Good Game Get! Spirit

Spirit may be the best deal in the app store right now. Seriously. It’s only 99¢!

Now lots of apps in the in the app store for the iPhone and iPod touch are 99¢; this I know, but Spirit is polished contemporary retro arcade goodness.

The premise is simple, it’s a top down score chaser with typical alien enemies with fairly recognizable behavior, hence the classic feel. The catch, and it is an awesome catch is that you have only one way of destroying enemies, and no you can’t shoot them, nope.

Your only defense is flying away from them, and your only offense is making circles quickly to form space-time holes to send them into another dimension. Once the field is clear of enemies, you too, move on to the next dimension and continue on until the game’s difficulty takes a toll on your limited lives.

The controls are spectacular, you just offset your finger from the spirit and begin to move your finger and fly around. Excellently simple and well executed.

The art style and graphics engine are great too, with great particle effects and a pseudo 3D top-down view where the field is manipulated by your death and when you create space-time holes.

Totally nerdy looking and sci-fi, but completely fitting and overall cool. Definitely the best score chaser on the iPhone, next to Canabalt.

Good Game Get! Eliss

Eliss is a multi-touch iPhone/iPod touch game that destroys any notions that the iPhone and iPod touch aren’t relevant video game systems.

The game is much easier played than it is described, but simply it’s a game about controlling different colored planets with your fingers, keeping them from colliding with one another, and turning them into supernovas.

On top of that you have to deal with splitting and combining them with fluid multi-touch controls. You also have a health meter and that decreases when you collide planets (or let them collide) and when other sources of danger affect your planets, thus killing your health, and decreasing the size of the planet making it difficult to create supernovas and stardust which can be swiped to regain health. The goal is reached when you create a predetermined number of supernovas.

If that sounds simple, it is. On paper. The difficulty develops when the game forces your multi-task abilities into over-drive forcing you (if you want to win) to use up to three or four fingers at a time (put your device on a table-top for best play) to control various colors of super novas, especially when a black hole is trying to pull them into one another. It’s challenging, but oh so satisfying when you complete a level that you’ve failed at numerous times, and like any good game, it rewards you with satisfaction when you best it with knowledge learned from failure.

Graphically the game is something behold with its modern minimalist and retro appeal. The color pallette that creator Steph Thirion developed for the game is also awesome. The graphic design from the interface to the GUI to the actual gameplay is top notch and solid throughout. Not only is Eliss an achievement in incredible and original gameplay, it further innovates games as art, and the wonderful music contributes to that as well.

You’ll love the game if you play the lite (free!) version, and if you do so happen to most likely dig it, you should pick it up and support the incredible yet tiny (compared to most of the shit on the App Store) indie game movement on the iPhone OS.

If you have an iPod touch or iPhone, you have nothing to lose.

Trust me. Eliss is pure mobile magic.

Good game get! Castle of Magic

Gameloft’s Castle of Magic was originally a 3D side scroller for the iPhone and iPod touch, but I guess they decided the game could be successful on DSiWare as well, so they made an all new 2D port of the game for the DSi. However, like many good games on DSiWare, I don’t think it’s sold very well, which is sad because Castle of Magic is superb.

The game reminds me a lot of a Super Nintendo game, and while it isn’t very original, the game just pops with personality and that is what really has kept me playing. You’re a boy who becomes a magician because he and his girl friend fall into this magic book they find.

An evil wizard takes the girl and challenges the boy wizard to find and rescue her. The game is a good length and has a variety of levels and worlds to venture through.

The only annoying, yet creative thing about the game is a photo booth that you are sometimes required to enter and then to use the shitty DSi camera to take a photo of a color to earn a certain power-up. While unique and original, it ends up blowing because that color isn’t always around you, and when it is, the lighting blows so the software doesn’t end up recognizing the color.

All in all, the game is so much fun and is a blast to pick up an play a level or two every now and then, and the best part is that the game is only five dollars. Five hundred DSiWare points. That’s it.

You can’t beat that, so pick it up the next time you load some DSiWare points on your DSi.

Good Game Get! Drill Dozer

Drill Dozer is seriously one of the best platformers that no one knows about. It was sadly released towards the end of the GBA’s lifespan so I don’t think it received the chance it deserved.



It was created by famous Pokémon creators GameFreak and designed by Pokémon illustrator, Ken Sugimori. Drill Dozer makes you really wish GameFreak would do more than just Pokémon since the game is just so solid and incredible.



The game’s cartridge is awesome as well since it included a built-in rumble pack, which awkwardly sticks out of my beloved Gameboy Micro, but the game looks amazing on that tiny yet great screen.

