Games, Gaming and Games Development: Crappy Flash Game Edition

Sooooo... Boredom struck, and I found my self playing some game called "Effing Worms 2." It is about as subtle as one would expect given the title. You play a giant worm. with wings. and flame jets. presumably from hell. or something, the story was not exactly the central focus.

Gameplay consisted of pointing the worm up to make it charge out of the ground, then flying, becuase apparently worms are known for their aerodynamic qualitys, and eating helpless townsfolk. Later on the army get involved, and things supposedly get harder, although I never had any trouble beating any level.

The game isnt exactly long either, I beat it in about 5 minutes, and once you win there is little else to do other than fly around and eat yet more villagers.

Still, it kept me moderately amused for 5 minutes, and that is all you can really ask for in a free flash game.

Here is a link, should you feel a burning desire to play this game: http://www.gamefudge.com/Effing-Worms-2

Warcraft: Orcs and Humans

Last weekend I felt like seeing how the Warcraft franchise started. Unfortunately, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans is so old, you literally cannot buy it new any more. Luckily, after a bit of googleing, I found a website that hosts torrents of games that are no longer sold or supported by the developers any more: http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/422/

Once I had downloaded this, though, I hit a snag. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was made a whol year before the first Windows operating system came out. This made it impossible to run on a PC like mine, with Windows 7. Luckily, some more googleing found me an emulator for M-DOS: http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

However, being such an old system, this required a decent amount of setting up to make work. Luckily I found a guide: http://www.glennsguides.com/2008/04/warcraft-orcs-and-humans-pc-game-free.html

After all this effort, I played the game for about 20 minuits, realised exactly how much had been improved in the newer Warcraft RTS games, and went back to playing Warcraft Three. Ah well, setting it all up was good fun at least.

METALLLLL!!!!!!

I picked up the most recent humble bundle a few days ago, and just finished Brutal Legend. It's an interesting mash up of 3rd person brawling game, real time strategy, and some guitar hero style elements, and it is all nicely tied together with a great heavy metal soundtrack.

The story is surprisingly good, other than a few badly handled moments early on where characters and bits of in-universe history seem to appear out of nowhere, and the mechanics are passable, but somewhat clunky. Overall though, it is a good game, and becomes a brilliant game if you like the music it is based on. Dedicated followers of metal will enjoy characters based on, and even actually voice acted by, Rob Halford of Judas Priest, Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead, and of course Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath, three of the most influential people in heavy metal.

Bonus points for using Painkiller, one of Priest's best songs, as the final boss theme.

SUPERHOT, a 7D(?) FPS

So I just stumbled across this game: http://superhotgame.com/ while browsing reddit, and did a playthrough. It is apparently a 7D FPS, which means it is a first person shooter where you have control over time as well (quite why that makes it 7D, as opposed to 4D, I don't know.) The basic principle is that, as long as you stay still, time flows slowly enough that it may as well be still. Bullets still move, but barely, and targets may as well be stationary. Moving the camera view speeds up the flow of time a bit, and moving using WASD returns the game to normal time, until you stop moving again. This makes fights have an innately cinematic feel to them, as the action slows to a crawl, shots are fired, then the speed picks back up again as the bullets make contact. It seems like it could be reasonably challenging in the future as well (the game is currently in a trial version, which I assume to be something like an alpha stage.)

All in all, it seems to be an interesting blend of shooting action, combined with slower puzzle gameplay as you work out the right times to stop and look at the bullet patterns as you run.

So... a blog

Hi there. So, I go by the name of Xarlan online, and I am currently studying Games Development. Apparently a requirement for a certain section of the course is  to make a blog about gaming, so here we go I guess:

In the future, I hope to make this blog more about games design and development, possibly taking the things I learn, as I learn them, and writing about them using a game I am either currently playing, have played before, or in some cases have sworn never to play. But for now my course has only just started, and we havn't covered much beyond the very basics, so... World of Warcraft!

Surprisingly, I only picked up WoW about 3 and a half weeks ago, as a very good freind of mine was getting back into it after a long break and I decided now was a good time to try a game I have meant to get for a while. After a long while questing, dungeon running, and leveling in the world of Azeroth, we finally made it to Outland this evening.


Dreknar, Mighty Orc Protection Warrior, stands before the Dark Portal to Outland, ready to face whatever fell creatures dwell beyond.