re: Wednesday’s post

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — stanleylieber @ 5:01 am July 29, 2010

via fckyeanintendo

Super Mario Bros. Crossover

Filed under: Uncategorized — Will @ 4:00 am July 28, 2010

I usually shy away from talking about works based on the original Super Mario Bros. game. Mostly because so many people put out such a volume of remixed songs, fanart, and just stuff, that I’ve all but become numb to the stuff.

But eventually something comes along that grabs my attention, like Super Mario Bros. Crossover

It’s a reimagining, of sorts, of the original Super Mario Bros. game, with the exception that instead of the titular Bros., you have your choice of several characters from the NES’s 8-bit heyday, each with signature moves and attacks. It’s kind of like Super Smash Bros… except without the fighting game parts.

Each of the characters controls more or less like they did in their respective games, though some concessions have been taken. Simon Belmont gets a double-jump, for example, to make up for his comparatively pitiful jumping ability.

Pretty much, the game is laid out as you’d expect. All the hidden powerups and warp zones are there. You can even play as the Original Mario if you want (but you’ve been there, done that, I’d imagine).

There are two things to keep in mind here:

1. If you play this game, you’re going to definitely want to use a gamepad and a copy of your favorite joystick-to-keyboard mapping program to make the game reasonably easy to control and
2. Ryu Hyabusa from Ninja Gaiden has been added as a playable character

You can play Super Mario Bros. Crossover here

Pets Live

Filed under: Uncategorized — CJ @ 6:43 pm July 27, 2010

Another quick iThing update: Pets Live is the closest game I’ve found to Pokemon on the App Store to date. You pick a starter pet (each with a different elemental specialty: earth, air, water, fire), from there you get to spend mana to quest or energy to battle other pet trainers. You start with 100/100 health, 100/100 mana, and 4/4 energy. Both battling other trainers and questing nets you experience points – get enough of those to level up and you can allocate some bonus stat points into more health, more mana, more energy, etc.

Unlike Pokemon, there is no real graphic interface or walking around in the tall grass. Pets Live is all menu based: push “do it” to start/finish a quest for x amount of mana, push “battle” to fight another trainer. Your health, mana, and energy levels are all self-replenishing, on different timers. Every ten minutes, you regain 10 health; five minutes regenerates 10 mana; three minutes for one energy. So depending on how you want to play Pets Live, you can really build the game to suit your needs. I prefer to avoid battling and simply quest to upgrade my pets’ abilities and find new pets to train, so I sunk most of my ability points into mana which lets me do more questing. This lets me check in on the game every few hours to spend my regenerated mana pool and see if anything new has shown up. On the other hand, my wife chose to spend her points into energy, letting her actively battle in order to upgrade her roster. This versatility has made Pets Live a pretty successful app, and at the low, low price of free, there are plenty of people in the Pets community to play with.

BASS

Filed under: cheapo games,Potant Potables,Web Games — Cameron @ 10:55 pm July 26, 2010

No no, I’m not talking about Basscomm, I’m Talking about Beneath a Steel Sky, a game that time has forgotten about.  If you came here today looking for greatness…you picked a good day to visit.

7032-468x-BeneathASteelSky

BASS was originally released in 1994 by those wacky Brits on the SCUMM engine and mixes humor, sci-fi story telling and a strong serving of cyberpunk.  For those of you unfamiliar with cyberpunk go here for a wikipedia definition.  It basically means that its a scenario where science and technology have progressed and futuristic devices exist but society has taken a turn for the worse, much like Blade Runner or maybe Borderlands.  BASS is also know for its art work that was done by Dave Gibbons, more popularly know as the guy that did the ink work for the  Watchmen as well as various other comic books of the time.  The graphics, although dated by todays standards, are amazing.  The worlds are cleverly designed and do a great deal to convey the atmosphere of the game.

Beneath_a_Steel_Sky

The game is set in a future Australia where there has been a major fallout of one variety or another and most all of the land has been made unlivable.  The story follows Robert Foster after he is adopted by Aboriginals in the outback after a helicopter crash when he was a small child that left him parentless and stranded in “The Gap”. The Gap is the barren wasteland between the two major factory cities.   The opening movie shows that Robert Foster is being hunted down by soldiers from Union City that are being controlled by a computer named LINC. All of the opening is illustrated by Dave Gibbons and has full voice narration and voice acting.  One thing that sets this game apart from some of the similar games of the time was that all of the characters had voices and almost every line was spoken out loud and with the added bonus of top notch art work made this game very easy on the senses.

