FREE PLAY - ISSUE 139 (Mar 2004)

Atari’s classic Super Sprint belongs to a special category of games – the victims of technology. Like 2D platformers and football games you don’t need a degree in rocket science to play, racing games viewed from overhead where you can see the entire track all the time simply don’t get made in the 3D era. It’s a bit weird, because there’s no logical reason that people would suddenly stop enjoying that style of gameplay just because some completely different kind of racing games also became available – if a new limited-edition Mars bar comes out, you don’t stop liking roast beef, do you?

Anyway, where the games industry fails us, you can be sure that heroic bedroom coders will step into the breach, and so it is with Super Sprint games. GeneRally (Free Play is unable to ascertain if you’re supposed to pronounce it as “generally” or “Jean Rally”) is a simple and ultra-customisable engine for the creation of Super Sprint-type racing larks, and has spawned a huge mod community creating countless original and inventive race tracks, but also – and as far as Free Play is aware, this is a first for the genre – accurate mappings of real-life race tracks.

When you come to think about it, it’s kinda odd that nobody ever released a commercial Super Sprint-style game featuring real racetracks, but it doesn’t matter now, because dedicated GeneRally fans have mapped and translated Monaco, Spa Francorchamps, the Hungaroring and all your other favourites, all in a variety of styles (some, for example, just recreate the track’s basic shape to whizz round in a few seconds, while others use the game’s alterable scale function to implement realistic length, so that a lap takes a couple of minutes in real time). You can race in all manner of different vehicles, on street or rally tracks, against humans or computer opponents with individually-selectable skill ratings, and just generally tweak and tune everything until you’ve created the Super Sprint game of your dreams. Sweet.

http://generally.rscsites.org/ - central hub for new versions and extra tracks
 

INDIE ZONE - ISSUE 141 (May 2004)

As Sega have recently shown by launching a lawsuit at Acclaim over the uncanny resemblance between Simpsons Hit And Run and Crazy Taxi, the issue of plagiarism isn’t dead in the world of videogaming, and nowhere is it more acutely felt than on the independent scene. A huge number of indie titles are still barely-concealed unlicenced clones of other people’s games, yet rather than condemn this intellectual piracy, the indie community often reacts with vitriolic defensiveness at anyone who raises the subject. Keep your eyes peeled for a full-blown Indie Zone investigation, but in the meantime, don’t expect to see any blatant ripoffs covered here.

AIRSTRIKE 3D
Divo Games £11.06 (£16.58 with CD)
Min spec: PII-333, 64MB RAM, 3D card

The on-rails scrolling shoot-‘em-up is one of the genres that’s tragically fallen by the wayside in the modern era of PC gaming. While pyrotechnic 2D blasters like Shikigami No Shiro and Ikaruga still command niche appeal on consoles, and semi-3D titles like Zero Gunner fashion the same gameplay into showcases for modern graphics, the PC’s been largely bypassed in the new age of shmups. Thank Jeebus, then, for the likes of Airstrike 3D. Visually reminiscent of EA’s “Strike” series of games, this is a no-nonsense helicopter shooter set across 20 levels of implausibly-heavily-defended river valleys. (It’s weird when games like this put you in a helicopter, because the primary characteristic of a chopper is being able to hover in one place, which the game’s forced constant scrolling never lets you do. But anyway.)

Frankly, between that description and the screenshots, there isn’t much else Indie Zone can tell you about Airstrike 3D that you can’t see for yourself. (Don’t you miss the days when two screenshots and one sentence could tell you everything you needed to know about something’s basic gameplay?)

It’s beautifully executed, with a range of resolution settings to suit all manner of PCs, and at the top setting it’s gorgeous, with extravagantly-lit explosions filling the screen (never more impressively than when you offload your mini-nuke weapon). There are stacks of nice weapons to experiment with, too. (Tip: the best thing to do with them is fire them rapidly at stuff.) Indie Zone’s main quibble is that it takes a little while to get difficult, but then Indie Zone is a cold-eyed, razor-edged killing machine, so you probably won’t find it an issue. For a fraction over a tenner, this is value-for-money mayhem from the top drawer.

PC ZONE VERDICT: Give your brain a rest. 80%

http://www.divogames.com/games/action-shooter-games/airstrike/

My, what big rockets you have.

FREE PLAY - Maziacs PC (PeeJay’s Remakes)

The problem with unlicenced clones, as noted in the Indie Zone intro, is that all too often they not only charge money for ripoffs of other people’s games, but don’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge where they’ve copied them from. The burgeoning “remakes” sector is a different kettle of fish altogether. Here you have coders bringing old games up to date for the modern age, for free, and openly and properly crediting the original creators by admitting whose game it was in the first place. This is one of Indie Zone’s very favourite remakes, right up there with the fantastic Skool Daze update Klass Of 99 (which incidentally has recently been rereleased in a Windows version).

