Category Archives: The Android’s Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

A Kick in the Pants

As I’m sure many of you fine folks will be aware, there’s a website called Kickstarter out there which has become rather popular of late. If you are indeed uninitiated, the essential idea is that you posit a creative project, set a monetary goal to fund said project, and then people can pledge dosh to support it. If you don’t make the goal nobody pays, but if you meet or exceed it, voila – you’ve got your cash. I can see the logic here as it means committing to a project only costs you if loads of other people support it too – so it’s security for your pledges, helps ensure dosh for the prospective producer, and is in and of itself a good source of advertising for projects.

What does this mean for games? Well it looks pretty promising so far. Now with something like a book, a one-person operation you can do in your own time, you get it out there and THEN try to sell it, at least with current e-publishing taking off. A videogame, even an indie one, is of course a much bigger investment. It takes time, and even if you’re working with a really small team you might need to bring in, say, a music guy for awhile. All of this of course costs money in a variety of ways, from wages to licensing to Thai ladyboy prostitutes. Games, in short, cost money to make. And the men in suits who fund them are aware of nothing except that. All they want is to get Call of Duty’s sales figures. Kickstarter offers a striking alternative to this which I think really needs to be highlighted; it’s the democratization of funding, insofar as you believe capitalism can be democratic. (Worker solidarity! Syndicalists unite!)

For mother Equestria!

Take a look at FTL. It’s a great idea, and I’m wholly behind it. Take a look at those numbers though; these guys figured they needed $10,000 to get their project finished, and they ended up with $200,000. Twenty times more than they asked for. Even if we assume a bigger company had looked at their idea and what they had so far and said “Yeah, I can see this working out.”, would they have gained that much funding? And if they had, would it have been so free of strings and meddling?

Of course not every Kickstarter works out. I’m surprised at how little Kenshi got, for example. It’s going to take some time for people to figure out how this whole thing works and how to get their names out there successfully; and we don’t have enough money to fund all the projects (because we’re not a global federation of anarcho-Syndicalist communes, no doubt), but nonetheless this field seems to me to be an exciting development. Even moreso if we look at how Kickstarter can be combined with Amplitude’s model of letting beta players vote on features and the Minecraft-led idea of letting people buy in alpha/beta. It’s hard to discern what shape this will all take, and of course there’s no end-state here, there’s going to be new developments that change the playing field if not the whole ball game again. But maybe, if we’re lucky, this will lead to an increase in player input and more importantly still the ability for developers to be in charge over publishers and executives.

Endless Space

Fillies and gentlecolts, we’ve got something we need to talk about. There’s a game on the horizon known as Endless Space, a 4X game that I had previously heard of but only kept half an eye on. Well as it turns out it was very recently put up on Steam and pre-ordering, as is becoming something of a norm for games from non-major publishers, gives you alpha access.

To bluntly not put too fine a point upon it, the alpha is as good as most gold iterations of other games. It is incredibly smooth, clean, and lovely to use. It obviously still needs work, but even as a late alpha game it seems to be entirely playable and thoroughly enjoyable so far, and I’ve been playing it for a couple of hours solidly now. As regular readers will know by now both Pike and myself are ardent fans of the 4X genre, playing stupid amounts of Civilization for example. Pike rates Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri as the single best game ever, and I rate it in my top three. And on the SMAC note, Endless Space has a very pleasing quasi-homage to SMAC in the tech tree icons.

There is ONE game Pike would consider better...

Endless Space hits the usual list of items that a 4X should, the whole 4X part of it that is, but it’s doing so in a way that is clear and making a lot of sense, providing a sense of rapid, but controllable buildup as you discover new technologies, unlock new buildings, and acquire new resources. In many ways it also takes after MoO2, for example in letting you colonize planets within a system once you’ve got one colony in it, without the need for new colony ships. Building your infrastructure is also a curious affair; you choose an area for each individual planet to focus on, like enhancing farming or being a trading hub, whilst you build your more typical improvements on a system-wide basis. It’s an interesting hybrid as a solution to the problem of the appropriate scale on which to handle this side of the 4X genre and so far I have to say it’s a fairly effective one; systems are the main basis of your empire, but your planets are still more than just completely interchangeable or indeed entirely invisible subunits; they have their own character and you can influence this.

