Almost Great: Amorphous+

There are, according to the late, great George Carlin, seven words that can't be spoken on (broadcast) television. This game will make you say them in bunches, and may award you a ribbon for certain combinations. Amorphous+ is yet another Flash-based game that would be much better served on a real gaming platform. The object: splat the hand-drawn blobs with the hand-drawn sword lifted from FF-VII. Oh, and stay alive as long as you can, until some combination of biting, sticking, acid-bursting, lunging, bumping, enveloping, skewering, and/or slicing species of said blobs decide your game is over. To keep you entertained along the way, a system of named checkpoints (awards) are set up for meeting certain scenarios, from your very first blob-splat ("Participation"), to splatting each type of blob (e.g., "Custard" for yellows), to being killed from something spawned off-screen("Unfortunate"), to the standard metrics such as Number of Kills and Time Survived. Here are some criticisms I have of the game, so far: Hit detection: Sometimes, hits don't register until after the swing. This smells like cleanup-code, and it actually causes problems, particularly when... Blue blobs can lunge through a swing. Due to the hit-detection problems mentioned above, the blue 'biter' blobs can lunge at you, through a swing, and end your game anyway. Bump delay is too long. We get it; our character has been bumped. Indirect death by bumping is a complete suck. Bump is omnidirectional. This looks silly; player should be able to bump the blobs from behind, instead of being bumped. Stupidly overpowered blobs: Gray, Horror, Void Eater, Razor Queen, Borg Thor. What the hell, Reed. Blind reward tree: This is where the game takes the biggest hit. Supposedly, there are power-ups; you can enable them by winning certain quantities of awards (those little ribbons). However, you can't see the power-ups without looking for a strategy guide; so the general game progression is: splat blobs - get ribbons - buy powerups - scrap savefile and start over when you realize your powerups are useless against a blob insurgency.

posted at: 23:31 | permanent link to this entry

Today's topic for discussion is:

Sandwich of the day: (real) peanut butter, strawberries, dark molasses, and thick-cut potato chips.

posted at: 12:47 | permanent link to this entry