VGNG 1: My First Skydiving Academy
After a couple of weeks of nothing noteworthy happening (since the general ip and morality bickering needs to rise to new levels before I consider it noteworthy again), the VGNG entries are starting to be finished so I’ll just write about that. Starting with the innocently named “My First Skydiving Academy“.
The innocence ends with the name in this game when the game kicks off with a baby being thrown out of a plane into a canyon, the player being charged with the duty to steer said baby clear of obstructions so s/he can survive to the bottom. By falling unhindered for a short while, the baby generates enough heat to catch fire and gains the ability to kill the creatures occupying the canyon – which is also how you score. If you are into dark humor (and who isn’t), it is immensely entertaining. The game is a very simple game, and while there certainly are things that could make it more interesting I don’t see it lasting more than a few hours unless some drastic changes are made – the gameplay that is there is great, though, the controls feel just right and the difficulty ramps up nicely.
Presentation-wise, My First Skydiving Academy is clean and consistent. Having everything that actually makes any difference to the gameplay as a black silhouette against the colorful background is a really nice touch that removes any problems with detecting what’s important without making the game look empty. All in all I enjoyed the game and hope the rest of the entries have the same quality to them, but it would be nice if some of them go beyond the complexity of online flash games.
Rest in Peace, Gygax
News sites reported last night that D&D co-creator Gary Gygax, affectionately known as the Father of Role-Playing games, passed away at age 69.
Having only played derivatives of his work I don’t feel as personally moved by this as others have, but the event requires a moment of reflection. Dungeons and Dragons did much more than influence the PnP roleplaying genre – by extension it is responsible for shaping much of the entire games industry. The words “his legacy lives on” have seldom been more true.
The VGNG competition
The folks over at the Independent Gaming Source has started off a new competition – in a nutshell, you fire off the Video Game Name Generator until you get somehting you like and the build a game around it.
Considering the fallout of the B-Game contest, I expect this to spawn at least a few short and brilliant games. If I didn’t have a little too much on my hands already, I’d probably jump in the fray and make “Perverted Math Revisited” myself, but I guess there’s always next year…