![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroCatch a Falling Star - This is a cute little casual game where you move a basket to catch stars. There’s a surprising amount of nuance, including an assortment of power-ups and power-downs, the ability to “bump” stars and falling ice with your basket, and coins you can collect to buy upgrades. Fun for a short time.
Turbo Pug - A side-scroller runner game, where you must navigate a cute little pug dog through jumps and hazards and collect pug points. More characters with additional abilities eventually unlock. It’s cute (...and I’m curious where it goes, as bloody spikes started showing up after a while), but it’s no Nyan Cat: Lost In Space.
Clergy Splode - You play a priest in arena-based throwing bombs at zombies. Occasionally a ghost nun turns you into a vampire. Casual/arcade. Goofy, briefly fun.
Calcu-Late - Another example of interesting things you can do with RPG Maker, this is a very short puzzle game with a framing story about a boy who’s failing math being helped out in his dreams by the Goddess of Mathematics. There are five puzzles which get harder on each of the four difficulty levels; and assuming the puzzles aren’t brand-new to you, the game is about twenty minutes long.
Flesh Eaters - A zombie apocalypse survival / resource management game. Gather materials and bullets for your small team to either escape or cure the zombie plague. The exploration is top-down in small repetitive areas; and many of the actions are text-based. And of course, if there’s more than one zombie on the screen, it’s heavily tilted against your survival. Moderately fun for half an hour.
The Tower Of Elements - A very simple casual game: Press one of six color-coded to keys to knock an endless stream of goblins off a tower. I suspect this might be fun with a touchscreen; I found it clunky with a keyboard.
New kind of adventure - This is a pre-alpha build of a 3D exploration game starring a little girl and a blue fairy-man. It’s not a game yet. It’s barely a tech demo.
Eaten Alive - Another RPG Maker game, this one a survival horror game where you need to escape zombies and do adventure game-type puzzles. It has two major problems that I see (in addition to a lot of minor problems, like glitches and freezing): The controls are mouse-based but you have to hold shift to run, which is a hideously dumb control scheme when you need to escape things; and there’s permadeath that dumps you back into a fetch-quest semi-tutorial every time you get too close to a zombie.
Super Mustache - A level-based platformer (featuring a super mustachioed spaceman fighting evil robots on Uranus) that’s bit Mario (you collect coins and can jump on monsters), a bit Commander Keen (you have a laser and need to collect keys to leave each level), and is short (15 levels) but with a sharp difficulty curve. Despite having three hearts, the number of things that can instant-kill you is impressive.
Ampersand - A polygon-based racing game with lousy controls and bad documentation. The track is peppered with land mines and your car’s hitbox is enormous when it comes to obstacles but tiny when trying to pick up items.
Escape Machines - This would kindly be called a tech demo of a third-person shooter. There’s no real game balance and the hitboxes are weird, and the only news item on the front page is an announced switch to a new engine...from 2015. Oh, and the cutscene pictures are laughable bad—I’m pretty sure they dressed somebody’s dad in a lab coat to pose for them.
Tinboy - A scientist builds an arrow-shooting robot that looks like a knight...just because, I guess? That knight can jump on arrows stuck in walls, shoot rope-arrows to swing and let the explosions of bomb-arrows knock him around. As puzzle-platformers go, that’s not a terrible concept, but the execution is shoddy. The mouse-based arrow aiming and the mechanics for the rope-arrows make this painful to play.
Neon Hardcorps - I’m not sure why this has “neon” in the name; it’s a top-down shoot-em-up where your trio of soldiers tries to shoot lots of dudes without dying. If there’s a plot, I didn’t notice it. It’s also glitchy; an attempt to change characters (as directed by the tutorial) crashed the game.
Kivi, Toilet and Shotgun - A vaguely Mad Max-inspired game of driving through the desert while people try to shoot you unless you shoot them first. Top-down view, mediocre controls, and a vague sense of pointlessness to the entire endeavor.
Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant - Badly-made and poorly-explained tactical grid- and turn-based space fighter game.
Lup – A wacky, bouncy platformer which never makes any attempts to explain itself. You’re a little blue guy who shoots at things that it’s too dark to really distinguish and bounces off of anything that sparkles. You collect coins and green orbs; though it’s unclear what either of them does. Oh, and the buttons map in a stupid way and you can’t re-map them.
Stellar 2D - An impressively terrible 2D shoot-em-up that feels like it was made with flash animations of random graphics found on the internet. It’s pure guesswork what’s an enemy and what’s a power-up (or power-down—at least one thing locks your horizontal movement), everything appears to be randomly generated, and your ship’s graphic doesn’t change when you die (or explode, or anything). This edges from “terrible” into “hilariously terrible.”
Terra Incognita ~ Chapter One: The Descendant - I had some vague hopes for this, as it’s a standard jrpg with the premise of the gods sending a protector (amnesiac, natch) to defend the world in the times of crisis. Unfortunately, it’s unfinished and very rough around the edges. You can see big dreams in this that they'll likely never fulfill.
