There have been a lot of Lums at lunchtime here at Fire Hose becuase we’re playing Rayman Origins. It is a bright and colorful platformer that offers fun environmental puzzles and Super Mario Wii-esque four player gameplay (with slightly less griefing).

“It’s awesome!” wrote Jeff, Fire Hose programmer, “Collection performers are totally my thing, in 2D or 3D.  I loved the first Jak and Daxter, I loved Ratchet and Clank, and …Rayman is just really, really polished fun.”

“I agree with Jeff,” said Eric, another Fire Hose dude that was kind enough to bring the game in for everyone to play, “I’ve been playing Rayman Origins and loving the hell out of it.”

We have found that playing with four players can be a bit busy, with onlookers only being able to keep up with Globox, the largest and bluest character.

He kind of stands out.

Everyone else seems to blend into the scene, with cameo appearances made when they make sweeping jumps or fall behind enough to stick out from the crowd.  Not that that doesn’t add a certain level of fun, like Super Mario Wii each player can interact with the others, pushing, prodding, or helping. (Usually just pushing and prodding when we play.)

The game design itself is kind of awesome; there is a rhythm to the game that the player can discover by uncovering “Lums”, which are sleepy personifications of musical energy. A player can go through a level and free the pink and rather fab “Electoons”. You can get one Electoon for making it through he level, but uncovering more Lums and discovering the tempo of the level will earn you more.  Not only that, but as you traverse the stages you may run into a super spiffy King Lum whom will give you further hints which will allow you to uncover the inner rhythm of the level and allow you to save every Electoon. And you totally want to save every Electoon, just check out that pony-tail! Plus Each world contains a “tooth” level. In these levels you have to chase a living treasure chest through a dynamically changing, thematically interesting environment.  They are super challenging but the restart is quick and you frequently get that “just one more try” feeling.

Check out the game for yourself on the official website over here.

]]> http://www.firehosegames.com/2012/01/games-we-are-playing-rayman-origins/feed/ 1 http://www.firehosegames.com/2011/12/top-10-holiday-games/ http://www.firehosegames.com/2011/12/top-10-holiday-games/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:05:38 +0000 kate http://www.firehosegames.com/?p=3241 Continue reading →]]>

There are some terrific games coming out this holiday season; but today we want to take a look at some of the greatest holiday themed games to grace a console or computer. We even put them in order for you based on fun and overall ridiculous-ness.

10. XMAS Lemmings

9. Christmas Nights Into Dreams 

Released as part of a Christmas console/game package in 1996, Christmas Nights Into Dreams almost made up for the fact that you got a Sega Saturn when you had asked for an N64. Christmas Nights is a two level version of the cult favorite Nights Into Dreams from Sega. Fly through wreaths, collect pretty baubles, and weave your way along a path filled with goodies to achieve a high score. Also, for some reason, there are birthday cakes scattered about.

8. Popples Christmas Adventure

Created as a 1986 give-away item from American Greetings, this gem features the adorably weird Popples. Playable on the Commodore 64, this “game” offers little in the way of interactivity, instead you sit and watch as the Popples bounce around on screen. Sometimes they play instruments.

7.  Die Hard Trilogy

You may think that the top Christmas action movie would translate into one of the greatest action Christmas games, and you would be right! This game was a fun run through the first three films. Available on the Playstation, PC, and Sega Saturn John McClane runs around barefoot kicking butt and taking names. Maybe not taking names.  Pretty sure he just calls everyone ‘jerkweed’.

6. Elf Squad Seven

An indie game from Stardock Entertainment, Elf Squad 7 offers single and multi-player elf squad action.  Lead your elf team through puzzles to save Santa before it is too late!

5. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

Help Kevin find his family in this game based off of the sequel of the same name.  You’ve got baddies on your tail as you adventure through strange environments towards the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center where your rather neglectful family is waiting for you. Plagued by wonky controls and an incoherent plot, the game released for the NES, Sega Genesis, Game Boy, and Super NES system does not hold up well to scrutiny. There is a portion of the game though in which you are charged with avoiding bird droppings as a flock of pigeons flies above you… so there’s that.