I think it’s really one of the last original and solid 2D sprite platformers to ever be released, and it’s sad to think that games like these are truly almost dead in mainstream gaming.

If you can get your hands on the real cartridge instead of a rom, you’ll be in for a real treat as the rumble really does make all of the difference, especially when you are doing the fun shifting gear elements using the shoulder buttons.

The game rules, get it, and play it. That simple, and even though I feel that the rumble is very important to the game, this is truly one of those games that could get a wonderful second chance on DSiWare.

That is if Nintendo actually gave a shit about promoting good DSiWare titles.

home

My grandfather and grandmother are extremely ill. My Mom’s father, and my Dad’s mother, and while they both still live at home, they could supposedly use the care and expertise of a nursing home. Nobody wants to go to a nursing home, and you hear horror stories and great stories of old loved ones adopting to a new lifestyle with new friends, activities and what not. It’s especially good for them if family visits them often, but then again, maybe that would depress them.

I can’t possibly get inside the head of my grandfather but I know his pain is more than just his failing and ill body, it’s the fact that he can longer function on his own and that he is slowly or quickly dying, whichever is the speed, it’s still an awful fate to face, regardless of when it’s going to happen.



Stephen Lavelle dropped an art game called Home last Saturday that addresses how pathetic one may feel when going to a nursing home, and even more heart-wrenching, the protagonist is not bitter and in fact is overly positive for someone in his situation. The game plays out with you the player addressing the protagonist’s needs by moving him through the world to food, a toilet, a nurse, and a bed. Each of these interactions will increase different stats on the old man. He’s not hungry when he eats, and he’s happy when he interacts with a human. After your first night, things aren’t so wonderful and soon it becomes overwhelming to help keep track and satiate the old man’s needs. The game compensates for your inevitable inability to be responsible for the old man and slowly your responsibilities begin to decline, leaving medication and diapers to take care of the old man’s simple, yet hard to fill needs.

It’s depressing, you can’t win, you can’t lose, you play it, and then it’s over. Home pushes the game medium to the uncomfortable realm of forced inter-actual narrative. Uncomfortable for it’s subject material and the things you are forced to do to finish such a game. You can always exit, but watching accidents and misery is just too interesting for us to switch off sometimes. It’s like the most depressing Gigapet clone ever created. Cruel, right? The sum of all things in your life surely end up being more than this, but perhaps it’s not something to dwell on too much, and is it something we should accept?

You can download and play Home, here.

- Kyle

Good Game Get! Grappling Hook

Any gamer that has spent some time with Nintendo’s fabled “Metroid” franchise will be quite familiar with the illustrious grappling hook. SpeedRun Games has taken the concept of first-person puzzle-solving using this device in some intriguing new directions with their new game “Grappling Hook.”

A quick and easy purchase via download, currently available only for PC users but with Mac and Linux versions promised for the near future, “Grappling Hook” is a bit of a rarity in that it is an action-packed first person puzzler, combining elements of platforming, shooting, and exploration in a slick decidedly science fiction-heavy arena. The graphics are clean, attractive and exceptionally well done, and after a short introductory “message” from the supposed creators of the strange puzzle arena, the feeling of being imprisoned in some strange other-dimensional space fortress seems very real. The presence of a subtle and nearly ambient but well-executed electronic soundtrack certainly adds to the experience.

“Grappling Hook” rather gently ushers the new player into an escalating series of challenges with a few simple challenges and check points designed to convey all of the necessary information on how to move, jump, explore, find, and most importantly, escape. These tutorials are a necessary evil in most games, especially those that come without the benefit of a print booklet, but the way these tutorials are integrated into the environment is often tricky. The artificial nature of the “Grappling Hook” world, a series of puzzle arenas in outer space, lends itself well to the conceit of being provided hints and guidance from an invisible technological benefactor, but the execution is another matter and unfortunately the simple floating exclamation marks that the player moves through to trigger, and the basic, almost pop-up windows of text did seem a bit rushed. Occasionally, the actual text itself was strangely hard to understand, such as the line “Stop hooking in flight and fly far” which actually means to release the grappling hook beam while you are being pulled and to let your momentum carry you farther. While this may seem a small point to the casual player, the attention to even these smallest of details can do a great deal to enhance the overall gaming experience.

