August 23, 2010
I’m not saying that everything has to be original. We’ve gone over this before; some of the best ideas in history began by ripping someone else off and then veering off in an original direction. One of the best ways for a budding artist to learn form and space is to trace everything in [...]
August 19, 2010
My association with Recreational Software Designs started early, maybe around the time of my first game. I don’t remember the circumstances. Maybe I wrote in with some suggestions. Maybe I was trying to show off my work. Whatever my motivation, I was fourteen and unhampered with caution or tact. I mailed a letter [...]
August 10, 2010
The same game jam that brought us Whale of Noise and Pigeon Racing (and indeed Deltoid Onions) has inspired Edmund and My First Skydiving Academy creator Paul “Farmergnome” Greasley to contrive a side-scrolling survival-based take on Animal Crossing. At least, that was his stated goal. The end result is a highly original cross between [...]
August 10, 2010
Deltoid Onions, AKA Onion Warriors, is one of those single-player cooperative puzzle games where you play as a character then switch roles then switch again to accomplish tasks. In this case the enigmatic Fabienne has unleashed on us a Kwirk-flavored push-and-pull action-puzzler. In place of a tomato, we’ve three onions with slightly different mustaches. [...]
August 10, 2010
Kyle “Neonlare” Riley has reforged the baffling Action 52 opus Meong into a NES-styled action-puzzler reminiscent of Adventures of Lolo. The story involves a blue-robed thief who goes tomb raiding in China. Avoid traps and occasional mind games to get to the next screen.
The game uses just the arrow keys and a single [...]
July 29, 2010
When I want to read Catch-22, what are the options? I can go to a library, and do it for free. While I’m there, I can browse the rest of his works or nearby, possibly similar, books. I can search by topic, author, or year of publication. If I want my own copy, I [...]
July 27, 2010
A medium goes through its phases. Generally it starts off piecemeal, little snippets of ideas that stand alone, each studying the nature of the medium. What’s possible? How do things look? How do people respond? Later the ideas coalesce into short subjects, often delivered through a reservation in some passing medium. Periodicals set aside [...]
July 27, 2010
Over time Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker may have become obscure, but in its time it was both progressive and widespread. From a small family business in New Hampshire, the software traveled to Russia, to South America, to Singapore, to Australia. It sometimes seemed that every other game was from a new country. This was [...]
July 25, 2010
For its time, Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker offered users the world over to put practice to their game design ambitions, within certain strict limitations. Mostly this ambition took on an informal shape. Users connected with each other through bulletin boards and shared ideas and resources. They explored how to subvert the engine’s limitations, and [...]
July 24, 2010
Not to be mistaken for Unnatural Selection, Fault Line creator Nitrome has unleashed its own subversive worm-based browser game. This one, though, takes more of an arcade route and seems to follow the example of Taito’s Syvalion. Mechanically, it seems to; thematically, it’s… you know those old 8-bit games based on horror movies that [...]