mcbpete's indie game of the month - Tasty Static

So for those who've played the DOS classic Skyroads you basically have to download this now! For those too young / couldn't be doing with any of that HIMEM.SYS & MEMMAKER.exe shit - it's a sort of racing game but your main task is just to make it to the end in one piece. It's Trailblazer crossed with Tron (kinda) and it gets pretty tough darn quickly (but is utterly compulsive, and the music's ace)

Anyway it's grand, it's free and it's for PC, Mac and Linux folks

And here's a sneak peek -

Download the cheeky monkey here - http://www.tastystatic.com/

holy shit it's skyroads

have you played

a) plants v zombies

b) braid

c) crayon physics deluxe

d) everyday shooter, mcbpete?

the insurgence of excellent, non-shitty and amateur indie games lately excites me*

we really are finally starting to see some very, very good games developed by individuals or small teams**, and i think it's great. it coincides with a real paradigm shift in how people get games as well - steam, xbox live, wii channels etc

steam especially though :) - they had a great deal last weekend - audiosurf, blueberry garden, braid, crayon physics deluxe, darwinia, everyday shooter, gish, mr. robot, the path & world of goo for $30. no arguing with that.

* insert 'braid is not an indie game' argument here. i'll counter-insert 'portal is an indie game IMO' argument. anyway crayon physics is barely even a game. it's almost eno-esque. i play it to relax. i am, however, compleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetely addicted to PvZ at present. i woke up at 8am last saturday with an urge to play it :(

** for the first time, really, since david braben and mike singleton sat down to write awesome shit for the speccy 48 or BBC, really. even by the C64 it had changed.

  On 8/11/2009 at 1:52 AM, kaini said:

we really are finally starting to see some very, very good games developed by individuals or small teams**,

It never really went away for certain genres (roguelikes, IF, other faggy non-graphical shit for dorks).

Oh yeah, and just seeing these words

  On 8/11/2009 at 1:12 AM, mcbpete said:

HIMEM.SYS & MEMMAKER.exe

sent shivers down my spine. I started getting into PC gaming during the twilight years of the DOS age (1994 or so) and it was still a fucking nightmare then. DOSBox is a joy not just for reliving the games I used to love, but for playing the games I could never get working in the first place!

i remember eye of the beholder 2 being so very awesome and then westwood wouldn't pay the team for EOTB3 (which predictably sucked)

anyway the EOTB2 team went off to do lands of lore I and II independently. the struggle to get fuckin speech working! jesus wept! endless fucking about with extended and expanded memory depending on the game. my autoexec had a primitive shell script in it long before i ever hear of linux.

also around those times was the ultima underworld series, which had full proper 3d long before quake, and were excellent rpgs to boot

this shit was all JUST on the cusp of a proper gui, and proper utilisation of memory beyond a meg*

* 'no-one will ever need more than 640k' - bill gates circa 1983; thanks bill.

Ha, I started a game of Underworld just last week, I should really pick that up again but lately I'm addicted to Linley's Dungeon Crawl (actually one of its open-source variants). It offers a stripped-down and 'fairer' roguelike experience than Nethack or ADOM or something. And then there's Dwarf Fortress... the amount of coverage which DF has recieved in the mainstream gaming media over the past few years has been really heartening.

Somebody needs to remake Space Harrier. I had it on the Sega Master System... with 3D GOOGLES!!

Up/2/1/2/1/1 bitches

Oh and the normal non 3D version kicked ass on the Master System. It had 30 levels instead of the 10 3D ones... and the amazing bonus stage that surely an inspiration of the Never Ending Story dog.

