Okay, folks, it's wednesday! Time to share the wealth! What neat things have you discovered this week to share with the group?

This week, I discovered a site I genuinely resent not having known about years ago. I speak of a treasure trove of time-wasting whimsy called The Independent Gaming Source.

If I had known about this game years ago, I surely would have discovered gems like Cave Story and Spelunky long, long before I did. This website is basically a regularly-updated blog of small, independent groups of game designers and their output. It's really quite staggering to see just how much neat stuff is being produced all at once outside of the professional mainstream, and just how genuinely good some of it is. A lot of what they link to can be downloaded and/or played online for free, and most of the rest of it can be obtained really cheaply.

I have been particularly entranced by an incredibly silly little game called Runman: Race Around the World.




Deliberately drawn in the style of childlike doodles, with a soundtrack of folk songs from the early 20th century, this game is just so unimaginably cute as to put a big, sloppy grin on my face every time I play it. The fact that the gameplay is fast, clever and well-designed certainly doesn't hurt either. The video above tells the tale rather nicely; if that doesn't make you want to give it a go, nothing I'm going to say is going to get that job done.

I've only gone back about 13 pages in the blog's archives and already downloaded five games, some of which I haven't even gotten around to trying yet. I'm sure I'll be able to fritter away many otherwise-productive hours with what else is to be found here, and so too, I'm sure, can you.

So! What have you got this week, folks?

Have you heard of Spelunky? If not, then your life is at present a howling void of torment and despair, relative to what it’s about to become, because I’m going to tell you all about it. I’ve actually been thinking of writing about it for a couple of months now, but there’s been no more opportune moment to do so than now, as it has – after many months of existing as an ongoing work in progress – just been released as a finished product, and indeed, will soon be released via X-Box Live, for download by people who like good things.

Spelunky is simply one of the smartest and most impressive side-scrolling video games I have ever seen. And I’m a child of the late 1970s; I grew up with side scrolling video games as an element of my childhood as important, as ubiquitous and as critical to my survival as air, water, and running away from murderous small-town bullies attempting to throw me into the path of oncoming cars.

I grew up in a pretty crappy town.

But anyways. Spelunky. It looks and plays a little bit like a cross between the old Super Mario and Metroid games, with a cartoony little Indiana Jones-style explorer character running, jumping, whipping and shooting his way through a series of increasingly-perilous caves in a quest for unimaginable wealth and treasure. The true genius of this game is that every level is randomly generated every time you play, which keeps the gaming experience fresh and new each and every time you play. The goal is always the same: You start off at the top of the level and need to make your way down to the exit at the bottom, avoiding, destroying or circumventing the innumerable traps, enemies and hazards scattered throughout. But the path is always different. The treasures and equipment you’ll find is always distinct and novel. You’ll never have the same experience twice.

One of the great charms about this game, to my mind, is that the physics and logic of the game is exactly what you would think or want it to be. Things which will effect you will also effect other things in the same way. An arrow trap set into the wall which is set off by movement in its area will be set off by an enemy straying into its kill zone, and that enemy will take just as much damage as you would. Indeed, this is often a great way to kill two birds with one stone; setting off a trap (and thus disarming it) and eliminating an enemy at once. Objects like darts and rocks which you toss will ricochet off of walls and ceilings in logical ways, which can be useful to you, unless you’re foolhardy and cause a dangerous weapon to rebound back into your own stupid face in closed quarters. There are bombs which can and will destroy walls, floor s and ceilings, often revealing hidden paths and treasures to you, and which will pretty much instantly kill any living thing – both you and enemies alike – that are too close when they go off. Everything just feels RIGHT. There’s never that moment when you stop and say “Oh, come on! Why wouldn’t [X] cause [Y] in that situation?”, and that’s very satisfying.

There are shopkeepers scattered throughout the game, and they’re just as vulnerable as you are; murdering them and looting their shop is quite possible... though doing so carries significant risks; the shopkeepers are well-armed, fast, tough and aggressive, and once you’ve killed one, every subsequent shopkeeper in the game will be quite literally gunning for you, and will shoot you on-site. Mind you, this can add an extra element of fun and challenge to the game, and if you can pick off all of the shopkeepers who come after you, you can loot all of their shops as well, making off with their jetpacks, climbing gloves, spike shoes, shotguns, ropes, bombs, and other goodies along the way. The range of diverse and sometimes bizarre equipment available in this game is pretty mammoth, and adds a lot to the diversity of game play, whether you acquire them by purchase or by marauding.  

This having been said, adding an extra level of challenge to this game might not be all that advisable: The game has only one difficulty level, and that’s nightmare mode. You have just one life, no continues, and four hearts at the beginning of the game, and that’s got to last you all sixteen levels. There ARE means of gaining health along the way (such as rescuing damsels in distress along the way and carrying them successfully to the exit of the level without getting them or yourself killed in the process), but they’re few and far between. The game is murderously difficult, and death can come swiftly and without warning, but to those of us who enjoy overcoming vast challenges, this is not necessarily a bad thing. On those rare occasions that you DO finish the game, the sense of accomplishment is considerable. There are shortcuts which one can unlock during gameplay to later levels, but making use of them isn’t necessarily to your benefit; the equipment you accumulate during the earlier levels is often all that allows you to survive the unimaginably difficult later levels.