Aesthetics aside, the vast majority of the puzzle environments are incredibly well done and the challenges ramp up to an almost fiendishly difficult level relatively quickly. Intuitive clues and game mechanics allow even the most novice player to quickly grasp the nature of the goal (escape!) and how to do this. Combining simple keyboard commands that any computer gamer knows well – arrows to move, spacebar to jump, etc. – the player is soon moving through the maze with ease. Looking around is accomplished rather seamlessly through the motion of the mouse, although adapting to using the spacebar and 4 arrow keys with the left hand and a mouse with the right can take some getting used to. This became especially difficult during the platform jumping sequences, requiring me to actually switch hands or leave the mouse and use the keyboard with both. While I was desperately wishing for some better alternative to looking and moving, I’m really not sure what SpeedRun could have done differently here for computer users, most of whom do not have the luxury of playing with a controller or joystick. While movement, jumping, and looking got easier with practice, I was left wondering whetherSpeedRun had tried to fit too much into the control scheme and whether the learning curve might put off some gamers with less time to devote to simply learning how to get through the game areas.

For those with the time and patience to master the control scheme, “Grappling Hook” offers a series of 22 puzzles full of cold silver metal walls, electrified grids, moving blocks, glowing orange bits of code that must be found and “assembled” to activate the escape teleporter, bright green grappling hook targets, towering shafts, dizzying vistas, dazzling starscapes, and vertigo-inducing spaces. It is easy, and wonderfully so, to become almost completely disoriented at times within the game, and this only adds to the maddeningly difficult puzzles the player must try to navigate through. “Grappling Hook” is definitely not a game for the easily discouraged gamer, but like the best of challenges, once the player finally figures out how to work their way through some particularly gnarly sequence of disappearing platforms, electric floors, and cunningly spaced grappling hook targets, the thrill is its own reward.

Perhaps the only real downside to the game is how challenging some of the puzzles can be. A few of the platform jumps require almost impossible timing, and given the nature of the player’s movement – by pressing the arrows on the keyboard – it can be quite frustrating to keep falling from a ledge the player means to jump from instead. Again, the use of a joystick or controller would have mitigated this somewhat, but in a game titled “Grappling Hook,” perhaps there should have been more emphasis on that kind of movement over the kind of precision jumping usually reserved for strict platformers.

All told, “Grappling Hook” is a nicely done, beautiful, and incredibly difficult puzzler that will definitely sate the cravings of the hardcore gaming crowd but may prove a bit too frustrating for the less active gamer. The few rough edges are easily overlooked by those hungry for new challenges and with a little more time and polish, I expect even bigger and better things from future SpeedRun Games releases.

- Matt

Good Game Get! Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

So yesterday I finally beat Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

The game was an absolute blast and was one of the more endearing and creative RPGs I’ve ever played. I’m not hot on spoilers, so sadly I can’t say too much about the game, but here are a few small details that rule.

- You can equip up to three pieces of equipment.

- When the brothers are inside of Bowser, they’re exploring a 2D world instead of the top-down outside world.

- Bowser is such a funny character, almost every other line he yells is worth a chuckle.

- The game contains some amazing and humorous animations between Bowser and the brothers, and while they may only be used once or a couple of times in the game, they’re so worth and I’m glad the team put so much heart into the game to create them instead of constantly recycling animations.

One small complaint:

The game is an absolute blast to play and I am a bit confused at Nintendo for marketing it to kids so heavily because the dialogue in the game is advanced and some characters make heavy use of weird accents and ticks within their monologues. Of course, maybe I’m just dating myself and predicting that children are dumber than they are. The game could be really easy for kids to read, I’m not entirely sure, although I would say at the minimum age is like a 13/14 year old would be comfortable with the game.

All in all though, the title itself and not the marketing surrounding it, make for such an amazing experience on the DS. The game clocks in around twenty hours and every one of those hours are worth it! So much fun.

- Kyle

Good Game Get! Everyday Shooter

Playstation Network, PS3, and PSP. Queasy Games, 2008.

The term “game-as-design” or some variation of that is thrown around an awful lot these days. It is most often deployed by writers and gamers who really have no clear idea how to articulately describe a game which falls even slightly outside the established bounds of gaming norms.

I’m currently paying Jonathan Mak’s “Everyday Shooter” and enjoying it a great deal. I know, I’m pretty late to the party since this thing is around 2 years old, but what can I say. Since I’ve been so into the game, I did some digging online to see if I could learn more about it, any sequels, or Mak himself. A lot of what I found made me mad, although it had nothing to do with the game or Mak.

Basically little more than a top-down multidirectional shooter with unusually beautiful and unconventional graphics, “Everyday Shooter” has been called everything from art to design to music, but seldom simply a game. I disagree with all of that, and I think that to continually try to position “Everyday Shooter” as something MORE than a great videogame does a disservice to Mak and his skills. Even Kyle, who wrote about the game previously, stated that it was BOTH a great game and a great album.

