Humble Bundle – Play and Create
Sep. 30th, 2015 06:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA collection of games made with GameMaker Studio. As a bonus, most of the source codes were included, so I could make edited versions if I really wanted to.
Spoiler Alert - A platformer with a cute twist: You’ve already beaten the game, now you need to run the whole thing in reverse, unkilling enemies and uncollecting coins, while avoiding time paradoxes. You have infinite lives and each segment is short (which is good, because missing any single thing causes a paradox and forces a restart of that segment), and it’s cute. (Heck, you’re playing as a chili pepper!) You get the “beginning” when you beat it, which, as you’d expect, casts the game in a different light. Probably an hour to play through; replay value from trying to “gold medal” every level by doing them on a single run.
WizardWizard - A nasty puzzle-platformer divided up into a series of levels where you need to collect a key and reach a gate without getting killed by buzzsaws. The only tool for this is the double-jump, and you need to use that well starting from the very beginning. Really short (only 25 levels when I played it), but there are a few clever challenges. (Difficulty-wise: It took me 100+ lives to get through 20 levels, though I occasionally respawned in a place that killed me again.)
Wasteland Kings - This is a repetitive top-down shooter; vaguely arena-battle (you need to kill everything in each level) and vaguely roguelike (you only have what you scavenge and there’s common permadeath). Not much to it, and it didn’t really win me.
Super Crate Box - This is like the original Mario Brothers game, just faster and with guns. Monsters pop out of the top, and you need to either avoid them or shoot them while collecting crates. If they reach the bottom, they return to the top and turn red, making them much faster. A single hit kills you (including one from some of your own weapons), but your total crates accumulate to unlock new weapons and characters.
Abbaye des Morts - Kind of a mini-Metroidvania done in a late-Atari/early-NES graphical style. Kinda clever that the framing story is that you’re a priest fleeing the crusaders in a haunted crypt, but that’s about as far as that goes.
Savant – Ascent - A rails shooter with an interesting take: You use the mouse to aim and collect items, and the keyboard to dodge between two positions. It’s a very pretty game and the power-ups are soundtrack CDs that unlock both the music and an ability. I’ll probably play more of it.
Another Perspective - This reminded me more than anything of Pretentious Game, but with less self-awareness. It's a collection of platforming puzzles with a set of musings about identity overlaid. Which is to say that it’s full of itself, but the puzzles are pretty solid and I enjoyed them. The big gimmick is that you have multiple bodies you can shift through; each body can see and interact with different keys and platforms; and inactive bodies function as platforms.
YoYoRPG - This was packed in with GameMaker Studio in the bundle, and is basically just an example / framework of a Zelda-style game made using their tools. It comes with the source code, so you can design your own quests within it, which is pretty cute.
Spelunky - A roguelike platformer in the clearest sense: Death is swift and permanent, the levels are randomly generated, and the only way to figure out what anything does is to experiment (and likely let it kill you). I didn’t love it.
Stealth Bastard Deluxe - Very stealth-based puzzle platformer. May be worth revisiting, but I think I was burning out on picayune platforming challenges by the time I tried it, and stealth mechanics have never really been my bag.
Death Ray Manta - A similar sort of shooter to Savant – Ascent, but with a full range of motion and more discrete levels. And the need for the biggest damn epilepsy warning you ever did see, because this game is like shoving your face inside a pinball machine. It’s made for twitch gamers who like really busy games, which I typically am not.
10 Second Ninja - Speaking of puzzle-platforming: In each level, you have 10 seconds to destroy all of the robots using your ninja skills. Doing it faster nets you more stars, which are needed to unlock later levels. I may revisit it because it’s an easy pick-up-and-play. (After all, each level only takes ten seconds!)
Detective Case and Clown Bot in Murder at the Hotel Lisbon - A point-and-click kleptomaniac adventure game that you would swear was made in 1980 if you didn’t know better. Terrible jokes, a laugh track, an absurdly obtuse mystery and caricatured characters—which, for the couple of hours of gameplay it affords and the not-terribly-difficult puzzles, works just fine. The major gameplay bit is an “interview” system in which you need to choose the correct item and question to sweat a suspect with. Some of them are pretty much guessing games, but none of them are too difficult and you can always just retry.
Overall: Like most Humble Bundles, this ended up being worth my money just because it was so cheap. Even the best of the games were only a few hours’ worth of entertainment, but that still added up nicely. I think my favorites from this batch were Spoiler Alert, Another Perspective and Detective Case.
