Dr. Robotnik's Nice Rice Device 最近的评测

I wasn't totally sure I would gel with this game, since I'm not a big fan of block pushing puzzles, and as I reach what feels like the midpoint, I've found myself pleasantly surprised by Isles of Sea and Sky. The vibes are very Zelda-esque, and the game is good at steadily feeding you a supply of puzzles that break up the box-pusher flow and new gimmicks that expand how you approach rooms. If you enjoy classic top-down Zelda, especially the puzzle portion, you might find this game clicking with you.

Like a lot of recent reviews, I've felt encouraged to write something up for Nuclear Throne since they announced a beta branch with 60 and 120fps support and realizing that this game is coming up to its 10-year anniversary.

This game is a beautiful nightmare. It's you and an ever-growing horde of enemies, searching for ever-greater firepower to maul them, bobbing and weaving between attacks as you thin the herd, then gather radiation to mutate, then rinse and repeat as you try to reach the throne.

It's violent and frantic and addictive. No metaprogression, no story. Hit retry and start killing again, hoping this time you do better. Like Tetris or Mario or Doom it's a simplicity that doesn't feel basic, just enough space to play around in without feeling limited. As you learn about the game and its secrets you start to appreciate the design, and by then it will have its hooks in you.

The struggle continues.

50 games is 50 opportunities to find something to fall in love with.

A beautifully simple game that turns the Tower of Babel on its head. Disparate cultures inhabit a tower, sealed at every floor. Learn the languages of these cultures, solve puzzles, and scale higher, to see what's at the top.

The mechanics of learning the glyphs that form the languages of the inhabitants are well-constructed, allowing you to use the context of the world around you, and logical deduction to gain a grasp on the world around you. The puzzles aren't overtly challenging but they supplement the core mechanic sufficiently to create an enjoyable experience. There are some stealth sections that are also well-made but can occasionally grate on you since there's not much you can do other than wait and time it right moving from hiding spot to hiding spot.

The story is pieced together through short statements and murals that are never fully intact, creating a sense of a world with a history that no one has the full truth of. Finding the connective tissue between everyone's interpretation of the tower and using that to get a sense of the truth is part of what makes exploring the game so engaging, and adds a weight to the final revelations in the story that I think underpins the core conceit. It's not a complex game, but it is a solidly made, lovingly crafted adventure that muses on how similar we are and so different at the same time.

It's always a bit of a balancing act when you're making something that's a spiritual or literal successor to something bad. It can be tempting to take advantage of your inspiration's bad reputation to peddle a subpar product under the guise of being "deliberately bad", which misses the point that the original product tried to be good and failed.

Arzette thankfully ignores that entire balancing act, instead delivering a solidly made adventure game that hearkens to its influences through its presentation and style, plumbing the Zelda CD-i games' most infamous yet most memorable aspect - those weird cutscenes that I think were animated by some Russian studio for not a lot of money and I assume without much quality control. In some regards, because the most memorable part of the games has nothing to do with the gameplay, it's a lot easier to deliver a well-made game since no one remembers the CD-i or that it was really more designed for edutainment and FMV game show adaptations rather than real games. Hell, there's so few people invested there isn't even a good emulator for it.

But that's beside the point. Arzette's gameplay is solid 2D action platformer fare, bolstered by lovely visuals, fun music, and a good sense of humor. If you have any nostalgia for Youtube Poops (or the CD-i, I guess) then Arzette is a pretty easy purchase for a game that pastiches and homages. You even get a good game out of it.

I mean, it is exactly what it says on the tin here. It's quite short, but also free and a fun little puzzle game that plays with the simple idea of a maze. You'll likely complete it within an hour or two, but it's quite stimulating and fun even if it's short. Hopefully the developer can figure out 20 more small mazes, I'd be willing to throw him some cash for it.

I think most people appreciate that making a game is hard, but I think sometimes it can be easy to only apply that thought to a grander, more high-budget project. Quicker, more arcade-y experiences tended to be treated as lesser, often not as showy as bigger games, with people often overlooking what they did bring to the table. In a similar vein, I think it's fair to say that Flash games as a whole tended to get treated as distractions, something to make the time pass by and little else. Flash games, in more ways than one. They're short, small games with not much depth and often low production values. Even still, flash has been around for a long time, and in that time many developers cut their teeth on the software to make impressive stuff, sometimes pushing the technical boundaries of what a flash game could do. People got better at programming, at art and animation, honing their craft to make bigger and better games, some even making the jump to full-on game development, like Team Meat's Super Meat Boy, Edmund McMillen's Binding of Isaac, or The Behemoth's Castle Crashers.

Among the most iconic flash games I'd be quick to include the games from The Elephant Collection, which contains a collection of ten games starring a little blue elephant, made over the course of several years by one developer, jmtb02. If you look him up, you'll find that he likely had a hand in many of the more high quality Flash titles that were around the internet, many of which you might have played and enjoyed! Of course, while doing that, you might ask yourself, "Hey, but weren't all these games free? Why the hell would I spend 15 bucks for a collection of Flash games?"

Well, for one, Flash is dead. Your best bet to play a lot of these games now is Flashpoint, and even then there's some finagling you'd need to do to get them to work like they used to. The games in this collection have been remastered to work better and remove gameplay elements that are not feasible anymore, like opening two tabs in your browser or clicking links to old walkthrough sites that are now likely dead. It means that if you want to try these out, you have a convenient collection of most of the highlights.

