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$20 Game of the Week: Crayon Physics Deluxe (PC)
by William Talley, filed in $20 Game Of The Week, Games on Aug.18, 2009
If you have been paying attention, you’ll notice that there is a revolution going on in gaming. The independent gaming scene has been getting bigger and bigger these past few years. Freely available open-source tools such as Gimp and Blender, as well as the accessibility of easy to learn programming languages such as Python and Blender have made game programming easier than ever, and there is more of an incentive for indie developers to get started as well. Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace features sections for independently made games, while indie developed games such as Everyday Shooter, Braid, and Dishwasher: Dead Samurai have been swiped up by big name companies, releasing them on various download services to critical acclaim. These games are going way beyond DIY shooters and puzzle games, introducing unique methods of story telling and gameplay mechanics. Crayon Physics, developed by Petri Purho, is one of the most recent faces of the indie gaming movement. It won first place at the 2008 independent games festival, and it puts many mainstream-developed games to shame.
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The Guilty Gear series is a string of fast-paced fighting games first developed by Japanese company Sammy in 1998. During an age where Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter was still champions of the fighting games, with Killer Instinct on its way out and Soul Caliber and Super Smash Bros. on their way in, it was a hard time to be a thrown into the fray, so to speak. However, if there was one thing that Guilty Gear games could always capitalize on, it was speed. Probably the fastest fighting game to date, the sheer velocity of the game made it a favorite amongst button mashers.
Like beat-em-ups, the light-gun shooter is a genre that gained most of its popularity during the 8 – 32 bit generations of gaming. However, as the mechanic is quite simplistic, the shooter genre has slowly been losing its appeal since its arcade heyday, just like the beat-em-up. Moreover, most light gun shooters can be completed in less than half an hour, making them shallow and light on content. To truly gain the attention of gamers, light gun games have to do something innovative and eye-catching. House of the dead featured zombies and showers of blood. Time Crisis featured a duck pedal, allowing players to seek cover and catch their breaths. Silent Scope featured a sniper rifle, and relied on precision and calculation rather than being a simple blast-a-thon. Police 911 (which really should be bought to Wii using the Wiimotion plus and maybe the balance board) translated player’s motions into onscreen action, getting the player’s body involved in the game. 
While playing this weeks $20 GOTW, I’ve come to realize something. There aren’t nearly enough games that allow you to step into the shoes of a criminal mastermind. Yeah, Grand Theft Auto and Saint’s Row allow me to craft a criminal empire and run a city, but even then I’m just playing as a gangster with a heart of gold. I wanna build a secret island base, chock full of henchmen that will lay their lives down for me on my say so. I wanna send my soldiers out to put in work across the world. I wanna capture, interrogate, and kill civilians and secret agents who snoop around my base. I wanna have a badass second-in-command who swears complete allegiance to me. I wanna instill fear in my workforce by killing one of my more incompetent workers right in front of them, Saddam Hussein style. Thankfully Elixir Studios recognizes the void of villain simulators. In 2004, they released this title, which places players in the wold of an evil genius as they try to achieve world domination.
I love a good beat-em-up. I know they get looked down upon these days, but few things relieve stress better than beating up busloads of thugs, mutants, mobsters, robots, ninjas, samurai, terrorists, dominatrices, zombies, hippies, republicans, and god knows what else. From Final Fight and Double Dragon to Streets of Rage and Sengoku, the beat-em-up genre has seen scores of great titles. One of the best and most unknown entries in the genre is this little known title from Neo-Geo developer Noise Factory. Taking control of one of 5 characters, you make your way through a post-apocalyptic world, battling demons and mutants. While it doesn’t do anything that hasn’t already been seen in the genre, it has some excellent graphics and a awesome soundtrack. While there is little chance of this game showing up on any home system anytime soon, this is definitely something you’ll want to pump quarters into if you come across it in the arcade. 
Regardless of what anyone says, the Playstation 3 (along with its competition the Wii and the Xbox 360) is a very good system, and anyone who says that Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft is dying anytime soon is an idiot. However, the problem with the system is is that when it was first released, there were hardly any games available for it. Scratch that, there were plenty of good games, but they were already available for Xbox 360, and in many cases, they had been available for the better part of the year prior to the system’s release. Even with new features, people weren’t exactly rushing out to pay $500 – $600 just to play a new version of Fight Night or Marvel Ultimate Alliance when they could already play them on Xbox 360, and the few exclusives that the PS3 had at system launch weren’t exactly anything to write home about. However, is there was one game that was worth the price of the new system, it’s this FPS classic from Insomniac. In fact, this game along almost makes it mandatory to own a PS3.
So I was able to catch the Video Games Live stop in Lewiston, NY this past Friday, on its North American Tour. Video Games Live, if you have been under a rock in terms of gaming culture, is a roaming show that features live orchestrated music from all the most popular video gaming series, including Sonic, Halo, Mario and others. Co-created by Tommy Tallerico and Jack Wall, both game composers in their own right, the show has traversed the U.S. and Canada and several other countries since 2003 and has gained popularity amongst gamers and music enthusiasts alike. A perfect blend, if you will.
After Midway struck gold with Mortal Kombat, they tried again, again, and again to repeat its success in the fighting game arena, but failed miserably. While Capcom was able to follow up the wildly successful Street Fighter 2 with Darkstalkers and the Marvel fighting games, SNK successfully presented Art of Fighting (along with King of Fighters, Samurai Showdown, and so many others) as Fatal Fury’s successor, and Namco followed up Tekken with Soul Blade, Midway churned out failures such as Bio Freaks and Mace: The Dark Age. They had some potential though, as Bio Freaks had an dismemberment game mechanic and Mace could have been Soul Edge’s evil twin. However, Midway’s most notable attempt (and by this I mean biggest failure) was War Gods. Although it had some promise, it was dragged down by horrid controls, lousy character design, and a frustratingly cheap artificial intelligence.