Love+ is a small platforming game with a “pay what you want” price tag.

It’s a short game though, taking me roughly 20 to 30 minutes to play through it’s 11 levels, but it’s really worth seeing. The controls are fast and precise, but because there is a lack of keybindings for the game, I had to use my logitech software to map my gamepad to keystrokes.

The sounds, levels, music, and gameplay are really well polished and you won’t be disappointed.

You can download the demo and purchase the game here.

Check out a review of it here.

Nimbus is a 3D platforming/puzzle/racing game, all based within a 2D plane. That is to say that while the game is all 3D graphics, you only move in two dimensions. The graphics are very crisp and clean, and look nice and polished. All the objects and pick-ups are easy to spot, easy to recognize, and serve the game perfectly. You control an airship of sorts, that has no way to self-propel itself, so you glide around using gravity and the various objects in the game world, to propel yourself to the finish line of each level. Within the levels are all sorts of objects that can propel you. Cannons, arrows that pull you along a path, boost blocks, bump pads, gravity direction changers, and a few others. There are also all sorts of platforming object such as spikes, moving platforms, physics puzzles, keys, switches etc.

Nimbus appeals to me in a lot of areas. There is a game map that is similar to Super Mario World, including alternate routes that can be discovered by finding the alternate finish to some levels. The puzzles are very real and sometimes extremely difficult. You can find up to 68 gold coins scattered around in the levels in mostly hidden or difficult-to-get-to areas. You can unlock new ship models, and new smoke trails for your ship to leave in it’s wake.

The gameplay itself varies from slow, precision movement of the ship, to balls out, boosting all over, extremely fast racing style levels, to difficult puzzles with keys and switches to hit. Each level has a lasting impression to leave, and the style of play never gets boring. I believe the level design is what really sets this game off, and it’s clear that a lot of time, play testing, and care went into making most of the levels. The developers have already released a free Christmas theme level pack, and the amount of levels in the game is truly astounding for the price of the game. They also included a “scrapyard” that unlocks when you complete the game, which is a collection of maps they didn’t feel “made the cut” with the release of the game. Some of these scrapyard levels are frustrating, poorly designed, *extremely* difficult, or just not really very good. They are, however, interesting.. and some of them are also my favourite levels in the game.. they are a welcome bonus.

The controls in the game didn’t take getting used to for me like most reviews claim. I found them to be natural, simple, and generally very good. I did actually find them to be a little twitchy at times, but this is a necessary evil. Fast and precise movement really is needed in this game, as you need to make split second moves and decisions to avoid obstacles or race around the levels. The twitchy-ness in the controls never really bit me in the ass until the last three levels in the scrapyard (after I had completed the game). These last three levels are meant to be mind-numbingly difficult, so this doesn’t really take away from the game much at all in my opinion.

Nimbus is a great ride. From the very first tutorial levels I was smiling, and I stuffed the whole game into a couple days because like a good book, I could not put it down. Nimbus is a very well thought out game, and the best deal in gaming I have seen in a long time. This game will stand out as one of the great puzzle games in my mind for a very long time, and I can see myself revisiting it regularly for way longer than $10 should allow me to.

Pros:
- Fast, addictive, refreshingly new, puzzle play
- Great graphics
- Good music, and excellent sound effects
- Global leader boards, all accessible in game
- Difficult puzzles will make you work for your good times and bonus coins
- Great final boss battle

Cons:
- Slightly confusing button remapping
- Twitchy controls (while necessary can provide some frustration)

Verdict: 9.5/10

Update: I have finally cleared all the levels including the scrapyard ones on the hard difficulty, earning me the last of the 17 achievements. If I had to guess, I would say that Scrapyard 4-3 took well over 1000 tries to get it done!

You will understand the name, VVVVVV, when you play the demo, or watch a video. I’ll just start off this little mini-review by saying that you need to at least try the demo or watch the video on the steam page. Just go do it right now..

VVVVVV shows an initial load screen that is a direct spin of the loading screen from old Commodore games. The screen flashed all colours, and it has the exact same blue colour and font for “Loading…”! I was please and already smiling, before I had even played the game. The game controls are very flicky, fast and a little tough to get used to, but by the time I has played through a bit of the game, I realized that this is a necessary evil, to complete some of the levels. The game is completely based around one really simple trick, changing gravity at will up and down (hence the name). It’s a one trick pony, but takes this concept and stretches it to pretty much every puzzle imaginable with that one button press.

