So yesterday I get this email asking me to review some indie game, and all I can think is… “Oh boy, another lame game hoping for promotion, This will be fun to rip on!”

I couldn’t have been more wrong… and boy I am disappointed, I was really hoping to be an asshole today.

Something Amiss is a testament to what a passionate indie developer can really do.  Sure it has a few small quirks, but everything that has gone into it is just so impressive that it’s easy to ignore them.

The first thing that stands out is that this game is the graphics.  In the first chapter, everything is nicely rendered in 3d, including Alice, the main character.  But where the game gets REALLY impressive is in chapter 2.

Tucker Bowen, the game’s creator, actually ventured out into the rainforests of Kauai to photograph the perfect background images for the game’s dense jungle. The Hawaiian island was one of the locations where Jurassic Park, and several other films, were shot.

While the scenery is well rendered, and the photographic imagery is breathtaking, there are several areas where things seem a little stiff in opposition to other areas that feel much livelier.  Still, even these scenes have a Myst type feel to them.

The sounds in this game are fantastic.  The mood and settings are not tainted by unnecessary music, rather, they all use atmospheric ambiences that just fit perfectly with the imagery.
The gameplay is about the only thing I had any issues with.  The interface, at times, is mildly unresponsive, so clicking an item or command may not actually do anything. This only happens on rare occasions, and is merely a minor nuisance.

The puzzles are the real guts of this game.  Chapter 1 was pretty simple and short, but again, chapter 2 just takes and raises the bar with a much broader playing area, and far more challenging puzzles.

The story is also quiet compelling. You wake up after what was supposed to be a routine MRI, only to find the MRI room abandoned, and you have been locked in.  Some simple investigation points to some kind of experiment, and you need to escape.  From there, it turns into a bit of a mind-bender, and the end of chapter 2 leaves you wanting more.

This game is far from complete, but Tucker keeps everyone up to date via the Something Amiss blog. Unlike most blogs (present company excluded of course), it’s actually worth reading!

Please hurry and finish this game Tucker… PLEASE!

[ Play Something Amiss ]

Fans of Wii-compatible games, rejoice!  Extra-Toxic has partnered with Nintendo to deliver an amazingly addictive and original experience.

Chick Chick Boom pits you against the maniacal Poster Bunny who is hording a collection of official Nintendo desktop wallpapers.

In typical Nintendo fashion, you will be pitting cute little critters (in this case, orb-shaped chicks) against each other in an arena setting.

The art is really stylized and cutesy, but not overly impressive but it does have a kind of ‘Loco Roco‘ thing going on.
The sounds in the game are great and match the look of the game, as does the music, which does get annoying after a while, but doesn’t quite make you want to shove a bic pen in your ear until your eyes turn blue (or red if you are auditing taxes at the moment).

What makes this game such a pleasant experience is the interface.  In order to win you have to select an attack, and then you need to trace a symbol to execute it.  Based on how well you trace, your attacks have more impact.  This sounds simple, but you also have to trace symbols to get your chicks to avoid oncoming attacks, so the amount of time you have to trace a symbol can be quite brief when reacting to things.

Even with my Wacom tablet, this game was pretty challenging in later levels.  I can only imagine how hectic it would be with a WiiMote.

Each level you beat unlocks an official Nintendo desktop image you can download, which is a very cool reward system for this game, but once you have unlocked them all, the single player gameplay doesn’t leave much replay value.  Still, for a free game… it’s pretty damn good.
This game would be awesome as either an online multiplayer game, or a 2 player Wii game, so let’s hope there is a follow up title in the near future!

[ Play Chick Chick BOOM ]

It’s not an uncommon thing for me to ask for things only to be left with nothing, withering away in a pool of liquor and disappointment. But when I reviewed an amazing game called Gateway and asked for more, I was granted my request!

Okay, so maybe Gateway 2 wasn’t made just for me, but that doesn’t change the fact I am a happy camper.  The follow up game was almost everything I could hope for.

