Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Did I post two games today?
Dangit! Now I have to work even harder. Shakes fist, emoting vigorously.
One Chance
What would you do if you discovered that there were only a few days left to your life... not to mention that lives of everyone you know, and everyone you don't?
That's the idea behind One Chance, an odd little art game where the world is about to succumb to a deadly virus. You're one of the scientists responsible for accidentally creating the virus, and now you need to decide how you'll spend your final days on Earth.
Concept
Surely just about every grown person has considered the idea that the planet might end one day, through a giant asteroid or a plague or alien invasion or something, and having the chance to act it out is pretty neat. What makes One Chance really nifty, though, is that you really do only get one shot at success - after you 'beat' the game once, you can't go back and start over. (Unless, you know, you empty your browser cache. But that's not the point!)
What makes this game's concept so neat, though, is that it blends your character's personal life with his professional. If you decide to pursue a cure to the virus, you may well succeed - but your family will pay the price for your negligence. You need to balance your priorities to keep them going... but then the world will suffer.
Oh, and you have a cute little daughter.
But you can betray your family!
See the problem? It's not an easy game to stomach.
Controls
Very, very simple. Move left and right, occasionally stop to interact with people or objects. This aspect of One Chance can get frustrating, as it takes your character a long time to move from one screen to the other, and you'll often have to move through multiple screens to get where you're going. Though the pace does add a sense of impending doom, as you're forced to watch society crumble around you, going from this...
To this...
Aaaaaand eventually to this.
Harsh.
Graphics
Decent. The visuals on One Chance are relatively basic, appearing as though they've been constructed from construction paper. They serve their purpose nicely.
Sound
There's only one song in this game, and it plays constantly. It's a fitting tune, given the theme of the game, but it gets a little aggravating after a while... and once the world goes kaput, silence works just as well, so don't feel too bad if you turn off your speakers.
(Oh, and there is one part with a song by Tautou, but that doesn't count.)
Challenge Rating
You don't really win or lose in this game, you just decide. Each of your decisions has a good and bad side. (Though, uh, admittedly, letting the world die kinda sucks, which usually happens!) That said, getting the ending you want can sometimes be trickier than you'd think, so you might be refreshing that cache more than once.
Conclusion?
One Chance is a cool experience, if rather depressing and clunky. You probably won't play it more than once or twice... but those play-throughs should prove thought-provoking nevertheless. And for those of you more interested in the subject, yes, the multiple endings make it a fairly replayable game, which does defeat the PURPOSE, but, oh well.
PLAY ONE CHANCE
That's the idea behind One Chance, an odd little art game where the world is about to succumb to a deadly virus. You're one of the scientists responsible for accidentally creating the virus, and now you need to decide how you'll spend your final days on Earth.
Concept
Surely just about every grown person has considered the idea that the planet might end one day, through a giant asteroid or a plague or alien invasion or something, and having the chance to act it out is pretty neat. What makes One Chance really nifty, though, is that you really do only get one shot at success - after you 'beat' the game once, you can't go back and start over. (Unless, you know, you empty your browser cache. But that's not the point!)
What makes this game's concept so neat, though, is that it blends your character's personal life with his professional. If you decide to pursue a cure to the virus, you may well succeed - but your family will pay the price for your negligence. You need to balance your priorities to keep them going... but then the world will suffer.
Oh, and you have a cute little daughter.
But you can betray your family!
See the problem? It's not an easy game to stomach.
Controls
Very, very simple. Move left and right, occasionally stop to interact with people or objects. This aspect of One Chance can get frustrating, as it takes your character a long time to move from one screen to the other, and you'll often have to move through multiple screens to get where you're going. Though the pace does add a sense of impending doom, as you're forced to watch society crumble around you, going from this...
To this...
Aaaaaand eventually to this.
Harsh.
Graphics
Decent. The visuals on One Chance are relatively basic, appearing as though they've been constructed from construction paper. They serve their purpose nicely.
