Alright, part three. If you haven’t been reading the series, this is the third in a little four-part editorial outlining the different games I saw at Indiecade, and the experiences I had. If you want to read more, here are part one and part two. Hope you enjoy!
Note: I am not a game critic. I play games, and I get excited about games. Prepare for gushing, not invested inspection and critique.
Whether or not you love Mini Metro will depend a lot on what kind of gamer you are. Course, I suppose that could be said about any game, so that’s pretty much a cop-out intro and I’m not even sorry. So, if you’re the kind of person that really thinks subway maps are the bees knees and have ever thought to yourself that you could probably design a mass transit system better than whatever asshat put together the one that’s currently at fault for making you late for work, you should perhaps give this game a gander. Mini Metro is a nice clean game where you put together a mass transit system, if you haven’t figured that bit out already. You’re given a map of a major city, and locations start popping up on the map with particular symbols. Say for instance, you have a triangle, a square, and a circle. You can connect those symbols to each other and create a railway. At each location, people will start popping in and deciting they want to go visit another symbol. It doesn’t really matter which one, they’ve just had enough of the circles and would love to give one of the triangles a go. Railcars patrol the tracks that you’ve set up, picking up as much as they can at each stop, and dropping off anyone who has reached a desired symbol. At first the game is really soothing and fairly easy; I was half convinced that there wouldn’t be a challenge and that the game was more of a zen exercise than anything. However, as time goes on and people start piling up and all of a sudden you have a bunch of squares who want to be circles and there just aren’t enough cars to get them there, you start feeling the pressure and wish you’d have gone to mass transit design school after all. All in all its a cute little game, and I quite enjoyed it.
I actually got my first peek at Nova-111 at PAX Prime, and enjoyed it enough that I came back for seconds at Indiecade. I didn’t get much information on the game besides the gameplay, so everything I say about what the game is about is probably false, cause I’m gonna make it up as I go. From what I could tell, you’re a little robot who is mining spacerocks and fighting spacemonsters. There’s nothing really providing me with evidence that space is involved, I just imagine that it’s in space. It plays somewhat similar to a turn-based strategy game, with a cleaner feeling timeline. The view is an orthographic map with a grid overlay that you explore and uncover. It follows basic turn-based mechanics in that you move, then the enemy movies, on and on. However, unlike many turn based strategy games where you plan out some actions within a move and then end your turn, your turn is simply one action. While I was playing, the only action I used was movement. So I could move in any direction to a new grid square, and then then all the enemies on the screen would immediately make their move. So, the gameplay can be as slow or as rapid as you want. If your brain can handle it, you can move around the grid as fast as you want, while the enemies chase you about in seemingly real-time action. Or, you could stop and wait after every enemy move and spend some time planning your next one. For the most part. There are some enemies that ain’t got time for that, so they move in REAL real time, but let’s just.. not think about that. You attack enemies by bumping into them, and they attack you in the same manner. You defeat them by learning how they move in order to out-maneuver them. I feel like the goal was either to get through the level or to collect spacerocks… I’m really not sure. I was just having fun running about beating up rocks and monsters. I highly recommend giving this one a go, cause I had a lot of fun playing it and will be buying it for sure. Plus, the company who made it is called ‘Funktronic Labs’. How much cooler can a dev studio’s name get?