The minimalistic/stylized style from the first game is still as sharp as ever, and yet, this one has even more polish.

The visual beauty of the game is only ENHANCED by the moody background sounds and musical tracks.  You can’t help but get immersed in this game.

And the story… wow.  The first game was definitely interesting, but this one actually puts you into a strange, mind-bending tale that makes you really want to explore and see what happens next.
The nitpicky controls haven’t had much of an upgrade, your blockman still gets stuck a lot which at times is rather annoying, but not so bad as to make the game unplayable by any means. Just pretend your blockman is a special needs student and getting him from point A to point B will make you feel like a social worker with a heart of gold.
This game didn’t seem as long as the last one, but with the extra degree of immersion you feel it doesn’t come up lacking.

I’m going to push my luck and ask for even more of this franchise!

[ Play Gateway 2 ]

Just what a click and point game needs, TRAIN OF DEATH! Railway to Heaven by Gamershood puts a nice twist on the C&P genre with a time limit of sorts, involving you in a cage on some train tracks with a not to concerned train coming right at you.

While fairly decent art, there’s just two things you will see actually moving: the TRAIN OF DEATH and you getting hit by it and oh yes you shall get hit by it often trying to beat this. Myself, I would rather see pre- rendered backgrounds than basic flash hand drawn but you will be franticly clicking on everything to much to care.

Sound wise, you cannot get better than a train slowly coming up ready to crush you. The audio makes this C&P game want to kick yourself fairly hard to try and find what you need faster.

I haven’t even beating it yet as I wanted to post this for people to play. It’s like a horror/scare/the Saw movie type C&P. While situations in games like this isn’t uncommon it still makes you wanna crap yourself, turning around the cage looking for stuff than you see the train is right on you, hehe. Game play wise, standard hover the mouse over stuff and click, with the edges making you turn around. I’m sorta pissed though as there was no top hatted mustache twirling baddy but not everything can be perfect.

[ Play Railway To Heaven ]

Traditionally, RPGs made in flash have been pretty lame. There’s a few that stand out now and then, and Mobile Weapon is about to join their ranks.

Tyler Projects has developed an amazing RPG engine for this game and pumped out a lot of really good 3d-rendered artwork to build a pretty detailed sci-fi world where everyone runs around in fighting robots. I loves me some fighting robots!

Not only does this game look beautiful, it SOUNDS beautiful. All the effects are there, and there’s plenty of variety with the music as you go from level to level and into combat screens.

The controls and interfaces on this game are very easy to pick up. I actually skipped all the tutorial stuff at the beginning and it didn’t hinder my abilities to play in any way. You can use the keyboard or the mouse, or a combination of both, so it’s desktop AND notebook friendly, which is more than some games can boast.

Unfortunately, I have a very short attention span, and the very first quest in this game was to go about gathering parts by killing things in random battles. After 20 or so battles without finding the last part I needed, I got bored and that ended my adventure… so I won’t be shelling out the $16 for the full version any time soon.

That said, I know a lot of RPG fans LOVE this type of game, and as I said earlier, it’s one of the best made RPGs I’ve ever seen in Flash. I would expect a great following for this game, and it may even convert a few people who aren’t typically fans of this genre. I just won’t be one of them.

If you have a lot of free time, and no social life, I think this might actually be worth the upgrade price, and you should DEFINITELY try the free version.

[ Try Mobile Weapon Now ]

Hewitt isn’t what you’d call a ladies man, but he’s desperate to become one.

You see… a senior-citizen version of himself, in a time-traveling robot, visited him in a dream with a warning of how miserable he would become if he failed to find a date for the homecoming dance. And so, you must undergo the great adventure of finding yourself a piece of tail (before the afore-mentioned homecoming dance) in this Monkey-Island-esque adventure game.

The characters in this game are all fantastic, and the overall look is reminiscent of something you might see on Nickelodeon. While animation isn’t the best, it’s a minimal part of these kinds of games anyway, and doesn’t detract from the overall enjoyment in any way.