Sound
There's only one song in this game, and it plays constantly. It's a fitting tune, given the theme of the game, but it gets a little aggravating after a while... and once the world goes kaput, silence works just as well, so don't feel too bad if you turn off your speakers.
(Oh, and there is one part with a song by Tautou, but that doesn't count.)
Challenge Rating
You don't really win or lose in this game, you just decide. Each of your decisions has a good and bad side. (Though, uh, admittedly, letting the world die kinda sucks, which usually happens!) That said, getting the ending you want can sometimes be trickier than you'd think, so you might be refreshing that cache more than once.
Conclusion?
One Chance is a cool experience, if rather depressing and clunky. You probably won't play it more than once or twice... but those play-throughs should prove thought-provoking nevertheless. And for those of you more interested in the subject, yes, the multiple endings make it a fairly replayable game, which does defeat the PURPOSE, but, oh well.
PLAY ONE CHANCE
Dadgame
Anybody who haunts Newgrounds on a regular basis (so, like, me) has probably seen the Dad series at least once. I first discovered Dad back in college, and I've enjoyed the series ever since.
So I can't believe that I hadn't noticed that it had a game. And that said game was two years old! I must be slipping.
For the uninitiated, Dad is a crazy bugger who, ah, busts stuff up. For no real reason. He can fire lasers from his eyes, pull a sword from his throat, run at super speeds, fly, rock out on a guitar so well that the police forgive him for his misdeeds... that sorta thing. The second movie took him into his work, however, and here he faced off against his boss...
... who, it turns out, is EVIL. Here enters Dadgame, Dad's struggle against the Evil Boss and his hordes of minions, all for no discernible reason. The guy's evil, that's probably good enough.
Concept
As mentioned, Dad likes to bust stuff up, and though there is a plot to this game - crazed though it may be - the main goal here is to ravage the landscape. Destroy everything you see. (Dad might be the actual villain of the game.) Simple concept, and quite fun: mash your surroundings. If you happen to catch some enemies in the process, all the better.
Or is it? Admittedly, a game based on the Dad series couldn't be anything other than wanton destruction. Problem here is, there's little else to the game - all you do is punch, slash, zap or otherwise destroy everything in your path. A little slim, even if you do have lots of options for mangling your foes.
Controls
Dadgame's pretty basic in the controls department, which makes it rather easy to pick up and play even for novices. You'll spend most of the game jumping and punching (or smashing stuff with a weapon), to the point that you might not even know what's going on at a given time. Controlling Dad is a little loose, but not to the point that you'll suffer too many cheap deaths.
The main issue with controlling Dad comes back to the game's concept: all you do is attack. You'll probably break your finger tapping the Z key, because that's almost all you do the entire game.
Graphics
Dadgame is virtually identical to the other Dad installments in terms of aesthetics: semi-crude cartoon characters in chaotic situations. The art probably wouldn't pass muster if not for the way in which it's employed, using smooth animations to depict scenes of wanton (yet surprisingly bloodless) violence. Of particular note are the bosses, who are in some cases much more complex than the normal characters and really neat to watch in action.
Of course you also fight a monkey, so... don't expect every boss to be a feast for the eyes.
Told you.
The only thing that disappointed me about the graphics were the cut scenes. They seemed... sloppier than the original videos. Not as well drawn. This is a small quibble since these scenes don't last very long, but, there you go.
Sound
Dadgame has a fairly solid soundtrack, typical of a Dad production. Good, high-enegery tunes that fit in with the mayhem. Not much else to say. (You can buy the soundtrack, as well, if you really enjoy the music - I don't think I'll go quite that far.)
Challenge Rating
The level of challenge fluctuates radically in this game. The majority of the levels are really easy - you could probably sit in one spot, jumping occasionally and swinging a weapon, and do just fine. Then you get to the bosses, and the difficulty jumps through the roof. They're not impossible, but... well, needless to say, you might get too annoyed at the last boss to bother beating him. There is, fortunately, a challenge setting, so if you find the game too hard by the end you can restart somewhere easier (or vice versa if you're a gaming god and you find it too easy).
