While I usually focus on released and playable games here, I’d like to highlight this prototype with a lot of promise. Here’s Against the Wall, a first-person platforming-puzzle game about climbing a wall. It’s a surreal and acrophobic experience, strange, perilous, and inviting all the same.
The alpha build for Against the Wall can be downloaded here.
The game involves pulling pillars out of the wall through a magic wand, allowing you to jump on top of them as platforms. Although all the pillars are randomly generated, you have to understand how far and how high you jump. The serenity of correctly calculating your moves as you ascend farther up the wall is an intriguing experience.
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Remember Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles? Presumably, all the hardcore Final Fantasy fans greatly disliked the inability to level-up in that game. This, despite the extremely addicting multiplayer, the excellent graphics, and most importantly, poetic music. Without further ado, here’s Endless Sky by Kumi Tanioka.
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is a story of 4 strong villagers who venture out to collect a drop of myrrh from the sacred myrrh tree yearly. What does the myrrh drop do? Energizes your village’s crystal, that protects them from the hazardous miasma that encompasses the entire world. The crystal is only able to protect a certain radius, depending on its size. For your company, you only carry one small shard that can cover your caravan. Thus, at least one team member must carry this shard, while the rest stick close to this character as they fend off the enemies.
Unlike the majority of the Final Fantasy games, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is more like a real-time multiplayer action game than a JRPG. The game required a Gameboy Advance to connect to the Gamecube. The portable device displays your items and traits, thus keeping the information visible only to you. Even though taking and keeping drops from enemies is part of the fun, the game also required precise coordination to combine attacks and spells to a more powerful variant.
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles was released for the Gamecube. No other port exists.
Extra!
Title:Annual Festival Game: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles Composer: Kumi Tanioka
Away with the flash games, and back to awesome story-telling. Here’s a student project from RPI, Left Arrow Moves Left. It’s a simple platformer where nearly every element of the game are composed of words, including platforms and walls themselves. It’ll occasionally add new items, such as the teleporting bookmark that you can throw with the spacebar. Pressing enter allows you to teleport to that bookmark.
Since it’s a student project, Left Arrow Moves Left is very rough on the edges. There’s no saving, and some paths leads to inescapable dead-ends. Despite these flaws, however, the experience is astounding. The words on the platform spell out an intriguing, lonely story. By exploring the story itself, it’s easy to lose yourself in the deep and poetic environment this game creates.
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Every once in a while, I find a well-composed music from the least expected places. Case in point? The Credits music from The Dog Island. It’s composed by a huge team: Junko Ozawa, Etsuo Ishii, Minamo Takahashi, Junichi Nakatsuru, Rio Hamamoto, Yoshihito Yano, Tetsuya Uchida, and Tomomitsu Kaneko.
Edit 3/31/13: Apparently the previous video got deleted, so here’s a voiceless walkthrough which contains the credits music.
Lets get the most important detail out of the way: The Dog Island is a children’s game. And the story is depressing. The game first takes place in a small town at the coast of an ocean, populated by speaking dogs with disproportionately large heads. You play as a mute, but loyal dog. With your powerful nose and power claws for digging any surface, you help out your mother tend your sickly younger sibling before trotting off to the town festival. Unwilling to miss the fun, your younger sibling tries to join in the party. But on that faithful night, your sibling (predictably) collapses. Later, the local doctor reveals that your sibling’s disease is only curable by a wise doctor at The Dog Island, but the seas to get there is too dangerous. Even your mother finds this hopeless, exclaiming that your father went missing when he ventured to the same island. Despite the risk, you decide to venture to the The Dog Island to find this very doctor.
The Dog Island is sort of a dowsing game. Each mission involves finding a certain object in the ground, and you use your trusty nose to detect how close you are to the said object. Naturally, since the object are usually underground, you attempt to dig that location to gather it. Each mission provides you a currency that can be traded for accessories to decorate your own character.
The Dog Island was released for the PS2 and Wii.
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Here’s a popular flash game: QWOP. It’s a game about controlling the leg muscles of a track runner on a 100 meter track. The ‘Q’ key rotates the thighs in a clockwise rotation, while ‘W’ rotates it counter-clockwise. Similarly, ‘O’ rotates the calves clockwise; and the ‘P’, counter-clockwise. This deliberately unwieldy controls, and the floppy rag-doll physics makes QWOP one of the most difficult games.
Despite the difficulty, QWOP is strangely addicting. There’s a certain satisfaction when you learn to crawl to the first 5 meters, then learn the timing to hop to 10 meters. The simple music that plays as you start moving towards the finish line adds the gratification of moving forward. As the commenter below explains, slow and steady wins the race.
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Happy Holidays, everyone, and Merry Christmas to the respective Christian followers. Here’s a little special remix called Super Mario’s Sleigh Ride. It’s an excellent live music arrangement that mashes together Sleigh Ride with various Super Mario World themes. Can you name all of them?
Super Mario World‘s music is originally composed by Kondo Koji; Sleigh Ride, by Leroy Anderson. The band who remixed this piece is the OneUp Mushrooms: Mustin (Bass), Dale North (Keyboards), Nathan McLeod (Alto Sax), David Embree (Trumpet), William Reyes (Guitar), and Chris Strom (Drums).
And no, no description of the game today. Everyone should already know Super Mario World: the game that introduced Yoshi. And besides, it’s my favorite game of all time. Anything I write will be terribly biased!
Extra!
Title:White Feather in the Storm Game: Super Mario Galaxy Composer: Masaya Matsuura, Yoshihisa Suzuki Remixer: CarboHydroM
Title:Secret Level Game: Super Mario Sunshine Composer: Koji Kondo, Shinobu Tanaka