It’s a rewrite of a fondly-remembered Don Priestley game from the early days of the Spectrum , in which your intrepid adventurer searches a maze populated by creepy spider-like monsters in search of gold. The Speccy version was famed for the dramatic fight scenes when you encountered one of the Maziacs, and this remake adds its own twist, the surprise of which Indie Zone won’t spoil for you. The game comes with both original-style graphics and a whole range of other selectable “skins”, and offers both “classic” and updated gameplay options.

http://www.peejays-remakes.co.uk/ - more remakes by the same author

The original Speccy game, with a horrible Maziac.

In the remake, you’re a ninja bear. Cool!
 

INDIE ZONE - ISSUE 143 (Jul 2004) or WHAT IS KNOWN AS… SHELFLIFE

One of the most dismaying things about the world of games as opposed to other forms of culture is the incredibly short shelflife of the typical release. While it’s easy to walk into a High Street shop and buy a 20-year-old Rolling Stones album, try getting hold of any game released more than three months ago and see how far you get. This is one of the greatest advantages of the web-distributed indie scene – as long as you don’t do something fat-headedly stupid like put a year, or inappropriately time-specific setting, in your game’s title, nobody need ever know that it’s ancient, and you can continue to sell it indefinitely as if it was the hottest new thing on the block. Hurray for those clever folks in the indie scene, eh?

BOULDER DASH XMAS 2002 EDITION
FlyOrDie Software, $19.99 (approx £11 at time of writing)
Minimum/recommended specs: None given – any PC should run this.

The history of Peter Liepa’s rocks-and-diamonds puzzler Boulder Dash is a long and confused one since the released seminal 1984 original, and the game is one of the most unofficially-cloned designs of all time. FlyOrDie contributed their own bit of water-muddying to the story with their “inspired by” title GemJam a few years ago, but since then have ponied up for the official licence and made several officially-endorsed Boulder Dash titles. Adding to the mystery is the fact that GemJam isn’t much cop and their later “Treasure Pleasure” official BD sequel is rubbish, completely missing the point of what made Boulder Dash great, while this – released between the two - is by far the best game in the series since the first one. A genius piece of sensitive designing, it takes a perfect grasp of the heart and soul of the original game and adds only sparingly to it to create the most compulsively addictive thing this reviewer’s played in about a year. It deserves a wide audience, so if you have any complaints about the fact that Indie Zone’s reviewing an 18-month-old game, kindly go stick your head in a pig.

Offering 50 levels - plus 15 optional tutorial ones if, as is alarmingly possible, you’ve never played a Boulder Dash game before - BDX2002E (Indie Zone is sure that was the registration number of its first car) lures you in with a few quick and simple stages that can be completed in under a minute, but then steadily ramps up the difficulty until you’re faced with levels that you’re head-scratchingly CERTAIN just can’t be done, until in a lightbulb flash of inspiration you realise the solution. Helpfully, the map structure lets you go off and try different stages if you get stuck on a particular one, and only the slightly rubbish save-game implementation (just one too-easily-overwriteable slot, and idiotically saved to the bastard registry rather than a handy file) lets it down at all.

The levels are wildly varied in puzzle style, so it never feels repetitive, and so fiendish that the sense of reward for beating one is heartwarming. For eleven quid, no-one who fancies themselves as a lover of videogames should be without this. Think the graphics are too basic for such a score? Kill yourself.

PC ZONE VERDICT: Tremendous and compelling update at bargain price. 90%

http://www.flyordie.com/games/download/bd-xmas.html

Balloons are among the new features.

FREE PLAY - PACMAN WORLDS (Danjo Software)

One of the very few games which can lay claim to being more ripped-off than Boulder Dash, of course, is Pac-Man. There have been literally hundreds, probably thousands, of Pac-clones, the vast majority of which are total rubbish. This one, however – despite presentation that’s just asking for a slap, like a teeny windowed mode and an always-default fullscreen mode that irritatingly screws up your desktop – takes the concept and extends it in a thoughtful and entertaining way, while maintaining the all-important game balance that so many clones entirely miss. It’s easy to imagine one of the official Pac-sequels taking this clever, more exploratory route away from the original game, with a handful of well-chosen additions like the “policeman” ghost who comes out and chases you if you use the turbo power-up in sections of the mazes marked by speed-limit signs.

Full background and instructions can be found within the game, the complete version of which is included on this month’s coverdisc, so find out for yourself.

http://www.megagames.com/news/html/freegames/pacmanworlds.shtml

Pac-Town, the game’s central hub area.
 

