Four very different games in this edition of Link Dump Friday, enough to appease the hungry appetites of RPG fans, tower defense masters, action gamers and anyone looking to give their reflexes a little test or two.
Look Out, Mr. Johnson! - A game of ghosts, zombies, and hapless mustachioed citizens! Use your cursor (pink scary ghoul with sharp teeth) to scare Mr. Johnson in the right direction to avoid obstacles. Chomp barriers and enemies by tapping the [a] key.
Towering Forever - A side-scrolling tower defense-type game that blends some nice fighting moves into the mix. Run across the landscape and place one of several types of towers, then attack baddies with your avatar as they spawn. Upgrade your fighting combos, tower capabilities, and the damage of both using points in-between waves.
Adventure Ho! - Take your typical RPG, strip out all the walking, questing and dialogue, and you have an idea what Adventure Ho! is all about. Choose a character, buy items and equipment, then head out and face foe after foe. Defeat each group, earn experience, get stronger. Simple, but engaging.
Crow in Hell - An arcade-style avoider game played with the [arrow] keys and infused with a whole lot of artistic style. You play a crow whose unfortunate fate was to be shot and tumble straight down to hell. Avoid obstacles as you wind your way through twisty passages, collecting keys to unlock special challenges.
i'm enjoying towering forever. It's stylish, and i like how it sort of makes sense in a way. I.e. the noulder towers do better if its on a hill so the boulders have somewhere to roll.
It should be noted that the first game w/Mr. Johnson contains loads of swearing each and every time he's scared in whatever direction. Just a heads up...not for kids.
Okay.
Artistic? Yes.
Interesting? Yes.
Gameplay? Easy.
But what's with all the lame boobytraps in Crow in Hell? Here I am in the first screen, flying my own business, and all of a sudden a boulder comes crashing me down. In the third screen an axe tumbles down without a warning and whoops - another feather lost.
Great game, but the boobytraps are really unnoticable... If that's a word.
Adventure Ho is interesting, but one would be far better off checking out good old Kingdom of Loathing instead.
The controls and fighting of Towering Forever are absolute RUBBISH.
It has all the makings of a good game with excellent design, but they messed up the crucial bit: being able to move properly.
You want to do a combo. Sometimes you click twice. You can't just hold down the mouse button after that. You have to wait till the combo cuts off at some point and then begins again. When that happens, whatever you are punching is already half-way to the tree and you end up doing another half-combo at nothing.
What's that? You made a punch but need to move quickly?
Too bad, you have to wait for the painfully slow animation to end, then slowly work up your speed.
You accidentally let go of the arrow key for a moment?
You'll lose all of your speed and have to start again.
The only efficient way of attacking is doing air combos a few pixels off the ground.
And even then you'll have to worry about a single speedy unit going passed all of your towers because they thought it might be a better idea to attack those really slow people a-coming that you are currently beating.
tl;dr - Good idea, bad execution.
Crow in Hell: Nice artistic game, nice crow animation. I enjoyed watching the speed run, especially near the end.
But. Crows eat spiders and bugs. They love them. So why does my crow die if it even brushes a spider's cobweb? Why is it mortally scared of even the tiniest bug?
Why is my crow unable to alight on even the most convenient landing object? (spade handles, bits of wood, the ground outside the house, etc)
Nice game but these little things bothered me (and usually I'm able to overlook plot holes). Maybe that's a compliment on the realism of the crow animation.
Look Out, Mr. Johnson! is a lot of fun, but it is also gets very difficult very quickly. It comes down to split-second timing and is quite unforgiving. Still fun, though.
I wasn't as impressed with the other games as I thought I might be.
Okay, just because no one brought it up yet, I played Adventure Ho!
Now there aint a lot of ho's in it, neither is there very much adrenaline-pumping adventure to be seen, but it's quite allright.
It's a turn-based game in wich you have to spend your Gold and Skillpoints efficiently in order to buy defence, attack and other sorts of stuff to keep up the fight.
It's a static game, so it couldn't go wrong there, however I would have liked to see my moose (which I named Ripley) actually wearing the denim jacket and carrying the leafblower (+7 attack!!) I bought him.
It gets harder per level so its basically a static, Moose wearing sunglasses, mana draining and healthpotion-buying turn-based game which in't all that bad.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the somewhat salty language with Mr. Johnson. Each time you scare him in the proper direction he belts forth an "Oh s#$t...oh Ch@$%t...oh J@##s" on and on and on.
Not for the little ones.
soeperik:
Hmmm, I thought the traps were the best part of Crow in Hell. Because you learn them and also it has you eyeing the background for potential new traps.
The part that is absolutely horrid, in my opinion, is the fact that basically any collision with the background will kill you, even if there's no apparent reason why.
It would be nice to have some visual scheme that you could use to identify what is fatal to the touch (well, assuming not everything was fatal to the touch as it is now). Traps would only reveal this after they are sprung (or otherwise they wouldn't be very good traps).
Another thing that I didn't like about Crow in Hell was the big flash when you collect a key. The first time, I was so surprised I mashed the buttons and hit the spiky wheel of deathTM, losing a precious feather.
Why do cobwebs kill you? D:
Crow is very pretty, but not for the impatient.. especially since the simple silhouette means that an axe head can look just like a branch. Sigh. What are the keys for?
The loading time on Towering Forever was ridiculous. Second, it completely froze and crashed my computer. Third, See: xenon October 24, 2008 6:42 AM
Crow in Hell was a nice Avoid game, it reminds me of Soap Bubble.
http://www.miniclip.com/games/soap-bubble/en/
Crow in Hell is attractive, and I like the booby traps. I do agree that every little thing shouldn't kill you, but oh well. My suggestion on improving it would be to make every new screen a check point. It sucks to have to go back and complete a screen you already conquered just to get to the one you have trouble with.
Donut:
Soapbubble came to my mind almost instantly, too, when I saw The Crow.
However, I found Soapbubble far more playable than this week's Crow.
I will say I finished Adventure Ho with only fleeing once (more to see what it did if anything) very easily. I recommend the hamster with heavy mana upgrades. His heal ability makes it almost too easy.
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