Insane Balancing On One Leg In Extremely High Places is a game with a self-explanatory name. It’s indie. It’s free. It has high scores. Do you need any more explaining than that?
Oh, all right.
Month: January 2013
Longtime readers may recall that I was quite impressed with Might and Magic Book One, a game originally released in 1986, when I played it for the first time a few years ago. Impressed enough, in fact, that I honored it with the very first History Lessons post on this blog. Well, it turns out I’m not the only one who likes that particular brand of old-school role-playing. Swords and Sorcery — Underworld Gold is an homage to the first two Might and Magic games, created (as they were) by a single person.
Now, the word “homage” does not fully capture just how similar Underworld is to those early games. The six-character party, the first-person turn-based movement, the 16×16 grid maps, the combat system, and even many specific spells are pretty much copied from the first Might and Magic games. In fact, the original version of Underworld had almost no graphics, just like Might and Magic Book One. Underworld creator Charles Clerc later made a slew of design changes and bug fixes, and hired an artist to redo all the graphics, resulting in the newer, shinier Gold edition.
Actually, let’s talk about those graphics first.
Endless Forms Most Beautiful has an interesting history. It was originally released by Dave Hughes early in 2012 for the ZX Spectrum. Yes, the ZX Spectrum, a machine that first hit the market in 1982. There is still a community developing for the Spectrum over at World of Spectrum, although I imagine many of the games are actually played through emulation these days.
Anyway, Locomalito (known for their retro-styled freeware games like Hydorah and l’Abbaye Des Morts) were looking for a game to remake for PC, and decided that Endless Forms Most Beautiful was an ideal candidate. The port not only updates the graphics with a more recent retro aesthetic, but also apparently lowered the difficulty significantly to make it more accessible to newcomers. Now, you can play this remake of the arcarde-style game for free on your PC.
I am playing Dishonored extremely slowly. Which is amusing, because apparently one of the main complaints that certain players have brought against the game is that it is too short. I hear that this is true, provided one heads directly for the objective in each mission. But I’ve been meticulously sneaking into every nook and cranny I can find, taking my sweet time about it, such that my Steam counter says I’ve played for 15 hours already but I’ve only just finished the second mission. And since I’ve barely been able to find time to play, it’s been a really rather epic stretch of time since I first started. I’m hoping I can pick up the pace, because I’ve quite enjoyed it so far.