Huh, I have some Gameboy games

Interesting. Turns out I have a bunch of Gameboy games that I started and never finished. Since I don't have wifi today (I'm posting from my Kindle's 3G), I thought I would go back and try to pick some of them up again.

Problem. I have no idea where I am supposed to go. This is an issue for the Zelda games. In both The Minish Cap and Link's Awakening, I'm at the final dungeon and completely lost. Where am I? What was I doing? Where was I going? This is a little disorienting.

So I guess Zelda is a wash. Maybe I'll look them up later. What else?

I never beat Metroid Zero Mission. But I think I see where I am in this one: I'm at the final boss. And Mother Brain is HARD. For a brain in a jar, she sure knows how to kill bounty hunters. Her lair is filled with turrets and lasers that shoot at Samus and there is a pool of boiling lava on the floor. So I have to stand on these tiny platforms and try to fire missiles at the tank. Except the turrets constantly shoot me and every time I get hit, I fall in the lava and have to jmp back up, and if I get hit again I fall back in the lava and it's a hard fight, okay?

Stupid Mother Brain.

Anyway I also tried out Auditorium. Pretty neat game. There are these colored particles and the object is to get them to the right boxes to make music. You manipulate them with circular pad thingies that the level gives you. Like one pad pushes the particles up or down or left or right another makes them speed up, another makes them orbit around it, etc. Colorful game with interesting audio and visuals. I am enjoying it so far.

Been trying the "For All Intensive Purposes" bonus levels in Escape Goat too. They are definitely difficult. And fun. I approve.

I tried to play another level in Trapped Dead but ran into perfomance issues. So not today.

Indie Royale June Bug

Hey look, the new Indie Royale is out.





This time around, the games are PixelJunk Eden, Escape Goat, Noitu Love 2: Devolution, and Auditorium.

I'm actually excited about this one because I loved the Soulcaster games from the Valentine's Bundle, and MagicalTimeBean, the developer who made Soulcaster, is also responsible for Escape Goat.

Escape Goat is a platformer game with puzzle elements.

It was originally released on Xbox Live Arcade, where it's one of the most popular indie games available, and this is its first time being ported over to PC. I have a lot of goodwill towards this developer from my past experience with Soulcaster, and look at that trailer! That looks sweet! So basically, I'm already sold. It looks great.

But let's look at the other games.

Noitu Love 2 is an action game. I don't know much beyond that, but just looking at that gameplay footage, it looks pretty fun. I'm interested in trying this one out.

I'm less sure what to think of PixelJunk Eden. It looks kinda weird. Doesn't it look weird? It looks weird. I think it's some sort of platformer, but I'm not totally sure. Reserving judgement.

And lastly, we have Auditorium, which is a puzzle game. Looks pretty trippy. Might be interesting. I dunno, I'm mostly in it for Escape Goat.

Speaking of puzzle games, I played Ichi. And beat it. And got all A ranks on every level. Go me!

The way it works is there's a yellow dot. The yellow dot travels in a straight line and bounces off objects. You win the game by using the yellow dot to collect all the yellow circles in the level. However, you don't control the dot--you can only manipulate its environment by clicking to rotate red blocks, make shaking blocks vanish, and draw lines along the dot's current path.

Like I said, I've already managed to beat all 51 levels with a top rank, so it's not a super-hard game. But it is very cute, with its crayon-drawing art style and simplistic premise.

Yes, I think "cute" is an appropriate description. This is a simple game that's not very deep, but good casual fun. I can't say I love it, but disliking it would be like disliking a cute kitten.

So yeah, that's Ichi.

Also, I beat Ben There, Dan That.

I don't think I've ever seen anything as tongue-in-cheek as this game. It's constantly self-deprecating and lampshade-hanging, and it's actually pretty funny. So it's hard to hate it, I guess. Whatever my feelings about point-and-click adventure games, I have to concede that this one managed to make me smile. That's gotta be worth something, I suppose. *shrug*