Today: Glamour, or how to hide irony about gender stereotypes very well...

Or something like that... because as much as I think FOSS games should cater to the other ermm... 2nd out of three(?) gender, I am not sure if this is meant ironic or not (description of the game Glamour):

You are Maddeline, a young princess just turned 16. Now you're old enough to attend the royal balls and your fairy godmother will help you get ready for the most exciting dances.

Watch out your way while walking around this amazing city full of filthy foes. They may harm your look. You wouldn't like to reach the ball all covered with dirt.

Visit the Make-up, Shoe, Dress and Accessory Castle to find the most beautiful outfits and win the Prince Charming heart.

At least I see relatively little pink on that screen-shot...

Source-code is available here for those that wonder...

*stalkes slowly away*

But -BAM-... here is something clearly more manly:

Unvanquished Alpha 19

-BAM- check the alpha 19 changelog -BAM- Oh and the soon to released AlienArena Tactical also sound like a game for -BAM- real men!

Hmm BAM?

Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time

The Short

Pros
- The free sequel to the smash hit Plants vs Zombies
- Did I mention it's free? That's a pretty big plus
- Despite having microtransactions, the entire game can be beaten and is still fun without spending a cent
- New plants, levels, and time periods are great
- Tons of new challenges for each level, not to mention unlockable minigames and rewards
- Plant food was an excellent idea to give you something to do in the downtime
- Graphics seem marginally improved and look great on iPad
- Cone-head zombies in Egypt have little pharaoh hats. But still cones. That's pretty great.

Cons
- Currently exclusive to iOS
- Some plants can only be gotten through purchasing, and they're quite overpriced
- Missing an actual ending to the "story," which I assume will be unlocked later
- Challenges become repetitive quite quickly
- Hunting for randomly dropped keys is a chore
- Where's the zen garden?
- Doesn't quite have the same magic as the first game

Burn them all.

The Long

I, like the rest of the world, eagerly awaited a sequel to Popcap's 2009 PC hit, Plants vs Zombies. I played the game on almost every platform imaginable, unlocking everything in the iOS version and beating every mini-game on the PC version with gusto. It was a simple game that held a level of complexity to it that made it both engaging and easy to pick up. In short, it was a perfect casual game.

Four freaking years later and we finally have it: Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time. Exclusive (for the time being) to iOS devices and sporting a free-to-play model that is very indicative of the recent acquirement of Popcap by EA (seriously guys: everything doesn't need microtransactions), the outlook for this game was surprisingly grim. Did it ruin the magic of PvZ with it's touch-pad exclusivity and money-grubbing unlockables? Or will your plants still be soiled with delight at the prospect of murdering zombies?

Eh, a bit of both I guess.

Crazy Dave: Zombie Expert.

There's sort of a plot to this one. Sort of. Crazy Dave finally eats the magic taco you gave him back in PvZ, and he likes it so much he wants to travel back in time in his talking, time-travelling motor home to eat it again. Of course, it all goes wrong and you're slammed back into various time periods, specifically ancient egypt, a pirate "era," and the wild west. It seems zombies were around then, too, and in spades (this is seriously the worst world to live in), so plant your zombies on the tile floors and get killin'!

The dialogue is mildly amusing, but after a while it gets obnoxious. The charm of Crazy Dave was that he didn't show up after every single level in the first game, but now he seems to be the star character. While his insanity is endearing to a point, it also becomes grating how unbelievably stupid he is, not to mention his car sounds like the guide from Nintendoland and is just as static in her personality. 

The map is very "Mario World"esque. 

Another major change is the story mode, or rather, how it's presented. Ditching the linear level progression from the first game, it instead ops for a more similar approach to how it was done in it's Facebook game, Plants vs Zombies: Adventures. You progress down a fairly straight path, Mario World style, until you reach the Stargate (tm) at the end of each level. Along the way there's various doors that can be unlocked with keys. Behind these unlocks are new plants, powerups (such as getting a refund when digging up a plant) and the minigame portion of the game. All gated doors are some sort of minigame, and all require keys specific to that world to unlock.

How do you get keys? Well, two ways. Either they randomly drop (and the drop rate isn't awful, to be fair, though you'll have to burn through a few rounds of that world's Endless Mode to farm them up), or you can  just pay to open the gate. So on a scale of one to super offensive in the microtransactions-frustration-o-meter, the doors aren't that bad. 

Though having six keys left over in Egypt while I still need six more in Wild West is a bit annoying.

