Here we go for a Ludum dare 21 ga0es rapid fire reviews

Flee Buster

Sort of Bad Moodies this one! Yes, you control 3 different games, but not in parallel, you get turns for each one and you don't see all of them at once. So you have to remember where you left each game and take care NOT to leave the current game in a tough spot, otherwise you'll be in big trouble when you come back to it.

Addictive? Hell yes!



http://chevyray.com/art/ld21/5/FleeBuster_512.swf

AWOL

Here we have a horizontal shooter about a tank that shoots other tanks and can transform itself into a ship and fly. Terrific atmosphere and nice parallax scroll

http://www.quickfingers.net/builds/awol/awol_win.zip

Stratus

This is a first person affair, you wake up injured on a flying vehicle and you must figure out how to save the day because apparently you're under attack. Being injured is being conveyed from the game to you by the controls being jerky (I suppose you could also say that because the ship's a bit unstable, the floor is moving as well). The author mentions to go for the medi cabinet to heal a bit before exploring the rest of the ship (a small spoiler perhaps but people complained about the controls!).

Anyway, lots of neat ideas on this one and I liked the low-res style.

http://www.redprodukt.com/GPC/Stratus.zip

Amke's Revenge II

Here's an entry by the author of Game Maker himself (and contributor to Atari ST user back in the day ), Mark Overmars. It certainly doesn't win any originality contest. Instead it concentrates in how much (good) level design one can cram in 48 hours. And, well, it turns out you can cram a lot of it

http://www.mediafire.com/?4tq1uxvmzrwn7ig

Can't help it, Didn't Mark Overmars play for Arsenal like ten years ago?

One and one story

A little 10 minute game, a simple platform in which the rules change almost per screen. Nice touches all around the gfx and narrative that was woven into the game's design rather than forced in. I liked it a lot!

http://armorgames.com/play/12409/one-and-one-story

Sota

You have a limited amount of antennas, and you have to make almost every pixel in the level have antenna coverage. So, strategic placement of the antennas is the key. Loved it before I even started playing .

http://www.kongregate.com/games/exelents/sota

Five

While you wait for my pickings from the latest Ludum Dare, here's a quickie! It's a platformer! It's a sliding puzzle! It's both games in one! And you only gots 5 mins to solve it! So get going!!!!!


http://www.kongregate.com/games/z3lf/five

Castle of pixel skulls

Awwwww those sprites are soooo cuuuuute .

Ahem. Anyway, a fun but very hard platformer with tiny sprites (nicely animated, admittedly ). Only jumping on this one, and the agony of lives counter is replaced with a time counter, which is nice. However, I didn't like the controls all too much; the character's inertia and jump curve make him a bit uncontrollable, and since the levels require good precision jumps it's unnecessary hard. Plus, if you run out of time you have to play everything again from start, which is a real downer.

Still, cute sprites and all

http://www.pixelgames.com/game/755/Castle-Pixel.html

Crap, in my last post I forgot to mention that its author, Terry, has started a blog about indie games, and so far he's been posting some pretty awesome stuff! I might borrow some of his picks in the future, but in any case, have a look at it, it's worth it

http://www.freeindiegam.es/

Fixation

A flip-screen platformer with levels that require quite a bit of thinking to solve. Loved the smoke mechanics throughout the game, and that different supporting characters did have a logic of their own throughout the game. Being a prequel of "the company of myself" (which is one of the first games I mentioned here) made me want to go back and play it again!

http://armorgames.com/play/13070/fixation

And then there were none

I'll admit I haven't read Agatha Christie's novel with the same title, but I'm willing to bet that the title is the only thing this game will have common with the book .

It's a platformer in which you play a character that starts in a snowy terrain (or is that noise? Or both?). Immediately some voice on the radio starts instructing him what to do and where to go.

The game features within its one level some variation in gameplay; in the 2nd checkpoint you must retrieve a few items but you must remain close to a certain point in the map, otherwise you lose. Then you gain the ability to convert some of the terrain into walkable tiles for a short while. Soon it becomes a quite challenging game which is really worth playing. (SPOILER FOLLOWING READ THE REST OF THE PARAGRAPH AT YOUR OWN RISK!) I must mention that the game has a couple of red herrings that leave you searching the level for a long time and retrying the same thing lots of times, especially in checkpoint 4. This makes the game unnecessarily long, and since the progress isn't saved, you have to play it in one go, which makes the experience frustrating.

All in all though, quite enjoyable!

http://www.digital-synthesis.com/games/view/34

Parameters


Again one from Terry's amazing blog. This one's an RPG in one screen - no animations, no sound, just managing the stats!

A few tips to get the interested started (or, if you're feeling adventurous dive right in, it's fun figuring stuff out without help!): The screen is divided into parallelograms which may be locked, unlocked, have an "enemy" or be blank (or be unavailable). At first your stats are really low and you have no key, so you want to "attack" the unlocked "enemy-less" boxes. When you do, some numbers start jumping around - roll over the mouse to collect them. Green is experience points, yellow are money and there are yellow and gray keys, which you can use to unlock other boxes. As you gain experience, you level up so you can upgrade your character so it can "attack" "enemies".

And that's probably all you need to know to get started. Never again have I been stuck staring at a minimal screen with numbers for so long



http://nekogames.jp/g.html?gid=PRM

Awesome planes

I usually steer clear of any game containing words like "Awesome" (OSSOM) in their titles, bur since this was a recommendation from Terry's blog I figured "what the hell".

You have a ship, controlled by the mouse (i.e. you point somewhere, it goes there) and fire guns at ships and stationary targets. That's it. What's really worth a mention is the really cool PEW-PEW-PEW-PEW-PEW first weapon you have - I just can't get enough of it . (oh well, the LAZOR you can buy later on is pretty cool too!)

I finished the game quick enough, but kept feeling it needed some more tuning up, I'm not sure how though.



http://www.bigdino.com/game/472/Awesome-Planes

Memento XII

Ludum Dare 23's theme is all about "tiny worlds", and what I've seen so far is simply amazing, so hooray for them!

This game is a really short adventure game, but highly polished and with a verb I haven't seen before in games like these: remember. Flashbacks of the character's live come back if you trigger the right memories, and oh well I won't spoil it for you. If it sounds interesting to you, go and play it .

http://deepnight.net/games/ld23-memento/