The game has a short simple story line tossed in which is nice, and adds a little bit of humor. You play as a captain of a ship, saving your crew members and bringing them back to your ship, via teleporters you must discover. There are no real “levels” to speak of, just an open world to explore with a map to guide you, with 6 hidden crew members to rescue, and 20 hidden “orbs” to collect. Each single screen you pass through has it’s own set of puzzles and challenges, ranging in difficulty from very easy tutorial-like, to extremely difficult twitch-moving action. There is a wide range here, and if you like a challenge this game will definitely give you that. It does however have checkpoints literally on almost every screen, so you won’t be repeating content.

VVVVVV is deceptively simple yet refined, refreshing and most importantly of all, very fun. Don’t expect a long game, there are unlockable game modes, and a room with “trophies” to get after you get all twenty orbs, but generally I would expect the game to last a few hours if you don’t go hunting for all the achievements. This is indie gaming at it’s best. Cheap, fun, and a fresh idea all wrapped into one game. It’s well worth it’s price on Steam, and now that it’s on sale for $2.50, you shouldn’t really think twice about it. It’s easily worth more than the price, and that is not an easy find nowadays.

Pros:
- Fun, fast, simple, refreshingly new
- Good controls, they take a bit of getting used to
- Cheap

Cons:
- Short

Verdict: 8/10

I like games like this. I am a huge fan of indie puzzle games like this. Armadillo Run, Switchball, Pontifex/Bridge Construction Set, Marble Blast, Nimbus, to name a few of my favs. This means I have a little experience in the area, and this game could be compared directly to Switchball and Marble Blast, as a sort of new generation of Marble Madness.

The physics are good. Realistic in a lot of ways, but lacking in ease of use. I mean to say that the controls and moving about feel cumbersome and heavy.. there is a way to pull off “heavy”, and Switchball did it very effectively.. the game had real weight, but it only added to the feel of the game. In this game, it’s sort of a speed based game, similar to Marble Blast, but the weight of the ball throws that off somehow, and carries it over to the difficult-to-move-around side of things, which strips off the fun.

The gameplay elements to making a great game are there. There are jump pads, buttons, speed boosts, collectables (glorbs), and objects to move and push around. I feel like a lot of these gameplay elements are implemented in a hurried way. Let me rattle off a few examples for you.

1: The buttons are only a small step up onto the little 3d model, but it’s so cumbersome to get up onto them sometimes, that you’re sitting there rolling around it, nudging into it for like 20 seconds.. why not make it concave, so you roll into it with ease?

2: There is a speed boost on one of the very beginning levels that you have to jump up into, and it will toss you through a wall into the next portion of the level.. being that this is a beginning level, you would think it would be fairly simple. It took me a good 20+ tries to get it!

3: Time limits. Why? The times are all uploaded to a central server and published in-game for everyone to see. The times themselves would self-police and motivate people to be quick, completely eliminating the need for time limits at all. The time limits only serve as a way to make you play the game more than once. If you are an achievement hunter, you will have to play the game all the way through no less than three times. (Once for collecting Glorbs, once for speed on hard difficulty, and once or more for “The Impossible” achievement.) It takes away from the freedom of the game, and kind of ruins it.

4: Glorbs (the collectable items). They are scattered around in ridiculous places, making you completely change route or stop the flow of the game to collect them.. quite often you have to avoid the end portal completely, dance around it and collect three or four of them right by it, then go into the portal.. this removes the “blammo” fast finish that makes the ending of the levels fun. In Marble Blast, you would often get great speed built up, and fly through the finish line, giving you a huge sense of a real finish line that is quite awesome.

5: There is lava scattered around some of the beginning levels but it doesn’t hurt you. If you fall “off” the map into the lava, you can roll around down there with no penalty other than not being able to get back up to the play field. You then have to commit suicide to respawn back at your last checkpoint. Just make the lava hurt!

