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Sunday, December 23, 2007

Mondo Agency

UPDATE: cactus has decided to update the game due to the feedback he's gotten. The jumping level is now easier and skippable for those who have trouble beating it. There's been a few other changes as well, including vital bug fixes.

This is cactus entry for the winter competition at YoYoGames.com.

"Welcome to Mondo Agency! An eerie cyber FPS with horror and puzzle elements. As an agent it is your mission to kill laser indians and save the president!

Turn off your lights and turn up your speakers for maximum enjoyment!"

Name: Mondo Agency
Developer: cactus
Category: FPS/Adventure/Weird
Type: Freeware
Size: 7.5MB
Download: link 1
Walkthrough: link

Labels: cactus, freeware, yoyogamescomp1

Posted at 6:42 PM by LoverBoy69

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Sunday, September 16, 2007

News

You might remember a few months ago a game called Qui'Ifon (developer: ultim8p00) was posted about, which had some similarities to Cave Story. Since then, the engine has been reworked, its name has changed to The Undertaking and a new demo has been released, although apparently it was a rushed release so expect some bugs.

Author's description: "It's basically Cave Story meets swords meets Knytt (or Seiklus)." However, he also goes on to say that he wants to distance it from Cave Story.

Labels: cave story, freeware, WIP

Posted at 10:15 PM by Moshboy

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Sunday, July 08, 2007

News

WIP screenshots of a remake of Phoenix in development by Minion.

Labels: freeware, remakes

Posted at 5:11 PM by Moshboy

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Saturday, June 23, 2007

Hurrican

Hurrican is essentially a modernised, graphically-updated, feature packed version of Turrican. As with the original, the levels are large (and beg to be explored), the enemies come thick and fast from all angles and the game is far from a pushover. Due to the sheer number of features included, the controls tend to feel a little over complicated at times (there are so many combinations to remember) but the end result is still very rewarding.

Name: Hurrican
Developer: Poke53280
Category: Platform Shooter
Type: Freeware
Size: 40MB

Labels: freeware, l0607, remakes

Posted at 1:08 AM by Moshboy

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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Copic Fighter Update

The demo of Copic Fighter has been updated to 0.3.0. The new version features ten updated sprites, as well as changes to the gameplay mechanics and bug fixes.

Still no new content in terms of additional stages, so this update is primarily tweaks and fixes. Make sure to check the Readme for instructions.

Name: Copic Fighter 0.3.0
Developer: Michal Wisniowski
Category: Shooter
Type: Freeware
Size: 6.25MB

Labels: freeware, Mentisworks, shooter

Posted at 2:08 AM by Michal

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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Copic Fighter Demo

The first demo for Copic Fighter has been released this morning on Mentisworks. It features classic shmup mechanics, with a little twist in terms of presentation. The intention with Copic Fighter was to move towards the art game realm in terms of overall style.

All artwork, sounds, and music in Copic Fighter are original, and unique. At the same time, controls should be quite familiar, as you move with the arrow keys and shoot with Z. Additional controls are outlined in the Readme file, which you should also check for installation instructions.

A little twist to the gameplay is that each shot fired uses up your Ink, indicated by a meter. Collect Ink left behind by destroyed enemies to replenish your supply.

Name: Copic Fighter
Developer: Michal Wisniowski
Category: Shooter
Type: Freeware
Size: 6.23 MB

Labels: freeware, Mentisworks, shooter

Posted at 2:18 AM by Michal

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News

A screenshot of new artwork for Soft Landing posted. [Soft Landing Developer's Diary]

Update on Copic Fighter and new screenshot posted. [preview, Mentisworks]

Vilmos is working on an update on Thruster. The new version will be running in a higher resolution, a much anticipated improvement. [Thruster via Mentisworks]

Labels: freeware, Mentisworks, news

Posted at 1:08 AM by Michal

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Thursday, April 05, 2007

Copic Fighter

My new project now has a name: Copic Fighter. It's a top down scrolling shooter, with a (hopefully) unique art twist. Official announcement can be found here, and a boss battle update here [Mentisworks, Thruster].

A preliminary demo should be ready soon. Your feedback is, as always, welcome and appreciated.

Labels: freeware, Mentisworks, preview

Posted at 7:08 AM by Michal

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Monday, April 02, 2007

Thruster

Thruster is a caveflier, originally released for the Tapwave Zodiac, then ported to the GP2X, and now Windows. The game's concept is based on an older black and white title called Spout, by Kuni. Here are some of the features of Thruster.