Beneath-a-Steel-Sky_1

So as I was saying, you control Robert foster and his sidekick Joey the robot that he built living with the natives of Australia.  After being forced back to Union City the helicopter you were brought in on crashes, bringing your escape from custody and the start of the game. Your mission is to find out why the authorities are looking for you and what is really going on with the mysterious LINC computer system and eventually gain your freedom. The controls are a lot like other point and click SCUMM games.  Left mouse controls where you go as well as using it to examine items. Your right mouse button controls actions like open and use and talk and so on.  F5 brings up your menu to save and load and adjust game settings. Side note: I noticed when I saved my game to a slot nothing showed up as being there, so if this happens to you don’t worry, its there it just doesn’t show up.

bass

I won’t spoil anymore of the games story, you’ll just have to play it yourself.  Its is stuffed fully of funny dialogue and sight gags as well as a serious tale of corporate greed and oppression.  In 2003 the game was declared freeware from its producers and is freely available from many sites on the web. You can get it from the SCUMMVM site or from Good old Games, which I highly recommend.  Their site is much easier to navigate and you don’t need to download SCUMMVM to play it and its still 100% free and DRM free.  Also at GOG you can get the manual and other artwork for the game as a separate download.  They have a very good layout and many download options once the game is in your library.  I could spend a whole article talking about how much i love GOG.com, but I’ll save it for another day, just go there and get the game and I promise you will be happy.  So if you love point and click adventure games and cyberpunk post apocalyptic future dystopias with a sense of humor, then this game is for you.  Its is also available on iPhone and Android for .99c with a few updates to the game play thrown in.

gog

HELLO????

Filed under: Potant Potables — Cameron @ 1:47 pm July 23, 2010

We seem to be having a lack of writers these days, I’m not really sure where they have gone to, but they appear to be dead.  So,  in their place i trolled the internet for something worthy to show you today, and i found it.  I present you, the mighty Chipophone.

This guy built this damn thing and he deserves song sort of congressional medal because of it.  It was designed for live chiptune playing, which basically means this man can play video game music on his homemade organ.  The build quality of this thing is remarkable.  The sound reproduction seems flawless as does his playing.  Its fine Swiss engineering at its best.  If you want to see more of the build on this thing or just get more info go to his site http://www.linusakesson.net/chipophone/index.php .   There’s a bunch of other really nerdy stuff there too, I haven’t had much time to look through it all but I’m sure there’s other interesting stuff there as well.  Enjoy and have a great weekend.

Chop Sushi!

Filed under: cheapo games — Will @ 10:00 am July 21, 2010

Game: Chop Sushi!
Purchased from: The iTunes Store
Price paid: $0.99
Platform: iPhone, iPad, & iPod Touch

I like playing puzzle games, but any more, most of them seem to be some variant of ‘match three of the same thing to make them disappear’. Which is great (kinda) for a while, but I do crave different experiences occasionally.

Take Chop Sushi! for example. On the surface, you have a match 3 things and make them disappear thing going on, but there are enough little additions that this doesn’t quite seem like the cookie-cutter puzzler that it could be.

There’s a kind of a story, but it was so bizarre that I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to it. The gist of it is that people are sad because of their demons (“Nobody likes my hair!”, etc.), and you, as the Master Chef, use the power of sushi to defeat their demons… somehow.

You’re presented with a 7×7 grid of sushi and wasabi. You have the ability to pick up any piece you want and move it in either of the four cardinal directions to the edge of the board, with the goal of matching three of the same things. Match most things, and nothing much happens, but match the wasabi and you attack your opponent’s life bar, and with a little guile you try to prevent your opponent from doing the same. The first one to run out of HP loses. It’s pretty straightforward (if not a little boring) for a while… until you start adding traps, specials, and boosts. These are special ‘recipes’ that are triggered by clearing certain combinations of sushi for a benefit (or in the case of traps, a detriment). Now the strategy comes in of trying to get the bonuses while forcing your opponent to trigger the traps. It’s a little complicated.

But there’s not a whole lot more to the game than that. There’s a half-hearted puzzle mode that feels kind of bolted on, and an overly simplistic fishing activity you can do, but they don’t really add anything worthwhile to the experience. So, no big gains or losses there. The real meat and potatoes of this game, so to speak, is the adventure mode, where you go up against the computer in a series of battles that steadily ramp up in difficulty, culminating in a final battle against… Well, I better not say, don’t want to ruin the surprise.

