Link Dump Friday
January 22, 2010
Happy Friday, noble reader! It's another installment of games, games, games, earnest heartfelt talks about our feelings, and games! I know every week you show up here, your eyes full of light and hope, and... I just wanted to make today special for you. So... I got you a pony. But while I was filling out the pony paperwork I got hungry, so I ate it.
Kidding, I'm just kidding!
I would never get you a pony. I spent the Pony Fund on tricked out glasses and these platform shoes with goldfish in the heels. It's probably for the best, anyway. I hear ponies rarely make it through Customs these days.
What's For Dinner? - Track down your ingredients, cut them up properly, and then prepare them according to the directions... all within a time limit! This time management/simulation game looks good, but the controls and the time constraints occasionally make it difficult to enjoy yourself. At seven recipes, it feels a little brief. Maybe the next installment will include an Extreme Mode where Gordon Ramsay makes you cry into your bolognese. I hear tears are the perfect seasoning.
Rotato - It's ultra simple, but this hand-drawn match-3 sliding game is also ultra cute, and ultra weird. Rotate the screen to drop the blocks into place and make matching sets disappear. Do you ever wonder where they go when they vanish? I think they go to the place all magical creatures go, like unicorns, leprechauns, and films by Sam Raimi.
Mecharon - This top-down shooter featuring enough eight legged freaks to give even the manliest of men the squigglies is fun, if a bit repetitive. Each time you level up, you're granted a perk instead of points to sink into stats, which means you've got to sink some time into it before you really shake up the gameplay with your own minibot. It's nothing you haven't seen before, but, c'mon. Dude? Mech. It's a mech, dude. You shouldn't need justification for stomping around in a mechanized death suit.
Lab Rat: Quest For Cheese - It's edutainment with this maze game featuring a lovingly animated rat searching for increasingly exotic cheeses. The gameplay is stock standard... I mean, you're a rat in a maze. But there's something weirdly charming about it all, not the least of which is the mini detail of each fine cheese you discover. I predict exotic cheese trading is going to be the new craze on the playgrounds. Instead of tiny animated creatures, Timmy and Billy will be slugging it out over Gruyere.
vel.blast - Lucidrine's latest, while not as knock-down, drag out insane as, say, Cube Colossus, is still pretty nuts. In that it's a shooter... but you don't actually shoot. Which is not to say there won't be any bullets on screen. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Ha. No. What you've got is shields, upgrades, and achievements. And that sound? That's the enemy laughing at you. You going to let them get away with that? Oh, I also heard they said your shirt is ugly.
Good Friday to you too Dora !
The rat in "Lab Rat: Quest For Cheese " is relatively well design (its paws and tail looks really real !). The game is rather repetitive and the music is a bit annoying but I still enjoyed the experience because of the rat's design... I found surprising the number of American and British cheese I came accross... I spend a bit of time on it and gave up before finding any French cheese. I'm a bit disapointed ! :)
"What's For Dinner? " could be entertaining but I was quite annoyed by some of the controls (shaking the pan was particularly difficult). I feel bad because it's the kind of games I could really enjoy playing.
I'm sad about the Poney . Could we have a Llama instead ?
Just wanted to mention, I think you meant "match-3 sliding game", not "math-3". Although before I realized it could've been an error I was intrigued and tried to figure out what a math-3 game would be like.
Lab Rat was fun for a while, but then the thought of cheese got me hungry so I tried What's For Dinner? and may I say "Anybody can grate cheese faster than the game allows?!" and one should never cut chicken on the same chopping board as the vegies. Haven't they heard of salmonella?!
I'm hungry.
"What's For Dinner?" was pretty fun, even if stirring is next to impossible and plenty of the techniques are absurd: who chops onions and garlic with the outer peel on? Who assembles a pizza inside an oven? Who stores vegetable oil in the refrigerator, but lettuce in the cupboard?
I'd like to protest your mention of Gruyère! It's not exotic! D: Try Charouce :P
I hate how much those cooking games rely on mouse movements, since the salt and pepper shaking was impossible with a touchpad.