These games were just always around and always fun to come back to every few months. I liked how irreverent and charming they were, but that they still showcased the kind of tight design a more "professional" product would have. These games wouldn't be unwelcome on the Xbox Live Arcade, or as WiiWare back in the day, and I think the price is a worthy one for the years the guy has spent making games and asking for nothing in return. Making games isn't easy, and even the old flash games we played instead of doing our homework or answering work emails are labors of love. Even if they weren't perfect, they deserve to be more than memories. So if even once in your childhood you remember playing one of these "silly little games", I implore you to give the collection a shot, as a thank you to the man that made them.

If you're looking at this you're probably already familiar with the Zachtronics series of games, and with the often-included solitaire style of game included within them, and you'll also probably already be buying this regardless of what the reviews say. If not, I'll start by saying these aren't your run of the mill Klondikes and Spider solitaires, they're unique variants with all the fat of modern card puzzle games cut out. That shouldn't be confused for a lack of flair, however.

Each variant included here was invented by the developers as a minigame within their releases. This influences their design both visually and mechanically, which is part of what made them such an addictive addition to every Zachtronics game. When you're not bashing your head against a problem or going back to optimise a prior solution, you can take your mind off of things by playing a round of solitaire. Not every game is like this, it'd obviously be a stretch to match their visuals and gameplay design to their setting, but I find that when it does it's the bow that ties the package together. Either way, you're getting a collection of well designed and uniquely stylised solitaire variants, generally easy to understand rules that hide the deeper level of skill required to truly win, which makes the hundredth victory as satisfying as your first.

Also included is a brand new variant, Fortune's Foundation. It's ungodly tough compared to the others, its the only one I've played where a round can take multiple sessions, but it's definitely a worthy last hurrah to an aspect of Zachtronics games that while was often appreciated, I think few people truly understood the work that went into making these.

I think if I had to sum this game up, it'd be that it has potential. It's clearly not a high budget, hundred-man production but it looks solid, plays well, clearly has ideas it acts upon, but it just kinda has teething issues that I would associate with a first game.

The core of the gameplay is a 3d obstacle course with some combat mechanics. So right off the bat I actually like the movement tools available to you. I'm definitely a stickler for how a platformer feels, and I don't like them feeling slow. DeLTA is responsive and your dash and other upgrades combine to let you move around stages swiftly and efficiently.

Your main tools in combat are an arm cannon with a charge shot feature, and a melee combo. The melee is punchy and strong, but the arm cannon feels quite flimsy on its own, and isn't quite as spammable as Mega Man's usually is, and the charge shot takes a while to activate and uses up energy, so you can't rely on it all the time. At the same time, you can't just rely on your melee because while it stuns most enemies it puts you at risk of taking damage from bigger enemies who often won't get interrupted. The combat isn't bad but it feels like the flow hasn't been quite figured out; like the game wants you to use all your tools but in the process it feels like they gimped both weapons to justify the other existing. Enemies in general feel a bit too spongy for my liking; even the small fry take a few shots to destroy, and I get it's a little necessary given how you have lock-on, but it definitely can be frustrating and doesn't help the arm cannon feel like a good part of your kit. It does reach a point where I just want to ignore combat at all times and focus on reaching the end because fighting isn't doing much for me.

You do get weapons from the four bosses, but they all cost energy to use and I don't feel like they really offer a reason to use them a lot of the time? The best of the bunch is Crushdart because it allows you to ignore barriers that would otherwise need a charge shot or melee to break, and sometimes the Shockbolt lets you stun enemies to then beat down. You can also find melee techniques that are fine enough to use but also don't really stand out. You have a dashing ground slash, a spinning attack and an aerial combo, and of them all I tend to use the aerial combo the most to simply ignore ground hazards and get energy back. The overall weapon roster is fine but it feels a little bland to me.

There's a sizable roster of characters here, all fully voiced too! But it feels like the rest of the world isn't quite as fleshed out as the characters are. The stages lack personality, gimmicks that are their own, and although the bosses all seemingly pilot unique mechs, the boss fights lack that pizzazz too. And it's a shame because I like what I saw in the game! It was a futuristic world that seemed advanced and optimistic, but also on the cusp of potentially losing it all. It feels like there is a solid conflict between the two protagonists, with DeLTA not wanting to resort to violence while AnnDROID is willing to shed blood to maintain the peace, and DeLTA's creator caught between an old flame who doesn't share her view of the future and an old friend who is willing to mete out justice by any means. There's absolutely meat on these narrative bones but it feels like ambitions that the scope of the project can't meet at times.

Like I said at the start, the game has potential. It's a rock solid foundation that I think could lead to great things, and in total fairness, the last time we saw a more traditional Mega Man in 3D it was X7, so it's not like there's a great pool of ideas to plumb from here, it's practically uncharted waters. I think this game is fine and you wouldn't go wrong buying it, but it kind of leaves me wanting to see what the team can bring forward in the next game instead.

Anything I could say in this review has been echoed by many others at this point. It's a love letter to the Mega Man franchise, and everything it represents, in particular the Mega Man X and Mega Man Zero sub series. It's flashy and cool, it's fast-paced and fluid, it's challenging yet fair, and most of all, it's fun. This to me is absolutely one of the standout indies, wholly deserving to be talked about next to Shovel Knight or Celeste when we think about the greats. It is made with a clear love to what it is inspired by but it never feels derivative and stands on its own, in some ways even evolving from its inspirations.