Key get!

The gameplay itself is identical to the original game, down to the grid layout. Egypt gives you a full plot, with later levels popping up destroyable gravestones to slow you down a bit. The pirate level mixes it up with a gangplank over water on the right side, with pirates swinging in on ropes for the shorter lanes. Wild west has probably the best new addition: minecarts. You can plant only a single plant per track, but you can move it freely and at any time up and down. It's a neat trick and makes me wish each level before it had possessed as clever an idea. 

There's two other new things with regard to actual gameplay that should be mentioned: plant food and powerups. See, coins actually don't buy anything anymore, at least not in terms of unlocks. All the money you get is used for in-level powerups. The first is plant food. Green-colored zombies will randomly drop plant food, or you can pay some of your coins to get one immediately. What they do varies depending on the plant you put it on. Sunflowers drop a jackpot of suns. Pea-shooters blast out a plethora of peas. Iceberg lettuce freezes all zombies on the screen, and so on. This is actually the best new feature because it adds a level of interactivity during matches that the previous games didn't have. It also allows the levels to be much harder, forcing you to ration your plant food and use it wisely. Then again, you can always "cheat" and buy more on the fly if you suck, but I beat the entire game without ever having to buy any more.

Fire at will!

The other addition is payable powerups. These are also used during matches, and can only be obtained by spending coin. You have three: a "pinch" move that kills all the zombies you pinch, a "flick" move that launches them back (or off screen), and a "hold" move that electrocutes them. They all have a limited timer and (in some levels) can only be bought a set number of times. Again, these cost coins.

And, as you have already guessed, you can pay real money for coins. However, if you have any ability at Plants vs Zombies, you won't need any of these powerups until attempting to tackle some of the harder minigames in the later levels, meaning you'll have a massive pileup of cash to blow anyway. Again, I beat every level and got every star and never spent a cent, while using powerups liberally at the end. So, still ok on the microtransaction front. 

My only downside to all of this is that, if you do use the powerups liberally, it kind of completely kills the challenge. This is one of those "you can just pay to win the whole game" problems we see, but since this is a single player game and not an MMO, the only person's fun you are cheating is your own. Trust me: don't buy coins. You don't need them. 

THIS is the stuff I don't like. 

I think I'd better finish off the microtransactions talk by talking about the part I don't like: the store. Now, let me say this: you get tons of plants as part of the game, and even more by unlocking doors. This includes a variety of new plants. While the count isn't quite as high as PvZ, they do seem to have streamlined their purposes down a bit better (there are no "upgrades" anymore; double headed suns are just their own plant, for instance) and the arsenal they give you is more than well enough equipped to destroy just about anything in your path.

The annoying part is there is no way, either through in-game currency or unlocks, to get to some of the bonus plants and powerups. The powerups/plants featured above can only be gotten with real money. You could have fifty billion coins and you still couldn't buy the squash; not an option. I wouldn't be bitter, but they gated the Ice Pea behind this dollar cost, and he was one of my staples in the first game. Jerks.

The other annoying part is these powerups are way too expensive. Nine bucks for the chili and a sun powerup? Seriously? And with no options to just drop like $15 and get all the upgrades, you do have to buy them all separate for an inflated price. At that point I'd rather just pay $6 for the app and get everything. But what do I know about business? I'm not EA, the most loved of all video game companies. 

Snow Pea, I love you, but not $4 worth. 

All that aside, considering the absolutely absurd amount of content you get for free with this game, I really shouldn't be complaining. Once I looked in the shop once I never went back, and I was happier for it. Buying stuff just wasn't an option for me. While the gameplay was a little too similar to the first game to keep me really engaged, I still got sucked in. And while having to hunt for Stars (which meant replaying earlier levels with special, "hard" objectives) was fun at first, the objectives get competitive and you have to do the same ones for every time period, and I felt they were really trying to tack on some time to this bad boy.

At least the game looks good. I was kind of a hater of the new art style at first, but after playing it a bit I don't mind. It's more "hand drawn" than before, and the plants have considerably more frames of animation, which is nice. The new mixup of zombies is the real highlight, though, with each period sporting a new batch of obnoxious zombies  for you to kill. I just really wish there was a "Time Vortex" level where I could have Camel Zombies along with the Pirate Zombies and the Wild West Chicken zombies. Maybe in DLC.

The Texas flag with a brain on it is a nice touch.