One of my biggest concerns challenge-wise is the ease with which you can gain invincibility. Every time you trash something on-screen, you build on an invincibility meter, and once you get that meter high enough Dad will go into a whirlwind frenzy:
And then most enemies don't stand a chance against you. This wouldn't be so bad if you couldn't prolong this state of invincibility, but you can. Way too easy to blaze through levels as a dervish of indestructibility.
Conclusion?
Dadgame is fun. It's not the best Flash title in the ever-growing compendium of browser-based games, but it will give every Dad fan a chance to share in the carnage, especially given the sheer number of references to Dad's other adventures.
PLAY DADGAME
So I can't believe that I hadn't noticed that it had a game. And that said game was two years old! I must be slipping.
For the uninitiated, Dad is a crazy bugger who, ah, busts stuff up. For no real reason. He can fire lasers from his eyes, pull a sword from his throat, run at super speeds, fly, rock out on a guitar so well that the police forgive him for his misdeeds... that sorta thing. The second movie took him into his work, however, and here he faced off against his boss...
... who, it turns out, is EVIL. Here enters Dadgame, Dad's struggle against the Evil Boss and his hordes of minions, all for no discernible reason. The guy's evil, that's probably good enough.
Concept
As mentioned, Dad likes to bust stuff up, and though there is a plot to this game - crazed though it may be - the main goal here is to ravage the landscape. Destroy everything you see. (Dad might be the actual villain of the game.) Simple concept, and quite fun: mash your surroundings. If you happen to catch some enemies in the process, all the better.
Or is it? Admittedly, a game based on the Dad series couldn't be anything other than wanton destruction. Problem here is, there's little else to the game - all you do is punch, slash, zap or otherwise destroy everything in your path. A little slim, even if you do have lots of options for mangling your foes.
Controls
Dadgame's pretty basic in the controls department, which makes it rather easy to pick up and play even for novices. You'll spend most of the game jumping and punching (or smashing stuff with a weapon), to the point that you might not even know what's going on at a given time. Controlling Dad is a little loose, but not to the point that you'll suffer too many cheap deaths.
The main issue with controlling Dad comes back to the game's concept: all you do is attack. You'll probably break your finger tapping the Z key, because that's almost all you do the entire game.
Graphics
Dadgame is virtually identical to the other Dad installments in terms of aesthetics: semi-crude cartoon characters in chaotic situations. The art probably wouldn't pass muster if not for the way in which it's employed, using smooth animations to depict scenes of wanton (yet surprisingly bloodless) violence. Of particular note are the bosses, who are in some cases much more complex than the normal characters and really neat to watch in action.
Of course you also fight a monkey, so... don't expect every boss to be a feast for the eyes.
Told you.
The only thing that disappointed me about the graphics were the cut scenes. They seemed... sloppier than the original videos. Not as well drawn. This is a small quibble since these scenes don't last very long, but, there you go.
Sound
Dadgame has a fairly solid soundtrack, typical of a Dad production. Good, high-enegery tunes that fit in with the mayhem. Not much else to say. (You can buy the soundtrack, as well, if you really enjoy the music - I don't think I'll go quite that far.)
Challenge Rating
The level of challenge fluctuates radically in this game. The majority of the levels are really easy - you could probably sit in one spot, jumping occasionally and swinging a weapon, and do just fine. Then you get to the bosses, and the difficulty jumps through the roof. They're not impossible, but... well, needless to say, you might get too annoyed at the last boss to bother beating him. There is, fortunately, a challenge setting, so if you find the game too hard by the end you can restart somewhere easier (or vice versa if you're a gaming god and you find it too easy).
One of my biggest concerns challenge-wise is the ease with which you can gain invincibility. Every time you trash something on-screen, you build on an invincibility meter, and once you get that meter high enough Dad will go into a whirlwind frenzy:
Conclusion?
Dadgame is fun. It's not the best Flash title in the ever-growing compendium of browser-based games, but it will give every Dad fan a chance to share in the carnage, especially given the sheer number of references to Dad's other adventures.
PLAY DADGAME
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