The sound is pretty good too. The effects are minimal, but fitting, and the music is well selected. Each area of the game-world has it’s own soundtrack, and none of the tracks are annoying.

The gameplay is a little different then what you may be used to for this kind of game. Rather then clicking the ground to walk, you use the arrow keys or WASD, however, you still pount and click with the mouse to interact with items and people.

Once you get the hang of the controls, the game plays pretty easily. There are several mini games you will play as you progress, that each have their own control schemes, but thankfully each one gives you some instructions before dropping you into the mini-game itself.

The item management and selection controls were a bit annoying (I’d rather see a menu you could click on to use items, and have drag and drop interaction for combining items), as were the lengthy start-up tutorials, but the cleverness and humor of the puzzles you solve are fun enough to make you overlook any other shortcomings. Any game where you can cause a rabbit to become roadkill is A-okay with me.
The game is complete with save slots so you can track your progress when your boss busts you for slacking off, and a comprehensive walkthrough for people who don’t have the patience to figure EVERYTHING out.

[ Play Hewitt Now ]

Once again, I’m here to review what I feel is a brilliant hybrid of game-styles I absolutely love. Gateway is a brain teaser that mixes the gameplay and controls of point-and-clicks like monkey island, with the level-based puzzle solving of games like chip’s challenge.

The art in this game is designed to look low-poly 3D. It’s not detailed in any way, and the animation is pretty minimal, but this simplified approach is rather quite pleasing, much like Apple’s design approach in their hardware.

The sound also has a simplistic elegance. The buttons, objects and footsteps are all fitting, and the music has been bypassed for more of an eerie ambiance. That, mixed with the minimal level art, draws you into a void-like atmosphere that you really do want to escape from.

The gameplay is very easy to pick up. All you do is click where you want to walk, click on things you want to use, and…well… that’s about it! But if you aren’t too bright, the first few levels will tell you exactly how to click on stuff.
The levels are brilliantly designed, each one forcing you to use your brain to figure out what you need to do to progress. I especially loved some of the later levels where you spy on this house and watch other block-people moving around.

There is some degree of frustration in the collision. A lot of the time if you are near a wall or edge, and you click to walk in a straight line, your block-man won’t move. Kind of like guiding a fat, blind man with no arms, through a narrow hallway, only not nearly as funny. It’s a minor annoyance most of the time, and you just need to click a little closer to get unstuck.
About the only thing stopping this game from getting a much higher score is how short it is. There’s only around 10 levels or so to figure out, and if you are smart each one will only take you a few minutes at most.

If you aren’t the brightest crayon in the box, there is a save feature so you can spend as long as you need figuring out each level, and you can always pick up where you stopped at any time.
I’m really hoping to see a sequel or an expansion of some kind, because I really enjoyed the challenge and style of this game. Now… where did that armless, fat-ass, blind guy I was looking after go?

[ Play Gateway ]

This game, pardon the pun, is a hidden treasure, especially for anyone looking for something quick and simple to play.

Pirates & Treasure, by Tim Drew, is basically a small collection of mini-games bundled together with a very funny story of one pirate captain’s quest for rum and riches. Fans of games like WarioWare will want to check it out.
The art is very simplistic and stylized, but very well presented, and fits the lighthearted nature of the game quite well. The sound is pretty good, mostly ambience and effects, but they fill the silence of your lonely, lonely life well enough.

The gameplay isn’t anything spectacular. It’s mostly simple point and click or arrow reaction type mini-games, but the overall variety of play makes this game so much fun.

The only bad thing I have to say ’bout this game is it’s too short. When you beat it (in about 10 minutes) you will unlock the minigames gallery, which has all the games you just beat, plus one new sliding square puzzle.

Even though it ended to fast, and there’s not much replay value, the first play-through is a lot of fun, so give this game a go right now, or ye’ll be walkin’ the plank matey!