All in all, Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time is a great game that's store leaves a bit of a sour taste in your mouth. However, if you can look past the microtransactions and repetitive star-hunt that ends each world, there's a lot to love here. It's almost everything one could ask for: more zombies, more plants, more levels, more tricks, and more ways to play. Honestly, if it weren't for the iOS exclusivity and the overpriced DLC, I'd say this game very nearly surpassed it's predecessor. 

However, there is still something missing. The magic of the first game, which might be no fault of this game itself, but that PvZ felt so novel. In either case, it's good to finally have a sequel to one of my favorite tower defense games, and if you happen to own an iOS device it's a must download. Because...seriously. It's free. 

(Now port it to Android and PC already!)

Four out of five stars. 

Needs more boomerangers. 

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

The Short

Pros
- A fun hybrid of shop management and action RPG questing
- The translation is surprisingly entertaining and appropriately silly
- Taking heroes on quests only to sell the best stuff they find back to them at 300% markup is pretty great
- A surprisingly long RPG quest campaign with multiple adventurers, dungeons, and secrets to find
- I sold month-old egg on toast for a thousand bucks. Take that, economy!

Cons
- Selling items becomes a bit formulaic; most new shop-related stuff (custom orders, etc.) show up early and don't introduce anything new later on
- Dungeons can be a grind for XP and items, and the limited bag space (which is upgradable) is a chore
- Music is fun at first, intolerable in large quantities
- Recette's Japanese exclamations when she does anything are incredibly obnoxious
- I pressed "Esc --> Skip Scene" more in this game than maybe any to date
- Made me feel like the Wal-Mart of the fantasy world when I would only sell severely marked up junk to housewives just before the market crashed and everybody was poor
- I hate little girls

Capitalism, ho, indeed.

The Long

Let me play a scenario out for you. Let's say you go to a store with intent to buy something, like a hat. You've gone to this store lots of times, and seen the hat in the window, so you know the exact price or at least an estimate of the price. So when you prepare to leave, you bring the amount of money you'd expect to buy the item with, right? No? You'd just bring like fifty cents and then complain when they didn't mark down a five-hundred dollar item down to match your level?

Congratulations, you are now the little girl from Recettear. I should put a sign on the door that says "No little girls, ever." We sell weapons in here, for crying out loud! One little girl wanted to roll out with a freaking Crystal Sword +6! I'm gonna get fined out the ass if that happens!

And that, in a nutshell, is Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale on PC. Little girls showing up, demanding low prices, and whining. Same with old grandpas. Recettear: Screw the young and the elderly.

I wish you were dead. 

Recette has a problem. Her dad just up and decided one day to become an adventurer, and since this is a JRPG Recette only has one parent. Next thing she knows he's just left her at home with his massive amount of debt, and then got killed by a dragon or something. I dunno, I couldn't be bothered to read all the text.

Anyway, Tear, some jerk-bag fairy, is with the collections agency and needs this absurd quantity of money paid off. Why she didn't bother to come earlier rather than like two months before the deadline is beyond me, but I guess it make the game more stressful that way. So you have to meet weekly increments to pay off this outstanding loan your jerk dad accrued, while having a shizzy job, getting trash talked by the elderly, other store owners, and basically everybody in town, and just trying to sell the damn toast back so you can make a minimal profit on it.

Basically, Recette is a generational trying to pay off the debt they accrued by going to college because their parents told them it would be ok, and now gets blamed for being lazy and useless because she sits around the house all day selling candy instead of "getting a real job." So, in all honesty, it's a parable for our times. 

Where was I going with this? I dunno. I sit at home playing video games because I want to, dang it! Now leave me alone, mom! When my YouTube channel gets big, you'll see who is laughing then!

I even marked it down to 50% what I paid for it, and the little twit couldn't afford it. BOOKS BE PRICEY, YO. GET A KINDLE.

Recettear is a fusion between two genres. In that sense, it kind of reminds me of Persona 3 and 4. The first portion of the game is in the title: selling stuff. It's pretty easy to make money in the game, as every store in town sells stuff for under it's base value, and you can usually get at least at 10-30% markup on that junk by just turning around and selling it. It's like that jerk at the flea markets who goes and buys all the good stuff from the other vendors really early, then slaps labels on them and makes a mint throughout the day. You are that person. Or rather, Recette is. She's a soulless creature driven only by capitalistic urges. 