4.  Elf Bowling

Santa has the bowling ball. The elves are the pins.  Let the festivities begin! This game released in 1999 by NStorm is not only ridiculous but also has a fair bit of obscenity thrown in for good measure. The elves taunt St. Nick when his bowling ball misses by calling out, “Is that all the balls you got, Santa?” If that were not enough (and no, it is not enough) the Elves moon Santa, smack their butts in his general direction, and dance in between frames to ‘Elf, Elf. Baby’ (a play on a famous Vanilla Ice tune that is not in any way similar to a David Bowie song)

3. Santa Saves The World

This Playstation One game pits Santa against the menacing Nilam. Collect candy canes, climb ladders, and drink soda in a strange new land. Nilam hates the holidays with a  serious passion and attacks Santa with cavemen, flying elephant creatures, and tigers. Clearly one of the most realistic holiday titles to come out of 1992.

 2. Daze Before Christmas

In this 1993 game for Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, Santa is minding his own business being jolly and wonderful when, for the purposes of plot development, he drinks a magical elixir that turns him into the feared ANTI-CLAUS! Anti-Claus, overflowing with newfound jumping powers, attacks each mouse that dare stir in his workshop as he collects the presents strewn about the levels. The presents have been refilled by baddies and now contain enemies for the Anti-Claus to beat including snowmen that decapitate themselves and then use their heads as weapons by flinging them at Santa.

1. Duke Nuclear Winter

Hail to the King, Santa. One of three expansion packs to 3D Realm’s Duke Nukem, Simply Silly’ s Duke Nuclear Winter (aka Duke Nukem’s Nuclear Winter) has everyone’s favorite misogynistic dude saving Christmas.  Santa has been brainwashed and Duke has to shoot and wisecrack his way through legions of holiday themed baddies.  The star on top of the tree: bodaciously evil female elves that dual wield sub-machine guns.

Honorable Mentions

The Christmas Story Room in Borderlands

I am not going to tell you how to get there. (You can look here if you don’t want to find it on your own) But yes, there is a secret room in Borderlands and it is A Christmas Story Themed. Ralphie would have loved to play with half of the weapons in Borderlands and you can sneak down to this secret room and find a make shift tree, spiffy presents, and a rather macabre leg lamp.

Christmas is Here Mission in Bully

This mission is a pretty straight forward one.  Jimmy wakes up in his dorm and hears over the loud speaker that a present is waiting for him in the office. What makes this little side mission ripe for the list though is that by not completing this mission you can make Christmas last forever.  Sure in this mode Jimmy cannot attend class or partake in missions, but who wants to go to school on the holidays anyway?

Did we miss one of your favorite in-game holiday moments? Talk at us about it on our Facebook page or Twitter.

Got an XBox 360, and want a fun old school platform puzzler for $3? Then go onto the indies channel (XBLIG) and download Escape Goat, the latest offering by Magical Time Bean.

In escape goat you star as an inexplicably purple colored goat who has been imprisoned for witchcraft. Teaming up with a small mouse with a taste for magic hats you have to navigate and escape from 64 puzzle rooms using a relatively simple rule set of jump, dash, push button, avoid fireball. The game shines because the level design is fairly tight and most of the levels are fun and interesting to play, and the few bits of dialog you encounter are relatively amusing.

My gripes with the game are few; the graphics aren’t very impressive, some of the critical elements blend into the background too much, and the game elements all have a similar look and feel (for instance, keys and magic hats look almost identical). However none of these points are damning, and we found ourselves coming back to this for more on a regular basis until we beat the game. The title even comes with a level editor that is surprisingly easy to use and fun to make your own levels.

If you are an indie fan and want a puzzler then this is certainly one to get. And for $3 it’s pretty damn cheap. Go on XBLIG and grab it now!

Oh yeah, and if you like the game’s music (composed by the dev, mixed by Chainsaw of Twisted Pixel fame) then you can grab it for whatever you want here.

Let me introduce myself, my name is Kate and I am the new Community Manager and resident Gal Friday at Fire Hose Games. What does that mean for you? That means that you will be seeing more updates, more exclusive Fire Hose games information, and more interaction between Fire Hose and their fans than ever before.

