TimeWasters: Gretel and Hansel
TimeWasters is a new column highlighting many of the excellent Web-based/lightweight downloadable titles that you can dive into and finish in the space of a lunch break. This week, Chris Gampat explores Gretel and Hansel.
If you’re bored during the lunch hour or at a slow day of work, you may want to give Gretel and Hansel a try on your computer. Based off the famous fairy tale, you find yourself navigating different puzzles that can actually be quite tricky unless you pay attention. While the graphics seem like something synonymous to a fairy tale from hell, they really do work for the overall feel of the game. If anything, the artwork is right up there with the gameplay.
Games of Halloween: Goosebumps Escape From Horrorland
Games of Halloween is a retrospective highlighting the most frightening video games that we’ve ever played. In this particular look back, Chris Gampat reflects on DreamWorks Interactive’s Goosebumps: Escape From Horrorland.
For those of us that are late 80’s and 90’s kids, you may remember that novel series that everyone went crazy for: Goosebumps. It was scary, it was entertaining, the marketing was genius, and the writing was pretty damned good. Now how many of you remember the PC game, Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland? Not many perhaps. If you played it, you’d understand why that game scared the crap out of players back then. The entire game was basically a greenscreen with actors popping out at you. Despite this, the game gave me nightmares when I was eleven.
Games of Halloween: Out of This World
Games of Halloween is a retrospective highlighting the most frightening video games that we’ve ever played. In this particular look back, Tim Torres reflects on Eric Chahi’s pioneering game, Out of This World.
Out of This World, also known as Another World, gets cited by Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus), Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid, Zone of Enders) and Goichi Suda (Killer7, No More Heroes) as major inspirations, so that probably makes it one of the most important games ever made.
It has some atmosphere for a game from 1991. “Ahead of its time” doesn’t even begin to describe its lonely, bleak world. There’s barely any music. Just sound effects of rocks falling or beasts breathing and the occasional ambient tone pulsing in the background. Er, from what I know of the first few screens of gameplay anyway.
Yeah, I barely got past the first area. I was a real scaredy cat when I was younger, but what an introduction this game has. You’re blasted into another world, underwater, where tentacles creep up at you, and when you get on dry ground awful black slugs crawl after you. Get too close to a slug and a quick little scene plays where a single retractable tooth juts out of and kills you. Scared the hell out of me when I first played the game. And I never outran that beast.
Playing it now the sluggish controls make me impatient and the try-and-fail style of gameplay can only entertain me for so long, but yeah, it inspired Ico, so I’ll have to play through it sometime in my life. I just hope I get past those slugs.
Review: Time Hollow (DS)
Time Hollow is a story-driven point and tap style adventure along the lines of the cult classic like Phoenix Wright. In Time Hollow, players assume the identity of Ethan Kairos, a high school student whose parents disappear on his 17th birthday. Strangely enough it’s as though they never existed. After your parents’ disappearance, you come to possess something called the “hollow pen”. Not your average, ordinary nerd tool; the pen can draw portals into time. This pen becomes immensely useful as ultimately what remains of your past are these unclear picture-like memories, also known as “flashbacks”. With said pen, you can draw portals to specific moments within these flashbacks. Still with me? Good.
A Boy And His Blob: A Look Behind The Scenes
Interested in more A Boy and His Blob info beyond that which was provided in my hands-on preview? Check out this short video clip that will give you a behind the scenes glimpse of the magic involved in its creation.
Review: Lux-Pain (DS)
Lux-Pain is part of the terrible epidemic that has been sweeping the Japanese development scene in the past decade or so. It seems every director secretly wants to work in the anime field, but since they’re stuck in the far more challenging world of video games with nothing but blob-eyed girls and Evangelion rip-offs in mind, they channel all their frustration and misplaced “creativity” into cliched dreck no one but the staunchest of otaku dorks would bat an eye at. I’m talking about low-tier RPGs like Kingdom Hearts, Xenosaga, Wild ARMs, Tales of Whatever, Grandia III, and Star Ocean 4. Even recent Castlevania titles, Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin especially, drank deep from the well of anime bullshit.
Not that it’s all been bad. Persona 3 and 4 used the typical high school drama setting and style exceedingly well, there ought to be more giant robot action games like Zone of the Enders, and Final Fantasy X-2, despite its embarrassing shoujo trappings, managed to be fun.
But not Lux-Pain.
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