But the real bucks come in market fluctuations. Remember that Sword of Pure Pwnage +239 that you bought for a fat price yesterday? Well too bad, idiot, because the market here bounces more than an ADHD kid in a bounce house, and now it's worth nothing. But don't worry, all those almond breads you've been hording are now worth triple value! Slap them on the shelves and giggle with glee as starving mothers have to pay absurd amounts of money for a candied apple!

The market fluctuations are pretty much guesswork, but a simple strategy also works well: buy low, sell high. Or buy medium, sell high. Just always sell high. If stuff isn't high, then go do something else, or just be sure to stock up on massive amounts of inventory. Or just stock your store with only books and see who shows up. You'll be out of business faster than you can say "Borders Books." 

SOMEONE PLEASE BUY THESE FREAKING WANDS.

The other half of the game is the adventuring. See, you're in a JRPG world, which means dungeon crawling for items with a limited bag to carry them in. There's a wide assortment of heroes you have to unlock via traditional or untraditional means. You have your generic swordsman guy, a thief girl, an elf archer girl, a punching monk, some airheaded spear lancer chick, a demon mage, an obnoxious whiny boy child, and a robot. Pretty much all they needed was a dog and they'd have covered all the JRPG basics. Maybe in future DLC.

Questing is simple and is done in the Secret of Mana style of action RPGing. You run around and stab/shoot/kill stuff on each floor, picking up precious XP and loot before going to the next one. Every five floors is a boss, and after you kill it you can either bail on the dungeon or keep going deeper. If you die, however, you can only take one item back rather than your full bag, so be careful! Luckily you can bring all that super-expensive junk you bought for your store that is now worth nothing because of the market crash, and the heroes can borrow them so they don't suck. Don't worry, you get it back after, and can sell it to them directly at massively inflated prices to save you time. Friends exist to be abused, people!

I'll take a hundred. 

The other Persona similarity is the time management. You have four blocks of time in a day. During these you can either open shop, go scour the town for hot deals, or go adventuring. You only have a week to meet Tear's rapidly increasing demands, so being certain you don't screw around during your day is essential.

I will say this: there is something exhilarating about making absurd amounts of money. I discovered pretty quickly that I'm da bomb at this game. Most of the time when debt collection came around I had more than double what was asked, the later ones having me have not just enough for that debt, but the debt after as well. I guess I was really good at taking advantage of the sudden metal shortage, selling that junk sword I bought when swords were more common than toothpicks like it was freaking Excalibur. 

The main issue I have with Recettear is no one point is particularly...well, fun. Is it engaging? Absolutely. Addicting? No doubt. But like grinding around in the dungeons in Persona, nothing was every quite good enough for me to be in love with it. When I was adventuring I wished I was back at the shop. When I was selling stuff at massively engorged prices...well, I was having a good time, but at the back of my mind I kept thinking about my inventory and when I'd need to go adventuring again. Not to mention if you miss custom orders because the bozos didn't bother to show up during the one block of time you were open, they'll come chew you out as if it is your fault and they couldn't just pick up the damn thing now since it's just the next day and if you really wanted your freaking three foodstuffs you would have showed up in the morning when we were open.

Pictured: A huge mooch.

At least there's lots of dungeons to keep you sated, even if their mileage may vary depending on how much you like repetition. Expect enemy pallet swaps a-plenty, with bees and bouncing mushrooms being the worst enemies to try and hit ever. Mixing up heroes keeps things a bit fresh, but since they start low leveled it's much easier to just commit to one person (read: the fast thief girl) and just take her the whole way. They're randomized, which is also a good thing, but tedium can set in once you get in a groove. Still, it's just as good as any other game where the whole game is dedicated to the crawling, and Recettear comes with a bonus Wal-Mart simulator, so I suppose I can't fault it too heavily. 

Point being: it's fun, yes, but also a bit of a grind. Like many Japanese games, they're addictive by nature, but rely heavily on your tolerance for repetition in order for them to be fun. You could argue it's an analogy for the repetitive nature of Capitalism, where we just keep working and working, making more and more money to make more and  more money, all in some fruitless attempt to meet some society-created goal that will never, ever tell us when we are finished, leaving us an an endless loop of dissatisfaction until we're all dead.

Recetetear has that too. It's called "Endless Mode."

It's just not the same without Recette screaming "AYEEE?!" because she swapped out a bread roll with a beef bowl on her display.

