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For
any who played the game Military Madness back on the Turbo Grafx or its newer
revision Advance Wars, Lost Admiral Returns will at once be both inviting and
interesting. In Lost Admiral Returns, the basic game is set with you
controlling a fleet of ships and attacking the enemy. You have multiple
ship types, such as subs, carriers, destroyers and Battleships, that you will
engaged in combat with enemy vessels in addition to Armored Transports that
allow you to take over ports and thus increase the land you have and of course
build your own fleets. The graphics in the game aren't quite up to
Advance Wars' standards, but overall this is a great game that will provide
hours of fun to strategy enthusiasts.
Yet
another game by Fuel? Seems they have been busy of late, and this
adventure game based on the Mega Bloks world of Fire & Ice Dragons is really a
pretty cool place to hang out. You control a knight who must move around
a maze and pick up crystals and a key to escape the level. There are
other power-ups, such as weapons that can be found in addition to some objects
that you can interact with. The Mega Blok inspired graphics are really
pretty cool to look at and are probably the main reason why the game comes of
as well as it does though the music is another strong point worth mentioning.
Will a knight running through Mega Blok land have enough clout to get into the
finalist round at the IGF? I'm still putting my money on Cowboys and
Engines out of the Fuel web games that were submitted.
Unfortunately
I have very little information available on this game. The website
consists of little more than the picture I have shown here with the tag-line "Mobiloid
is a physics-based construction kit. Curious?
Unfortunately
Mulligan's Isle is one of a few games that weren't ready for me to play and
check out in time for our IGF Preview. However, the developer was nice
enough to get us an exclusive screenshot and a game description! Without
further ado, from the author: "Take a relaxing minigolf vacation on the lush,
tropical sands of Mulligan’s Isle. The beautiful graphics and soothing music
will whisk you away on tropical vacation from your own computer. Collect the
coins, explore the island, or try and beat your best score. But most of all
relax and enjoy!" Aside from the definite
developer slant on the statement there is a bit that can be drawn from it and
the image. This game definitely looks great with good detail, and with
my love of sport related games I'm looking forward to playing it.
While
there is a lot of history on the website about this game and the path it has
taken over the many years that have gone into taking it to where it is now,
there is precious little information about how to play the game and what you
are trying to do. Pest is available online through the website, you
control the gnarly looking guy pictured here. You have a mallet, which
you can swing by pressing the space bar, and there are bugs running
everywhere. It would seem apparent that you should smash the bugs with
the mallet, but after playing for awhile, running around trying to smash the
bugs and watching my mallet again and again seem to hit the bugs to no effect,
I started looking for an explanation of what I was supposed to do...and then
gave up. Graphics and music are fun if you want to play a web game for a
minute, perhaps you will even be able to tell me what I missed.
Unfortunately
Pocus Hocus is one of a few games that weren't ready for me to play and check
out in time for our IGF Preview. However, the developer was nice enough
to get us an exclusive screenshot and a game description! Without
further ado, from the author: "Link up same-color caterpillars to release
magic bursts and break through the weeds overgrowing the enchanted forest.
Caterpillars change into butterflies - if you plan ahead, you can link up long
combos for even more points! Have fun and relax in the Adventure or Puzzle
modes." Sounds a little like a sales pitch, but it also sounds
interesting, we'll be looking forward to checking it out when it is available.
Very
interesting top-scrolling shooter that instead of giving you the standard game
play changes things up a bit by giving you full control over your spaceship.
Your ship can fly anywhere on the screen, but will always face towards your
targeting cross-hair, which is controlled by the mouse. The game offers
a standard fair of power-ups, but puts extra emphasis on both air and land
enemies, which much be destroyed in different ways, air enemies by lasers,
ground by bombs, much like the classic Dragon Spirit. All the menus and
the website are in Spanish, so you may have a little trouble figuring out what
you are doing, but shooters have always been pretty easy to pick-up in any
language. A nice little extra is the ability to slow down time by
pressing the space bar, which can help you get out of the occasional jam.
Ricochet
Lost Worlds has become something of an online phenomenon. This very
slick looking arkanoid / breakout clone offers up some very stylistic graphics
and some of the better designed levels available in this type of game.
With good sound work and voices to top it off, Reflexive has created a winner
that has sold like hotcakes since it was first released earlier this year.
Ricochet Lost Worlds features custom paint jobs for your paddle, a wide array
of cool power-ups including laser blasters, missile launchers, and a fire ball
to go along with levels that shine with moving bricks and clever brick order
puzzles. With more than 100 levels, this sequel to the original Ricochet
has hit the mark for many fans.
I
ran into a bit of technical difficulty on this one, but I think I got the
general gist. The story is that Rock 'N Roll music was found to have the
ability to make people travel and wonderful speeds and lead to peach
throughout the galaxy. While the story sounds a little like Bill & Ted's
Bogus Journey at first, it goes down hill from there and it leads to our
current situation where we are fighting for Rock Station. The game is a
space shooter where you do a lot of one-on-one dog-fighting. The music
in the game is run by a DJ, and it has to come from your own personal
collection as there are no music tracks that come with the game (which is
slightly odd for a game that is entirely based on Rock 'N Roll music).
Overall this is a fun space shooter that is freeware with LAN support for up
to 8 people, so enjoy!
Wow!
I have to first off admit that I'm not a big fan of puzzle games and that I
did find the music in this game to be a little grating after time, but other
than that, this is a near perfect puzzle game that kept me playing for a
couple of hours without blinking. The concept is fairly simple you are
working in a power factory, and you rotate the 4 different colored fuses to
make a square with all colors being the same. You can rotate fuses left
or right to complete the squares. Puzzle games rarely sound like much
when you describe them, so let me just say that this is one that really works
well. There are of course power-ups and a few strategy points that will
get you farther, but how you play is left pretty open to you, which makes the
game even more exciting in my book. About the only thing I can think of
that would make this game better would be a two player co-operative mode.
