We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
It’s Spooky Season, and the best cartoon for that time of year has to be Patrick McHale’s Over The Garden Wall. If you haven’t seen it, go seek it out: it’s only ten episodes, each 11 minutes long, and tells a complete story.
If you’ve done that, or have already seen the show, then this will be of the most interest to you. About a year ago for the show’s 10th anniversary Julia Minimata used Adventure Game Studio to make a very short adventure game starring the show’s main characters Wirt and Greg.
It’s free to play in your web browser! It features the voice of Elijah Wood (yes, Frodo!) at Wirt, returning to the role, and music by the people who did the excellent music from the show, The Blasting Company. Another thing made by Julia is the longer adventure game The Crimson Diamond, so why not check that out too?
Wirt gets himself stuck in an apple tree (although he claims not to be), and it’s up to the whimsical Gregory to get him down. There’s only two rooms, but there’s an interesting connection between them to figure out. See for yourself.
Part of Youtube’s doomed-to-fail Playables series, so enjoy this before it gets heartlessly deleted by Google when they decide games on their video platform don’t make sense, isn’t worth it, or whenever Netflix gives up on games and they don’t feel they need to compete on that front anymore.
The game is basically Pac-Man, but with a Championship Edition-like speedup gimmick. As you eat dots, the game slowly increases the simulation rate. it never really gets up to CE’s white-hot speeds, but it does get pretty fast. You get a slight slowdown when you finish a board and lose a life. Since you start with five lives, earn an extra one every 5,000 points, and each of a rack’s three (instead of the arcade’s two) fruit are worth at least 1,000 points, and even more as you advance to later boards, you are unlikely to run out of lives. The game ends after 13 levels, so you have a decent chance of finishing this one!
My best score is right around 150,000 points, but I was only playing casually. See if you can do better!
(EDIT: I just noticed that the download link at the end just pointed to romhacking.net. Thing is, there is no easy web download link for this program, now called just Planets, or sometimes M.Planets, for reasons you can probably guess. It’s distributed in a private Discord. If you want to find a copy I must leave you to your own ends to find it. This thread on metroidconstruction.com may be what you need to find it. This page on Lutris has a copy, but it may be an old version. The link at the end has been changed to point to the Lutris page, and the page’s title changed to reflect the new name.)
Edit the Frog is still taking a break from covering romhacks, there’s thousands to sift through on romhacking.net, but in the meantime, here’s a fan-made, browser-playable version of Metroid! Although it looks a lot like the NES game, it’s no hack, but a from-the-ground-up reimplementation.
We all know what Zebes looks like by now, right? All of the screenshots in this post are from the early areas of “Novus,” the new world to explore in Metroid Planets.
It was made specifically to help overcome the limitations of the NES platform, so Samus animates much more smoothly, there’s particle effects, multi-directional scrolling areas, built-in mapping, and the music uses later, more orchestral versions of the original’s music, although with an option to switch to the 8-bit originals. (I find that the music is a bit reluctant to play in the current version, though.) There’s other interesting features new features to find as well.
Freed of the NES’s dire memory limitations, Novus’s world can be a lot more colorful.
Most interesting is a built-in randomizer mode, and a second, alternate planet to explore! It’s designed along the lines of the original Zebes (here called “Zebeth,” a nod to the on-screen Romanization of Zebes in the NES game), but has some new elements, including areas that scroll in all directions, and new bosses!
Metroid is approaching 37 years old, and it was looking a bit long in the tooth three decades ago. Yet it’s still remarkably atmospheric for its age, and I find there’s something evocative about how the game’s world doesn’t feel designed like a challenging obstacle course for the player, like it just exists on its own and doesn’t particularly show any care for the player. There are some item gates, but like the original NES Legend of Zelda, many fewer than you’d expect, especially compared to their SNES sequels.
Just another day… IN SPAAAACE.
Screed time! Will Metroid still be played 20 years from now? I think so, although I find that most of the internet energy around these classic NES games now is focused on speedrunning, randomization and romhacks, and two of these three things Nintendo is actively fighting against. It’s a good example of how copyright law and corporate control has the potential to hold back both fan interest and property longevity. The rights to these games should be released to the public, while there is still a public that cares about them. Nintendo would probably get more money out of it, in the long run, from making sequels anyway.
Novus has much more item gating than Zebeth. A place like that, where I’ve fallen (and I can’t get up), and can’t go down either because of a low passage… I wonder if the Maru Mari, a.k.a. “Morphing Ball,” is somewhere close? It would be a fan-made Metroid world if the designer didn’t try to be a bit tricky with hiding it, now would it?Freed of the NES’s limited tile space, areas can be a lot more varied. The elevators on Novus are a lot more interesting! The lava here is animated, and it hurts to move through those flows!
Kenta Cho, also known as ABAgames on Twitter and the web, has been at this for a good long while now. He has an amazing way of distilling the essence of gameplay down to its absolute barest essentials. He’s especially known for bullet hell, but my favorite games from him are his many many gameplay experiments. This is one of them: Pac-Man boiled down to its very essence, with the whole maze being a single corridor. It’s Paku Paku:
The single control, any keypress, reverse the direction of travel of Pac-Man’s green cousin up there. The single ghost chases Paku single-mindedly, slowly getting faster. Paku can wrap around the screen at the edge, which causes Blinky to chase them directly. (They’re not that bright.) Eating the large blinking dot that I insist on calling an Energizer makes the ghost vulnerable for a few short seconds. If the ghost is eaten, they regenerate if their eyes made it off the screen. Clearing the whole board of dots instantly produces a new set.
You only get one life, but new games start rapidly. The nearly five minute video above contains dozens of plays. No one gets you over losing and into a new attempt like Kenta Cho does.
Think you can do better? You might! Give it a try!