Overall: This bundle was a mix of briefly-entertaining simple games, badly executed games with half-decent ideas, and completely unfinished “games” that are basically tech demos. The entertainment value was worth the two bucks, but I don’t think anything on here is getting replayed or recommended any time soon.
Turbo Pug - A side-scroller runner game, where you must navigate a cute little pug dog through jumps and hazards and collect pug points. More characters with additional abilities eventually unlock. It’s cute (...and I’m curious where it goes, as bloody spikes started showing up after a while), but it’s no Nyan Cat: Lost In Space.
Clergy Splode - You play a priest in arena-based throwing bombs at zombies. Occasionally a ghost nun turns you into a vampire. Casual/arcade. Goofy, briefly fun.
Calcu-Late - Another example of interesting things you can do with RPG Maker, this is a very short puzzle game with a framing story about a boy who’s failing math being helped out in his dreams by the Goddess of Mathematics. There are five puzzles which get harder on each of the four difficulty levels; and assuming the puzzles aren’t brand-new to you, the game is about twenty minutes long.
Flesh Eaters - A zombie apocalypse survival / resource management game. Gather materials and bullets for your small team to either escape or cure the zombie plague. The exploration is top-down in small repetitive areas; and many of the actions are text-based. And of course, if there’s more than one zombie on the screen, it’s heavily tilted against your survival. Moderately fun for half an hour.
The Tower Of Elements - A very simple casual game: Press one of six color-coded to keys to knock an endless stream of goblins off a tower. I suspect this might be fun with a touchscreen; I found it clunky with a keyboard.
New kind of adventure - This is a pre-alpha build of a 3D exploration game starring a little girl and a blue fairy-man. It’s not a game yet. It’s barely a tech demo.
Eaten Alive - Another RPG Maker game, this one a survival horror game where you need to escape zombies and do adventure game-type puzzles. It has two major problems that I see (in addition to a lot of minor problems, like glitches and freezing): The controls are mouse-based but you have to hold shift to run, which is a hideously dumb control scheme when you need to escape things; and there’s permadeath that dumps you back into a fetch-quest semi-tutorial every time you get too close to a zombie.
Super Mustache - A level-based platformer (featuring a super mustachioed spaceman fighting evil robots on Uranus) that’s bit Mario (you collect coins and can jump on monsters), a bit Commander Keen (you have a laser and need to collect keys to leave each level), and is short (15 levels) but with a sharp difficulty curve. Despite having three hearts, the number of things that can instant-kill you is impressive.
Ampersand - A polygon-based racing game with lousy controls and bad documentation. The track is peppered with land mines and your car’s hitbox is enormous when it comes to obstacles but tiny when trying to pick up items.
Escape Machines - This would kindly be called a tech demo of a third-person shooter. There’s no real game balance and the hitboxes are weird, and the only news item on the front page is an announced switch to a new engine...from 2015. Oh, and the cutscene pictures are laughable bad—I’m pretty sure they dressed somebody’s dad in a lab coat to pose for them.
Tinboy - A scientist builds an arrow-shooting robot that looks like a knight...just because, I guess? That knight can jump on arrows stuck in walls, shoot rope-arrows to swing and let the explosions of bomb-arrows knock him around. As puzzle-platformers go, that’s not a terrible concept, but the execution is shoddy. The mouse-based arrow aiming and the mechanics for the rope-arrows make this painful to play.
Neon Hardcorps - I’m not sure why this has “neon” in the name; it’s a top-down shoot-em-up where your trio of soldiers tries to shoot lots of dudes without dying. If there’s a plot, I didn’t notice it. It’s also glitchy; an attempt to change characters (as directed by the tutorial) crashed the game.
Kivi, Toilet and Shotgun - A vaguely Mad Max-inspired game of driving through the desert while people try to shoot you unless you shoot them first. Top-down view, mediocre controls, and a vague sense of pointlessness to the entire endeavor.
Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant - Badly-made and poorly-explained tactical grid- and turn-based space fighter game.
Lup – A wacky, bouncy platformer which never makes any attempts to explain itself. You’re a little blue guy who shoots at things that it’s too dark to really distinguish and bounces off of anything that sparkles. You collect coins and green orbs; though it’s unclear what either of them does. Oh, and the buttons map in a stupid way and you can’t re-map them.
Stellar 2D - An impressively terrible 2D shoot-em-up that feels like it was made with flash animations of random graphics found on the internet. It’s pure guesswork what’s an enemy and what’s a power-up (or power-down—at least one thing locks your horizontal movement), everything appears to be randomly generated, and your ship’s graphic doesn’t change when you die (or explode, or anything). This edges from “terrible” into “hilariously terrible.”
Terra Incognita ~ Chapter One: The Descendant - I had some vague hopes for this, as it’s a standard jrpg with the premise of the gods sending a protector (amnesiac, natch) to defend the world in the times of crisis. Unfortunately, it’s unfinished and very rough around the edges. You can see big dreams in this that they'll likely never fulfill.
Overall: This bundle was a mix of briefly-entertaining simple games, badly executed games with half-decent ideas, and completely unfinished “games” that are basically tech demos. The entertainment value was worth the two bucks, but I don’t think anything on here is getting replayed or recommended any time soon.
