Glorg

Glorg, Grapefrukt's new one button hack-n-slash RPG tribute, has some great hilariously misleading faux-box-art, and an interesting premise. Glorg is the story of a warrior whose unibrow is small but whose heart and courage are large. Glorg finds himself in a dark, deep dungeon. At first, Glorg is scared, for Glorg was surrounded by monsters, Glorg's least favorite thing. But then our hero sees that also surrounding him are treasure and weapons; Glorg's favorite things! Striking out with his mighty stick of bashing and shield of blocking, Glorg heads out to explore. Will Glorg ever see the light of the surface again? That's up to you! You control Glorg just by clicking the left mouse button. The green circle next to Glorg will tell you what will happen when you click; it's used to explore areas, loot treasure, walk, and, most importantly, fight.

Battle is real-time, so you'll need to pay attention to the prompts that appear on your green circle. Click when it says "Block" or you'll take damage. You can click fast to attack rapidly, or you can hold down the button to charge up a powerful attack, which has a chance of stunning an enemy if it hits. If you defeat your enemy, you'll not only earn EXP, but you'll also occasionally get treasure that you can use to purchase portals. Portals let you skip levels if you die, so you'll learn to love them fast. As you explore, you'll uncover new areas in the dungeon; you can't choose the direction Glorg moves when presented with multiple paths, unfortunately, but if he runs into a dead end he'll simply head back the way he came.

Analysis: Since the release of One Button Bob earlier this year, platform developers have tended towards increasing innovation with ultra-streamlined control schemes, but Glorg is the first time I've seen this kind of simplified structure applied to an RPG framework. Reducing any genre to minimalism is going to come off as perhaps overly artistic, but fortunately, Glorg, with its adorable aesthetic, humorous asides, and sense of dreaminess, is as entertaining as it is experimental.

Naturally, streamlining a genre can mean sacrificing quite a bit: in this case, story, customization, and any sense of non-linearity. And I don't mean it's "linear in the sense of "it only has one ending." I mean linear. Lin-E-Ar. Super-Linear. Ultra-Linear. The kind of linearity that would cause a straight line to say "Boy howdy, that's linear!". It turns out removing most aspects of the control scheme really limits player-freedom. If you've ever wondered whether Nethack could be reduced to a series of quick-time events, wonder no more.

Of course, ultra-linear quick-time-event-based games can be quite entertaining, if often repetitive (...I'm looking at you, Dragon's Lair), and by removing the illusion of choice, Glorg allows for a subtle parody of most RPG player behavior. For instance, at first I found it frustrating that Glorg always took the most circuitous path through the dungeon, never finding a staircase until he had explored all the rooms. Then I realized: when crawling through an RPG dungeon, and having barely explored it before finding the staircase to the next level, does any self-respecting gamer immediately take it? Of course not! The designer wouldn't have included the other rooms if they didn't contain some awesome loot! So every room ends up explored anyways. Likewise, I thought it a little strange that you had no say over what weapon Glorg used. Then I remembered that 95% of the time the only thing you ask about a found weapon in an RPG is "Is it stronger than the one I already have?", even if that means replacing your broadsword with a sharpened umbrella. Grapefrukt clearly understands the tropes and player behaviors of the RPG enough to poke fun by making them automatic.

Glorg is a unique experience. At first I was drawn in by its charming style and music. After playing a while, I thought it more than a little monotonous. Yet I kept coming back to it, using the check-points to get further and further, five minutes or so at a time. Glorg sometimes feels like a mini-game (if a high-quality one) expanded a little further than its mechanics could handle. Still, Glorg is an interesting twist on the RPG formula and quite worthy of your time.

Play Glorg

Corporate Climber

It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, kid! The corporate world takes no prisoners and even you won't escape in Corporate Climber, a new platformer from PixelJAM and Adult Swim. You begin as a lowly poop-shoveler and eventually work your way up to becoming CEO of your company... meaning you're shoveling an entirely different kind of poop but making more money while doing it.

Move around with the [arrow] keys, press [X] to jump and press [Down + X] to hop down through platforms. This is a frustration platformer, so one hit will kill you and there's plenty of stuff out to do just that. The object of each floor is to get to the elevator on the opposite side of the screen, though sometimes you'll have to fulfill special conditions like firing employees to open the door.

This game features a unique layout where you climb up your company's office building floor by floor. As a result you can see the next level you'll be facing, plus certain levels will include dangers coming at you from lower floors. Even being able to see what's coming isn't much help, though; prepare to die quite a bit as you try to reach the top.

A word of warning: there's a bit of objectionable content near the end of the game, but it's nothing you wouldn't expect to see on Adult Swim. This also isn't a very long game; you can expect to be done in about fifteen to twenty minutes on your first time through. All in all, though, Corporate Climber is a solid game for anyone who enjoys frustration platformers, and the online leaderboards definitely give you incentive to keep improving your time and score.

Play Corporate Climber

In3structoTank!

