With the thesis that the one element classic arcade games were missing was bears in speedboats, SPEEDBEAR was created for the Tigsource B-Games compo. As it turns out, I was wrong, so this game is terrible. That’s mostly due to pacing: early levels are too easy and it ramps up too slowly, and the upgrade system takes forever to pay off, although once the Sinistar-type entity finally starts appearing it can get fun. The problem is, because of the dull ramp-up, there’s no reason to play more than once which is death for a score-oriented arcade game.

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Made for a “make an Atari game” challenge. Twensix is an Adventure tribute with the goal of collecting three items from a large labyrinth: the Hyperdrive, the Nav Computer, and the Energy Reactor; and bringing them back to your crashed starship. There are a few helper items along the way too. Note that it’s possible to sequence break and get stuck at one point, but you’ll know right away if that’s happened.

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You know what, I fucking hate Sonic the Hedgehog. I don’t even mean the new games. I haven’t played any of the new games besides an hour or two of a gameboy one which was sort of arena fighter. Anyway, it’s not just dislike, I actually hold a grudge. Sonic’s classic gameplay was about running really fast (this is cool) and not being able to see shit before you crash into it. The levels are therefore mostly multi-path courses which present the player with a ‘hold right to win’ scenario, bar the occasional pit or robot crab. For the time period, this is fine. Memorisation games have their place; while I want to say that the clunky feeling of the controls takes away from the incentive to retry and repeat to explore multiple paths and master all of the stupid off-screen jumps, that’s just not true here. Game libraries of the time tended to be small and kids are obscenely resilient to game difficulty (well, when it was still possible to find hard games); that’s why we have the term ‘Nintendo hard’. Sonic is a bad game, but there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being a bad game in the right way when your audience is receptive.

Except that Sonic is the game most imitated by amateurs, fangamers specifically, after Super Mario Bros. Mario is a good game, so there’s nothing wrong with that, and in the context of fan game communities there’s nothing wrong with squirting out hundreds of Sonic things either. But I can’t help but wonder how some of those fan game developers might have turned out if they started their hobbyist career on solid game design territory rather than something which is going to suck no matter what. It’s a shame. On the other hand, would those people have been interested in game development at all without it? I think on the gripping hand however something would have always filled that role as Sega’s heavily-promoted mascot. Had all those kids been excited about making Alex Kidd fan games I’d be thrilled as shit. Fortunately Sonic hasn’t had a great deal of influence on commercial games relative to its popularity (let alone compared to that other mascot). I can’t think of very many direct clones which I’ve personally played besides the Jazz Jackrabbit series. Still being a dumb kid I didn’t realise at the time that allowing myself to be bounced around aimlessly until the end of the level shows up is the antithesis of fun. I dislike the word ‘antithesis’ too, but I’ll use it sometimes anyway.

Same goes for running fast. Redguy24h was for a 24-hour “make whatever” challenge on the defunct Total-Klik forum, and features one long level and a boss. It’s something of a mashup of Mega Man level design and Sonic-inspired high-speed movement, although here the point was to experiment with high-inertia ninja-like movement as opposed to being way past cool and blind. The character was inspired by Bone, mainly because it seemed easy to animate given the time limit.

 [DOWNLOAD (windows, 1mb)]

This game was also to have served as a basis for a Winter-themed competition, but I didn’t end up going anywhere with the idea beyond this video. It would have been a level-based action game incorporating scattered targets based on the target-breaking minigame from Smash Bros. as some sort of bonus or scoring mechanism. They wouldn’t have been literal targets as in the below video, though.

I’ve played a lot of EGATrek (video). It’s a member of the Trek family of games, which go back a long way. The game sees you managing your ship (with its crew, subsystems, fuel and ammunition) to exterminate enemy ships which appear in random positions in small 10×10 sectors which make up a larger map.

Defiant Black was built over three or four days at the beginning of a university semester, before classes had started, before there was anybody in the dorms to talk to, and before my internet had been hooked up. The unfortunate name is a combinaton of Defiant Renegade, a barnstorming biplane game I never finished, and ‘black’ as in space. The file went missing for a while and finding it again involved wading through a lot of racially-oriented Google results. The resemblance of the ship to the USS Defiant is a coincidence; the sprite was originally drawn for an easter egg in another of my games, 2elacsy. The USS Defiant is one of my least favourite Star Trek things.

It’s meant as a tactical action adaptation of the Trek games. You’re tasked with defeating every bad guy in the galaxy alone, this is done by exploring planets for goods to trade for weaponry and repairs at starbases. I like some of the ideas here: the game’s damage/repairs system is fun, with systems becoming less effective proportional to the damage they take. Shields and armour serve distinct roles: shields absorb a percentage of damage equivalent to their charge percentage, while armour either absorbs all or none of a hit, with the chance based on how damaged it is. Exploring space is slow, while combat is often fast and extremely brutal, and an encounter lasting a couple of seconds can end with your ship adrift and critically damaged with the surviving crew racing to perform repairs before the oxygen runs out.

But it’s pretty flawed, too. The galaxy map is probably three times as big as it should be, so finishing a campaign is a chore by the end. Permadeath is cool, but not when you’ve spent an hour or two only to die in the last sector, because while everything is procedurally generated it’s just spacey shit floating around in random spots; who cares. There are multiple difficulty levels, but really only the highest should ever be played, so players who try any other level are quickly turned off by the lack of variety. Combat’s confusing, too. The game started out as a submarine sim rather than a spaceship game, and as a result your primary weapons are intended to be consumable missiles and torpedos. There are a number of recharging beam weapons, but your slow ship isn’t nearly agile enough to use them as anything but a ramming attack against capital ships. This is all pretty counter-intuitive to players who expect their workhorse guns to be either the infinite lasers or the most-expensive bombs rather than the cheap little rockets you start out with. Oh, and I accidentally bound the same keyboard command to two different things, because I’m an idiot.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 4mb)]