Kongregate

Just saw this site mentioned in the Mercury News today. It's a gaming community site - with a twist in that it supports an apparently quick and easy upload process to upload your own (Flash) games.

And there's a metagame going on, for the site as a whole - you earn points, etc playing the games and uploading your own, and redeem them to get cards in Kongregate's own TCG, which is being designed by my former Backbone colleague, David Sirlin. Hmm..

I played Fancy Pants Adventures, which is really just a stick figure with pants that you guide around with the arrow keys, but has some really fun physics stuff going on, like Line Rider except you are actually controlling the little guy the whole time instead of setting up a course and then watching him go.

You apparently jump on enemies to attack them a la Mario, and there's a lot of fun loop the looping going on. And people were actually chatting in the chat room.

Also - "Kongregate shares between 25% and 50% of ad revenue with developers."

Wonderland Adventures

I just briefly played Wonderland Adventures on the 60 minute free trial and was quite sucked into it until I got to a puzzle where I kept frying my "Stinky" character on a set of fire geysers, because I'm not focusing enough on the patterns.

The game has very simple 3D graphics with cute yellow characters that look like little Pac Men (yellow round characters) that can be customized by the user. They also remind me of Zoombinis.

You wind up going on a series of adventures - in the first place, saving groups of young 'Stinkies' by waking them up and leading them out of the caves where they're trapped. Initially there are simple 'step on the colored square and open the colored gate' puzzles, but there's some surprise there, as the square that you think will open up a bridge going one direction actually opens it in another place, where you can then access the trigger you want. You can also use some of the stinkies you're rescuing to stand on triggers to keep some of the gates open.

After the initial "gate" adventures, there were a couple more that had "teleport" like areas where the character got boomeranged to another part of the level. There's really fun sfx and vox here so the character is exclaiming as they are flung around, which is quite entertaining.

So, the graphics not state of the art but the attention paid to gameplay and making the characters fun, is quite good. I would have kept playing had I not been slightly frustrated by the fire puzzle and not wanting to spend my whole free trial there.

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

I can't figure out if this game would have enough staying power for me or not. I like the leveling up and getting new spells, but I am just not the best 3 in a row player and so I keep losing.

Here's the PC Demo link. It's supposed to be out on DS now but everyone has trouble finding it in the stores.

Get the Glass

Get the Glass

Family going after a milk glass

blatant plug

Cousins at GDC!

Cousins at the Game Developer’s Conference! Picture taken by developer we met at PF DinerBash!
This is so freaky. Waiting for the BART on the way home from the Red Room, (the Red Room is a writing studio I just started going to and which will be written about in the book blog), I decided to google “Blackwell Legacy faq”.
I just wanted to see if I can avoid having to ask Dave Gilbert, the creator of the game who I just met yesterday, how to get past the part where you have to get a picture of JoAnn, a girl who’s committed suicide but her dormmates won’t help you. It’s for an article the character, Rosangela Blackwell, is writing for the Village Eye. A bit of a surprise assignment since she’s usually a mild-mannered book reviewer.
Maybe I could find the answer somewhere online without having to reveal myself as a stoopid adventure gamer.
(But I did get through Hotel Dusk pretty well with almost no hinting !)

(breath).

As I thought, the critical mass of people who don’t quite get this puzzle, is either not quite there yet or doesn’t come up in the first few Google hits visible on my Treo screen.
But what did come up is the link to Dave Gilbert’s blog.

I bring it up – and am amazed and surprised to find that Dave G has written about meeting me and my cousin Chris at the PF party the other night.
And there’s a picture, which I remember him taking. I might actually have my eyes open in that picture! (something rare).
Quite entertaining, a quote from Kenny. I think Dave got the order of meeting a little wrong though - giving credit where it's due, it was Chris who spotted him and pointed him out (since he'd seen his talk earlier I think).

I get on the train and can read most of the page still even though I’ve lost reception on the Treo so it's not updating anymore. It just feels very eerie to have randomly found this just then and be reading it on public transit.
The rest of the blog is pretty entertaining and detailed also. Since I do not get to go to much at the GDC (except Miyamoto-san tomorrow!) because we’re sharing 2 passes amongst 8 people, it’s fun to read.
Impressive amount of detail written about an event that we’re still in the middle of – and I have had no time to send out my notes from Women in Games on Tuesday.

I realize after this party that I like working for a publisher much better than working for a developer, which I was doing more recently.
I like this feeling of trying to scout around for good stuff for us to distribute or publish, especially if it’s something I actually like to play, like these games or Tasty Planet (which is already being sold on the site after Ethan and I brought it up a couple months ago)! Buy it!

Lunar Knights for DS

Borrowed from a colleague, this game is now back with its owner (not by my choice, I would have kept it longer!)

This game is the "next-gen" version of the Boktai series for GBA, but doesn't have their solar sensor built in as the GBA cartridges did. I don't miss that much - you get the same gameplay here with night and day being shown on the top screen, along with weather.

I like the main gameplay with your two characters, specializing in melee and ranged attacks, getting through dungeons and solving various puzzles (hit the switch with your ranged character, etc). As in original Boktai there's a lot of stealth, but you're not able to slide up against the wall and hide. (Seems like people in the forums are very sad about this).

The weapons can be upgraded with junk parts found throughout the levels, but initially the game seems to suggest you need to tediously upgrade the weapon before you can leave the first dungeon.
The interface for showing what parts you have to upgrade the weapon and which you need, seems a bit confusing also.

The game seemed to come together when I first started having more than one "terennial" or pokemon-like elemental being that helps your attacks, to switch between.

After almost every dungeon, you defeat a vampire or group of vampires and then fly their casket up to a satellite to be purified. This is like having to drag the casket through the level as in Boktai.
But the initial level just seemed way too hard for a "here's your first time with this shooting style, and it's the beginning of the game, let's give you a break" period.
You have a ship flying forward in space. You use the stylus to both click on enemies to shoot them, and to drag the ship around to move it. I found this quite challenging initially. Once I got more terennials and got a firebomb and a targeted bomb, this was much easier.
I guess these take the place of actual bosses in the levels, because the bosses themselves were much easier than bosses in games like Zelda:Minish Cap, etc.

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