YES. Death Ray Manta (DRM) – the classic arena shoot-em-up game from Indie God, Rob Fearon, is out now for iPhone and iPad and iPod and also your eyes.

That’s probably Rob on the right, there.

Death Ray Manta is an arcade game about making stuff explode.

It is just 69 of your EARTH PENCE at launch. That’s like a dollar or something. It’s a steal, and a blast.

Death Ray Manta is an ARCADE GAME. Two sticks and a screen full of laser beams…Death Ray Manta does not waste your time. There is no guff, no IAP, no upgrades, just a videogame. Tap to start. Score higher….Death Ray Manta is a game about blowing up stuff. All the stuff.
(official DRM game site, with DRM vids and more words)

What is DRM? Why Santa? Why Fanta?

Take the mind-bending, tooth-melting, eye-searing slap in the face that is a can of cold Fanta.

Add the warm, fuzzy, soft-bearded Santa snuggle of your childhood memories.

DEATH RAY MANTA is what you get.

This awesome conversion of an awesome game has been brought to iOS by Jeff Murray of Psychic Parrot Games. That’s probably him on the right there. I couldn’t find a picture of Santa wearing a parrot.

Seriously, what is it?

DRM is a very pretty arena shoot-em-up that manages to be soft and brutal at the same time.

You control a little glowy manta ray. You’re in an arena, Robotron-style. Hordes of glowing bad guys try to kill you: you have a massive laser death ray and you shoot the glowy death that makes them explode into even more glowy shrapnel.

It’s hypnotic, relentless and very pretty. It sounds pretty groovy too.

How hard is your manta?

The most you can score is 64 (I think), but you’re not gonna get anywhere near that. The early levels welcome you with big glowing neon arms, but only so the hard ones can melt your teeth off later.

Your gums, however, will keep smilin’ through.

It’s a serious game that doesn’t take itself (or you) too seriously. One life, no saves: it’s a simple distraction or a serious challenge – it just depends how you play it. You don’t ‘lose’. You just get as far as you can possibly get, and then try again and do better.

Finding the tiffin

Oh, and the tiffin. There’s a thing called a tiffin on every level. Collect it and you’ll add even more power to your massive laser death ray. Makes things even crazier, which makes it a bit harder, but then your death ray is significantly more deadly, which makes things a bit easier.

Love your Manta, just like Santa.

Will you make it past An American Manta in London? Will you reach The Abominable Dr. Manta? Is there really a level called Debbie Does Manta? Only one way to find out…

Get DRM on the App Store now!

Why do I/why should you care?

• ASCIIpOrtal is a very playable little puzzle game with a great sense of atmosphere
• It’s free and has some nice little game mechanics and suchlike
• I did the sounds and music

Check it out at  www.cymonsgames.com/asciiportal and if you have any strong positive opinions, make noise about it and let’s see if we can keep the profile nice and high and IGF judge-visible :]

For more info about the music, go here (work in progress page with some additional downloads).

– it’s a very playable little puzzle game with a great sense of atmosphere

– it’s an ASCII game, which means added retro goodness

– it’s free

– I did the sounds and music :]

Check it out, and if you can afford to, drop the author (Joe Larson) a dime or two by donating through his website, www.cymonsgames.com. He’s a nice guy and it’s a nice game that’ll keep you busy for a wee while.

For more info about the music, go here (work in progress page with some additional downloads).

I just hope the gameplay this implies is realised…

I’ve played a few mech games over the years and without exception they all boil down to one thing: a daft circle-strafing competition, as giant machines dance unfeasibly quickly around each other at a distance of about 50 feet.  This is boring. It is also unrealistic, but let’s not get into the pointless (but nonetheless long-running) argument about what constitutes realism in the 31st Century, whether mechs would be obsolete as tanks are becoming today, why these long-range killing machines are so close you can see the colour of the enemy pilot’s eyes, and so on.

It’s just boring because it’s unimaginative: a slightly slower fps, Quake with different graphics. But if we’re talking about taking cover in a city, using effective recon, worrying about building strength and mech weight, weapon range, smoke, spotting nice visual clues about weapon overheats and all the other stuff suggested by this video… then that’s more likeee.

I remember, years ago, when I saw in White Dwarf  an advert for Citytech, an expansion for the original Battletech game.  That was when the whole mech thing made sense to me. If you’re going to make enormous killing machines to traverse and fight over vast empty plains, I think you’d probably make them have wheels, or wings, or hoverjets or tracks or something. You wouldn’t make them walk.

If, however, you need your enormous killing machines to cope with an environment that’s basically designed for bipeds – a city, say – then legs make a lot more sense. The boardgame, of course, was always about terrain: it’s the earlier releases in the computer game dept that let the side down somewhat.

Anyway, I will believe in Mechwarrior 5 when I see it for myself (actually it’s just Mechwarrior – a ‘reboot’ apparently, not a sequel). Meanwhile it seems these guys are gonna give away MechWarrior 4 in the near future to drum up interest in giant walking robots, as if that were a concept no-one had heard of  recently. Can’t complain though.

Transcendence: funky free 2d space game action

Free arcade / RPG space game with roguelike tendencies

Following the discovery of Spelunky, I’ve found another fun, free game with a roguelike randomness to its design: Transcendence, by a guy called George Moromisato. This one’s been around for ages, it seems.  Set in space, it provides a unique game universe to explore every time you start a new game.

