebike has, it’s still quite a fun old game, and I have very fond memories of it. Especially given it’s age (it was one of the first NES games, 25 years ago), I can’t really find fault with it.

Total: 8/10

Fun fact: Excitebike fit on only 24K of ROM. By comparison, this review, together with the five screenshots it contains, takes up about 23K–just about the same size as the game that is its subject! There’s certainly a lot of excellent gaming packed in such a small size. This is one game that’s absolutely worth playing, and since I understand that it’s available on the Wii virtual console we all have the good fortune to be able to play it, even if we can’t find a working NES.

Bastet

Bastet, written in 2004 by Federico Poloni, is a Tetris clone with a twist.

It seems like an ordinary game of Tetris at first, allowing you to choose the level you start at to determine the game speed, and with the usual controls–left and right to move the piece, up to rotate it, down to drop it. That “Won’t give you this one!” thing seems a little odd, though…

After a few pieces have dropped, you might begin to suspect that something is wrong, or at least that you’re having a very unlucky game.

As the game progresses, you’ll see that Bastet does live up to its name: “Bastard Tetris”. The AI in Bastet calculates how useful each piece would be to you if it were dropped next, and then refuses to give you the few most useful pieces. In fact, it has a high chance of giving you the piece it computed would be least useful. As a result, getting even a single line can be quite a challenge, and getting more than a few lines is very hard indeed: the author noted on his page when he released it that his friends hadn’t even managed to pass twelve lines.

When the game ends, your score will be saved to the high score list. As you can see above, my first attempt yielded a high score of zero points. Challenging indeed.

Bastet was originally written for Linux, but a Windows port (by Salvatore Meschini) is available, which is essentially the same, though the colors are a little different, which I’d attribute to the change to PDCurses for the Windows port. You can download either or both from the author’s web page.

AI: 9/10

Bastet absolutely lives up to its name. The AI will consistently give you the worst, most annoying pieces, just as it should. If you want to compile it yourself, you can modify the difficulty, too. Minus a point for requiring recompiling to do that.

Gameplay: 8/10

The game behaves as it ought to, though the high difficulty makes it probably a little less fun that it would be if it were somewhat easier. That’s the goal of the game, though, so I can’t penalize it much.

Graphics: 4/5

The game looks nice. I’d prefer it in a graphical game so I could see the edges of the pieces I’ve already placed, but for a text-mode game it looks fine. I’m counting this one half since it is a text-mode game.

Personal Slant: 6/10

I like Tetris, and this is a competent implementation of it, but the difficulty stops me wanting to play it very much. Perhaps some people looking for a real challenge will like a little more.

Total: 7.7/10

Though you probably won’t want to play Bastet for long, owing to its difficulty, it’s worth a download just to see how hard Tetris could be if the game were really intentionally giving you bad pieces.

Achievement Unlocked

Achievement Unlocked by Armor Games, published in 2008, is a flash platform game and parody of metagaming.

 

The player controls a small blue elephant on a single screen, which can run and jump and fall and die and not much else. The goal of the game is to unlock the achievements listed on the right, for which only the titles can be seen until they are unlocked.

By my count, 15 of these achievements can be unlocked simply by starting the game and standing still, although it looks like one of them shouldn’t be unlocked that way and is a bug. Most of the achievements can be unlocked just by stumbling around, and the way to unlock most of those that remain can be divined pretty easily from their titles and the nearby achievements. The last few that I got I had to look at the hint page for, but fortunately that’s an achievement, too.

The game ends when all 100 achievements have been unlocked.

Achievement Unlocked can be played here.

Gameplay: 8/10

The controls do what you’d expect. More importantly, achieving the achievements is pretty nice. I spent about fifteen minutes on it, which wasn’t long enough for me to get bored with it, so I’d say that the game is a success.

Graphics: 3/5

Even as flash games go, the graphics aren’t so good, but since that’s not really the point, only half weight.

Sound: 7/10

The music isn’t really annoying, but it is a bit repetitive. The sound effects are okay.