Spoiler Alert - A platformer with a cute twist: You’ve already beaten the game, now you need to run the whole thing in reverse, unkilling enemies and uncollecting coins, while avoiding time paradoxes. You have infinite lives and each segment is short (which is good, because missing any single thing causes a paradox and forces a restart of that segment), and it’s cute. (Heck, you’re playing as a chili pepper!) You get the “beginning” when you beat it, which, as you’d expect, casts the game in a different light. Probably an hour to play through; replay value from trying to “gold medal” every level by doing them on a single run.
WizardWizard - A nasty puzzle-platformer divided up into a series of levels where you need to collect a key and reach a gate without getting killed by buzzsaws. The only tool for this is the double-jump, and you need to use that well starting from the very beginning. Really short (only 25 levels when I played it), but there are a few clever challenges. (Difficulty-wise: It took me 100+ lives to get through 20 levels, though I occasionally respawned in a place that killed me again.)
Wasteland Kings - This is a repetitive top-down shooter; vaguely arena-battle (you need to kill everything in each level) and vaguely roguelike (you only have what you scavenge and there’s common permadeath). Not much to it, and it didn’t really win me.
Super Crate Box - This is like the original Mario Brothers game, just faster and with guns. Monsters pop out of the top, and you need to either avoid them or shoot them while collecting crates. If they reach the bottom, they return to the top and turn red, making them much faster. A single hit kills you (including one from some of your own weapons), but your total crates accumulate to unlock new weapons and characters.
Abbaye des Morts - Kind of a mini-Metroidvania done in a late-Atari/early-NES graphical style. Kinda clever that the framing story is that you’re a priest fleeing the crusaders in a haunted crypt, but that’s about as far as that goes.
Savant – Ascent - A rails shooter with an interesting take: You use the mouse to aim and collect items, and the keyboard to dodge between two positions. It’s a very pretty game and the power-ups are soundtrack CDs that unlock both the music and an ability. I’ll probably play more of it.
Another Perspective - This reminded me more than anything of Pretentious Game, but with less self-awareness. It's a collection of platforming puzzles with a set of musings about identity overlaid. Which is to say that it’s full of itself, but the puzzles are pretty solid and I enjoyed them. The big gimmick is that you have multiple bodies you can shift through; each body can see and interact with different keys and platforms; and inactive bodies function as platforms.
YoYoRPG - This was packed in with GameMaker Studio in the bundle, and is basically just an example / framework of a Zelda-style game made using their tools. It comes with the source code, so you can design your own quests within it, which is pretty cute.
Spelunky - A roguelike platformer in the clearest sense: Death is swift and permanent, the levels are randomly generated, and the only way to figure out what anything does is to experiment (and likely let it kill you). I didn’t love it.
Stealth Bastard Deluxe - Very stealth-based puzzle platformer. May be worth revisiting, but I think I was burning out on picayune platforming challenges by the time I tried it, and stealth mechanics have never really been my bag.
Death Ray Manta - A similar sort of shooter to Savant – Ascent, but with a full range of motion and more discrete levels. And the need for the biggest damn epilepsy warning you ever did see, because this game is like shoving your face inside a pinball machine. It’s made for twitch gamers who like really busy games, which I typically am not.
10 Second Ninja - Speaking of puzzle-platforming: In each level, you have 10 seconds to destroy all of the robots using your ninja skills. Doing it faster nets you more stars, which are needed to unlock later levels. I may revisit it because it’s an easy pick-up-and-play. (After all, each level only takes ten seconds!)
Detective Case and Clown Bot in Murder at the Hotel Lisbon - A point-and-click kleptomaniac adventure game that you would swear was made in 1980 if you didn’t know better. Terrible jokes, a laugh track, an absurdly obtuse mystery and caricatured characters—which, for the couple of hours of gameplay it affords and the not-terribly-difficult puzzles, works just fine. The major gameplay bit is an “interview” system in which you need to choose the correct item and question to sweat a suspect with. Some of them are pretty much guessing games, but none of them are too difficult and you can always just retry.
Overall: Like most Humble Bundles, this ended up being worth my money just because it was so cheap. Even the best of the games were only a few hours’ worth of entertainment, but that still added up nicely. I think my favorites from this batch were Spoiler Alert, Another Perspective and Detective Case.
