Surely this logical method for solving a sudoku puzzle without thinking is completely obvious. I mean, how else do people solve these things? By guesswork?
According to my save file, I’ve played LocoRoco for a good 36 hours so far, and I still haven’t quite seen everything. This game is just pure, distilled fun, where many games these days feel more like a chore than a hobby.
I love exploring game worlds, and the 20 berries and wealth of secret areas hidden throughout each level provide great replayability. It’s not a difficult game, but there’s enough of a challenge there to keep you coming back for some time. The music is hilarious and varied, changing subtly as you pick up more LocoRoco, with a chorus of Simlish-esque nonsense to accompany it.
Collecting secrets rewards you with parts for your LocoRoco house, a sort of Incredible Machine physics minigame, with living blobs instead of balls. And you can pick up more parts in the two minigames, a claw machine, and a sort of golf obstacle course. Finally, you can create your own levels using LocoRoco Edit, although you can only lay down parts as in the LocoRoco house, rather than full terrain editing. It’s a shame, but an understandable limitation.
I can’t really explain what a joy this game is, but anything that makes me laugh not because I saw something funny, but just because I’m so happy, must be pretty good. Go buy it.
Ever since getting the demo of this game a couple months ago, I’ve been quivering with anticipation in a manner not unlike the game’s main characters. It finally arrived today (thanks to Amazon’s efficient pre-order service). I’ll try to post some comments once I’ve played it a bit, if I can tear myself away.
Introducing Inform 7. Stephen Granade at Brass Lantern gives a good introduction and overview of Inform 7. I think what I missed in my last post on the subject is that the natural language thing is more than just syntactic sugar; it actually introduces a whole new rules-based way of describing your game world to the computer.
I’m finding it difficult to put into words just how happy this game is. The LocoRoco are wobbly, singing, cute little blobs, who can join together to form a lumbering mass o’ fun. There’s a demo out, and I urge anyone who has a PSP to download it now.
Don’t be worried about not being able to understand the Japanese, the controls are beautifully simple. You tilt the world using the shoulder buttons, and jump by pressing them both down then releasing. Tapping the circle button will split the LocoRoco up, and holding it down will join them together again.
Don’t be fooled though, the game is amazingly rich. Even after playing the demo over and over, trying for a perfect score, I think I’ve spent more time just sitting and watching them play around on their own.
Graham Nelson has just released Inform 7. It’s a radically new frontend to the de facto standard of interactive fiction design tools, Inform.
The big difference? Instead of having to learn a special programming language, you can now use natural English sentences to describe your game to the computer. See the gallery for a walkthrough of its new features. It looks really impressive.
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David’s made a Flash game called Swing. It features a ball on a string, which swings. Hence the name.
You have to swing the ball around and collect as many stars as you can. The trick is that you can only control the pivot point of the string, and you have to let physics do the rest.
It’s a beautiful game. Unsurprisingly, I suck at it (my high score is 19, w00t), but watching David play it is inspiring stuff.
Welcome to Two Brain Cells, by the way.