A very well-conceived game.
A
rather simple flash game that pits you against another army of snowballers.
The graphics are clean and not very detailed, but they give a good feeling of
the wintery surroundings in the game. On your team you have kids who can
do different things, from throwing snowballs farther, building snow forts to
hide behind, umbrellas to hid under, lobbing snowballs and other specialist
abilities. The game requires a bit of strategy in using the different
abilities of your kids to destroy the opposing forces with a a snowball
barrage. There is also a multiplayer LAN option in the game that will
let you get the battle on with some of your friends. The game feels
distinctly like an online flash game and that is either a good thing or a bad
thing depending on your tastes.
Star
Sonata is a really great universe to become a part of. In Star Sonata
you will join a universe of galaxies connected by wormholes. The game is
online and has a huge structure of players already in place. You begin
with a simple space ship trading between stations. Working your way up,
you will get enough money to buy a better ship and start out on your own to
determine what type of character you will be in the game, becoming a specific
character class, and working to take over and control the universe.
Along the way you can join a team, which works a lot like a guild, and even
build your own space stations. Certainly not for the faint of heart,
Star Sonata requires a lot of play time to come to fully understand and
appreciate the depth of game play that has been put into the game.
However, if you've ever wanted to roam the galaxy with tons of other human
players, you should definitely give this game a look. 
Supremacy:
FPTP is one of the games that I've enjoyed most out of the 2005 IGF games.
This universe-builder game reminds me a bit of Oasis, one of last years
winners, and that is a very good thing. In Supremacy, you take on the
role of one of four races vying for control of the universe. The game
has the look and feel of a game that will take hours to play, but the building
and expansion segments of the game have been streamlined and simplified so
that you get to spend most of your time focused on the battle portions of the
game. For example, instead of spending hours trying to improve the
strength of your ships armour or attack power, you capture stations, which
then give you the option to choose from a list of 25 upgrades. Capturing
several stations will give you more upgrades, thus making you more powerful.
The game includes space combat with your fleets, and then troop deployments on
the planets where longer strategic turn-based battles occur. The
graphics and sound are top notch in Supremacy, which makes for a game with few
holes in its armour.
The
Witch's Yarn is quite unlike any other game at the festival. It plays
more like a book or a play than a game, and provides a very innovative game
play that will likely get this game noticed. In the game you don't
control a character as you typically do in video games. Instead you
queue actors into the story. So for example, the main character in the
story is a witch who wants to open a store and join the everyday world.
Her mother, who disapproves of the store appears, and... Well the next thing
that happens is up to you, though to some degree it isn't really. You
will be given several different characters or items to choose from, and after
you choose one, the story continues around that item or character. After
a couple more moments of the story moving forward, you'll choose another
object or character and thus the game proceeds with you choosing what item or
character will be the focal point of the next portion of the story, but not
really choosing exactly what that item or character will do. This very
different style of game play is targeted at female game players, but I think
it is something that everyone can appreciate.
I'm
really digging on this one. The game is called 'light' as it is intended
to be a pseudo sequel to Star Control II. In this unfinished version,
the game is a typical dog-fight arena
game, though there is not tutorial or real help in game to explain to you how to play,
what buttons do what, or what you are trying to do. I found myself being
blasted continually without realizing half the time where I was on the screen
or what was happening. In fact it reminded me of an episode of the Simpsons where Grandpa Simpson is playing video games with Bart and Bart is
yelling at him to fire and go into hyper space, and when Grandpa dies he says
"I was that guy? I thought I was this guy." In addition, the
graphics really aren't up to par with Dark Archon, Starscape and a host of
other Indie games that are similar. I'm sure there is a good idea or two
in this game, but it was difficult to dig it out.
A
game that shows a lot of promise Warrider places you into an adventure / RPG
world of action where much of the coolness of the game has to do with your
character's interaction with their horse. Much like the upcoming Zelda
game, you will do plenty of battling from your horse in-between visiting towns
and while trying to complete quests. Warrider appears to still be in a
very early stage of testing and I crashed the game every time I played it
within a few moments of starting it, so unfortunately I wasn't able to check
out all the cool riding action in the game, but there are some
For
anyone who loves games that take a little bit of practice to play there is WIK,
a wonderfully exciting new character from Reflexive. Wik resembles
gollum from Lord Of the Rings, but behaves quite differently. With a
long sticky tongue that would make most frogs envious, he moves himself around
the screen using his tong to attach to items higher up in the screen, and then
swinging like Spiderman across the screen. Getting the handle down takes
a little bit of practice, but there are BIG dividends for those who put in the
time. WIK's graphics are gorgeous, and playing the game is pure fun as
you swing and hop from one portion of the screen to another, throwing in the
occasional loop if you know what you are doing. One of the strongest
games submitted to the IGF in my estimation, WIK has plenty of goodness to it
to keep players happily entertained and involved.
The
team at Nitrous Butterfly unfortunately weren't able to get me a playable
version of this game by press time, though they were trying like mad.
They were able to get a me a few screenshots, one of which I've chosen to
place here. From all the screenshots this looks to be a sort of
First-Person Shooter that replaces the people you usually control in a FPS
with spaceships. There were a few screenshots that I saw that also
showed an overhead view, and I'm not sure how that figures into the mix, but
the graphics so far, per the screenshots seems to be quite clean. For
more information I think we'll just have to await the release of this one. :)http://www.gametunnel.com/html
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