I am disgusted by the total lack of Cave Story AKA Doukotsu

http://www.miraigamer.net/cavestory/

Perhaps the most under-appreciated game ever made is The Last Express (1997).

The game is hard to describe but it is something of a masterpiece. It cost millions to make but never achieved commercial success due to the marketing arm of the publisher going bust a few months before release. No advertising meant few sales.

Basically, the story is set on the last ever journey of The Orient Express in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War 1. The train is populated by a number of characters, each with their own motives and plans, and you are able to interact with most of them. Now, the beauty of the game is that the whole thing runs in real time (compressed though, obviously), and while other characters may be doing various things on the train you can only be in one place at once. This means you might miss a conversation or event, or come to a sticky end if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. You are free to roam the train, knock on doors, chat to other passengers at dinner, watch a musical performance etc.

You might be thinking "Well what if I miss something important?". The answer is that there are a great many endings to the game, most of them bad in some way.

For example, on my first play of the game I got onto the train and was trying to get my bearings. Instead of going to my cabin I went straight to the dining car and talked to a German chap - I asked him if he'd seen Tyler Whitney (your friend who you are supposed to meet on board). He suddenly got agitated and said something like "Isn't everybody? I'm sick and tired of this!", then stormed out. I thought "wtf" and carried on exploring the train - then two minutes later the German guy comes back and starts screaming and pointing at me. The game ended with an Englishwoman passenger reading her diary entry for the day - apparently the train stopped shortly after leaving Paris, a body was taken off and a young American was arrested for murder. I stopped and thought "Damn, this is hard!"

There are many more endings - I've had my throat slashed by an angry Serb and I've been arrested because a French kid saw me throw a body off the train, to name a couple. The story plays out differently each time depending on what you do, and when you do it. You might think this is pretty harsh on the player, especially as you essentially are given no guidance or instruction like in modern games. No tutorial - nothing. However, you can rewind time in the game (the lead designer later worked on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) to do things differently - so if you die you can choose a particular hour in the game to go back to, for example. Of course, you might not know what you'd done wrong to get yourself killed, so the game is very difficult indeed if you want to get a perfect ending. You always feel like you are racing against time as well - so the adrenaline is often pumping and you're thinking "What should I do next?"

The non-linear design of the game also means that various walkthroughs or hint guides on the Internet are completely different from one another.

Another thing which really impressed me was the high quality of the voice acting. All of the characters in the game speak in their native languages - no badly accented English here! Your character understands French and spoken Russian (but not written), and subtitles are displayed for those languages, but not for German or Serbian, for example. This means you will not understand some conversations, again making the game "harder" but more immersive.

One last thing to mention is the graphics. For 1997 they are pretty impressive. The backgrounds are pre-rendered (ala Final Fantasy VII, which came out in the same year) and the characters are drawn in the contemporary style of Art Nouveau using rotoscoping (like in A Scanner Darkly).

It all combines to create something which isn't so much a game as a work of art. I highly recommend that everyone obtain a copy of it, though I don't think it is in stores anymore.

A screenshot and a trailer:

I was going to post it, but I forget why I didn't.

Wow, sounds very interesting will but after playing LSD I'm a little bit iffy about "random, depending on what you do" sort of games. Still.

It's not completely random. Use a hint guide and you can figure out important things you need to do.

I found this somewhere while browsing a popular news site: http://www.wolfire.com/humble

The 5 indie games mentioned there for whatever price you want to name, so you can be cheap if you want or support the developers or even have it go to some kind of charity. You get to choose who the money goes to.

Offer is available for about 7 days; probably started about an hour before I posted this.

-update-

Was justing looking around on the page, and I noticed their statistics are showing several people buying it every few seconds. I tried refreshing a few times, waiting just a few seconds between, and several more show up on the number. lol

-update2-

Oh, must have been 10 days, not 7, because I saw a screenshot somewhere from when it was just barely up. Well, it is about 7 now.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on May 4 2010, 9:34 pm by ShadowFlare.

Had it for xbox... 'twas very good. The gameplay is very good and the enviroments are varied - they're all totally different. The goal in the game is to enter the minds of others in order to resolve their issues... it's quite interesting - and fun. I'd recommend it to anyone with good taste

looks awesome, but unfortunately those games don't even look like I'd want to waste space on it.

Megaman Legends 2
Fun game that I didn't even know existed till a few weeks ago

Just beat Aquaria recently. I guess you could consider it a mashup of Ecco the Dolphin and Metroid, in a sense. Pretty fun, if you like nonlinear exploration games.

There's a lot of little things I could complain about, but I really won't since I think it deserves better than that. You can sense they were trying to make a decent game, and to a large extent, they did succeed. If I had to evaluate it, I'd say it's at least as good as Cave Story, but for different reasons and in different ways, of course.



If you got the Humble bundle, you should already have it.

I tried the demo, it didn't support my resolution and it pushed the game to the left with one solid black bar on the right (rather than equal black bars on each side). The locations of the buttons were all messed up, and I couldn't click on things properly. Took me forever to figure out how to exit the damn thing.

Odd. It always gives me an option to set my resolution the first time I started it up. Try it without fullscreen, maybe?

It let me set my resolution; it just didn't have any widescreen ones. Without fullscreen would probably work though... I might try again.

Also: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/06/Aquaria-goes-open-source

Apparently that only means the program itself, not the game data. Though that does mean those bugs are probably being fixed.

Yeah. Free as in free speech, not free beer. And such.

Be neat if someone adds a proper physics engine to it...

Beat Hazard is an amazing music game. It's like Audiosurf in the sense you can play your own songs, but in terms of gameplay it is like Touhou in space with seizures.

/download