Most videogames, when you boil them down, follow a strikingly similar pattern. The player controls something on a screen and is given an objective. The player, through observation, trial, error, failure, and success, learns the internal rules of the “world” of the game, achieves the objective, and is rewarded. Nearly every single game I can think of, with the possible exception of “Noby Noby Boy” (now THAT is a piece of art far more than a game) follows this formula.

And so does “Everyday Shooter.” The player controls a pixel-shaped thing which shoots, they learn how to navigate the various stages, which things to shoot, which to collect, how to chain explosions, and how to survive. There are even bosses to fight. At the end of each stage the player is awarded with continued play and points so they can unlock other features. Absolutely no different than “Gran Turismo” or “Final Fantasy” or “Super Mario” or “House of the Dead” deep down.

What really seems to throw people is the graphics. Since the thing you’re controlling is just a little pixel and the things you’re shooting are just shapes and colors and boxes people are confusing abstract imagery with abstract game play. It’s really disappointing that so many years of similar games have really conditioned us as gamers to be completely confused by anything that looks different.

In a way, all the hoopla about “Everyday Shooter” reminds me of how “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker” was absolutely BLASTED by the critics, well before the game was even out, because it looked too cartoony and unrealistic. “Give us 3-D realism!” they commanded, deciding that the game sucked before they had even played it. And of course many of them had to eat their words when the game arrived, sold fantastically, and was of course a delightful and beautiful adventure to play.

So again, while “Everyday Shooter” is an absolutely fantastic game, wonderful to play and play again, it is most definitely not a “piece of design work” or simply “art” (although art is a huge part of it). Nor is it an “abstract game” or a multimedia project. It’s just a game. A great one, but just a game.

- Matt

Good Game Get! Fat Princess

I like Robin Williams, and I can honestly say that every line he says in Alladin as the genie, makes me laugh every time I see it. I’m twenty by the way. Robin Williams happens to like video games and Trent Reznor, who happens to like video games too. In fact when I was obsessed with Nine Inch Nails in middle school, I remember obsessing over an awesome E3 photo of John Carmack, Trent Reznor, and Robin Williams, just hangin’ together, like absolute best buds.

Did you ever see the animated movie, Robots? I did, and I liked it, and do you know why I liked it?

Exactly, it’s because Robin Williams was a voice actor for the film, and so was that Star Wars guy, but he’s not as memorable as old Robbie Williams.

“See a need, fill a need.”

Remember that line from the movie? Robin Williams didn’t say it, but Bigweld did and Ewan McGregor believed every word from the quote.

Fat Princess, the Playstation Network video game, realizes every word from that quote. The game is a simple RTS and instead of directing troops and telling them to fight and build stuff, you are one single troop, who fights, and builds stuff.

Well, you may be that person, but I’m not, as you see I am a Cake Feeder.

Go on, try and look up that class in the game. You won’t find it, but I assure you, that I am essential, because everyone typically wants to do the fighting and the logging, but me, little ol’ me, I take the arduous job of Cake Feeder for the greater good.

She must be fat, so as the enemy has trouble saving her.

I see a need and I fill it, and everyone appreciates it, or at least I like to think so, and that’s pretty much all I do when I play the game, and strangely, and sadly, it’s fun, and I feel as if I’m contributing to my team, and I am, but no one else seems to want to do the job.

All you other Cake Feeders out there, just know that I feel you, and we should start a union or something.

We are not appreciated enough.

Also, split-screen would be nice.

- Kyle

Good Game Get! When Pigs Fly

When Pigs Fly is Auntie Pixelante’s (Anna Anthropy’s) first commercial game, and it’s pixelated goodness is currently exclusive to New Grounds.

The game’s short opening scene establishes that you are a pink pig, and that this frolicking pig has fallen into a hole and can’t get out. You may try jumping, but shortly after much desperation, the little pink pig squeezes itself together and hatches wings, ridiculously big (and cute) and hard to control wings. After that, the game teaches you it’s controls, and then through some awesome music, some cute pig squeals, and spectacular title work, your adventure as the unfortunate flying piggie begins.

The controls are simple enough, but the difficult gameplay quickly overshadows the space bar/arrow key simplicity as you’ll have to have quick reflexes to guide your pink flustered self throughout the dark catacombs in hopes of searching for a way out. Your wings may not touch anything but air, and that doesn’t sound as hard as it actually is. The pig may bump her head, and you can use that to your advantage, but if your wings touch anything, it’s back to the beginning of the screen, not back to the beginning of the game which would have made the game torturous.

The game feels less of a web game and more of a solid and original title. The pig’s cute personality, coupled with an increasingly dark and strange underworld, really make for some interesting interactivity moments, as I found myself getting angry at the game, but not at the pig. After all, it didn’t choose to fall in the hole, did it?

However, it did choose to fly.

- Kyle