Mento

@buzz_clik: I actually found the music in Equinox quite intimidating as a youngster, especially the boss music. It has a weirdly intense and atmospheric (but great!) soundtrack for such a brightly-colored, cartoony game. Plok is a similar case.

EDIT: Turns out Plok is Tim (and Geoff) Follin's work too. Figures.

Hey duders, this is a blog that I wrote and posted to the internet. I might just skip these introductions in the future.

We're all aware of and have varying levels of excitement for the resurgence of two major genres from our childhood that had since vanished (or retreated to the dark realms of the hardcore and foreign audiences): Graphic Adventure games and Fighter games. But what of the other niche genres that disappeared as times and attitudes and technology changed? Whenever the urge strikes, I'll be using this feature to highlight some nearly-forgotten type of game that I've noticed has made a comeback through the increasingly relevant channels of downloadable Indie games - created by developers who clearly fondly remember this shit as much as I do.

On this edition of Wise Fwom Your Gwave we're looking at Isometric Puzzle Platformers. Now, we're all familiar with the isometric viewpoint - that weirdly 45-degree-angled bird's eye view where "up" isn't up but actually diagonally up and right. Many games, such as Final Fantasy Tactics or Baldur's Gate or Diablo and plenty of others use this view as a stylistic choice. The true isometric puzzle platformer, a genre that really started with Q*Bert and Zaxxon but found its groove in classic C64 and Spectrum games like Knight Lore and Head-Over-Heels, depends on its slightly disorientating presentation to set up several jumping, item-placing and maze-orienteering puzzles to test players with their sheer difficulty. More examples: The Cadaver games attempted to meld this action-puzzle gameplay with a more traditional RPG, Solstice and Equinox make for a very accessible duo of NES/SNES adventures and Monster Max is a very densely packed series of puzzles for the original Game Boy.

Because the isometric format can be considered a form of "2 and a 1/2"D, a concept I'm not technically allowed to talk about due to Gerstmann's Law, it seemed like a sneaky way for designers and artists with too much integrity to create highly detailed sprite-based 2D worlds and characters while appeasing whatever marketing executives or focus groups that refuse to release anything with fewer dimensions than three. Of course, as 3D technology caught up to be as aesthetically pleasing as the older and wiser 2D format, the number of new releases that used the isometric view slowed to a trickle - including these platformer puzzler things. Which brings us to the present.

Moonpod's Mr. Robot (available on Steam) is a sci-fi themed puzzle platformer that uses the isometric format to depict a tiny robot attempting to rescue the stasis-kept humans from the hostile forces on board. Orbital Media's Scurge: Hive is a (very) derivative Metroid-esque adventure that is based around exploring non-linear isometric rooms and figuring out how to acquire keys and activate transporter nodes. Crystal Dynamics' surprisingly not awful Tomb Raider game - Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light - isn't quite isometric, but sets up its puzzles with a fixed 3D camera which creates a similar effect. It's starting to feel like this genre has a presence again, if only in small numbers so far. If Super Meat Boy is any indication, we're all eager for more super-tough nostalgia trips.

Bonus Comics

After reading (or skipping >:( ) all that waffle, it's time for more of this thing I do a lot now.

Deus Ex

Scurge: Hive

Hunted: The Demon's Forge

Because it's their last day, and one or the other of them keeps featuring my dumb comics, I made a comic for Intern Nick (Babylonian) and Intern Ben (GlenTennis) as a final day gift to see them off. It's posted below with Nick's permission.

I'm sure there's a busy thread around for seeing them off already, but feel free to wish them well here too. Hoping for more Meta-games and Internal Affairs podcasts via some kind of Skype networking thingummy from them in the future.

Braid vs Flower? Tough call for an art question.

Fortunately, it wasn't an art question but an elegance question. So now it's the elegance of a petal floating through the breeze to gentle music vs the elegance of a date-rapist hydrocephalic who constantly needs to reverse his clumsy-ass collisions with furballs so a blocky dinosaur can make fun of him. Sorry Ana. Though if we're just judging the arguments I'd say you both represented your games equally well (assuming Ana was making a case for an elegant narrative/presentation package.)

Before the jerkbutts show up and say this in an angrier way, you guys could use a shorter intro. Maybe just cut it to: 
Lemon: "Steve" 
Kessler: "Matt" 
Lemon: "Coward" 
Kessler: "Coward too" 
Both: "Let's fix that!" *both hold incredibly goofy 'let's go!' poses*

The trouble with doing this many is how often the game cards show up. The questions are vaguely defined enough that you can choose to interpret them however you want (which has lead to some creative cases made), but there only seems to be a few dozen game cards and they're laced with lemons like "Passage." I can't say how many people have even heard of Passage, so I'll assume that whichever indie developer was behind it was probably behind the card game too.
 
I'd suggest hitting this link (props to LordAndrew) five times and moving on from there. I tried it, got two unknown games with almost no details, an indie game about sinks, a Saturn shmup and the as-yet unreleased next Smash Bros. Discussion-inspiring stuff.

"The Vinnysaurus cast bufu on the hydroelectric plant, you have insufficient power. I told you you'd regret it if you cut back on funding."
 
Vinny lucked out on the sudden death card. Maybe should've let him do the same thing with the game cards and see if he didn't get Rez or ICO or something else that takes an afternoon to beat.

Since I appear to have killed this promising thread, here's the other guys' evil double names: Krom Badhearse, (Count) Vile van Anal-Cry and the diabolical Geff Jerstmann.

The DOOM thing is just like Metroid and Mario, in that it wasn't necessarily the first of its type but its huge amount of success led to so many imitators that they eventually had to be legitimized by being re-classed as an entire genre. I think a major problem with the video game genre system is because a lot of them had a single, novel "origin point" game that spawned way too many replicas. It starts getting a little messy when they overlap like this.

Here's a low rent MS Paint job from myself. If anyone's wondering, Navy Raids is an anagram of Ryan Davis. It's an evil double thing.