I decided to try out the gamepad to see if it would help with the controls. I went into the controls interface, and chose to use the gamepad. I then tried to map my dpad to up/down/left/right, and couldn’t. I decided it must want me to “save” the fact I want to use a controller, then go back into that screen and add my remappings.. when I chose gamepad then clicked “back” nothing was mapped. The game completely removed *any* way to move about the menus, and now the game is completely useless unless I can find some way to remap them through an .ini file or something. I’m not sure at this point that I should even bother.

It’s a shame really. I had a good feeling about the game at the start, and it turned out to be a title that feels like it was never actually play tested. There are lots of glaring problems and stupid ideas that were left in the game for no reason. This game kind of sucks. :(

Pros:
- Good visuals
- Good sound

Cons:
- Poor gameplay and controls
- Needs playtesting and patched before it will be fun
- Time limits on the levels don’t make sense. Ranked, and timed is more than enough to encourage speed

Verdict: 4/10

http://www.humblebundle.com/

There is a great deal going on that you shouldn’t pass up. The Humble Indie Bundle II is a group of 5 independent games being sold for whatever price you deem it worthy. They are all cross platform, and carry a normal price of around $80! The proceeds are split between the developers, some charities, and a tip for the people arranging the bundle.

I’ll be picking up my copy soon.

edit: I bought it, woo!

I’ve been into watching speedruns for some years now, and there are always new and interesting videos to be found on the ‘net.

Here are a few I watched this weekend that I thought were interesting. If the video has a (TAS) tag on it, it means it’s a Tool Assisted Speedrun. That is a video that was made by playing the game with an emulator and making use of save states, game glitches, etc, to make the run as fast as possible. If it doesn’t have a (TAS) tag on it, it means it’s a normal speedrun, performed without “tools”.

Zelda: A Link To The Past (TAS) (1:16:11.05) – This one is pretty awesome if you’re a fan of the game. It’s a full run of the game, completing every dungeon in about an hour and a quarter.

Super Mario 64 (TAS) (5:04.57) – This is a zero star run of the game, as fast as possible. Not much else to say.. it’s basically breaking the game in any way possible.

Portal (9:25.567) – This is a new video of the game completed in under ten minutes. This is a multi-segment run, meaning he played each level (or segment) as many times as needed to get the fastest time possible. It really is incredible what can be done to break the game mechanics and get a time like this.

Jumper: Redux (11:08) – I’m posting this because it’s clear that it is incredibly hard to get a time like this for this game. While I have never played the game, it was still really entertaining to watch. It’s a single segment run, all done in one sitting, no reloading levels/saves etc.

If you enjoy the videos, check out these sites.

http://speeddemosarchive.com
http://tasvideos.org

Enjoy!

After owning my PSP for over two years, and pretty much never using it outside of the first few month I had it, I have finally hacked it and put custom firmware on it. I looked into this when I first got the PSP but was quickly discouraged at how convoluted and difficult the process seemed. Things have gotten a lot better over the last couple of years (especially for the older ones like mine), and I’m happy to say that the hack was fairly painless, and I am thoroughly enjoying the fruits of my labour.

I first had to take apart the battery on my PSP. I cut one of the leads on a small chip which puts the battery into service mode. This will make the PSP boot from the memory card. You can then install some custom software on the memory card and boot the PSP. Once this is done, you can install any software you like.

I’ve been playing Rock Band: Unplugged, and Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core. Crisis Core is a 3D rpg set in the same world as the original FFVII. It has real time combat, not turn based like a lot of games in the Final Fantasy series. The combat is very good, and so far I’m really enjoying it, although I’m still less than an hour into the game.

Rock Band can be described nothing short of incredible. It’s much much more fun than I would have imagined on the PSP. Instead of picking a certain instrument it puts you in charge of all four at the same time. There are 4 tracks displayed on the screen, and you switch from one to the next constantly, playing each one for only a single chord. Once you play a chord on an instrument, that instrument will play itself for a certain amount of time, and you can switch to the next and repeat. Much like keeping 4 plates spinning on sticks, you need to keep them all going. This seems quite awkward at first, but once you get used it it can be quite fun.

If you’re like me however and prefer to stick to one instrument, unfortunately it doesn’t have an option to make that happen on the tour, but I prefer to just select and play songs I like playing anyway. You can go into the extras section and go into practice mode where you won’t need to switch to different instruments. That way you can play away and choose any song you like. I have been doing this, and it’s very interesting to see how the same songs are different on the PSP from the normal rock band games. Some of the really hard songs on drums like ‘Foo Fighters – Everlong’ are not bad on the PSP, and there are some songs that are the opposite. It’s ridiculously fun though. You owe it to yourself to try it if you like rhythm games.