Graphically the game is dated, but you probably won't notice it. Honestly, this would be a great PSP (or now Vita or 3DS game), because it's low-graphics and perfectly suited for quick bursts of play. As a PC game it's a bit grainy, the sprites repeating and generally looking a little old (but it's an old game, so that's ok). The enemies have a massive graphical inconstancy, with hand-drawn pixel sprites alongside awful polygonally rendered knight creatures. It's like they just looted a bunch of other games and tossed them all in for their enemies. Alright.

The music is whimsical and generally unoffensive, but it will drive you insane due to the repetition. I found myself putting on some sort of metal soundtrack when I went through the dungeons (Nightwish works pretty good) and some Bob Marley when I was opening up the shop. 

Oh yeah, there's voice clips, and they're all in Japanese. Again: cute at first, annoying after repetition. 

Welcome to Applestop, would you like to pre-order a Granny Smith?

I might have sounded a bit harsh on Recettear, so let me end by saying this: it's a cute little game with a funny premise and great, addicting gameplay. Those looking for more depth in their RPGs (or shop keeping games) might want to look elsewhere, but if you're a fan of JRPGs, the Persona series, or Wal-Mart's power scooters, Recettear is a game for you. The story is silly (and text heavy...), the game whimsical, and loaded with enough to do to last you several dozen hours at least. Considering this game's usually on sale for like $5 on Steam, you could do a lot worse. Like, a lot worse. Have you seen the indie games on there? Get this instead. 

Now port it to a portable device, where it belongs. Capitalism, ho!

Three out of five stars. 

So...is his porn collection in the soup, or...?

WebGL dungeon crawler Moonshades now FOSS

More browser-based RPG goods for you today: the developer behind the game Moonshades recently indicated on the Opengameart.org forums that this neat old-school (ok not as old-school as Heroine Dusk) dungeon crawler is now fully open-source.

Have a look at the alpha game-play:


It seems the entire game (including the source-code) is released under the rather art focused Creative Commons Attribution (cc-by 3.0) license, but since that is pretty compatible even to the GPL, this shouldn't really matter at all.

Have fun playing!

Super Hexagon

The Short

Pros
- Extremely addicting, difficult action game
- Action game? Is this an action game? I'd say it's just like a reflex game
- Seriously, the default difficulty is "Hard" and then it goes up to "Hardererestest"
- Minimalist graphics and flashing colors add to the difficulty
- Only three songs. All are awesome.
- Exceptionally addicting
- Quick; one "round" can last anywhere from a minute to under a second
- Nearly the perfect game for portable devices

Cons
- Not competing for score against friends kind of makes the game less interesting
- Might give you a seizure
- The "Game Over" and "Begin" voices are a bit obnoxious; I wish you could turn them off.

Screenshots don't really describe this game, so here's a video.

The Long

The thing about Super Hexagon that's so great is...hang on, I died.

Ok, we're rolling again. So the thing about...dang it! One more.

So ok, if I just quickly get this...nope. Hold up, one more go.

What? I died in under a second? That run didn't count. This one's for serious.

Ok, no, this one is for serious.

What were we talking about again?

This has reaffirmed my theory that all things hexagonal are evil. 

Ok, right, Super Hexagon. It's a game that's out on Android and iOS and also your computer, Mac, Linux, probably Palm Pilot for all I know; I don't care. The point is: you should probably go get it. If you have all the above devices and can't decide, there's clearly only one course of action: buy it on all of them. It's only $3. But if you for some reason don't have unlimited funds to buy the same game over and over, then I'd suggest the portable (iPhone, Android, etc.) version over another version.

Or you can kick yourself because you didn't buy it in the Android Humble Bundle a few months back. Like I did. Gosh dang it. 

Anyway, this is supposed to be a review, but I seriously can't stop playing this dumb game long enough to write it. Let me just...ok, hang on, we'll do it between rounds.

It's like every stop sign I ever ran is back for revenge.

So the point of Super Hexagon is simple. You play that little bitty dot on the screen, and the world around you spins and sucks all those walls in towards the hexagon at the center. Your goal is to weave through the gaps of this labyrinth, because if you so much as graze one of those solid blocks of color your run is over and you're back to square one.

That's seriously the entire game. There's milestones that are associated with shapes, with line being the start at 5 seconds, triangle at 10, etc. And yes, you heard me right: the first goal is to survive just five seconds. If this sounds easy, note that my current record for Hexagon Hyper Mode (the "Hardester" difficulty, and a remix of the first "Hard" level) is 4.11 seconds. Yep. Just can't get to that 5 second mark.