Three different game modes.
Two difficulty levels.
High score tables with replay.
Beautiful backgrounds.
Original Soundtrack.
Ability to add your own music.
More than 2K particles in play at once.

Art and music in Thruster was inspired a good deal by Rez, resulting in background images and sounds that will be familiar to fans of the latter.

Use X to select menu items and active your ships thrust. Space will pause the game, as well as going back in menus. Using the arrow keys to steer your ship, propel yourself upwards and erode the landscape with the thrust particles.

(Thruster wallpapers can be found here, via Mentisworks)

Name: Thruster 1.3
Developer: Andrew Kearns
Category: Arcade
Type: Freeware
Size: 18MB

Labels: freeware, Mentisworks

Posted at 8:08 AM by Michal

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Saturday, March 17, 2007

News

New interview with Nifflas over at Planet Freeplay.

[Knytt, Within a Deep Forest review]

Labels: freeware

Posted at 2:18 AM by Moshboy

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Recent Comments

Mondo Agency ahaha oh god what
This is going to be a fun ride through hell isn't it Don't have the patience to make it through the jumping towers level (level 2, i guess?)

I really don't understand why this game is so marvelous. I liked a lot of cactus's other games, but i can never really get into mondo, and I feel like if it where made by anyone else short of Kenta Cho there wouldn't be as much asspatting. Level 4 seems to be really difficult! I can't possibly keep track of all those damn laser indians. I really wanted to love this game, but I quit on level 2. Level 1: cheap falling through floor puzzles. Level 2: cheap jumping puzzle (and then I got stuck between 3 of the towers and couldn't move without quitting the game).

Mondo Medicals was cool because it was about figuring out what was going on. It only got frustrating and sucky toward the end when you got to that level with the moving blocks that squish you and you have to constantly start over.

Mondo Agency is like that level of Mondo Medicals, but from the very beginning. Ugh. Sorry about the first jumping level. Seems like a lot of people had problems with getting past that.

Didn't have time to get anything tested before release. Been a busy christmas... I can beat all the levels with ease, so I figured there wouldn't be a problem.

I need to understand where the problem is before I can fix it, though. It could either be that my monitor is too dark (and hence the game would be too bright for you to see things clearly), or that people are trying to take the wrong way to the top.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll post a video walkthrough to see if people can tell me what I do different when playing from those who have trouble with it. Video demonstration of first two levels
here. Loving it so far. I've only managed to play it in short bursts (it's christmas afterall) but I've reached submission 4.
Once I completed the first jump level I could easily do it a second time. My only complaint is that there should have been an ingame mouse sensitivity adjuster and autosaving. Well, cactus - if your games aren't art then I don't know what is. I'm somewhat interested in modern art myself and believe me - if you set up a computer with a demo of e.g. Mondo Agency running in an art gallery it wouldn't stand out as strange in any way. =)

However, I have to agree with Jonathan that jumping puzzles in FPP games are hardly ever a good idea. (Although I had no problems with finishing them.) @Lim-Dul: Thanks! I was concerned that I was possibly repeating Half-Life's Zen world mistake. Guess that concern had some grounds to it :( I really sound like an asshole when the person above me deletes their comment. Anyway, I can't really tell what is going on in the video on level 2, every time I jump on the towers they immediately start to get lower, and i cannot make it to the next one in time. Does it have to do with skipping the shortest tower? Also, a control to adjust mouse sensitivity would be nice, and not that hard to implement. I feel like i move my trackball one inch and I've gone full circle. You're playing with a trackball - that could explain the difficulty. You sir, have a brilliantly diseased mind. Even if I could program anything I wouldn't be able to do anything one jot as bizaare as the nonsensical text and general sinisterness. I tried playing further, and got up to Relativity Practice (or whatever the name is), at which point, after dying about 50 times, I finally quit.

cactus... this game is a lot more frustrating even than the Xen levels, because the field of view is so narrow (can't see jack) and there is very little feedback for when the player has missed or hit anything, or even when he is moving versus not.

The Mondo games are very cool in terms of atmosphere, but the atmosphere is destroyed as soon as the player starts trying to do the same annoying / frustrating thing 20 times in a row.

In the first game, at least you didn't die and have to start over all the time. You would just be kind of lost and trying to find the solution, and that fit the fiction / mood -- of being lost in this weird place and not knowing what's going on. This game is all about starting over from the beginning every time you fail, which is a lot worse (even the 2nd level where you don't literally die, if you miss a tower you start from the ground again).

