This is really more for my use than anybody else’s, but I figure the blog needed an update and it might as well be about games:

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Super Crate Box

Incredibly simple, clever, and fast-paced. The scoring system is goddamned genius; the only way to get points is to get crates, but each crate changes your weapon. As a result, you’re making split-second decisions every single time you score. Do I use this awesome minigun to clear out the entire room, wasting time and not actually getting points in the process but potentially making the next few crates easier to grab? Do I just jump around, grabbing as many crates as I can to get a high score early and then deal with the monsters? Oh shit, I only have a shotgun and the next crate is next to a half-dozen floating skulls; do I just rush the crate and hope it’s holding a bazooka, or do I take my time and try to kill the skulls while praying nothing stomps me from above? You’ll need to have pretty good twitch reflexes to succeed at Super Crate Box, but it requires you to make — as is the case with so many well-designed arcade games — a lot of subtle, interesting strategic choices. Fantastic graphics, great music, wonderfully addictive. And free.

More after the jump.

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BECAUSE REALLY GOOD

Oh shit! It’s my first ever Gearbox credit!

I wrote some “creature lore” (i.e. backstory and laffs) for some baddies from The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. I didn’t write much — certainly nowhere near as much as designers Jonathan Hemingway and Paul Hellquist — but still first credit! Yay!

If you can’t use your blog as a shameless place to show what Team Fortress 2 items you’re trading, what CAN you use it for?

(Also, I’ll write some critical stuff about the Mannconomy just so this post doesn’t come off as 100% selfishness. [Just 95%, maybe.])

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If you’re not in the mood to spend money on The Scariest Game Ever Made And Maybe The Best Horror Game Of All Time Next To Silent Hill Shattered Memories, there is a demo here. Just play it — it’s free, and it’s spectacularly good.

Long story short: it really understands how to create a terrifying atmosphere through environmental narrative and interactivity.  When you get to the inevitable “here’s where people were tortured, isn’t this scary” level, the terror is heightened due to the fact that you can actually manipulate the torture machines — you can get inside an iron maiden; you can personally yank the chains that once pulled a victim’s arms from their sockets.

Amnesia also manages to nail one thing Shattered Memories attempted, but kinda-sorta failed at (which is good, because it’s so goddamn important to making the player feel frightened): total player disempowerment. You cannot fight anything. You have to run or hide upon meeting an enemy; you can’t even look at an enemy for too long or your character will go insane. There’s a distinct magic in accidentally gaining the attention of a bad guy, sprinting into a room and slamming the door shut behind you before shutting yourself in a closet like a scared little girl. The “oh shit you just got spotted” music still pumping, you listen, tense, as the bad guy breaks down the door into the room. You hear his footsteps as he gets closer and closer to the closet.

A pause, that seems to last forever.

The music seems to fade away. You slowly — slowly – crack open the door to the closet, praying that you won’t find yourself staring straight into the face of a demon once you do. The coast seems clear, for now. You spend the next fifteen seconds convincing your heart to return to its normal speed.

It’s also on Steam, if you’re one of those guys who never buys indie games unless they’re on there.

If you are going to PAX, you need to (A) go to our GameTrailers panel and say hi to me and my dad, then (B) head to the show floor and play both SpyParty and Monaco.

I did a writeup of Chris Hecker’s SpyParty while I was still at Destructoid (long story short: it’s potentially the best multiplayer game I’ve ever played), but I never got around to talking about Monaco.

I will do exactly that after the jump.

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Maybe buy it if you’ve got an iPhone or iPad.

It may seem overly punishing or slow the first dozen or so times you play it, but once you begin to understand just how much of the game is really focused on momentum, it becomes an addiction. The gravity bombs represent one of the most straightforward risk/reward systems I’ve ever seen that, when combined with the momentum physics and your ability to bounce off the walls, can lead to some legitimate edge-of-your-seat moments.At least twice, I’ve found myself gritting my teeth and raising my eyebrows as my little dude came within an inch of being obliterated by an orange bomb, only to bounce off a wall and swing past it by a few pixels.

Davis and I bought Super Street Fighter IV to entertain the Dtoid guests at our wedding. We spent about twenty minutes trying to play it before deciding we were both too stupid and unskilled at fighting games to wring any real degree of enjoyment out of it (to this day, I have not gotten above a C rating in defense or technique).

While it’s obvious that there is a huge market for these sorts of high-level fighting games that hold an implicit respect for the player’s skill and understanding of fighter etiquette, I have to ask: why, unlike nearly every other videogame genre I can think of, do so many fighting games not include modes or options that cater to people who suck?

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…Scored to the Robocop theme song, with all the sprites replaced by copyright-infringing mascots.

Basically, after we finished the “real” version of Runner — a version considerably more mopey and ex-girlfriend-filled than this one — Jon said he wanted to make a joke version with funny sprites. We didn’t really have an excuse until Bit.Trip Runner was announced.

Long story short, we thought it’d be funny to fabricate some lawsuit with Gaijin to (A) give us an excuse to post about their game every once in a while, because we like those guys a lot and (B) give Jon an excuse to make the silly version of Runner under the wait-that-makes-no-sense pretense of copyright infringement. Most people either didn’t like or didn’t get the joke, so it was kind of a failure in that respect, but whatever — we got to put Robocop’s head on my body. I call that a win.

Weirdly, the music in this version syncs up with the action WAY better than it did in the original game. Like, eerily so.