The party has started and it is here.

There is so much that I want to talk about– Slam Bolt Scrappers is more than likely the best tower strategy meets brawling match up I have ever played and there will be lots of news about that title coming up soon. (Speaking of which if you haven’t played SBS yet why not go ahead and fix that over at the PSN store? ^_^ ) Go Home Dinosaurs is ridiculously fun and educational. (Did you know that dinosaurs were, in fact, made of bacon? True story.)

For my first post though I just want to say hello and tell you a bit about myself… By which I mean I will provide a quick rundown of the games I am playing that were not created by Fire Hose. ^_~

I am currently playing RE4 on the XBOX 360.I am also dabbling with Atlus’ Catherine and am looking forward to both 2K Games’ XCOM and BioShock Infinite from Irrational. I am also a big fan of Twisted Pixel’s Mr. and Ms. Splosion Man. I am especially fond of Ms. Splosion Man singing bits of Spice Girls songs. ^_^

Everybody loves to splode.

I enjoy several different types of games from platformers and RPGs to puzzle and FPS style gameplay– if there is a controller or a computer screen involved I will more than likely play for hours on end ignoring all basic human needs for nutrition until I have gotten all endings, achievements, trophies, or other spiffies.

I am also relying on video games to get back into shape and am currently moving and grooving my way to a better me using Harmonix’s Dance Central as a key piece in my exercise strategy. (Hey, did you know that Dance Central is actually part of the Fire Hose portfolio? It’s true!  …. maybe I can get someone here to fix it so that Poker Face shows me loosing 6,000 calories per round…. ^_^ )

There may or may not be footage of me on Youtube dancing around to Maneater with a blindfold on.

So, that is a bit about me. I look forward to getting to know all of the Fire Hose fans out there and providing you with heaps of news, exclusives, pictures, videos, the works! If you have a question or comment drop me a line or find me on the Fire Hose Facebook Page or the Fire Hose Twitter. ^_^

Ah, prepackaged Windows games. Solitare, Minesweeper, Freecell, Pinball; how many hours have these games wasted? They’re certainly some of the most popular games out there if you go by how many people play them, and for how long.

Minesweeper in particular is one of my favorites – it’s a great time waster that everyone spends a few minutes on here and there. That’s why I was particularly excited by Mamono Sweeper, a terrific Japanese game that puts a neat spin on the old standby. It treats the game as a dungeon crawl where you are trying to clear the board of all enemies. You can kill enemies of your level or lower (enemies are all level 1-5), and as you do you get experience and can level up, allowing you to fight tougher enemies. When you click on a tile it shows you the sum of all the adjacent enemies, so a “7″ might be surrounded by a 3 and a 4, a 3 and a 2 and a 2, etc. The logic takes a game or so to get used to but once you get in the groove it really starts feeling good.

Mamono Sweeper does a great job of showing how introducing one small (and simple!) new mechanic can make an old game feel fresh again. Go give it a shot, or if you have an iOS device you can grab it from the app store.

Canabalt

Run through 8-bit urban landscapes and jump to not die.  Canabalt is one of those games you can play for one minute or one hour and still feel challenged.

Strange Attractors 2

This game strips down everything you need into one switch and uses awesome physics to create a really neat action puzzler.  The best way to explain it is to just play the demo.

Nanaca Crash

While I have only been playing this game for a few minutes at a time, there’s clearly a lot of complexity!  It’s helpful if you speak Japanese, which I sadly do not.  As a hint, try holding down the mouse before you release, hitting the red arrows and watch out for which character you’re hitting- they do different things and some will give you combos if you hit them at the right time.

Super Press Space to Win Action RPG

Ok, play this game (takes like 2 minutes), then check out the dramatic reading of a review by someone who really disliked the game.  You will be in pain from laughing.

It’s time for our annual “we’re too lazy to put up new content so here is a rehashed post” list of all the games we played this past year. Sweet! Here’s what we played in 2010.