But you can bet I'll be back every 4.11 seconds to try again. 

What else is hexagons? Well, bees make their honeycomb in it. And bees are evil, too.

This game is purity incarnate. It's minimalist graphics, extremely simple controls of just left and right (it plays like a dream on both touch and computer, though I tend to prefer it on touch controls), and obvious goal are so simple a baby could figure it out. But when you get to the actual game, aka dodging stuff, this game is exceptionally tough. Tough, but very rewarding. When you're on a fourty-five second run on Hexagon (the default "Hard" difficulty), knowing in only fifteen seconds you'll get the much-wanted "Hexagon" shape call and unlock a new level, you start sweating a bit. Or a lot. It's the most intense minute of  your life, and that's the easiest difficulty.

There's six difficulties total...well, three actually. The second three are unlocked after passing a minute in the first three, and are the same levels amped up to extreme speeds. This is the kind of game where you'll play the hardest level, failing out after 5-10 seconds, then jump back to the first one and realize how slow everything is moving in comparison and how much better you suddenly are at the game. And then die anyway. And play again. Because a run is hardly longer than a minute, and everybody has a minute. I have a minute right  now, actually...whoop, died again. 

The tunes of shapes. And rotating death.

The excellent, pure visual design is accented by some kickin' chiptunes. If you don't like them, you can use your own music, but I seriously dig them. One of the best parts is after you die and restart it'll jump to like 2 minutes ahead into the track, meaning you'll hear a different song. But if you want to hear the in-between stuff, the song that happens from 1-2 or 2-3, you'll have to live long enough to hear it. I'll fully admit I haven't heard any of these songs all the way through in-game. Seriously. I can't do it. But I'll keep trying. 

The only thing that's obnoxious is the female voice that says "Game Over" every time you die, or "Begin" when you start. But even that becomes a sort of hypnotic quality, urging you to try again after hearing her say "Game Over" in that kind of disappointed way, giving it one more run before...ok, I died too fast that time, let's try one more time. 

According to Wikipedia, this is how you make a Hexagon. Note the lack of bright, spinning colors and constant failure. 

Perhaps the only real complaint I could lodge against this purity of video game addiction is the fact that it's longevity is, primarily, based on personal accomplishment. If you aren't the kind of person who likes to stretch oneself without others being involved, this might not be the best game for you. However, you can easily fix this by convincing a few friends to buy copies of the game (or buying it for them yourself during a Steam sale) and then competing for top scores. That greatly increases the game's lifespan, assuming your friends are as determined to dodge spinning shapes as you are.

Seriously...there is so much one could say about this game, but really it explains itself exactly perfect in the trailer video I posted above. Super Hexagon is a fantastic experience, and a damn near perfect game. It's extremely addicting, unbelievably challenging, an impossible to put down. Like Tetris on the Game Boy, Super Hexagon is my modern-day mobile killer-app. 

Five out of five stars. 

I was going to put an outro graphic here, but instead I just played more Super Hexagon. Hey; not my fault my phone is right next to my computer. 

Browser based MMO: Ironbane

I wanted to write about this browser-based MMO game called Ironbane for a while, but never actually got around trying it (it's easy though, no need to register for the alpha currently, just hit play; but for me under Linux with Firefox 23 it just kept loading and loading... could have been my very slow connection though). Luckily the creator got into contact with us to remind me about it.

Here is an slightly older video of the tutorial level:


The code (GPLv3) can be accessed on Github, and there is a nice contributors guide. The author also confirmed that there are plans to release all the artworks under CC-by-SA soon, so it can be called a proper FOSS game.

But regardless of that, I feel they need to work on the huge pixel (ok actually texel) density spread, e.g. the strongly different size of individual pixels on the screen ;)

We also asked the creator about any longer plans to commercialize it and this is what he got to offer in that regard:

When we reach beta we would like to offer optional stuff like houses, special clothes and other things for donations (nothing that can give an unfair advantage). So in a way this can be classified as F2P, yes.

Which I guess sounds like a good idea to fund further development and hosting costs.

Anyways... unless you live in the same internet darkage like me, there is no reason not to give it a try!