I think you would benefit from finding about 10 friends (or random people) who have never played this game, then have them try and play it. And just sit there and watch, and don't say anything at all to help. Just watch them try to play, and see if that experience they're having is what you really intended to be. Apart from hurting my eyes and making me get headaches. I like the atmosphere of his mondo games. Medicals I think gets a little bit too much credit than it deserves. As illogical as the puzzles were, none of them were too difficult and none of them really made me feel that smart about myself. They were pretty basic and rather lame puzzles. I like the idea of laser indians. I mean, that's pretty awesome, but the ridiculous jumping puzzle turned me off. No more of this game. hey cactus... any word on Brave Karma Warriors? I don't keep up with your forums, but that video from B-Game competition era looks really great. I agree, Laser Indians are awesome. I want them to be in a more-playable game. cactus, when making games, never, EVER expect players to get trough something because it's easy for you. Those s(t)inking rods on level two require precision with overreactive contols, speed and either perfect 32-bit eysight or excellent memory from all the falls - because when you look at them from above they're just as white as the floor.
F-rust-rat-ing. I have observed that putting jumping in a first-person game often turns PC gamers brains into cottage cheese.

Ask them to dodge through a hail of bullets while countering with pinpoint accuracy against a dozen targets simultaneously, possibly even while reciting poetry, and it's easy. But ask someone to jump from Point A to Point B? That's impossible!

Seriously guys. The platforming level is easy. You just look up, figure out which is the next platform you need to reach (there's only one real tricky jump), then align yourself, look straight down and jump forward. There's very little chance of missing a jump.

Then again, I found Xen easy, and felt right at home playing Metroid Prime, so perhaps I'm some sort of minor god of spatial awareness. I didn't have any problems with the puzzles.

Maybe the people complaining need to get better at gaming? Ah, Cactus, how I love your mind. I'm not spoiling it, but i'm talking about the ending :D Just beat it - had to stop playing halfway through due to christmas reality and all that jazz.

Kudos, Cactus. That was genuinely nightmarish. It really does feel like a bad dream. Your own breath, tinnily echoing, the environment a hazy, glitchy mess. The dialogue is a string of disjointed half-thoughts.

Good stuff. Amusing you churn these things out so quickly, as they're good arguments for the concept of games-as-art. Roach Roundup A fun and interesting little game. No couches for my house! PDRC #3.667 News there are just too many castleroids these days, not all of them good.

i actually find this one to be much more interesting:
http://www.l-ames.com/nothing/ There's not enough castleroids (metroidvania?) out there! Especially ones that are good. Give me more! More! "Nothing" looks good though. I wasn't keen on the presentation with this. There's no way to skip the intro, Alt+F4 doesn't work, the backgrounds lack the finesse of other ¨castleroid¨ games.

Could be good but this demo hasn't impressed me. A lot of the new "castleroids" just have big graphics. That's what turns me off about most of them. This, and Nothing are good examples of what I'm talking about.

I know Nifflas' games are Castleroids, but the way he does his graphics is very appealing to me. Small, neat, and not a strain on the eyes.

I think more developers need to go smaller and more detailed rather than big and imposing. Game itself's fairly cool so far, albeit a bit unpolished. The main menu's too slow in responding, though, and trying to shut the game down is a real nightmare. First got to go through that whole blurry intro thing again, and if you pressed spacebar to skip the introduction one time too many, the entire game starts again, instead of letting you choose "Quit", and you can start all over again in trying to shut it down. Ended up using Windows Task Manager, but that gave me such a hard time getting my screen's resolution back to something useful. kon-tiki, the EXACT same thing happened to me... i didn't even find that damn sword. Nate, I agree with you about graphics. Of course, the same could be said about most games getting hung up on graphics rather than gameplay. Still, new games are encouraging. I quite liked the graphics, actually. Sure, they're a bit crude and the guy doesn't have arms, plus the jumping animation is less than basic, but it sets a good atmosphere and are nice to look at, plus it doesn't perform any stylebreaks. It's not like the character is a pixel sprite and the entire world is polygon-based. That's already more than quite a few games manage to do. It's utterly killed by the main menu and the inability to shut the game off, though. Well it is a rushed demo, so I think those issues will be pretty easy to iron out for the final version and I'm sure they will be. I feel like it has made some definite improvements over the last demo build. There is a greater sense of atmosphere and the music feels much more dynamic and mixed with ambient sounds. The big problem with this build is the same as the last one; unskipable cutscenes. This one adds even adds a frustrating menu interface on top of that. But then again, for a rushed demo, it's pretty solid. Fret Nice This game will work with the USB Xbox 360 GH controller too. Oh that's right, my bad. I'll make that correction right away. Thanks! I just happen to own an XBox 360 Guitar Hero controller (no XBox 360 though ^^) to play Frets on Fire on the PC. :-D It also works with a normal Xbox 360 controller, although that does make it considerably harder to play :p Well I hope you guys had as much fun playing this as I did. A great game to be sure! Hey! I've tried the game now and it rocks! (pun intended)

