Well here’s a little success story that makes me happy. Fancy Pants Adventure was one of the best flash games of its kind, and it was created entirely by a single man. Brad Borne is both an excellent programmer and animator, which is a rare thing, so it’s no wonder he was snapped up by EA to work on some 2D projects. His quirky platformer is now available on Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network and I played it for a bit at the weekend…
After being hired by EA to make the excellent Mirrors Edge 2D, Borne seems to have been working hard on the console version of Fancy Pants Adventure. This time, with the full help of EA behind him the game has been able to expand substantially, with a whole host of new features such as 4-player co-op, melee weapons, and fully customisable characters with collectible items. It still has the same charm and style the original flashn games has, but seeing it on a proper HD tv and controlling with a 360 gamepad is undoubtedly the best way to experience it.
I hope this sells lots because its brilliant. In the vein of Super Mario Bros Wii, having 4 friends running around semi-competing to complete each level is pure chaotic fun. Check out the trailer below.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Format: PC
Year: 2000
It may look clunky as hell thanks to the original Unreal engine, but Deus Ex was a pioneer in videogames because it gave the player so many choices to make. It resulted in one of the deepest gaming experiences of the time, because it went to great effort to show the consequences of those choices. The story was spread across many ‘hub’ levels, giving you total freedom to approach your objectives whichever way you wanted, aided by an RPG style upgrade tree that you invested in as you played. Wanna finish it without killing a single soul? That is entirely possible. Prefer to tool up with a rocket launcher and just murder your way to the end? Nothing could stop you. Your NPC allies would respond differently back in the Unatco base, depending on what you did out in the field. This level of responsiveness was unparalleled for a long time, to the point that even if you walked into the ladies toilets, your boss would scold you for it during the mission debrief later on. It was many little moments like that which made the game so memorable for me.
It’s difficult to describe the levels of hype that I felt leading up to the release of Half Life 2, and I know I wasn’t alone. This was a generation-defining moment in gaming, the likes of which has never really been replicated, and likely never will, for multiple reasons. Not only was HL2 a huge leap forward for its artistic and technological design, it ushered in an entirely new way to buy games and changed the gaming landscape forever.
Format: PC
Release date: 1993
I have 2 memories of this game that are separated by over 20 years.
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