Our year started off with one of the best games to come out of the Boston Global Game Jam, a highly descriptive and amusing platformer called RunRunRunJump that has one of the best soundtracks you’ve ever heard. After that we played Robot Unicorn Attack which since our post has become one of the best selling games on the iPhone (coincidence? I think not! Of course not all games on our blog get quite as much attention, and Paul Sztajer’s Particulars seems to be somewhat abandoned nowadays judging from the leaderboards. But hey, if you ever wanted to be #1 on some boards now is your chance! I’m personally at #2 of all time with 325K.

We laughed a ton playing Sydney Shark, one of the most hilarious games we’ve seen since Robot Dinosaurs that Roar. Where else can you chomp horse heads, killer whales, and nuclear missiles as a shark? Jay Pavlina’s Super Mario Bros. Crossover got a ton of well deserved internet attention, and since the initial release Jay’s been hard at work adding special new features for each character. We then looked at an artier game called Every Day the Same Dream, which still has a terrific ending if you haven’t tried it yet. I find it interesting that since that game came out a similar title called One Chance was released, which while somewhat derivative is also excellent with a fantastic ending(s?).

Of course if you aren’t feeling especially artistic and just want a fun platformer then Enough Plumbers was probably right up your alley. Any game where you kill clones of Mario and light yourself on fire with jalapeno peppers has to be fun. If you’re more of an RPG or educational gaming fan you’ll probably like CellCraft, a game which not only has “craft” in the title but teaches about both cellular microbiology and platypuses. And if you’re the type of gamer who care for roguelikes and has several days of free time then Desktop Dungeons is the game for you – I think I almost burned a week on that one before deciding I had gone “far enough”. I hope QCF design brings it to consoles!

At the end of the year we wrapped up the demo of the still-in-development indie game Planck by Shadegrown Games, a neat experimental music game with some fun shooting bits. We also played the phenomenal tower defense game Ghost Hacker by Core Sector, and then finally wrapped up the year with the engaging short interactive fiction title The Warbler’s Nest by Jason McIntosh. It was a good year!

If you haven’t played any of these games yet be sure to take a look at them over break, they’re a ton of fun and every single one of them is free to play!I can’t wait for the awesome games we’ll wind up playing in 2011.

Let’s check in on what’s happening with some of our friends in Boston, shall we?

Our good friends at Autobahn Games are now accepting pre-orders for their next title, “1… 2… 3… KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)“. In addition to consistently awesome game naming the DJ ban guys really know how to put together a fun experience, and their latest offering is no different. I’ve been playing pre-alpha builds for a while, and Kick It is kind of like a mash up of Aaaaa!, Rez, and AudioSurf. If you know any of those games then you’ll understand why I’m so excited about this game. Pre-ordering gets you an early playable alpha build now, and then you get constant updates as they come along. If you like being on the cutting edge of games I strongly suggesting picking it up!

But perhaps you aren’t into games about base jumping, and prefer a good old interactive fiction experience? In that case you should stop reading this post now and go play The Warbler’s Nest by Jason McIntosh. It is a very short old school IF game where…. well, you’ll just have to play it. The whole thing can be played in 10-15 minutes and it is super solid. I normally don’t care for the IF genre but after about 5 minutes I got really sucked in and couldn’t get enough, and the ending is absolutely fantastic. Go play it for free now!

Want more free games made by Boston devs? Well ok then! Exanaut is a explorative platformer (or to use the hip slang, “metroidvania-like”) by Matthew Fister. It’s a free download for Windows where you star as a space man with a jetpack and gun searching for… alien artifacts? I dunno, it’s not super plot heavy. The game is a bit rough around the edges as it is one of Matthew’s first games, and it’s pretty damn hard. I wound up enjoying it a lot more after editing the python files and giving myself tons of health, jetpack fuel, and a super high level gun.

Of course, not everything is cheery in Boston Indie Land, and I’m very sorry to announce the folding of one of our flagship indie studios, MacGuffin Games. Founder and local indie hero Scott McMillan wrote a farewell post detailing what happened, with the short of it being that Mustache Mercenaries didn’t perform nearly well enough to keep them afloat. Happily it looks like the MacGuffin team will be moving on to bigger and better things, so while we will be pouring out a bit of beer tonight at our local indie meet up we will also toast to their future success.