Sorry for highjacking lol

SH was an early example of voxels - a 3d background with loads of pre-rendered tiny sprites (as opposed to a shape defined by vectors) making up a character (as opposed to scenery) - each sprite would have at least 8 iterations for each distance, for 0-360deg in 45 deg intervals.

i remember games allowing up to 8 z-distances. back in the day everything from comanche to UUW to descent (which was another fucking amazing game) used voxel tech. when i think about it a reboot of voxel could make a really original looking game with modern graphics hardware. besides pc and arcade stuff, the SNES mode 8 was amazingly well equipped to do really fast, relatively low-res voxel stuff like that.

oh! and this guy should be fed through a fucking mincer!

http://www.iphonegamenetwork.com/update-on-edgy-lawsuit

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-edge-of-reason (long, but comprehensive)

the three-liner:

i) hairy 80s programmer guy had software company in 80s called edge. made some good if sometimes derivative games actually

ii) modern company develops sweet puzzle game for iphone and calls it 'edgy'. it's a pretty generic maze game

iii) 80s programmer guy makes site with shitty flash games and sues modern company developing sweet game for iphone

what really annoys me was EDGE's best game was bobby bearing which was a more arcadey version of spindizzy (still in my top10 games) which was in turn a more puzzley version of marble madness. all derivative. all good.

this guy is a fucking prick.

Some good games with voxels:

Blade Runner (voxel characters on pre-rendered backgrounds)

Outcast (best third-person adventure/shooter of its generation)

That squad combat game (edit: Delta Force)

That helicopter game (edit: Comanche (which lent its engine to Delta Force))

Did descent use voxels? I'm not so sure it did

it did.

also blade fuckin runner. excellenr

very atmospheric. 5 CDs and half of it was vangelis - win

It was 4 CDs, and a lot of the soundtrack was actually recreations of the Vangelis originals (still really good though). And I still think you're wrong about descent - I'll meet up and fight you if you want.

http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/games-with-voxel-graphics

i'm drunk right now, so if you can make it to limerick before the really cheap lager wears off, you're on. bring cider.

we shall meet in the middle;

  Quote

Descent was released in February 1995, just over a year after id Software's Doom (December 1993). Like most games of its era, Descent uses a software renderer, because mainstream 3D graphics accelerator cards did not exist at the time. However, while most of its contemporaries— such as Doom included— use sprites to render enemies, Descent renders enemies in full 3D using polygon meshes, a technique employed by Quake the following year. (However, Descent does use sprites for power-ups and the hostages.) Unlike Doom and Quake, Descent does not use BSP trees for visibility culling (to speed up rendering), instead taking advantage of the game's use of collections of cubes to form rooms and tunnels. This system was very efficient, and made possible one of the first true 3D textured environments in a video game. On lower-end systems, detail levels could be reduced to cut out some of the smaller polygons on robots and render solid color blocks in place of textures on distant walls and across passageways in the distance.

 

The original Descent uses indexed 8-bit color in DOS's display mode 13h, using 320 × 200 resolution. Unlike its sequel, it uses only one 256-color set during gameplay, rather than a unique set for each group of levels; these colors tinge red during damage and purple during fusion charging.he Macintosh and later PC versions allow higher resolutions, such as 640 × 480. The default engine uses a software renderer in which the perspective transformation for texture mapping is only performed once every 32 pixels, causing textures to appear to pop or shift when viewed from certain angles. The software renderer also uses nearest-neighbor texture filtering, as opposed to bilinear filtering or trilinear filtering used by modern video cards. [/color=red]Nearest-neighbor texture filtering causes aliasing artifacts, such as blocky or swimming textures. These rendering compromises allowed the game to be played on most PCs contemporary with it, while better rendering techniques would have prevented it from being running on any but the most powerful gaming PCs in 1995.

3D graphics are for those born after 1990 anyway.

absolutely. i'm tempted to up an ISO of william shatner's TEKWAR

i liked it until the freefall levels. then i had to take a break before i lost my shit

Fuck, I remember trying to play that after hearing it was the first build engine game... LOL.

thank you very much for bringing this awesome game to my attention mcbpete! i'm a huge skyroads fan, (especially the music) and have even worked on my own crappy skyroads clone in flash. this game is definitely awesome, love the style

That was fun until I got to "autumn."

I've been playing Trine. Nowhere near the quality of Braid or World of Goo.

I think I should buy Multiwinia, Darwinia was awesome! Anyone playing this?

Hmm of everything on the C64 I'd say it's closer to Cosmic Causeway :

yeah man fuck this game, it's like the guy who made it focused more on tricking the player rather than challenging him. "hey! hey go in this tunnel! HA HA just kidding you dumb fuck have some lava." :(