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

The Short

Pros
- Reinvented Castlevania by taking the aesthetic and mixing it with Metroid-style exploration
- Single-handedly invented the "Metroidvania" (or "Castletroid" if you're a tool) genre
- RPG elements including leveling, gear, and currency all play a role in this new style
- Fantastic 2D art mixed with some 2D and 3D backdrops make the game look good
- Music is absolutely some of the best in the series with almost all new tracks
- Long adventure, with the "inverse castle" twist still crazy
- First game to introduce Ayami Kojima's fantastic gothic artwork for the series
- Buttload of secrets, including fighting game-style magic combos
- Can be a genuine challenge if you play with the "max luck, low everything else" code, which makes the game as hard as the old-school Castlevanias (aka the best way to play SOTN)
- "WHAT IS A MAN?!"

Cons
- Game balance in terms of difficulty is all over the place.
- That being said, 99% of the game is pretty easy, the exception being a few bosses
- These said bosses you pretty much have to cheese using the broken and op items (the sword dropped in the inverse library or the Shield Rod + Alucard Shield combo)
- Recycles a lot of assets from Rondo of Blood from the CD Engine.
- Marked the official end of linear style Castlevania games, which is too bad
- Spawned roughly eight trillion modern day indie (and commercial) games that knocked off the game's formula
- Inverse castle is basically just a hard-mode straight shot, without any story and just one song for the whole area (what is up with that?)
- PSP re-release re-dubbed and retranslated all the lines. They aren't much better, but the corniness is gone, so that's a con.

Dracula: Expert on men and what they are.

The Long

Symphony of the Night was NOT the first Metroidvania game I ever played. That reward goes to Circle of the Moon, though I beat Aria of Sorrow first. I just figured I'd toss that out there just so you know I play games in totally the wrong order, and that's ok.

Anyway, everybody's heard the story, whether or not it's true. Koji Igarashi went to Sony to say that they wanted to make not a 3D, but a 2D Castlevania game on their new Playstation system. Sony told him to suck it up and make it 3D, because 3D was the future. Then Koji went to Konami, and Konami said "No 2D Castlevania, no Metal Gear Solid," so Sony relented. Then the game actually sold pretty badly on release and only really picked up after gaining a cult following a few years down the road (enough to get it "Greatest Hits" status, at least).

I think this story is totally fake, but it does prove a point: game developers know what is good for their series. Most of the time. If you look at Symphony of the Night and compare it to the "modern" 3D Castlevania 64, it's pretty clear that Sony got the way better deal out of this.

Nintendo really should have looked into that "Blast Processing" tech when it had the chance. 

Anyway, the game is pretty much a legend at this point, because it spawned the genre that Castlevania stuck pretty rigidly too in regards to it's handheld iterations for over a decade. It wasn't until Lords of Shadow had to show up and ruin everything that our 2D Castlevanias were squarely in the "Metroidvania" category of game design.

But let's say you know nothing about this nonsense I'm spouting, and need a full rundown. Is this game good? Has it aged well? Is it worth playing on it's re-release on every gaming system ever? Well...probably. I guess. Here's a review anyway.

That's using your head. 

Story-wise, it's the same old nonsense, though it does present it in an interesting way. The game actually starts on the last level of Rondo of Blood (complete with it's level intro graphic, though it calls the stage "Bloodlines," which is in fact the first stage in Rondo of Blood. Come on, Konami, I'm just a huge nerd, I didn't even design the game and I noticed this!), where you as Rictor Belmont bust into Dracula's joint and whip him good. Following which you get a massive text crawl explaining Rictor is missing, and Dracula's son Alucard (last seen in Castlevania III: True Blood) is off to punch him in the face and blow up his castle.

So you play as Alucard instead of a whipping Belmont. This isn't the first time we've mixed it up (Bloodlines didn't have a Belmont, and it had a dude with a whip and a dude with a spear), but the fact there are no whips at all until after you beat the game and enter an unlock to play as Rictor is pretty unique.

Anyway, the story's simple. Rictor's lost his marbles and thinks he's the king of Castlevania, and his sister Maria (who has gone from being a tiny girl to an actual woman) wants Alucard to beat some sense into him. The game does have different endings (based on if you kill Rictor or bring him to his senses, which unlocks a buttload more game to play) which is neat, but the story is hardly worth mentioning.

Minus the atrocious script and god-awful voice acting. It's so bad it's downright lovely. Seriously, I really, really dig this game's atrocious voice actors. They weren't even trying.

You tell 'em, Rictor. 

No, the biggest change is this is not a linear, straight shot Castlevania game. Instead, you as Alucard are tasked to explore the entirety of the castle, gaining power-ups and items that allow you to access further and deeper portions in your quest to find the princess. Wait, that's Mario. Whatever. 