I pretty easily blew through this game in about a week, playing about an hour a day, but after the adventure mode is done, there’s really not much else to do with the thing. You can go back and relive the battles in the game if you want, but since your guy levels up RPG-style, most of the fights from the guys at the beginning of the game are going to last for one move or so. So replay takes a pretty big hit, but the ride to get there is decently interesting.

Yahtzee Time

Filed under: Potant Potables — Cameron @ 5:36 pm July 20, 2010

If you are anything like me you love playing games. Whether they be video games or board games or even the dreaded out doors sports games, it doesn’t matter, games are fun and we all love playing them.  There has been a trend over the past few years where companies seem to be getting confused at what they are making.  One of the latest in a long line is Super Mario Yahtzee.

yaht

What does the world of Mario have to do with Yahtzee? Nothing.  Do we want this, you bet.  I’m not sure who the marketing genius was that figured out that if you put Nintendo characters on anything people will buy it even if they already have the same thing without the Nintendo characters, but give him a medal.  The game is exactly the same as the Yahtzee you know and love except that the dice feature pictures of the different power ups and comes with a snazzy question block to roll the dice with.  For $19.99 it would be a great addition to any geeks gaming collection so go on  over to thinkgeek and check it out. 

Fault Line

Filed under: Web Games — Cameron @ 4:04 pm July 19, 2010

Greetings.  This weeks games is another game by nitrome, the same guys that  made the previous game of the week tiny castle.  So sit back and prepare your self for the challenge of FAULT LINE!!!!!
fault

In fault line you play as a robot  with rocket hands that you use to connect nodes together to alter the level (more on that in a bit.)  You control your robot man with the wasd keys to move and the mouse to launch your hands at different nodes.  The point of the game is to make it to the exit by connecting to of the white nodes together to change the level to progress to the next area that was unreachable.  The way you alter the level is by connecting the dot you remove all of the level in between it all the way across the screen.  See the pictures below to make more sense of it.

fault2

fault3

level before and after

As with most games the puzzles get harder as the game progresses.  You get multiple nodes to connect to moving platforms to deal with and a massive migraine to deal with once you get about 10 levels in.  I won’t lie, the game gets pretty hard, but its an enjoyable hard (insert bad joke here). I hope you enjoy and let me know what you think.

Tune in next week when we get a little scummy wit it!

Play Fault Line here

Picture pages

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Amy @ 6:17 pm July 15, 2010

More inspired art from the land of Pacman

Be sure to click on the pics to visit the creators of these pieces!

Pipe Mania

Filed under: cheapo games — Will @ 10:00 am July 14, 2010

Game: Pipe Mania
Purchased from: Big Lots
Price paid: $4.00
Platform: PC

If you haven’t caught on by now, Big Lots is pretty much my go to place for last season’s games on the cheap. There just aren’t enough hours in the day or dollars in my wallet for me to play all the games that I want when they make their first trip through the retail channels. But there are also games there that I’ve never seen outside of my local stores, so that’s a plus, too. One such game is Pipe Mania.

Pipe Mania has existed in one form or another for a number of years, and (very briefly) seemed like it was going to be as ubiquitous as Tetris, but for one reason or another, it seems to have nearly fallen off the face of the planet. If you’re not familiar with this game, it features you as a plumber of sorts presented wth a series of levels featuring a spigot and a drain. After a few seconds a slow flowing liquid called Flooze (not to be confused with Flooz) will start to flow. Your job is to take the random selection of pipe pieces and construct a winding path to the drain. The more pipes you use, the more points you get. Easy! Of course, most real plumbers that I know would go for the most direct route possible, but they also don’t have a selection of parts raining down on them from on high, so that’s a plus, I guess.

So this game is the same as that game. Yeah, there’s been stuff added: fancy-pantsy graphics, some cartoony characters (including a pairing of a lazy cat and a fastidious mouse, what fun!) and some of the levels have obstacles that you have to work around, but it’s nothing too earth-shattering.

The real draw is that this is something that you can pick up and play for a few minutes in between… well, whatever it is that people do on a computer when they’re not playing games.

Well, that and it cost less than one of those $5 footlongs, and lasted way longer.

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