The Best Games You've Never Played: I Swear It's Not Fetish Porn Edition

The 1993 point and click adventure game, Day of the Tentacle, is a shining example of doing it right. You may recognize titles such as Sam & Max or The Curse of Monkey Island which were similar, more popular Lucas Arts adventures. While these franchises are getting modern a re-envisioning, DoTT is left alone, fading slowly into obscurity. However, I believe it is by far the best adventure game of its time. The game is about a group of 3 misfits that appear to be out of an 80’s teen movie, who are transported through time by way of portable bathroom time machines. They become stuck in 3 separate times, the past, present and future. The two goals of the game are to repair the time machines and to stop a purple tentacle from reducing humanity to mere house pets. This game does a lot of things better than other point and click adventure I have played and on top of that it’s a lot of fun.

Why It’s Great:

-Does not frustrate the player with “pixel hunting” to find important items or paths, something that plagues the genera.

-The time travel aspect is interesting, many puzzles involve changing things in the past to affect to future and help you characters progress.

-Item usage is for the most part logical, albeit wacky at times; at least it makes sense in the context. This is another problem with the genera, “How was I supposed to know to nail the banana to the string and lure out the baby moose from the rat hole?”

-Game is full of humor and interesting characters; they have more personality then most modern games.

-Voice acting also much better than most modern games.

-Meet real historical figures in their natural habitat!

-It’s also totally bitchin’.

An Indie Moment

Trying to make money as an indie game developer is something of a challenge. Gamers aren't willing to shell out between $10 and $20 for an indie game because they could get a "real" game for a bit more. Also, independent games are very platform limited, and by that I mean they barely reach the console market. It's gotten much better recently with some indie WiiWare and XBLM titles, but most indie devs aren't going to have to resources to get their games ported and accepted on these various platforms. Finally, piracy is a big issue with ALL software, but it hits indies games much harder for a few reasons. They already have a very small market of people to sell to coupled with the fact that their games get almost no promotion. Literally every sale counts toward, at the very minimum, recouping production costs. Secondly, they use almost no DRM of any sort and due to how most gamers view them, they just start distributing them like freeware. You might even pirate one by accident, who's going to question some 8-bit platformer they download, if it doesn't have 3D graphics at least one post-processing effect and some dude with a gun its probably freeware, right?

VVVVVV is a delightful 8-bit indie platformer with one simple mechanic, you can only reverse gravity up or down, no jumping. Its quite challenging and unlike other similar platformers you get a checkpoint after almost every obstacle rather then doing a whole set and dieing at one part then having to do the rest over and over and over again just to get one more crack at the difficult spot. The whole thing takes place in a trippy alternate dimension where you must find the crew of your spaceship. There are also challenging trinkets to collect that unlock bonus content. This game kept me glued to my screen for hours on end. Its fun, challenging and a nice throwback in terms of graphics and music. So, try it out here and if you like it consider buying it. If you don't this developer might have to end up taking your order at the local fast food establishment.

Bioshock 2 Impressions

I've been putting a good many hours into Bioshock 2 the past week, and I think I'm ready to at least lay down some form of mess of disjointed thoughts on the game.

-The Steam-o -meter is putting me at six and a half hours in, and I have yet to reach any location from the original Bioshock. Not even sure if there are any levels from the original, but it makes me feel like I'm exploring a completely different city, and I don't really like it.

-Big Sister encounters are pretty cool, and their impending arrival is introduced in a really menacing way. It's a reasonably tough opponent, and really feels like you need to put all skills to full use to take it down.

-I feel the same way about putting the Little Sisters to greater use. After a particularity tough first impression with this mechanic, I was about ready to give up on the game, and I'm not even kidding you. However, that stupid section aside, these parts really allow you to make use of your trap plasmids that were rather useless in the first game

-For all that BS2 does differently, it still feels very much like a carbon copy of the first. Playing as a Big Daddy doesn't feel too different from Bioshock's protaginist, and outside of the game forcing you to perform traits specific to a Big Daddy's routine, it'd be hard to tell the difference.

-Probably the most lasting impression I will take from this game is that it still sticks to the same corridor shooter design of the first. It's solid, but take away the (still awesome and eerie) audio diaries, and your left with some solid shooting mechanics and some fairly standard baddies on who you are to apply the aforementioned shooting mechanics.

I'm still a ways off from the finish of the game, so there may still be a few surprised I haven't unearthed. Full review to follow shortly.