#a good bundle

A(s)century is a little text-game-story-thing. It’s set in the future where computers have taken everyone’s jobs. Ideally, making computers do unpleasant jobs would be great, but I think the implication is that the now jobless citizens have no money and die. At least the corporations are safe.

Your character finds a doohickey in a filing cabinet that rewrites reality or something. Or maybe it rewrites actual documents, which influence reality slightly? Either way, the character uses it to write advertisements.

The actual gameplay in A(s)century consists of clicking the highlighted words in the ad to change them slightly. It mostly looks like this:

(Olivio), the (colorful) new drink from DrinkCorp, boasts a (good) flavor that will make you (chew someone's face off)!

Your advertisements are so successful that you become the CEO, and then control the entire world. It’s a pretty effective business strategy.

Now your creation efforts shift toward making decisions for the President:

This Sunday, President (Olivio) promised to (do good things and not bad ones), and also to (abolish war and disease).

At least that’s what my choices looked like. I guess you could do bad things, too, but I can’t actually tell if any of this is making a difference. You see a selection of headlines every so often, maybe that changes?

In the end, your doohickey becomes/was always sentient, and becomes the ruler of the universe, which is probably fine. You can tell the thing means well because it communicates by posting detailed smilies.

I asked it if I could retire. Instead of the instant death I was expecting, I was transformed into the internet. A positive version of the internet, I mean. That’s a pretty good retirement, as long as I can stream in high quality.

I got a list of stats at the end recording how I did. I scored high on Synthetics and low on Control? These scores contribute to one of multiple endings, meaning that my internet ending was personalized just for me. That’s neat, but I ended up feeling that there wasn’t much actual effect my choices had on the story. Maybe a second playthrough would illuminate more differences?

A(s)century did one other odd thing. Instead of playing music, it provided a link to a Youtube video containing the game’s soundtrack. I let it play in the background. It felt like a cheap way to shove music into the game, although it might have been the only way to play music using their text engine, so I can’t blame them. Besides, the video ended just as I was finishing the game, so I guess it was set up just right.

PARTICLE MACE is Asteroids, but instead of a gun, you have a mace made of particles. The tutorial apologizes for not having any real weapons for me. That’s fine, tutorial. You did your best.

It’s a neat twist to the usual twin stick shooter format, and it seems like a solid game on top of that, but flailing around isn’t my thing. It reminds me of the Guppy challenges in Binding of Issac, which forced me to survive Hell Basement with only a small orbiting hairball for protection. I mean, of course I did it, but it was no fun at all. I prefer the direct approach. Which brings us to:

WE ARE DOOMED is Asteroids, but instead of a gun, you have a beam. Also I guess you’re doomed.

This is a more traditional twin stick shooter. Fly around, hold your beam on the enemies, and dodge stuff. This one, though, had a couple problems. First, there are too many particle effects. Particles explode across the screen from every object, sometimes when you hit them, sometimes for no reason at all. This makes it hard to identify the particles that will kill you on contact.

The other problem is that some objects can’t be destroyed, and it’s not clear which. Maybe a few playthroughs would make it clear, but it’s annoying to find out the the huge laser-turret I’m running from in an unstoppable force.

FJORDS is a puzzle platformer with a neat gimmick: the character’s grappling hook changes if you find a computer and change game variables.

The first thing I did was turn on all the variables, which broke my grappling hook and threw my character into a bottomless void of screaming letters, which was neat.

Sadly, the game couldn’t hold my interest, because these variables are changed through a traditional computer interface. SET WATERFALL TRUE, that sort of thing. And, just like traditional computers, it’s a gigantic hassle to deal with.

Catacomb Kids is basically what it sounds like. Some idiot children go in a cave and die. In game form, it’s an action side-scrolling roguelite about running, jumping, and hitting.

This one actually seems pretty good. Action and deathtraps are my kind of thing. The downside, though, is that the game is in “early alpha.”

Pre-release games bug me because, if I play them, I’m getting a weaker experience then I would if I waited an unknown amount of time. Looking at it the other way, though, it’ll keep getting better over time.

I’m curious about what they’re planning on adding to the game, because it seems pretty solid already. I didn’t play it for too long. Maybe there isn’t much actual content? I’ll be coming back to this one to find out.

Takishawa is Dead! is an odd 3d platformer, I think.

It starts with an Important Message: there’s a very dangerous criminal guy named Takishawa, and we have to find him! Normally, a phrase like “very dangerous criminal guy” would just be me making stuff up, but here it’s pretty close to the actual message.

My character is a small humanoid with a TV for a head, as is everyone else around me. Does this mean we all got the Important Message on our own... sets? How does this society work? I want to know.

Pretty soon I realize I have no method of identifying Mr. Takishawa. Pretty useless emergency broadcast, if it doesn’t include any details. Probably pointless too, because the usual plot twist is for it to be my character. That, and he’s apparently dead.