Hark! One sentence I do bring (of) Indies which last week did spring…
Competitive memory match with Avatars. 80 Points.
Pretty much exactly what you’d expect, nicely done, plus a screen saver (yay?) 240 Points.
…because what Indie Games really needed was another simple button color matching game. 80 Points.
Have a holly, jolly Indie. There’s one sentence ’bout ‘em here…
How odd to see a brick-breaker on Indie Games. 80 Points.
Generic shooter where you can draw your sh- Code 3. 240 Points.
A start-to-finish board game with a math problem before your spin. 400 Points.
I don’t think there’s been a time before Leave Home came along that I felt like I’d really managed to completely piss a game off. Oh, I haven’t nearly enough fingers for the amount of times a game has managed to piss me off, but y’know, never before have I felt like I’ve done something to really wind the bloody thing up. Such is the genius of Matt James’ wonderful Leave Home.
First impressions can be deceptive. The game begins with you chained up, the leash breaks and you’re out into the big wide nasty world with the usual array of waves of aliens trying to cut you down.
Then within no time, you find yourself at the end of the game, the obligatory end of level boss doing its best to make your life difficult, you die trying to beat the bugger.
The game ends and you may well think “is this it?”
So, you nip in for another try. Only this time you think you’re prepared for the game. You’ve seen what it has to throw at you. It can’t be that hard, can it? So you do better. You fly through the opening legion of blue dots watching your points meter soar, you annihilate the first few waves then hang on a second, this wasn’t here before… and you explode in a flash of coloured light ready to respawn and try again. And it’s all different from here on in. The game has responded to how you played. The better you play, the more it throws at you, the more you get to see, the harder it becomes to survive. It’s brutal, it’s lovely, it’s procedural. And it works oh so well.
Let’s face it, the capacity for this to go tits up as a concept is pretty high. Shooters, generally, by their very nature are in some ways about pattern memorisation so munging it up with different elements each play could so very easily go mightily wrong. Luckily, we’re talking about the guy who made a pair of my favourite games here (that’ll be Fren-Ze and Super Mario Pac) and someone who quite clearly understands things that wot are right in the world. And so, rather than being a random jumble of ideas, Leave Home is beautifully Designed. Yes, Designed with a capital D for emphasis. There are times when you’re doing exceptionally well and it throws all manner of baddies into the mix (including some especially evil expanding mine-things) that you sit back and think “man, I really have totally pissed this game off”. Marvelous.
See that? That’s basically what Leave Home is. From the opening sound of a Spectrum loading to the loading border lines mid game, it’s a long overdue nod to the beauty of the greatest home computer ever. Throw in some beautiful tunes that (sadly, unusually) don’t make you want to punch someone in the cock and a side order of Minter madness – yes, even down to a tribute to the lost Minter game Unity and you end up with Leave Home.
For those who follow me on Twitter, you’ll already know my advice here. For those who don’t click this link and follow the wisdom therein. Y’see, each individual segment of Leave Home would in lesser hands be fleshed out into a full game and y’know, it’d probably be alright. Throw them all together in a quickfire bundle of inspiration and you’ve got something that heads right into the realms of the incredibly special.
Today is the day the shooter came to XBLIG proper and Leave Home easily takes its place alongside Space Giraffe as one of the best indie shooters of the decade. It’s a fantastic achievement and an absolute bargain at around half the cost of a Digital Eclipse special. Not just a great XBLIG game, but a great game full stop.
[It's out, so a timely bump and a recommended tag for Ishi's rather marvelous platform adventure. Go buy!]
I dunno if it’s the time of year or maybe the stars have aligned into the correct position but this month has been a rather sterling month for the platform game.
Earlier in the week, I wrote far too many words on the upcoming PC platformer VVVVVV which is a bit of a special gem all told, a few days later and what should land in my inbox but some preview code of Johnny Platform’s latest adventure courtesy of the ever glorious Ishisoft.
The original Johnny Platform still stands as one of the best platform games on the service, now at a ridiculous bargaintastic 80 Space Points and worth every penny. But y’know, it was pretty much a slightly enhanced port of an already existing DS homebrew game. With the latest installment, Johnny undertakes his first adventure designed specifically with the 360 in mind and it’s a lovely thing indeed.