Hey there, Tanky boy, flyin' in the sky so fancy free... If you're been sitting there, thinking to yourself, "This day isn't explodey enough. It could be explodier." then you might want to pay attention because this is serious business. In3structoTank! is bringing you a whole lot of arcade action as you fight to save the world from the Evil General and his legions of deadly, determined, and (might we add) highly explosive baddies. You didn't really think this one through, did you, Mister Evil General?

You (as Dirk Danger) pilot an indestructible tank. You might think that means you automatically win the game, but since the tank has no weapons of its own, you have to get creative if you want to fight back against the hordes of determined enemies. Move the tank with the [arrow] keys and steer it into enemies or bombs; explosions hurl your tank into the air, where you can guide it into enemies to make them blow up. For each enemy you destroy as you bounce through the air, your combo increases, and when you hit the ground, you'll gain EXP based on how many enemies you destroyed.

Leveling up usually causes the enemies to appear even faster, which is fairly important. Since you can't be destroyed, most levels will only end in failure if you don't complete an objective within a time limit, or if enemies succeed in theirs. Of course, even an indestructible tank needs fuel, and if that runs out, you'll blow up. And you thought gas prices were the worst thing you had to deal with! Fuel depletes slower when you make things explode, and refills completely when you level up. As you destroy enemies you fill up your BOOM bar, which can be activated when full by tapping [up] to trigger a small explosion to help you jump. You also have a nuke at your disposal, which you can activate with the [spacebar] when ready to clear the screen.

In3structoTank! isn't that different from its predecessors. Even the new leveling system and nuke don't make many changes to what is essentially the same game as before, just shinier and tweaked a bit. The standard action is still as fun and bouncy as you've come to expect, and the bosses you'll encounter in adventure mode add a welcome challenge that keeps the game from becoming too repetitive. (Yes, I just called repeated and multiple explosions "repetitive". I have officially become jaded.) While not exactly what you might call deep, In3structoTank! is fun, silly, and just what you need to relieve tension in a cruel world that doesn't actually allow you to blow people up. Life is so unfair.

Play In3structoTank!

RADiancE

It's Snake! It's Breakout! It's a gleeful amalgam of both! It's RADiancE, a new classic-style arcade game from developer Miguel Angel Perez Martinez, and along with some color matching and clever soundtrack work, it's also more than the sum of its parts.

You control the snake, using the [arrow keys] to point it in the direction you want it to go. Like in classic Snake, the goal is to eat food pellets, which make you longer, while avoiding walls and your ever-growing body. Like in classic Breakout, there is also a ball, which you should use to clear each level of obtrusive colored blocks. The snaky body is used to bounce the ball into blocks, the catch being that the ball can only destroy blocks the same color as itself. When you eat a colored food pellet, you add a new segment of the same color to the snake, and the ball also changes color when it bounces off that segment. So color transfers from the pellet, to the snaky body segment, to the ball, to the correspondingly colored block which it destroys. Clear the playing field of blocks without crashing into yourself or other obstacles, and live to see another level.

Analysis: The synthesis of these two classic games works fairly well, and after a few trial runs it's pretty easy to get in the groove of knocking down colored blocks, using colored balls with the slithering paddle that is also a snake. There is, however, a high degree of randomness, which may or may not be to your liking. The colored pellets appear randomly, and only a few appear at a time before you eat some, so there isn't much you can do to control the color of the snake. It's also difficult to control what color the ball becomes, and you are much better off guiding the snake towards the ball and leaving its color to fate. There is still a certain amount of strategy in corralling balls toward blocks and in judging when to eat and when to stop eating.

There are a number of different power-ups, such as classic multi-ball, or the "Supercharged" snake which can destroy blocks directly; and while these power-ups add variety to the game, they also tend to add to its randomness. Among the block-destroying levels are also a number of geometric boss fights (Behold the dread fury of the Meta-Square!), and while they have little to do with the core mechanic, they also add a different twist, as you puzzle out how to destroy these Euclidean menaces with your limited repertoire of maneuvers.

I'm a big fan of the randomly generated soundtrack in RADiancE. The ball produces random pitches whenever it strikes a surface, and the music changes key every time a block is destroyed (actually, I think it changes mode, but that only matters if you're a music theory nerd like me). The music gets more intense, adding percussion and ambient harmony as you destroy more blocks. While it sounds a little abrupt in earlier levels with fewer blocks, it's very effective when there are many blocks to destroy and the music has a chance to build gradually. I imagine, though, that the code and resources needed to execute the music is what accounts for the unusually long loading time, so there is a price.

RADiancE is much more than a slapdash chimera of two different classic games. The colorful neon graphics and inventive use of music and sound make for a bold, flashy presentation. And while there is more than a little bit of randomness in the gameplay, there is also enough skill required to make it interesting to arcade fans. RADiancE goes beyond simply combining two games and expands the concept into something original.

Play RADiancE