Video Games

Mediatonic | Jan 31, 2011

Earth is under attack by aliens from another dimension!  Who can protect it?  Why, the Defender of Earth!  But why did he let them get to Earth in the first place?  Well, he’s on trial to find out.

Who’s That Flying!? has the player take control of the defender of Earth as he recounts his exploits in defending Earth from evil invaders to a trial of his peers.  His peers being, the Defenders of the other planets.  For the most part, the trial dialogue though is between Jupiter, who serves as the Judge, Earth, defending himself, and Uranus, who is a little pissy about being stuck being named Uranus.  The story follows the trial, which is mostly Earth “describing” how he saved each city, then follows the epilogue of the trial through one additional stage.

The game itself is a side scrolling shoot’em up game.  There are 5 cities each with 3 stages to play through, the stages are somewhat themed by the theme of larger monster that shows up.  The design of the game is actually a bit simple as each stages features the same smaller black blog enemies, one medium sized “theme enemy” and a larger more difficult to kill version of the theme enemy.

There is a bit of a twist in the gameplay that helps to differentiate this game from traditional shooter games,  Your character is 100% indestructible.  So hey, that kind of ruins the challenge right?  The city you’re defending has health.  The more enemies you fail to destroy, the more health the city loses.  This very strongly encourages the idea of killing everything, which can be tricky.  Most of the larger special enemies of the stages are designed to keep you from killing the smaller black monster enemies.  They will charge you and cause you to get confused, or spit goop at you to keep you temporarily immobilized.

There are also some special moves at your disposal.  The more enemies you kill without letting any pass, you’ll charge up to unleash Rapid Fire shots, a laser like Super shot or the kill everything Hyper shot.  Miss one enemy and your charge bar drops to nothing, which is a little frustrating.  It can also be extremely killer when you lose it just as a large batch of enemies shows up.

The game itself is alight, though it is a bit simplistic in it’s design.  The simplistic enemies is kind of nice, it never gets overly difficult, but often most levels break down to sweeping up and down across the screen shooting constantly.  The cut scenes are neat, though the humor isn’t quite as funny as it wants to think it is.  It’s not a terrible game by any means, though it also doesn’t really give too much to get super excited over unless you’re a real fan of shoot’em up games.

You can find Who’s That Flying?! on Steam here.  it is also available in iOS.

Kheops Studio | Aug 2, 2006

Steam’s Daily specials are just fill of interesting little surprises.  Safecracker is one of those surprises.  It’s pretty straight forward in it’s story and presentation.  You’ve been hired by a family to find the will of their recently deceased relative.  The catch is that the late Duncan W. Adams was eccentric and wealthy and obsessed with safes.

So much so that essentially, the entire home is a puzzle.  Never mind that either this guy knew he was about to die and had all of this set up before hand or he liked to open laser locks requiring a key inside a safe in the basement every time he needed to take a piss.

You navigate around the spacious mansion home using a pseudo 3D navigation method.   It’s pseudo 3D in that it is all three dimensional, you can freely look around for clues, but it’s not “FPS” 3D, you move through a series of fixed locations by using navigation arrows and the mouse.  In face, the entire game is played via the mouse, including dropping back to the menus.  Most games use the “Escape Key”, the keyboard does nothing in this game.  Not a problem, just slightly offsetting when one forgets.

Scattered throughout the home are puzzles to solve.  Finding the puzzles is pretty easy, they are all labeled by glowing red lights and show up on the in game map with Xs.  For the most part, keeping memory of which puzzles are unsolved makes finding where to go next fairly easy.  For example, you may pass a locked door then find a key later which matches the lock’s shape.  On the other hand, figuring out the point of the photograph you find or realizing that you have to dismantle another lock are less obvious actions, which can lead to some frustration.

The difficulty of the puzzles vary greatly.  Some are key codes that are just given to the player, others are simply finding the right key.  Other more difficult puzzles involve manipulating objects and switches to activate or open safes.  There are something like 35 puzzles to solve, all of which must be solved in order to complete the game.  They are split probably 50/50 on actual puzzles and simple gimmie “puzzles”.