Normally, it’d surprise me to say such a thing given that as a rule Christmas themed games are either desperate reskins of already existing games or rather half arsed cash in attempts. However, we’re talking the ever talented Ishi here so no, it’s no surprise.
For those of you out there (all one of you, I’m sure) who’ve not sampled the delights of Johnny Platform prior, the game has a simple premise. It’s a single screen platformer (otherwise known as my favourite kind) where you attempt to clear the level of nasties and goodies to progress to the exit and onto the next stage. The principle for JPSC as we shall now refer to it (I know it sounds like a DSS form but hey ho) remains the same. Where this sort of game hits make or break is in the level design. It’s all very well having x amount of levels but if x amount of levels continually present the same challenge, you might as well not bother after the first one or two as you’ll have seen everything the game has to offer in no time.
Ishi clearly understands this problem and it chuffs me greatly that each stage presents you with different challenges based on different combinations of stuff wot you have learnt to do so far.
As with the first outing, the difficulty ramp up is somewhat slow – not that that’s a bad thing, mind you – constantly mixing things up each stage keeps the game fresh. On one stage you might be attempting a tricksy jump, another might see you carrying the biggest pile of presents ever and trying not to set yourself on fire with a bomb tucked amongst them or destroying an ambling troop of skipping robots or sliding across an ice palace of sorts bouncing on Christmas crackers. It’s the right side of fun and just the right side of frustrating.
Collecting cups of coffee along the way means you’re never short of extra lives unless you have an especially catastrophic run (because naturally, the more coffee you drink the more life you have) and save points every 5 stages take away most of the pain of restarts, it’s clear that Ishi understands the genre he’s playing in and understands what’s needed to make that all important fun factor come to the fore. As appealing as the odd masocore platformer has become, you can’t beat a proper old school single screener done well. JPSC is done well.
Throw in a bit of a more HD-erised makeover and you’ve got a winner.
Johnny Platform Saves Christmas is currently in peer review and will drop soon. We’ll give this a bump when it does and throw in the old Recommended tag at the same time.
If you find yourself sitting on Santa’s knee over the next week, tug on his beard and make sure you ask him that when he empties his sack underneath your tree this year, he leaves you a copy of JPSC in exchange for mince pies.
Remember PC gaming in 1992? A couple years before DOS extenders, when processors ran at 33MHz and a 16MB HDD was pretty big, just getting a platform game running at all was considered an accomplishment. There were timing oddities and collision errors in games that often had enemies bumbling about outside the range of your largely impotent weapon which would fling themselves into you at a moment’s notice. Most games were just free teasers to get you interested in buying further games in the series. Into this era, the Elfland games were released.
I know you’ve all been waiting for this so here it is. The story of a man on the EDGE™
Dashing through the Indies, with one sentence to say…
Watch random XBox Avatars do semi-random things on a street. 80 Points.
Auto-targeting dodge-’em-up splatterfest. 80 Points.
Christmas tree (and wreath) decoration activity with scalable ornamentation. 80 Points.
So, we got a mail yesterday from the folks at Dirge Studios about their upcoming XBLIG release Herman. Described as “one part Braid, four parts Lode Runner, five parts Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and three more parts Butthole Surfers” which you’d think could prepare your eyes for what you’re about to see. Not so, readers. Not so. Nothing could have prepared my eyes for this.
Screenshots after the break. Hold me, mummy.
I forgot to write anything about one-sentence looks at last week’s Indie Games releases.
Another “lite” version hot on the heels of the original, you get 1/4 of the Antigrav Racing Championship tracks for 1/5 the price, but no Championships. 80 Points.
Personally, I find slots incredibly boring, and virtual slots incredibly pointless additionally. 80 Points.
Trying to play Columns with wodges of coloured gelatine is just goofy enough to be amusing. 240 Points.
True Story. I once made a game about a hamster that rummaged up peoples backsides. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Obviously, it wasn’t really a good idea – a far better idea is to build a physics game around gerbils and let you attach bombs to them if only because there’s something quite endearing about blowing up cute things.
Luckily, we’ve got the trailer for just such a thing for you to admire. Brace yourselves:
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