Still in Beta and still in development, Transcendence nonetheless manages to provide a pretty compelling experience. You start from humble beginnings with a simple spaceship, and then get involved in running and gunning, trading and upgrading and all the other stuff that made Elite great. Only in 2d, with nice rendered graphics and elements of an RPG, managing inventory and so on.

Some bits are still a bit rough around the edges, and the backstory is a bit vague, but there are some lovely touches. The combat isn’t bad either – a bit twitchy perhaps, but enough like Subspace  to keep me happy.

I’m still at the early stages with this one, so I won’t say anything more than it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time (and then it’ll be four hours later).

Get Transcendence here: http://neurohack.com/transcendence/

Spelunky - free, fun, evil and insanely difficult

A free roguelike platform game with snakes, spikes, traps and other evil.

Spelunky is a game of cave exploration (the clue’s in the name). You play a familiar whip-wielding, hat-wearing explorer character who has to delve deeper and deeper into increasingly dangerous caves in search of loot and secrets.

It’s a lot like Dungeon Crawl (and/or Stone Soup) in that regard, and for one of the same reasons: the game map changes each time you play.

I could probably bang on about procedurally generated levels or something, but I won’t because I don’t understand the technology. All that matters is that levels are different every time you play (strictly speaking it’s like all Roguelikes in that regard, but Crawl in particular for me in terms of style and deadly humour).

However, while the level layout changes for every game, the aim of the game and the insane, old-school difficulty remain the same.  It looks a plays just like the platformers I dimly remember from my 8-bit days. It has simple, functional, retro graphics; even more retro sound, creating using the very funky sound generator, SFXR; and very retro gameplay. It was made using Game Maker from YoYo Games.

There are a few issues (it’s still in Beta) and the control scheme isn’t quite perfect, although to be fair neither is my joypad. Regardless, Spelunky is a cute, compelling, evil gaming experience that reminds me  just how fecking difficult games used to be. Best of all it’s free, so go play it and worship the author, one Derek Yu.

Get Spelunky here: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=4017.0

If you drop a ball you lose points and take a step towards losing the game. If you get ’em past the computer-controlled paddle you win points and get to play for longer. 

It’s simple and fun and only marred by the eternal problem with Flash games: if, in your excitement, you mouse off the playing area you lose control and generally lose the game.

Play Pwong here: http://www.jgames.ch/jgames/play.php?id=204

It might look pretty, but if the game's as dumb as the demo is...

This is a short, annoyed review of the demo of the PC game, Burnout Paradise Ultimate Box (as found on the cover disc of PC Gamer #199).

I’m not really going to review the game itself. I did get as far as playing it but what I saw didn’t help overcome what I experienced up to that point, to whit:

Installation
The installer works ok until the bit where it wants you to install EA Downloader Monkey (or something similar). It’s probably a fine piece of software, who knows. What annoys me is that it doesn’t make clear a) why you need it, and b) that you don’t need it to try the demo. I don’t need EA or anyone else clogging up my PC with shit I don’t want. 

Config part 1
Running the game produces a nice little config screen where you can set graphics options and so on. Nice, that is, except for the lack of explanation for the settings it chose. I’m to assume, I suppose, that EA knows best and these are optimum for my PC config?

Making something happen
Now onto the really good stuff. I get past the obligatory big spinning logos for whoever made and/or published the thing (they are not actually obligatory. These people have the mistaken belief that we care). The screen displays a legend along the lines of “push any button”. I push a joypad button. Nothing happens. I push a mouse button. Nothing happens. I push a few keys on the keyboard. Nothing happens. I wait a short while then assume the demo was coded by idiots, and try and call up task manager to kill it. Nothing happens. Alt-F4? Nothing happens. After some serious three finger saluting I get task manager to appear; almost immediately, the demo regains focus and something’s actually happened in the background. It’s giving me the friendly advice about not switching off the machine when the little “saving to hard drive” logo is flashing – the sort of thing I’ve only started seeing fairly recently, aimed at the sort of console owners who don’t know what a hard drive is. A port then.

Life is short
Beyond this I manage to actually start the game, or at least to kick off what is a very boring introduction with apparently no means of skipping. The time is at least 15 minutes after I began the installation process, and about 10 after I launched the thing after install.

Config part 2
After what is a very boring wait through admittedly high quality voice overs, camera fly-bys and so on, I’m finally shown a car (that’s me apparently) and told to drive to the repair shop to get it fixed. I press buttons on the joypad, keyboard, mouse. Nothing happens. I assume I need to configure controls for one or more of the above, or at least to check a list of what button does what. I press Escape. It shows me three options, none of which relates to game config stuff. I go back to the game and start pushing keyboard buttons in earnest. I manage to change the camera. I change the radio station. There is no options menu button I can find. There is no quit game option. I bring up task manager and kill the demo to look for a keymap or readme document that might help. There isn’t one.

Life is definitely too short
While I did relaunch the game and finally heard a message telling me to hold accelerate to start the engine, and eventually had success holding the “A” key… it wasn’t worth it. Anyone who complained about the control method for vehicles in GTA IV will probably love this. It’s like driving a glue gun through a big 3d city. You can hit stuff and break things and it’s very pretty, but you can also take any corner at 200mph, and it feels like… I dunno, Micro Machines or something.

To top it off, when I went to uninstall it, they made me go to control panel and add/remove programs. What a bunch of bananas. EA. It’s in the name.