There is also a vague story aspect through letters and diary entries found throughout the game.  These become important later after finding the will.  It’s a minor spoiler but one that actually is fairly obviously going to come up there more you realize how greedy the family is.  You must puzzle out and pick who should get the inheritance.  Actually, you just pick.  There isn’t much after choosing the heir, you just get a little blurb about what they did with the money and a single screen of credits.  It’s actually a bit disappointingly anticlimactic.

Unfortunately, that kind of is the whole tone of the game.  Anticlimactic.  The puzzles are pretty fun but once you’ve figured out the trick there isn’t much replay value.  Still, the visuals are nice and it’s pretty cheap, so it’s a pretty fun little budget title if you like solving brainteaser style puzzles.

Safecracker can be found on Steam Here.

NOTE: This game was received free as a review copy)

Paradox Interactive | 08.02.2011

It’s not too often you see a Pirate themed game, despite the popularity of Pirates.  Ok, more accurately, you don’t too often see a Pirate themed game that includes many of the traditional aspects of pirating all rolled up into one game.  You will get pirate ships in combat or you’ll get control of a pirate battling piratey villains.  Pirates of Black Cove combines both of these and mixes in some RTS and RPG elements for an interesting pirate experience.

You play as one of three Pirates, chosen at the start of the game.  They each give you slightly different base stats for your character.  You command your own pirate ship as you travel around the islands and seas gaining more reputation among the various factions by completing various missions.  Your missions range from things like “chase down a ship carrying some important cargo” to “raid an enemy base to kidnap important characters” or just all out raids on enemy bases.  There are even some large boss type fights at sea such as fighting the mighty Kraken.

As you gain more fame, you also gain more allies.  This will give you the benefit of more troops to command during combat.  You also can gain more ships, though this is controlled by discovering and collecting blueprints.  The blueprints aren’t specific to any one ship or upgrade but act more as a specialized currency at the ship yard to unlock different things.  The main currency of the game used for actually buying upgrades and hiring troops are Pieces of Eight.

Combat is different depending on if you’re in your ship or if you’re controlling a landing party.  When you’re in your ship you navigate around using the WASD keys (player centric rotational controls not straight up down left right).  You fire your ship’s cannons by clicking in the direction you wish to fire.  Timing is critical and can be a little iffy as your cannons simply fire out one side or the other of your ship.  You’ll have to consider the movement of your enemy and your ship and the momentum of the cannonball’s trajectory.

Land based combat is more like a traditional RTS game.  You select and move your troops and attack enemy troops from an overhead perspective.  It’s a bit more limited than a traditional RTS though which makes it a bit frustrating to control all of your men at once.  Other RTS elements come up when using the towns.  You can buy and build and upgrade places in the towns you control in order to build more units for your crew.

Generally speaking, it’s pretty fun and pretty complex in a good but not too complicated way.

It’s not all completely kosher unfortunately.  The biggest flaw I found was that the game seems to just flat out run slow.  It’s possible this is simply a hardware issue except that the game ran about the same on my wimpy Netbook as it did on my much more powerful Desktop (more than minimum specs).  It seems to take forever to navigate around towns and the controls are a bit less responsive than they need to be.  I could see this issue popping up on my Netbook but I can generally blast through most games with pretty good speed and FPS etc on my desktop with no problems.  I could not find any sort of video quality settings in the menus in order to possibly try to correct the problem that way.  It’s the only real problem with this game but it is a fairly decent one.  fortunately it may be something that could eventually be fixed via a patch of some sort.  Heck it may already be fixed in the retail version and non-review version of the game.

One final bit I’d like to touch on.  I love the art in this game.  The cut scene full screen art pieces are fantastic and the graphics in general are pretty decent.  The character art is done nicely as well and everything features a full dialogue set for conversations.  The theme is somewhat cartoonish so the voices are sometimes a bit odd but they are still pretty decent.

So what you get is a decent Pirate simulation that is plagued slightly by what’s most likely poor code optimization making the game run a bit sluggish at times.  It’s still pretty fun to play at it’s core.