Combat is the part of the game I’m not yet 100% sold on, though I’m not sure how much remains to be done there I hope there’s a little tweaking. It plays out as a video, rather like GalCiv 2’s combat scenes, but in ES you have the ability to choose actions for each of the three phases of combat; for example you can choose to deploy nanobots to repair your ships, to divert all spare power to weapons for a risky offensive, and the like. It’s a sound idea and could be a great halfway point between the full control of, say, Homeworld and the completely hands-off nature of GC2, but I think a few more options are needed in the early game to really ensure this works, and combat needs to be a bit more… I’m not sure exactly, visceral? It feels a bit like it lacks in impact. Still, it’s a commendable effort that is, as with everything in this game, very well presented.

Yayyy overviews of space!

There is also the standard 4X element of ship design, and this seems like a very good effort with a wide and increasing array of options as you progress through the tech trees; there’s not a huge amount to say except that there are no complaints whatsoever from me.

The thing that’s really getting me into this game, however, is the sheer level of polish that is present. As I’ve said it’s an alpha, but it acts nothing like one in most regards. Everything is fast, clean, smooth, obvious, and I actually turned the tutorial off because the screens and their tooltips provide more than enough information anyway. The music is atmospheric and suitably grand as well. Never underestimate the power of a good interface and a solid atmosphere – it’s the difference between a good game and a classic one, and it can make even a mediocre game enjoyable.

The Endless Space site!

Everyone Needs to be Aware that Sonic 2 HD is a Thing that Exists

Have you ever thought “Man, I’d love to play a version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that is exactly like the original except with updated graphics and great reimaginings of the music?”

If so, you’re in luck.  Sonic the Hedgehog 2 HD is a fan project that is setting out to do exactly that, and judging by the alpha demo released yesterday they’re going to succeed.  All fans of classic Sonic the Hedgehog need to download this demo right the heck now.  Being an alpha, there are a couple of bugs and glitches here and there, and only Emerald Hill Zone is available, but if you’re anything like me you won’t care and you’ll just play it over and over.

Look you guys, it even comes with Flaily Arms Sonic. FLAILY. ARMS. SONIC.

Okay, so maybe I’m a little overly enthusiastic about this thing.  Maybe I’ve done nothing but play old Sonic games for the last week so I’m all hyped about it.  But seriously, check it out.  aslkgh;aslkhg;lakha I can’t wait for Chemical Plant Zone.

SteamQuest 2: Ben There, Dan That!

SteamQuest is a series based around Pike’s quest to play all the games she has on Steam. Which is a lot. Her definition of “play”, here, is at least one hour for smaller games and at least three hours for more substantial ones. Feel free to follow along!

Ben There, Dan That!
injunctively Developer: Size Five Games
buy generic Lyrica online Genres: Indie, Point-And-Click Adventure
Website: http://www.sizefivegames.com/games/ben-there-dan-that/ – and the Steam Link
Time Spent by Pike: 62 minutes – unfinished

Today’s SteamQuest entry was actually going to be about Alpha Protocol, but as it turns out my computer doesn’t want to run it. So for the time being I’m stuck running games that take much lower system requirements. Hopefully I can patch up my computer eventually and then I can go back and play the newer, fancier stuff, but until then I’m plucking random indie and/or older games off of my list. Ben There, Dan That! is one of them.

I’ll come right out and admit it: I’m not a big Point & Click Adventure game player. This isn’t because I have something against them, but I just have very, very little experience with them. It’s one of those genres that I don’t know very much about just because I’m so inexperienced with the games in said genre.

This is a quintessential adventure game, though. You click stuff. You pick stuff up. You solve puzzles by combining stuff. That’s basically how the game works. It’s not a difficult mechanic, but in this game it’s well-executed. Once you get the hang of how things work it’s very intuitive, and some of the puzzles will leave you feeling very clever indeed.

The devs are clearly fond of Sam & Max and Monkey Island (in-jokes and homages abound) and so this is an adventure in a bizarre world and off-the-wall humor abounds. Should you choose to examine a light switch in the bathroom, one of the characters goes into a very detailed monologue about said light switch, for example. The characters also poke unabashed fun at themselves (they’re based off of the devs) and at prior games they’ve made. Not gonna lie, the humor had me laughing to myself on more than one occasion. The game is also super-British, so one of my early quests was to rig up an “aerial for a knackered telly”. Yeah, it took almost as long for me to figure out what they wanted me to do as it did to solve the puzzle itself. Fortunately I can always use Mister Adequate as a translator if things get dire.