We’re having a LAN at my place this weekend, and Fydo bought himself a PSP this week. It will be fun to get his hacked up and play some multiplayer/co-op. I can’t wait!

In this twitter-esque post, I’m writing to tell you that I’ve updated my backloggery page to reflect the reborn state of my pc now that it’s been cured of it’s swine-flu (also known as Bioshock). I also added a few new games that I’m “now playing” even though I have done nothing but play poker in the recent weeks.

I have been tossing around the idea of making a complete-as-I-can-remember list of all games I have finished (seen credits, etc) over the years. I finally got down to it while bored at work and starting jotting down the names of the games I had finished in my phone. After gathering quite a big list from the depths of my memory, from Commodore 64 and the Amiga, all the way up to PS3/PC games of today. I pitched my idea to fydo on IRC. He promptly said that he had already done such a list, and pointed me towards backloggery.com which is just the place to keep track of all this.

The site allows you to add games and set a status for them. “Playing”, or “Wish list” as well as “unfinished”, “beaten”, “completed”, or “mastered”. I added the games I’m playing now (Left 4 Dead and Quake 3 Arena in LIVE form), and got to adding all the games I had written down in my phone.

This is a pretty cool idea in my opinion, much better than the plan I had to just add it to here in a table. :P

Anyways, check out my profile if you’re willing to give in to the reality that I am better at games than you.

Some ones of note that I’m sort-of proud of:

• Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (all achievements done, rocket man, 333 grubs, etc)
• Little Big Planet (all levels 100% complete, Kyle and I did this together)

Some ones of note that stick out as incredible games (for their time, or even now):

• MDK II (So fun, I have finished it many times)
• Quake III Arena (Rocket Arena III, oh how I loved thee)
• Left 4 Dead (incredible gameplay, funnest co-op game ever made)
• Rollcage II (the first racing game with a puzzle mode that I played, changed the way I look at racing games forever)
• Syndicate (Open style play, mass violence, and the first game with an “active city”. Like GTA3, but very old)
• Serious Sam Series (Intense co-op play, one of the best lan games there is to this day)
• Trackmania Series (best racing games ever made.. hands down)

A friend posted this link in our IRC channel we all hang out in. This is amazing.. just click and be amazed.

Pixel Cookies

I love poker. Nothing of real substance to say about it here, I just love poker. When the World Series Of Poker comes around each year, I get to watching each episode and each bracelet event, then finally the main event. The main event is something else. It’s a $10,000 buy in, and they got 6,800 entrants this year which makes for a pretty amazingly huge prize pool. The top 666 spots paid this year, and the 666th person got over $21,000 dollars for his efforts. The scale of the thing is just unbelievable.

I’m well into the main event now, and they’re down to about 600 guys left. Should get really interesting from here on.

Man, I need to start playing again. I also need to start playing online.

Rock band kicks serious ass. I thought the game was good fun when I started playing it a while back, but I didn’t see myself getting into it. I played guitar mainly because drums were too hard. I got pretty decent at guitar, playing a bunch of songs on expert, but the real hard ones kick my ass.

I started playing drums a bit but struggled with the kick pedal like most. Once I got used to it, I started to really enjoy it, much much more than guitar.

Anyway, I broke my own and my friends kick pedal. They like to flex with a normal note, and they will crack right in the middle of the pedal. Today me and Kyle took the kick pedals out to the shop I work at and made some aluminum pieces that fit the foot pedal. We drilled holes and riveted the pieces to the pedals. Ii looks fantastic and plays better than a stock kit. The pedal feels nice and firm, and it’s not going to flex at all now.

I play almost exclusively on expert now with drums and it’s funner than ever. The feeling of playing note for note to these songs is just awesome! I think this may be the funnest game I have ever played, and the downloadable content is really good. Especially since they have some good metal tunes.

Pictures to come soon.

UPDATE: Here’s the pictures of it! Watch out where you rivet the plate on though if you plan on doing this. In the second picture you can see the rivet thrhough the top of the pedal. There is a sensor here on some versions of the pedal that you will have to watch for.