Just a few days after Gabe Newell moaned about a lack of originality when it comes to PC controls and peripherals - what an irony. :-P I can't get the game to recognize my controller...the strum bar is on the hat switch and I can't figure out how to change the config. Any help? Pekka Kana 2 Unlike Super Mario and Jazz Jackrabbit, this game's so horribly tedious it's not fun anymore. Has anybody actually got past the first 7 levels of either one of the two episodes? Great Blog! The game does have incredible pixel art, and the sounds are neat (it's just funny to have a chicken use a megafone against enemies), however the controls are maybe a bit too slippery. I felt like the floor was covered in thin ice for quite a while there.

Also, what makes a platformer fun, besides good controls, is level design, and that's where the game takes another hit. Most levels are very similar, the platforming areas are a bit more frustrating than they should with the slippery controls and the overly tight jumping spaces, and it just seems like the creators got a bit too excited with adding enemies and fruits everywhere, without putting too much thought in how they were placed to give the player interesting challenges. I also found absolutely nothing encouraging me to go through the hassle of getting to the more difficult spots just to get more fruit, which did nothing but add score. I personally hate score in platformers, because I don't think scoring high is the main focus in a good platformer.

This seems like another example of how some game developers spend too much time in creating fancy audiovisual content instead of focusing on the game's gameplay and core design. It's good to play to see some nice graphics, but otherwise I have to say it's a bore. Well said Melly. It's also very old - I remember playing this years ago! Linx Does not work with Vista x64. Error message is "Runtime error 21 at 0040418A", and is consistent with other released games. Based on the nature of failure, I suspect a library issue. Enigma rock n' roll was a cool game with catchy music. I love Enigma. I just wish they'd find better sounds - the marble clanking around starts to grate on your nerves after a while. Blazing Wings Update News Hurrican The game really is a lot better if you have a decent gamepad (such as the 360 USB controller). Keyboard just doesn't cut it for Turrican nowadays.

My setup is as follows:

Left bumper - Fire
Right bumper - Jump
X Button - Power Wave
Y Button - Grenade
B Button - Shockwave
A Button - Lightning Gun
Left trigger - Cycle Weapons (doesn't work?)
Right trigger - Look down

There, everything you could need. It's far more playable when you can aim and shoot AND fire lightning-charge shots without having to move your fingers. there is a workaround till the next patch is released for the weapon switch bug - you can find it here:
http://www.turrican.gamevoice.de/hurrican_site/forum/showthread.php?id=91 Aah, thanks for the heads up! That makes the game a bit easier. Now it's only as hard as Battletoads.

Just managed to scrape through to level 4 - level 3 was amazingly intense. Instant death in a second if you're careless. Very very hard, also with difficulty set to normal, but very fun to play and rather innovative.
I loved Turrican II and this game is the worthy successor.
I can't stop to play it!
Congratulations to the authors.
The control with keyboard it's quite difficult, I play it with joypad and I can easily manage it. ;) Blumenmacht Blumenmacht sounds very weird and is wrong. Blumenkraft would be equivalent(?) to flowerpower. "Macht" is indeed translated as "power." Such as "die Macht der Liebe," being "the power of love."

Though "Kraft" is also translated as "power," the implication is along the lines of "energy," (which is also one of its translations). I believe that an insinuated "flower energy" is quite different from the sense given off by the old phrase "flower power."

I suppose that this is more at the discretion of the creator though. It sounded fine to me ^_^, but oh well... ha ha... News Copic Fighter Update Copic Fighter Demo News Copic Fighter Thruster caveflier? Is that a newly invented term for thrust-type games? It's pretty cool. Oops, sorry I missed this comment :D. I didn't come up with that word actually. I've seen it used elsewhere in reference to Spout. It does seem fitting though, so I figured "why not." News News

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