Pic related.

There’s not really much else to say about this game except that it was considerably more interesting than I initially thought it would be and it’s probably worth a look for point-and-click fans, especially since you can get both this game and its sequel in a package for $5. I think I’ll be diving back into this at some point in the future when I’m not in a rush to get a blog post out before work. Supposedly the storyline involves Nazi dinosaurs or something, and that’s clearly worth a closer look.

Moments later I was abducted by the aliens outside the window and taken aboard their spaceship. ...no, really. That's in the game.

SteamQuest 1: And Yet It Moves

SteamQuest is a series based around Pike’s quest to play all the games she has on Steam. Which is a lot. Her definition of “play”, here, is at least one hour for smaller games and at least three hours for more substantial ones. Feel free to follow along!

And Yet It Moves
Developer: Broken Rules
Genres: Indie, Platformer, Puzzle
Website: http://www.andyetitmoves.net/ – and the Steam Link
Time Spent by Pike: 63 minutes – unfinished

And Yet It Moves is a puzzle-platformer that revolves around the gimmick of rotating the screen around in order to get your character from place to place. This gimmick is not a new one and has appeared in more than one Newgrounds flash game, and if you’ve played said flash games before, the first couple of levels of this one will sort of leave you with a “Huh… that’s it?” taste in your mouth.

That’s why you need to give yourself at least twenty minutes to get to The Good Stuff.

The Good Stuff, here, are puzzles that show up in the later levels and are challenging without being frustrating. These puzzles also take full advantage of the screen-tilting mechanic and you’ll find yourself, for example, herding bats around (bats will only fly to the top of the screen) in order to chase monsters away and whatnot. It sounds weird, but it works really well, and I found myself frequently very pleasantly surprised with how these puzzles turned out.

The game also has a much lauded unique paper-cutout-collage artstyle but to be honest the game could use any style and it would still be just as interesting because of the puzzles.

Did somepony say paper cutouts?

Probably my biggest gripe with the game is one that may or may not simply be a byproduct of my own, well, derpiness, and that is that I can never remember which arrow key tilts the screen which way and then I end up killing myself as I frantically try to rotate the screen in the right direction. This killed me more times than I care to remember. This is really the type of game that would work better with some sort of tilt mechanism or something. Or maybe I am just that much of a klutz.

Regardless, you will leave the game with a sense of vertigo that has you subconsciously wanting to tilt webpages or other computer programs long after you’ve quit the game. This is really a fun, compact little game once you get past the tutorial levels and I can definitely see myself returning to it in the near future and trying to complete it. I do think the $10 is a bit steep if you’re not really into this sort of thing, but it shows up in Indie Bundles every now and again and when it does it’s worth snagging if you can.

Guest Post from Rilgon: Jamestown!

Hi, I’m Rilgon, and I’m lucky enough to have Pike and Mister Adequate let me grace the Android’s Closet! Today, I’m here to talk to you about Jamestown and why you should be buying it and playing it – ideally as part of the Humble Indie Bundle #4. I consider myself somewhat of a shmup person. I’m not the greatest, by any means – I’ve never 1CC’d Ikaruga, never even come close to beating any of Treasure’s greatest on their hardest difficulties, and playing Touhou on Lunatic’s still a pipedream. I enjoy them dearly, however, and when a good one comes along, it’s hard to not take notice! I initially bought the Humble Indie Bundle #4 for Cave Story+, but Jamestown has stolen my heart – or, at least, the adrenaline-filled shmup-loving part of it!

For a game to be good enough to grace the annals of the Android’s Closet, it’s got to be best-in-breed. This is the blog that sings the praises of X-COM and SMAC on high (worthy recipients, mind you), so anything reviewed has gotta be up to snuff – and Jamestown fits the bill. Right off the bat, the steampunk styling and quirky story will grab anyone to whom a good steampunk slant attracts. The premise is simple – it is the year 1619, and you have escaped execution at the hands of the British king. You have made your escape to what some call The New World and other call Mars on a quest to clear your name. From here… well, that would be spoiling, wouldn’t it?

Steampunk pony? Steampunk pony.