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I could go on and on about all the great stuff in this game. Altars of Kali where you can perform human sacrifice for huge rewards! Ice caves filled with berserk yetis! Randomly generated boss fights scattered unpredictably throughout the game! Piranha-infested rivers! Plagues of zombies! Alien encounters! And all sorts of other craziness!

Seriously. Give it a look. Give it a play. It’s an instant classic, and all the product of the hard work of a single guy. A labour of love made freely available to anyone who wants it. You can’t not dig that.  

solace_eternal and I have been talking lately about the fact that Rampart is the greatest puzzle/combat video game ever devised, and that it's a baffling crime that no 3D rendered version of it has ever been produced, in this time when EVERYTHING is being remade and rehashed. Make no mistake: It gratifies me that they're making the arcade original available for the PS3 (and now that Vince is gone, I might finally get a PS3, since I no longer have to fear my getting one and seeing him wearing it out by playing it thirty-six hours a day). After all, the classics are so for a reason.

This having been said, I had a look around, and apparently I'm not the first person to have had this thought. For you see, there is evidently a half-finished fan-made 3D version out there.

http://mikoro.iki.fi/en/ramparted.html


It's evidently open source, and though the designers evidently have no intentions of actually finishing the game, there's nothing stopping anyone else from doing so. So the question then becomes: Is there anyone out there with the ability and will to do so? Because it seems to me it would be a remarkable gift to mankind if it were to take place. solace_eternal has even voulenteered to do any graphics design which might yet be called-for.

So, hey. Just tossing this out there.

Some year or so after I recorded the voice acting for this vieo game character, apparently he's just about ready for release, and I must say, I'm pretty happy to see how well he's turned out; a very smooth-playing and well-realized effort here.

As with one of my previous efforts in this field, Crashman here is a character who originates with Mega Man 2, which was the first Nintendo game I ever bought, back when I was a wee tyke of 12, and as such, there's some considerably pleasing nostolgia involved here.
 

Have you heard of the newly-released Megaman 9? Capcom has made an awesome decision, I feel.

See, people have for years now been requesting a new Megaman game... and a game in the ORIGINAL series; not Megaman X, not Megaman Battle Network, not Megaman Legends. Now, Capcom has looked at these requests and tried to understand them. All of these newer series have been basically the same, but with various improvements, you know? So why are people demanding a new instalment in the original and inferior series?

They eventually decided that what people were looking and asking for was basically "Give us more of our childhood experience again!" And so Capcom decided to do exactly that: They made the brand-new Megaman 9 in 8 Bit style, using the engine for Megaman 2, with the same style of graphics and music and everything.

I applaud their insight and just sheer balls in making this decision. Japan, I take back, like, 30% of every bad thing I've ever said about you.

I've made no secret of my love of the original Megaman games. As I've said before, Megaman 2 was the first Nintendo game I ever owned, and I played it obsessively for months after I got it. The idea of this sort of return to form is extremely enticing to me. I've been planning on getting a Playstation 3 for some time now, and when I do (and how hillarious is it that I should need a BETTER, NEWER system than the Playstation 2 I still have in order to play this?), this is going on my first-purchase list.

So I've lately been playing a stupid, fun little online game called Reset Generation. It's sort of difficult to describe. It's a little bit Tetris, a little Rampart, a little Super Mario, a little Bomberman, a little Tomb Raider, and a little bit of a whole lot of other things. It's a sort of anarchic, chaotic mess of video game references and homages, and I find I kind of dig it. 

It's free. If you're fond of enjoyment and such, you might want to give it a shot. If you happen to see "god_king" in the online multiplayer mode, know that this is me, and I'm about to dominate your ass with my viciously cold and logical play-style and randomly-chosen characters. 

 

A bit more substantial than the one posted back in December. I'm told the character is going to be released in full in the very near future, which pleases me greatly. I recorded the voice acting for him back in October or so; this has been a long, long wait.

 
This time, a small sample of the new Hulk character Iève been doing some voice work for. 

I really, really got into this one in the studio. Chanelling my deepest hatreds into this performance, thinking hard about the people I most loathe in the world. My aim, here, was to give a Hulk performance which was SO angry, SO intense that the player should actually feel a little uncomfortable playing him. I thought to myself, If I can make people cringe while playing this game, then I have done my job

 

So, as various other creative pursuits have been for one reason or another stymied, I have kept myself busy with something otherwise. For example: I am writing the dialogue and doing the voice acting for a video game character! 

The character in question is long-time Green Lantern nemesis, Sinestro. The character is being designed for the build-you-own-fighting-game game, MUGEN. This is the first video of the character; he's still in early, early alpha mode here; not even a beta yet. Still, it causes me some special delight to think of this character being finished and then having my sgrieking voice blaring out of the speakers of the thousands and thousands of members of the MUGEN community when the character is released in his finished form. 

Sinestro is not the only character I've been doing voice work for (nor yet my favourite), and I hope to be able to post another video in the near future of a smashingly good character I've also been bellowing out some voice acting for.