Personal Slant: 8/10

I enjoyed this, especially since I’m a spade, and it didn’t go on too long. Nice.

Total: 7.4/10

This game doesn’t take long, and it’s pretty amusing. We need to laugh at ourselves, so why not give it a shot?

Indy 500

Indy 500 for the Atari 2600 is a racing game, developed by Atari and published by Sears, Roebuck and Co. in 1977.

 

 

The cover boasts “14 video games”, though, as with most Atari games, these were mostly small variations. Indy 500 contains three or, generously, four distinct games. Three of the four game types have both one- and two-player modes available. For these, the object in single-player mode is to obtain the highest score in one minute, and in multiplayer to outscore the opponent.

The first game, “Race Cars”, is just what it sounds. Two tracks are available, with the cars moving faster on the second. This game is pretty good with two players, but quite dull for solo play.

The second mode, “Crash N’ Score”, involves catching a dot that appears on the map. Once caught, it relocates itself randomly, rather like a snakes game without the growing tail. As before, the cars move faster on the second map. This is the best game for solo play.

Third, we have “Ice Race”. This is like “Race Cars”, except with different tracks, and the cars continue moving as though they were on ice, making it very difficult to turn. I just found this one frustrating.

The final game is “Tag”. If you’re ‘it’, you try to touch your opponent and then run away. Points are scored for each second while your opponent is trying to catch you. This one is two-player only.

Gameplay: 7/10

The controls work pretty well in “Race Cars”, though I found the turns a little too tight to manage on the second track. “Ice Race” was entirely too difficult to control–once you got to full speed, you would slide across half the screen before stopping, even if you turned the car to accelerate in the opposite direction. The controls in the other modes are as in “Race Cars”. Minus a point for “Ice Race” having such horrid controls, but otherwise not bad.

Graphics: 8/10

Though it was possible to do nicer graphics on the 2600, Indy 500 doesn’t look bad. The only real problem is that the blue car didn’t show up well on the ice background, making it difficult to tell which direction you were facing.

Sound: 7/10

The only sounds I noticed were the hum of the engines and the crash of cars hitting walls. Those effects were fairly well done, though the engine sound did get a little old after a while.

Personal Slant: 7/10

“Race Cars” in two-player mode is pretty good fun, and “Crash N’ Score” is similarly fun in single player. That’s a pretty good value, really.

Total: 7.3/10

Indy 500 may not exactly deliver the 14 games it claims, but “Race Cars” and “Crash N’ Score” are good enough by themselves to make this a worthwhile cartridge. Some later games of each type were better–I like R.C. Pro-Am for racing, and pretty much any snakes game–but for 1977, Indy 500 wasn’t bad at all. I’d definitely give it a go for the nostalgia, even if you shelve it in favor of newer games afterward.

Mines

Mines by Ian Heath is a Minesweeper variant for Windows 3.1, released in 1990.

At first glance, it seems very much like Minesweeper, but the goal is somewhat different: rather than finding all mines on the playing field, your task is to find a mine-free path from the upper left corner to the lower right. You can walk any direction including diagonals in order to reach your goal. The game includes the same marking functions that Minesweeper had, allowing you to mark a square as mined or possibly mined, but these are only for your reference in Mines.

Although you can’t change the size of the playing field, you can choose the number of mines on it. The default, 30 mines, is quite easy, but the difficulty grows quite a bit as the number of mines increases. The maximum, 160 mines, is very difficult indeed.

Every generated playing field is solvable: some path exists through the mines, though, as with Minesweeper, it may not be possible to determine for sure where the mines are. In the above screenshot, for example, the mine on the third column of the first row could have been moved down one without changing the numbers shown when the game started–it’s not possible to be sure any move is safe, though the square down-right of the 3 was definitely mined.

Mines can be downloaded here.

Gameplay: 8/10

The concept is great–it’s definitely one of the best Minesweeper variants I’ve played. Most ‘variants’ only change up the size of the board, or something equally tiny. The only reason this didn’t score higher is that the game lacks keyboard controls, which seem like the natural input method for a game like this, and has no timer.