Oddly, I should've had more trouble with grating... but it was stirring that got me.
Also, I want to make some salsa! There was some avocado and tortillas in the pantry.
I'm disappointed that the Lab Rat game didn't include X-14, the most powerful cheese known to man. Other than that, it's a good - though repetitive - game, with a sufficiently cute rat. The footprints are a nice touch, though it could use a little tweaking with the boundary box on the head.
Mecharon is ok as arena shooters go. The only problem is the huge difficulty spike on that level. The little red enemies they introduce never miss and do appreciable damage, which is a death sentence when there's no reliable way to regain health.
The little red enemies in mecharon are not a problem. They can be dodged, easily killed, and a repair bot is quite help for for fixing the nicks you accumulate.
My problem is
What I assume(hope) is the final boss. IT has a huge laser on it that does massive damage, and is nigh undodgeable. I have max speed, and have been able to get through the rest of the game fairly easily, but I can't even get a noticeable amount of damage on this boss before it kills me. I have found no reliable way to dodge it, and trying to attack it from outside its range seems to fails because it will trap you in a corner. I feel like I am missing a something major about this level.
@Mystify
You can't dodge the end-boss' rail gun. The way to win is to focus on the small enemies that spawn. They have a high probability of dropping health or a shield. So you keep killing them until you get a shield, then start shooting the boss while trying for more health/shield drops when new enemies spawn. Keep repeating this and you can win fairly easily.
Kids in the Hall love! :D
Unless they were made by the same people, Mecharon is a complete rip-off of Crimsonland.
J. recognised the reference!
We're BFFs now. We're going to get matching manicures.
I don't think having a perfectly good mouse (as opposed to a pad) even helps with "What's for Dinner". I couldn't even accomplish one swipe of the first knife task. It's as if it just ignored me completely. Knife moving, you can see that your click is being registered, pointer moving exactly over the dotted line, slowly or quickly, but no cutting ever happens. Terrible controls, and a shame, really.
Mecharon: because what the world needed was another very poorly executed shmup.
Look, the coding is the hard part, I get that.
But the design decisions don't have to be consistently poor.
If your enemies are going to be numerous, relatively tiny, very fast, and blending into the background, you must give your player a rapid-fire weapon or they have no sporting (i.e., fun, you know, the idea behind games?) chance. This is why the Navy shoots down missiles with souped-up Vulcan cannons; fire one or two shots instead of 40,000, and you miss (and die).
As far as I can see, the only proper decision made in Mecharoth is that you don't start out slower than the bad guys. So I guess I've technically seen worse, as there are games that make that mistake on top of all the others.
I think Mecharon's a bit different from similar games, and doesn't really come into its own until after a few levels, when you have more perks and weapons (yes, that's a flaw, but it's not a bad game throughout). It requires a lot more moving around and dodging than typical top-down shooters.
I actually found the end boss pretty easy, due to perk selection:
I saved a perk in my back pocket for instant repair, since I needed it against the first boss. With upgraded weapon speed, crit damage (sharpshooter & sniper), and energy weapons + rail gun specialty, I simply walked up to it and demolished it (I did need the instant repair, but it only got two more shots on me). It's weird that it doesn't really leave a carcass, and the rest of the level is absurdly boring once it's dead. I thought I'd done something wrong at first.
I really enjoyed Lab Rat. That rat was really well done! I loved his tail. And I actually enjoyed the music. Good game!
The animation on Lab Rat is really impressively lifelike - or rather, it contains the essence of how rats move, if that makes sense.
I also feel compelled to mention that I too found the animated lab rat deliciously cute! I loved the little feet, fluid body and slowly bending tail. Watching that rat walk around was more satisfying than winning the levels :D
I liked Lab Rat too. I got up to a level somewhere in the mid-20s the first time I played. I just tried going back and playing again, and . . . the entire www.newgrounds.com website appears to be down! Not just my own glitch either, downforeveryoneorjustme confirms it. Pout. I wanted more cheese.
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