Newgrounds Five: Dragon Platforming, Turn-Based Strategy with Cute Animals

*Note: The Newgrounds Five is a summary of all the awesome games I find playing five Newgrounds games most days. I don't play with the audio on, so you won't find any comments regarding it!*

Dragoniada
Rated Everyone!
Genre: Platforming
Play Time: About 45-60 mins

I love when I can find a game in the "Under Judgement" that I want to rate well, it makes me feel good about myself! Dragoniada is a platforming game where you play as a dragon who fell from his/her mother's nest and has to climb back up. You jump, shoot fireballs and move; no power-ups, no leveling up, just simple fun that does what it does well!

The game sure starts out simple enough, but as you progress through levels they get much more challenging, but it never feels cheap (except those bats, although I think that's more because I'm not good at being patient with enemies!). There's also a boss to battle about half-way through, and although there are no power-ups, you definitely have to keep an eye out for green potions (extra lives) and blue potions (fireballs, 10 each) and, about half-way in, red potions (extra-powerful fireballs, 10 each as well).

Oh, and by the way... You'll be VERY happy to know that, if you happen to lose all of your lives, you'll restart the current level with 5 lives again. It's very smooth (trust me, I'd know!)

"Monster Tap Proto"
Rated Everyone!
Genre: Turn-Based Strategy
Play Time: 5-30 mins, depending on luck and how good you are ;)

From what I gather, this is a playable prototype for a bigger game called Somebody Help Me (in fact, if you check the game out, at the time of writing they're looking for possible beta testers for the future!)

There are no instructions whatsoever, but after a couple plays I've figured out the following:

• All four of the animals on the screen at first are on the same team.
• Enemies appear from the buildings around the outside.
• If you hit an enemy and it doesn't die, it goes back a space (if it can). If you kill it, it turns into a tombstone that you can "attack" again to get EXP, which is very very vital for later enemies!
• STAY TOGETHER!! You can heal each other, and even revive!
• If you can kill an enemy and leave a tombstone in front of one of the areas the enemies come from, they'll be stuck!

The game really is a blast, and if you can last through enough rounds you get... "Bronze, Silver or Gold", but I have no idea what that is because around 40 or so all the enemies were defeated and nothing else appeared. A fun little prototype play experience, though!

Newgrounds Five: Bouncy Kitties, Fish and Evolution, Oh My!

To kick off my reviewing of indie games in addition to making them, I'm going to do something I plan to do a bunch of: The Newgrounds Five. If you play five games on Newgrounds, you get to deposit your experience and level up, which makes your votes worth more. When I play those five games (or more), I'll write a bit about the really fun, awesome ones!

Note that I DO NOT play with audio on for the most part, so I won't be discussing the sound. I also won't be reviewing any Mature/Adult games whatsoever.

Cats'n'Fish
Rated Everyone! :)

The concept of this game is simple enough: get the cat to the box of fish! There are fish that are optional on each level as well; they don't give you any special bonuses or anything, but they're a good challenge to get!

What makes the game unique is how you do it - your mouse becomes a bouncy pad that angles toward the kitty automatically! You have to aim it to make sure that the cat won't go off the screen, and of course the faster you move your mouse, the harder the cat will get hit.

It's a great concept with some fun art and 30 total levels! I played through the first 10 completely, and this is a shot of #11. :)

Evolvo Plus
Rated Everyone, but it has some blood in the form of red circles and stuff

Evolvo Plus is all about eating fish! Your goal is to move around with the arrow keys and eat the number of fish required to level up. After each level up you'll get bigger and able to eat more fish, and every so many levels up you can evolve and do fun stuff like go all the way to the surface, turn invisible temporarily, get a shield to stop a hit and even the ability to use your whole body to eat fish (MASSIVELY helpful when you become so huge that you take up the whole screen!).

What's amazing about this game is the art and the amount of fish. It's a really simple game concept, one that's been made a lot, but it's really been expanded upon - there are 100 types of sea life and some are poisonous (they glow and have a little biohazard symbol on them) that make you go slow for a moment - plus other hazards like red tide, oil spills, hazardous waste spills and mines. There are also multiple difficulty levels for those who would rather relax, or who want a challenge. I started on regular and then tried again on the most difficult, and it seemed to make everything move much faster (as well as add new types of sea life!)

As your little fish gets bigger and bigger, it really morphs into an awesome beast (complete with a spiky tail!) and can take up the ENTIRE screen. A little bit after that, there's the "boss battle". Oh, and there are also cheats that can be used, Newgrounds achievements to get and the challenge to try to get all 100 kinds of fish.

Million Dollar Words is Ready for Testing!

Writing this blog half a day late, oops! Admittedly it's because we got a Nancy Drew game (Crystal Skull), and while we thought it was quite dumb at first it actually got to be quite good. So good that we were up til 4am trying to figure out more clues and solve more puzzles! Oops...

So, the main thing is that Million Dollar Words is ready for testing! It's the first version of the game, but it's there! I'm going to give First Impressions over at Flash Game License a shot for the first time. They're $1 a piece so it's an actual investment into a game, but I think it'll be worth it to get some honest feedback from random people.

Finally, Mini-Ludum Dare 23 is set for the 28th-30th this month! As usual I'll only have Friday night after work, Saturday night after work and then Sunday til the deadline (about 12-14 hours of the 48 gone there), but work time lets me think about the concept. (For those not familiar, a Ludum Dare - or Mini Ludum Dare - is a challenge to make a game based on a game concept within a 48 hour period. The challenge is that you don't know what concept the game has to center around until the beginning of the challenge, so it's 48 hours from concept to finish.

Hope the day finds you well! I will blog again this evening for tonight :)

Unknown (a movie), Overpriced Small Pizzas and Quizzes!

So, first things first, we watched a movie called Unknown today. It had Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Joe Pantoliano, Barry Pepper and Peter Stormare (dude who played Abruzzi on Prison Break), and is basically about 5 guys who wake up in a warehouse. They're all locked inside and have all lost their memories, and have to figure out what happened and who they are. It sounds trite and predictable I know, but it's actually not. The sudden loss of memory is actually explained in-movie and there's no crazy mystical force, or "would you like to play a game" master or anything of the sort. If you click the link, you'll see the IMDB page. Funny enough, even in the credits the characters are titled things like "Rancher Shirt" and "Broken Nose" instead of by their actual names.

Secondly, just a quick little rant... I absolutely, totally love how you can buy a large pizza for $10, with "any toppings", but then you decide to get a small so you don't devour the whole large, and it's $14!!! Seriously?!?!?! That'd be like if you wanted the standard edition of Black Ops because you didn't want the awesome RC vehicle to take up space in your house, but had to pay more for it!

Finally, got a lot of work done on Million Dollar Words today! As of this writing one topic is totally done, and the rest all have some good work on em. Hoping to have at least 3 or 4 topics totally done tonight and finish the rest tomorrow, then finish up the game itself Tuesday and get it going on the testing front.

Watching Eat Pray Love tonight also, and relaxing for the rest of my awesome 2 day weekend!