Graphics: 7/10

Mines looks basically like Minesweeper, which is to say plain but not bad. The feet that represent the player blend in a little too well for my taste, but it’s otherwise fine.

Personal Slant: 8/10

The addition of a timer, keyboard controls, and maybe the ability to change the board size would have made this a 9 or even 10, but it’s still quite good even without these things.

Total: 7.7/10

Mines is a fairly original variant on Minesweeper, and a pretty well-done one at that. Anyone who likes Minesweeper ought to give this one a try.

Checkers

Checkers is a Windows 3.1 implementation of checkers by Gregory Thatcher, released in 1990.

I’m just going to assume we all know the rules of checkers, and skip that part. Checkers provides an AI, so you can play against the AI or another human in hotseat play, or watch the computer play against itself. The difficulty (how smart the AI is) can be selected from five levels, Beginner through Master. You can also choose whether to play black or red, and can switch in the middle of the game, if you so desire.

The one with the white circle on it is a king, and was thoroughly beating me.

For anyone who doesn’t know how to play, the help file includes instruction on how to play the game as well as how to use the software.

Checkers can be downloaded directly at this link.

AI: 4/5

The AI beat me, so I guess it can’t suck too badly. However, I do suck very badly at checkers, so I’m only weighting this half to account for my inability to tell whether the AI is actually good. Minus a point since it could be more granular, too.

Gameplay: 4/10

It does what it says on the tin, but minus a point because waiting on the computer to move is boring.

Graphics: 2/10

The graphics are far too simple, and the board looks rather squashed. There’s no excuse for this, given that the DOS version of Battle Chess came out two years earlier and looked much, much better. The Windows version of Battle Chess wouldn’t come out for another year or so, but it too would look much nicer.

Personal Slant: 1/10

I don’t really like checkers that much, and this particular implementation doesn’t make me want to play it any more. I give it one point for including 0-player mode. Fight amongst yourselves, my minions, fight!

Total: 3.1/10

Checkers does indeed play checkers, but it doesn’t do anything beyond that. The overly-simple and somewhat poor graphics hurt this one quite a bit, along with the utter lack of anything original. Battle Chess had been out for two years at this point, so we all knew more was possible. Of course, this implementation probably wasn’t intended to be anything special–but it gets no points for achieving that goal. There’s really no reason you’d want to play this, since there are far better checkers games out there.

Lucas’s Problem

Lucas’s Problem is a Windows 3.1 implementation by James Curran of a puzzle created by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas, who also created the more famous Towers of Hanoi puzzle.

The object is to reverse the positions of the colored blocks, so that red fills the right, and blue the left. Each color of blocks can only move in one direction (indicated by the arrows on these blocks) one space, or jump over a block of the opposite color.

There is, I think, only one way to solve this puzzle (up to reflection), so there’s not much to say. The puzzle isn’t hard to solve when you realize what situation leads to an unwinnable game, so this hasn’t got any replay value.

You can download Lucas’s Problem, or play a web based implementation, at Novel Theory

Gameplay: 8/10

The game works and responds to clicks as expected. The puzzle is pretty clever, though not an invention of the game’s creator. There’s nothing wrong with the game, but there’s just nothing to it, so 8 is the highest score I can give it.

Graphics: 6/10

The graphics are very simple, but acceptable given the scope of the game. One can imagine a more visually pleasing implementation of the puzzle, even in 1990, so minus a few points for not really trying there.

Personal Slant: 5/10

Although I really do think that Lucas’s puzzle was quite clever, Lucas’s Problem has no replayability and offers no value beyond the satisfaction of solving a nice, though simple, puzzle.

Total: 6.33/10

The lack of replayability in this one was a killer for the game’s score. I’m not sure what could have been done to alleviate this–perhaps if the scope of the game had been larger, implementing several similar games, like Towers of Hanoi, it might have made the game worth a second look. As it is, though, even if the puzzle is worth remembering, the game will be soon forgotten.