[ YARRRR!!! ]

Blockhead (created by The Swain) is a psychotic, destructive moron with no sense of right and wrong. He wanders around causing mayhem and mischief wherever his short attention span takes him. The smallest thing distracts him from any goal he may be trying to achieve deep within his pea-sized brain. The only thing even remotely guiding him is his conscience, and that’s where you come in…

Blockhead does absolutely nothing but try the patience of his conscience, a fat middle aged man who is strikingly similar to Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Both Blockhead the character, and Blockhead the game will sorely try YOUR patience.

Firstly I need to say that the art/animation on this game is outstanding. Blockhead interacts with EVERYTHING in the levels and the number of animations you can see as he inspects and dismantles everything is extremely impressive.

Secondly the voice acting and sound work is nearly perfect. It’s not bland monotone dialog, and it doesn’t sound like it was recorded by a pre-pubescent kid with a crappy Wal-Mart microphone. The character’s personalities REALLY shine through even with just the audio.

Where this game fails to impress me is the gameplay, which is remarkably dissapointing considering it was coded by Komix, the super-duper programmer who single-handedly coded the complex engine behind Triachnid. The CONCEPT of the gameplay is great. Basically you have to manage the attention span of blockhead and the anger of his conscience to complete day to day tasks without too much collateral damage.

According to the tutorial, any command you give will cause Blockead’s attention span to drop, and any stupid acts by Blockhead will piss off his conscience. When Blockhead is about to do something bad you are supposed to be able to hit the “Interrupt” button to break his concentration when he flashes green. Doing this SHOULD give you a short opportunity to redirect Blockhead’s attention somewhere else. Instead, even with Blockhead’s attention bar completely full, hitting interrupt more times than not will cause the conscience to go “out to lunch”, taking away your ability to do ANYTHING, even if the anger bar is empty.

A LOT of the time you will also have full attention span and zero anger, but for some reason will not be able to move Blockhead around. The split seconds where you actually CAN move him can be even more frustrating due to the lack of ant path mapping. Blockhead walks directly toward the point you click, regardless of walls or corners and often ends up stuck on a wall or in a completely different room.

The author comments state that there is a control related bug that can be bypassed by reloading the game. That’s just another level of frustration piled on to a game that I already hate playing.

With all that griping aside, I still say it’s worth checking out… just don’t bother trying to play it. Let Blockhead do whatever he wants; the game actually lasts longer that way, and it’s pretty damned funny.

I would really love to play a version of this game that works the way it should and has more fun then frustration.

[ Don’t Play Blockhead the Game ]

The Super Flash Bros have put a lot of time and love in bringing us BR’s Climate Chaos. Everything from the beautiful art & animation to the innovative 3d environments to the challenging puzzles is done with an eye for detail.

Blue rabbit and friends have traveled to an island resort for a care-free vacation. Unfortunately for Blue Rabbit, they don’t have any money. What starts out as a simple fund-raising expedition quickly turns into a mystic mystery. Something has happened to the magical talismans that keep the climates of the neighboring islands in balance, causing each island to have some type of severe weather.

As I mentioned already, the artwork is fantastic. All the inhabitants and tourists are cutesy animals that you can talk to. The communication in the game is great, rather then using voice-overs or text blobs, they use pictures and emoticons. Understanding what people are telling you is just part of the puzzle solving.

The cut scene animations are amazing, really drawing you deeper into the story, and the sounds and music (provided by the talented Dustball) almost give it a true cinematic feel.

The actual gameplay is easy to pick up. You walk around with the arrows or WASD, and interact with the mouse. You end up doing an equal share of exploring and item collecting, similar to the type of things you do in classic point and click games. You can even take snapshots as you trek around the islands.

Overall this is a pretty immersive game once you get into it, but it will take you a nice chunk of time to play. If you are just hoping to kill a few minutes, don’t worry, there is a save feature!!!

I am so impressed by this game, I don’t even have any sarcastic comments to add!

[ Play BR’s Climate Chaos ]