Monthly Archives: August 2009

When Pigs Fly

When Pigs Fly is an awesome new auntie pixelante by dessgeega posted on newgrounds. I suppose you could call the game a platformer. The player controls a pig with wings, navigating the pig through tight corridors and past deadly spikes. Pressing the space bar flaps the wings and causes the pig to fly up a bit. The pig will fall due to gravity, so to keep the pig flying, the space bar must be pressed repeatedly. Because of this, the pig’s vertical position will fluctuate, causing much of the difficulty in the game. The pig will die if it comes into contact with spikes or if the wings touch anything at all. The pig does have a large hitbox, although the the hitbox is actually slightly smaller the sprite itself, allowing the edges of the wings to just barely pass over obstacles sometimes. To complete the game, the player must have precise control over the pig.

 
I took 26 minutes to complete the game, but I did chat online a bit while playing, not realizing that the game tracked completion time. I died 219 times. The game is challenging, but the deaths were fair. The game is broken into multiple rooms, and I could see an entire room at a time. The biggest design flaw in my opinion in platformers is the inability for the player to see dangers ahead of time, and When Pigs Fly definitely does not suffer that at all. In addition, after dying the pig is respawned at the beginning of the current room. You never have to repeat a room.
The sprite art is nice and simple with mellow, muted colors. The music is nice, and the sound effects are cute although repeat often. I can understand the sound becoming annoying to some people, and they can be turned off, but I enjoyed them. The sounds were created by Daphny, and a soundtest is available.

Bastet

mint at SelectButton recently posted about a free PC game called Bastet, short for Bastard Tetris. Rather than giving the player a random piece like normal, Bastet calculates the worst possible piece and gives that to the player. It’s an interesting game. I’ve played a handful of matches, somewhere between 10 and 20, and have only cleared seven lines in my best game. Give the game a try!

GameFAQs rethinks Space Deadbeef

Back in January I made a post titled “Space Deadbeef Not Worthy of GameFAQs” about GameFAQs not allowing me to submit game data about Space Deadbeef. GameFAQs claimed that they “normally [list] only commercially released games, with a few exceptions for very popular non-commercial titles” and that Space Deadbeef didn’t meet those requirements. Today I noticed that Space Deadbeef is now listed on their site. I’m not sure what changed that made GameFAQs change their position on Space Deadbeef. Maybe the game actually became very popular! That would definitely please me. Regardless, I’m happy that GameFAQs has added it, and I’ll submit my review of the game soon!