Category Archives: What We’re Playing

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.

Here at Fire Hose Games, we care about having our hands free for various purposes (high fives, caffeine imbibery, pillow fights), which is why we created “Beverage Mode” in Slam Bolt Scrappers, where you can play one-handed.  We submit, for your perusal, four inspirational games that you can play with one hand.

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!