Novices to the shmup genre are more than welcome. Jamestown has a staggering five difficulty levels – Normal, Difficult, Legendary, Divine, and Judgment. Normal will be approchable by anyone who’s been gaming as long as readers of the Closet no doubt have, especially after Jamestown’s fantastic tutorial that teaches you the basics of the minimalist hitbox that defines so many bullet hell shmups, the interaction between your weapons, and the Vaunt scoring/comboing system. Those of us to whom shmups are our bread and butter, though, will be treated to some seriously intense stuff. I saw a bullet arrangement that’s right out of Touhou 8, Imperishable Night on the second stage as early as Difficult level, and I’m still struggling to finish the final stage on Legendary. Divine and Judgment are… still to come, let’s say.

Shmups are visceral things, though – you’ve got to have catchy visuals and catchy music, or the whole thing just feels bland and unfulfilling. Jamestown brings this to play with bravado. Final Form Games, the makers of Jamestown, have something great here. The soundtrack is amazing (and comes with your Humble Indie Bundle 4, hint hint!), and definitely gives both context and conflict to the game, especially its bosses. One of the bosses you face is a steam-powered battle train, and the boss theme for it is sublime. You really FEEL like you’re racing this train down a railway, dodging its littany of fire and returning attack with your own.

Oh, and if you happen to be lucky enough to have friends over, Jamestown supports 1-4 players, using keyboard, mouse, and Xbox 360 controller schemes. It will also apparently recognize multiple mice independently. And if you’re a Mac or Linux gamer (*nods to Pike*), you’re also in luck, because as of the release of the Humble Indie Bundle, Jamestown works in Mac and Linux as well! I can’t speak to how easy it is to install, given I have nothing to do with OSX and all of my Linux installs are textual, but I’m sure Pike could cook something up on the Linux front as a follow-up post, should it be needed.

Today’s post was written by Rilgon, who you can also find on Twitter and on Tumblr!

The Binding of Isaac

There is a lot I could tell you about The Binding of Isaac.

I could tell you about its story, told at the very beginning of the game, a parody of religious tales which is certainly not the type of thing you’d find in your average video game.

I could tell you about the music, at times haunting and at times heroic, which will stay with you long after you’ve closed the game.

I could tell you about the art style, which is macabre and grotesque and not afraid to be so.

I could tell you about your character, a crying little boy who literally lobs his tears at enemies as projectiles and whose terrible life is told to you in the occasional short but effective flashback. He has no reason to live; he is unloved and unimportant, but he runs away from death anyway, for no other reason than, well… dying is scary and bad.

I could tell you about all of that in detail, but instead I’m going to tell you about the gameplay.

One of my better recent games.

This game is a masterpiece of simplicity. You run, you shoot, you explore your dungeons and you beat your bosses. This is all done extremely well, of course, but let me tell you about a few things that the game did to tweak this formula and improve it.

Firstly, in true roguelike fashion, there is permadeath. There are no lives and no continues in this game, unless you, by chance, manage to stumble upon a rare item which gives you a bonus life. But those items are few and far between. When you die in this game, you’re dead and you have to start the game over.

Secondly, the dungeons are randomly generated. No two games are alike. This goes together with the permadeath nicely because if you die, sure you lose your items and powerups, but it’s not like you have to redo a bunch of levels you’ve already done. Instead, you get to play through a whole new experience.

Thirdly, there are hundreds of little items and secrets in this game. Because your dungeons are randomly generated, you never know what items you’re going to find. All of the items do something completely different and interesting, and using them is often a surprise because you usually can’t tell what the item or powerup does just by looking at it. The game does keep track of which items you’ve found through the course of your travels, and finding all of these items (and cards, a whole different subset of items to collect) becomes this whole Pokemon-like minigame that keeps you hooked long after you may have otherwise stopped being interested.

Fourthly, the dungeon-crawling itself is just plain solid. It’s simple enough to be easy to learn and the difficulty is tweaked just enough that you’re always on your toes without feeling too overwhelmed– most of the time, anyway.

In short, this is what a 2-D action video game is supposed to be. I’m a sucker for things like the Humble Bundle or Indie Royale so I’ve played a lot of indie games lately, but this is probably the best of the lot.

You can find a pretty full-featured demo of the game on Newgrounds, and the full game is $5 on Steam. If you let the game grow on you, you won’t be disappointed.

