VGNG 4: Now in Alphabetic Order!
Voting has opened for the VGNG, meaning I’ll have to burn through the games at a faster rate, but I certainly don’t have anything better to do with my spare time.
Ace Starkiller in: Hillbilly Burger Bastards is an adventure game with not-too-obscure puzzles. While I liked some of the dialogue, I can’t understand why it was made with “retro-style” pixelated graphics; it is not very pretty and it makes it really hard to make out what is happening on more than one occasion. The attempts to include action sequences weren’t very good, but on the other hand it was almost always made clear that it was a wise choice to avoid direct conflict, so I won’t blame a good adventure game for having branches.
Attack of the Banjo on the High Seas is a combined Rhythm game/Simon says thing where you do Banjo-battle against a pirate. Pretty simple idea where the biggest hindrance was that you couldn’t see where the mouse was until you actually hit a fret. Didn’t last very long for me and – though it might be unfair to criticizes such a quick work – I was really put-off by the Bryce background. Maybe years of indoctrination by hateful artists left some marks after all.
Brain-Damaged Toon Underworld is another platformer, this one by semi-famous indie developer cactus. The game is very short and contains very little in terms of gameplay and story, but it still manages to set up a very nice, weird mood and I’m anxious to see where he takes this in the future if he keeps working on it.
Fotball Planet, the first sports game on the list, is a 2-player game where you play one-on-one soccer on a sphere. It’s painfully unfinished and not very fun (although I can’t say for sure since I didn’t have a second player to test it with me), but the idea of playing games on the surface of a sphere is interesting, I guess.
It should be said that ROM CHECK FAIL really made my day and my expectations rose so maybe I was unfair towards this batch.