This should come as no surprise: We like Tower Defense games. They’re a great little time waster, and they are surprisingly addictive. Some of the variants are completely derivative, while the best ones introduce a new twist or two to keep things innovative and exciting.

So it should carry some real weight when I say that Ghost Hacker by Core Sector is probably the most polished, and certainly one of the most enjoyable, tower defense games I’ve ever seen. The game is just dripping with attention to detail, and I’m super impressed with how much effort must have gone into making it. Let’s discuss what makes it awesome:

• The game has a programming/hacking aesthetic which I can’t help but eat up as a nerd.
• The neon on black visuals are quite eye catching, and the game is a pleasure to look at.
• There is a great level progression with 25 levels that slopes gently and keeps you constantly engaged. The game rarely feels too hard or too easy.
• The enemies in the game feel distinct and enjoyable. There’s a huge number of them, and it’s always fun figuring out how to deal with new enemy types.
• The game is short and sweet. You can probably beat the whole thing in 2 or 3 hours if you are good. At no point did I feel like the game was just “rehashing” the same crap and wasting my time (like most TD games).
• The mechanic for getting new types of towers works really well, as you unlock new abilities and towers steadily throughout the game. It’s a bit top heavy as the later game weapons and abilities far out shadow the early game stuff, but this is a minor gripe. And it’s fun to go back and destroy earlier levels with high end weapons.
• The mechanic for improving your towers is a blast. Each tower has 2-4 “upgrade” nodes that can be augmented with extra abilities. All the abilities are interchangeable, so you can pretty much turn any tower into any other tower. This allows for lots of customization and strategy, and feels very natural. I’ve never seen this in a TD game before and I really like it.
• If you beat the game there is a bonus mode where you get to play as the creeps. AWESOME
• However, the best part of the game is the currency system. Normally in TD you have to plan out what you build because sell back only gets you a fraction of what you spent. Not in this game! Sell back gets you ALL your money back, just with a brief delay on time. In fact, all actions (like special abilities) result in you getting your money back after a little while. So the game becomes more about timing than about always having the exact right amount of money. You can even move your towers for free with just a small cooldown! This change may not sound major, but it makes the game so much more enjoyable. than standard tower defense.

All of these points make Ghost Hacker stand out heads and shoulders above the tower defense crowd. In fact, my only real (minor) complaint is the plot they try to interject between levels, luckily you can quickly skip it by clicking through.

If you like TD games at all you need to go give this one a shot. Enjoy!

Last week Brenton, an indie dev from Upstate NY, drove all the way here to Boston to talk to our monthly meet up for local indie devs. He was showing off Planck, an interesting new take on a music game being worked on by new start up Shadegrown Games.

The game is kind of like a mash up between a shoot ‘em up and Frequency. You play as an invincible speedboat zipping along a tar black sea, shooting objects in your path with 1 to 4 weapons. Each of your weapons plays the notes of a different violin, and each of the enemies explodes in a little firework which plays notes as well. As you can imagine there is a lot of shooting going on, and you wind up making a fairly coherent, looping, and simple yet gratifying song in the process. Different weapons/instruments behave in different ways, but none of it really matters much as you are invincible so you don’t have much pressure to shoot/explode targets beyond what music you’re trying to make. You also have the ability to “crossfade”, which shifts the tint of the playing field and the style of the music you’re making while keeping the same beat and theme. The whole thing has a nice neon and water aesthetic, and kind of reminds me of Auditorium.

The game is interesting, and fun to play even if it is a bit rough around the edges. The song gets a bit repetitive after a while (only one track is available in the demo), and the gameplay seems aimless at times. That said the game is a neat psychedelic experience, and certainly worth a play. It also looks fairly polished for such an early stage of development. We’re excited to see where these guys go with the game – we’re looking forward to new mechanics, new levels and abilities, and more compelling gameplay choices. And I bet the Shadegrown guys can deliver!

Go download the game and give it a shot, especially if you like music games!