I kept hearing about this game, but didn’t actually get a chance to play it until Indiecade. The information I had floating around in my brain about it was that it had the look and feel of a clean and simple cellshaded topdown rpg, but sported a gameplay mechanic that let you change the rules of the game via changing the code. I’m a big fan of any game that is also educational, and I got the impression that this one was giving people a crash-course in programming. So when I saw it hanging out at Indiecade (and gasp, without a line!) I literally scurried across the hall toward it. Turns out, I don’t think it teaches as much about programming as I thought it would, bit it still looks wicked fun. You have an adorable little USB sword, and whenever you hit an object in the game, you can change its parameters. So you can set its HP to 0, and set the number of hearts it drops to like 10 and it will instantly die in a frenzy of hearts. It’s cool that it kind of gets you into the mindset of a programmer, and thinking about what kind of parameters go into making objects in a game (and kinda get you thinking about things in an object oriented way) but it doesn’t get you as involved with the coding as I hoped. To be fair, I haven’t yet played a game that really teaches you a lot about programming and still maintains a basic core gameplay, (I still have a few to try, but I don’t have high hopes) so it’s not like they aren’t still doing something amazing. The only thing I worry about is how difficult the game will be. I didn’t get to play it too much, so everything was pretty easy street; I kept getting more and more creative about how I was disposing of enemies or turning them into docile heart machines, but nothing was really a threat since I could pretty easily neutralize it and gain back any hearts I might have lost. I mean, the only hurdle I was really given was that you only have a limited time to make your decisions on parameter changes. However, since I didn’t play it very long, I’m assuming they start throwing more and more constraints or mechanics at you as the game goes on. Or, perhaps, I was playing super late in the game and you have to build up your powers to be that mighty. I still have high hopes for it, and will definitely play it once I can get my mits on it.
Oh my. This game. Let me first address that the subtitle to this game is ‘Just the Tip’. Sure, that’s a cheap pun to get a bunch of Archer nerds on board, but this Archer fan is alright with it. Anyway, I definitely think that the market is starving for some good couch co-op games. The universe apparently heard that complaint, and one of it’s many Indiecade responses was Starwhal. It’s a pretty simple game: you’re a narwhal, you have a heart, and you have to use your horn to pierce everyone else’s heart while protecting your own. (Yeah, that’s right. I’m team Oxford Comma.) The controls are that wonderful kind of intentionally awkward so that everyone is flopping around looking stupid, but if you really practice you can get around with some semblance of elegance. Its a 2D game, and your narwhal is hanging out in space with some other narwhals. Left and right on twist your narwhal, and the action button accelerates it. Since your pivot point is in the middle of your body, and the point of your horn is quite a ways out there, it gets pretty difficult to aim and pierce the hearts your enemies are jealously guarding along their bellies. From my experience, it was a lot of dragging your belly along the sides of the map and and flipping your horn up any time someone tried to get close. Or at least, that’s what the people who were winning were doing. I was flailing around in the middle of the map, emphatically stabbing at everyone’s everything and only rarely managing my prize. I was most definitely the most awkward of Cetaceans. Snag it when it comes out, and bring back the couch games. People don’t hang out and play games in person enough anymore, and everyone should give it a try.
At closing time on the last day of Indiecade, I was scrambling around trying to scarf down as many games as I possibly could. The very last one I played was an iPad game called Million Onion Hotel. I only got a couple moments to play it (which is why I’m not writing up a full blurb about it) but it looked adorable, and was actually pretty fun to play. The two men hanging out at the booth were Japanese, and I got the impression that they didn’t speak a whole lot of English. I believe at least one of them was a developer for the game, but I could be wrong. When I was done, I asked the man if his game was going to come out on any other systems. After a few moments of clarification, he told me that they planned on releasing the game on Android. I’ve actually been in camp Windows for a while, and take any chance I get to tell developers that they should start supporting windows devices, since most people don’t get Windows phones because of the lack of app support (and apps don’t support Windows cause people don’t have them, blah blah blah it’s coming around I swear). ANYWAY, I gave my best frown and slowly dragged my phone out and pointed at the little Windows symbol at the bottom. He squinted and then I kid you not, visibly recoiled with a disgusted “Ooohhh, Windows!”. Say that in your best repulsed Miyagi voice and you’re probably in the same ballpark. It was so dramatic, and every time I tell the story I get looks like I’m exaggerating, but I don’t even have to. Later that evening at the Indiecade after-party, I spotted the two gentlemen in the back yard. I waved at them, and when one caught my eye he elbowed his friend and pointed, proclaiming ‘Windows!’. I suppose it’s not the worst thing to be remembered for.