If that sounds like Metroid, then you're both right and have reading comprehension, because I only mentioned that like fifteen times already. The map screen? Ripped from Metroid. Power ups like double jump to get to new areas? Metroid. It does have a few super cool changes, like Alucard can change into a sprinting dog, form of mist to pass through grates and other small areas, and a bat that can fly, all of which unlock new areas to further your exploration. It's cool, and you can see how they took the Metroid formula, flavored it up with some Castlevania style, and it ended up alright. 

The main difference is this isn't a game that you can speed run, nor one that is based on skill like Metroid or the earlier Castlevanias. While, yes, some skill is required for the bosses, the game actually has a level-up system, similar to Simon's Quest. Sort of. Only not at all. I just thought I'd drop that comparison for some reason.

You get XP and level, learn spells by inputting fighting game-style combo moves, find new weapons and armor and equip them, all in a 2D platforming sense. This isn't the first time this has been done (one could argue Zelda 2 did it a billion years before), but it actually feels...well, good. While skill can technically be replaced with level grinding and number crunching, it's still very satisfying to get that 3D "Level Up!" text and have Alucard glow all crazy. Mixing RPG elements with Metroid exploration was, frankly, brilliant, and it shows because they kept using it for future games.

The combination of 2D and 3D in the backgrounds makes this game gorgeous. 

All is not perfect in Symphony of the Night, however. While the equips and level up system are nice, they're also a bit simple. In fact, the whole game feels a bit dumbed down. Focus isn't really on the enemies or the challenge, the meticulous platforming and merciless bosses. Instead it's about exploration and the adventure of finding every secret and rotting in every nook and cranny the castle has to offer. Is this bad? No, not really. But it is quite different from other Castlevania games in nearly every regard. As well as much, much easier. 

While one can argue the second or inverse castle offers the real challenge (and it does), the whole first half of the game is an absolute cakewalk. This is mostly because Alucard, unlike his Belmont buddies in earlier games, controls like a dream. He slides gracefully with way too many frames of animation across the screen, can change his direction mid-air, can easily morph into any animal or form he wants, and has a quick-dash to get him out of sticky situations (or just slide across the floor for fun in reverse). Much like Super Castlevania IV, the game didn't really scale it's difficulty for all these new abilities, meaning if you even have a basic grasp of how to play a 2D platformer you'll stomp your way through this game in no time. Minus the few secret bosses that you have to cheese to beat with the absolutely broken "ultra" weapons. Balance is thrown out the window pretty quickly in, and it just keeps blasting out of control from there. You could be murdering things without even trying, take a wrong turn, and die in two hits. It's a bit like a massive mixed bag of imbalance. 

That looks like a good place to go. 

What isn't a giant mixed bag of imbalance is the graphics and music. I'll say I think this is one of the best looking and sounding PS1 games out there, and certainly the best 2D one. The pixel art is phenomenal and gothic, with the backgrounds often hybridizing 2D and 3D elements to make it feel both modern and retro. As mentioned, Alucard has way too many frames of pixelated animation to be legal, and the enemies all look phenomenal, from the huge bosses to the tiny skeletons.

The music is also absolutely rocking, so much so I actually imported the soundtrack. The opening song (which I will embed below) is probably one of my favorite intro songs in a game to date, with all the rest being just as fantastic. I really only have two gripes: the absence of any "classic" Castlevania tunes (Bloody Tears, Vampire Hunter, etc.) and the fact that the inverted castle uses the same song for 90% of it. Seriously? And it isn't even that great of a song compared to the rest. Come on, guys.

Now that's rockin.'

Symphony of the Night is difficult to review, mostly because of my immense love for the linear Castlevania games. That being said, I absolutely fell in love with SOTN after I first played it, and even to this day I often revisit the game and rebeat it, both with Alucard and the unlocked Rictor. While it does have some serious balance problems, and most skill is easily replaced by grinding or just knowing where the broken items are, Symphony of the Night remains a complete and wholly decent adventure into Dracula's lair. While I honestly wouldn't rank it up as high on my favorites as the best 2D linear Castlevania games, I can say it is still one of my favorites in the series, and highly recommend you get the re-release on PSN or Xbox 360 if you haven't already. 

A new direction, a new style for Castlevania, and a hundred indie game creators rejoice. Finally, something they can overuse now that they've ground duel-stick shooters into the ground.

Four out of five stars. 

What is going on here I don't even know.