Voxatron

Way back in the day there was a game called Robotron: 2084. I played it a little as a kid– not much, though. This game was not easy, you see. For starters it had a two-joystick control scheme, so you could move and shoot in two different directions– this was the first game to do that. Combine that with weird unworldly sounds, flashing neon lights, and gameplay that just threw you into the middle of the action without so much as a countdown or warmup period, and you can see why this game was fairly unforgiving for a younger player. (It also scared me, but that’s beside the point.)

It was widely hailed as a pretty genius game, though, and now that I’m older I’m able to see why. Not surprisingly, it has spawned several homage games and “Robotron-likes”. Voxatron is one of those games.

Voxatron is not complete. It’s not even in beta. It’s currently in alpha, and even so it’s one of the most fun games I’ve played in a while. A screenshot isn’t really going to do it justice– heck, I don’t know if a video would really do it justice, but here you go:

Basically, the game is Robotron, but with plenty of weapon powerups and 100% destructible environments. Level after level you’re fighting nonstop waves of enemies. Your objective? Survive. Just… survive. If you don’t survive, you restart the level and get to try again. You’d be surprised how many times you’re willing to try again once you really get into the game.

Oh, and there’s a level editor, too, if that’s your kind of thing.

Anyways! For an alpha, this game is extremely promising. It works natively on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and for the next six days you can pay what you want for it as a part of Humble Bundle. I highly recommend it!

…and now I’m off to go play it some more.

You Have Seven More Days to Get Frozen Synapse

…okay, okay, you can get it whenever you want, but you have seven more days to get it for cheap as part of the Humble Bundle.

What is Frozen Synapse, you may be asking?

Well, let me put it this way:

Do you like tactical turn-based strategy games?
Do you like interesting game premises involving the player being an AI?
Do you like really good music?

If you said yes to the above questions then you should really be looking into getting this game. This is a solid TBS that gives you a considerable amount of control over your troops and provides a rather interesting twist of allowing you to run simulations of your moves before you actually move. You ARE an AI, after all. The actual outcome is always different from even your best looking simulations, though. In other words, the white-knuckle anticipation between turns might just be the death of you.

Twilight Sparkle = You; Rubiks Cube = Frozen Synapse

There is also a multiplayer mode which I’m assuming is intense as all heck but I’ve yet to try it. Mister Adequate and I have plans to butt heads in game at some point, though. As of now we’re both just working our way through the single player campaign between playing a million other things. And yes, Mister Adequate has given this game his Hardcore Strategy/Tactical Game Seal of Approval, which is basically our equivalent of the Good Housekeeping award, except even more elusive.

Anyways, if you think any of this sounds interesting and/or you’re still listening to the music (and you really should be), then go toss Humble Bundle a few bucks and enjoy. There are other games that come in the bundle, of course, and they seem to be adding more every few days, but honestly Frozen Synapse and its soundtrack alone is worth the (user-set) price of the package. Check it out!

Xenonauts

For a long, long, long, long, long time we have lamented the absence of X-Com. There have been various attempts at creating spiritual successors to it, most notably the UFO series by ALTAR, and these weren’t terrible games; but nobody has ever really captured the feeling of X-Com, nobody has ever come close in fact.

No ponies today. Only nightmares.

Now someone has. Spurred by the positive impressions of the fine gentlemen at RPS I picked up the preorder (Which unlocks beta access) a couple of days ago and, after spending a little time with the beta build, I can pretty safely say that Mr. Meer’s writeup is spot on. Let me lift a quote wholesale from what he writes;

A playable build of Xenonauts was on show in the RPS-sponsored Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer expo last week, and pretty much everyone I spoke to about it said the same thing: “well, it’s X-COM,” they offered with a wide grin. They didn’t say what worked or what didn’t or what they’d change or anything like that – they just said “it’s like X-COM.”

Xenonauts, ladies and gentlemen, is like X-Com. It’s hard to define what exactly X-Com is, but the end result is very clearly present here. You care about your soldiers even though you know they’re going to die very quickly. You find yourself cursing because in your eagerness to look around the next corner you didn’t spare enough time units for reaction fire. You feel the greatest tension when you take a long-range shot with a rookie. You need it to hit, it HAS to hit, or some other guy right next to the alien with no TUs is going to die next turn. And yes, you’re terrified of Hidden Movement.

It just adds up. Finally, after nearly 20 years, we’re getting a true and proper successor to one of the great, all-time classics of videogaming. I urge everyone to check out the Xenonauts page, take a look around, and to rejoice – for our prayers are being answered.