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Monday, December 10, 2007
Man, am I ever glad M is home. I'd forgotten how nice it is to talk to her :)
Aquaria
After seeing that it had won the IGF last year, I was super-stoked to play this. Unfortunately, the "spring" release rapidly changed to "summer", then to "it's done when it's done". This was looking more and more like it would up with other independent hopefuls (I'm looking at you, Braid - if you really had such awesome time-travelling mechanics, shouldn't you be out by now?) - lost in the limbo of endless revisions and fixes.
Fortunately, they managed to pull everything together, and released it last Friday. I wasn't actually expecting that much from it, after all the waiting - and initially, it did start off a little slow. But the world quickly opens up, and once it does, it is friggin' sweet. It has all the joy and fun of the classic 2d Metroid games, but feels more fluid because you can swim around in any direction rather than hop from platform to platform.
What really makes the game, however, are the creatures. There's astonishing variety here, with most of the fascinating creatures of the deep represented - vampire squids, blowfish, moray eels, etc. What's great is that each of the creatures has different behaviour - some ignore you, some attack you in groups, others squirt ink at you then swim away - it's constantly entertaining.
Aquaria trailer: (man, I'm impressed I figured out how to embed videos)
I'm preparing a list of my favourite games of the year, and I'm pretty sure this will be on it. (Incidentally, my favourite game of the year starts with p and rhymes with ortal - but how could it not, being a game about cake and all?).
Aquaria
After seeing that it had won the IGF last year, I was super-stoked to play this. Unfortunately, the "spring" release rapidly changed to "summer", then to "it's done when it's done". This was looking more and more like it would up with other independent hopefuls (I'm looking at you, Braid - if you really had such awesome time-travelling mechanics, shouldn't you be out by now?) - lost in the limbo of endless revisions and fixes.
Fortunately, they managed to pull everything together, and released it last Friday. I wasn't actually expecting that much from it, after all the waiting - and initially, it did start off a little slow. But the world quickly opens up, and once it does, it is friggin' sweet. It has all the joy and fun of the classic 2d Metroid games, but feels more fluid because you can swim around in any direction rather than hop from platform to platform.
What really makes the game, however, are the creatures. There's astonishing variety here, with most of the fascinating creatures of the deep represented - vampire squids, blowfish, moray eels, etc. What's great is that each of the creatures has different behaviour - some ignore you, some attack you in groups, others squirt ink at you then swim away - it's constantly entertaining.
Aquaria trailer: (man, I'm impressed I figured out how to embed videos)
I'm preparing a list of my favourite games of the year, and I'm pretty sure this will be on it. (Incidentally, my favourite game of the year starts with p and rhymes with ortal - but how could it not, being a game about cake and all?).