FREE PLAY - ISSUE 145 (Sep 2004)

A couple of months ago, alert readers may recall Indie Zone railing against plagiarism in independently-produced PC software. The blatant unacknowledged copying of other people’s games is indeed a curse, but that doesn’t mean developers can’t take large slices of inspiration from earlier titles. This month, we look at a couple of releases which borrow heavily in one way or another from previous games, but bring more than enough of their own to the table to justify the pinching.

DEMONSTAR SECRET MISSIONS 1
Mountain King Studios, $19.99 (approx £12)
Min spec: DirectX 5 Rec spec: None specified 

Seibu Kaihatsu’s 1990 coin-op Raiden is one of the most influential arcade games of all time. Many games have paid homage to it in the subsequent 14 years, and most scrolling shoot-‘em-ups can trace their history back to it in greater or lesser part, but never has closer tribute been paid than in Mountain King’s Demonstar series (of which SM1 is the second). Indeed, the game lifts the design of the Raiden spaceship, and the taking-off-from-the-carrier-deck intro to each level, almost pixel-for-pixel, but aside from such superficial nods to its inspiration (and the odd glance back at Amiga favourite SWIV) this is a game which follows the Raiden design template to a degree that verges on stalking, albeit that all the game’s eight actual stages are entirely new (and the graphics are somewhat sharper and lusher than Raiden ever managed).

What that means in practice is a tough, well-balanced, no-nonsense shmup that you can devote the odd blissful, brainless half-hour to for a straightforward but demanding test of your joypad skills. It’s a challenge - not least because of some slightly suspect use of colour causing enemy bullets to sometimes get lost in the onscreen mayhem, the game’s one noticeable flaw – that you’ll keep coming back to, because the only Continue option puts you all the way back to the start of the last stage you reached. There’s no lazy quicksaving your way through games like Demonstar, nor even the pump-more-cash-in option of playing Raiden in the arcade. To see the end of this, you’ll just have to plain old-fashioned earn it. This reviewer hopes that’s not enough to put the modern PC gamer off it altogether.

PC ZONE VERDICT: What are you, scared? 82%

http://www.mking.com/demonstarsm1/index.html

FREE PLAY - CODENAME: GORDON 
(WoS note: the text below never actually made it into the magazine. PCZ were too uncomfortable with slagging off Half-Life with the sequel imminent, and I wasn't prepared to fudge the piece, so the editor totally rewrote the Codename: Gordon section himself.)

Indie Zone is about to say something slightly controversial here: Half-Life is crap. Yes it is. It had unrivalled atmosphere, great film-esque direction and a fairly compelling plot, but in gameplay terms it was an irritating 3D rewrite of Dragon’s Lair – walk along, have something happen that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen, get killed, quickload and try again but remember where the surprise is coming from this time – with the addition of totally inappropriate platform-game elements that meant you died almost as often by falling off ladders as by getting mangled by horrible alien space beasties. Seriously. It’s shit. Sort yourselves out. Still, Indie Zone realises it’s swimming somewhat against the tide on that one, so it’s entirely possible that you’re simply going to adore Codename: Gordon, which Indie Zone hates more than the last git who keyed Indie Zone’s car.

It is, as the URL somewhat gives away, essentially Half-Life interpreted in 2D, and while it started off as a bootleg “tribute”, it now carries the official seal of approval. It includes most of the original game’s design features, and even – despite being a 2D platform game – retains the mouse-and-keyboard control method. The action is depicted in cartoonish, beautifully-shaded graphics that bring to mind the nicer parts of Metal Slug, and while Indie Zone can’t bear to play the horrible thing, the chances seem favourable that you’re going to like it. You freaks. The game can be downloaded via Valve’s innovative Steam network, or if you’d prefer to have your download finish before the sun cools and a new Ice Age dawns, the file is now widely spread across all the major P2P filesystems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename:_Gordon 

INDIE ZONE - ISSUE 147 (Nov 2004)

This month, Indie Zone encountered something of a dilemma. (Have we ever mentioned what great cars they are?) This column was set up specifically to give coverage and encouragement to independently-produced games, so what do you do when something comes out that’s interesting, yet not actually very good? After much soul-searching, Indie Zone decided that the best thing to do is offer constructive criticism, on the grounds that online-distributed games are a lot easier to update and release improved versions of. Hey, we’re here to help.

SKOOLS OUT
Mucky Baby £7.99 
Min spec: P600, DirectX 7.0, 100MB disk space

Skools Out (sic) is a pretty transparent attempt to recreate the magic of the legendary Spectrum game Skool Daze, while transporting into the modern three-dimensional era. Developers Muckybaby have partially succeeded, which is to say they’ve got the “3D” part down pat – the game is set in a very nicely-rendered environment, incorporating (briefly) the hero’s home, and then a sizeable school with playground, sports field, outbuildings and suchlike. Pupils and teachers scurry around, occasionally muttering pithy comments, and objects can be examined and manipulated.

Sadly, however, the gameplay hasn’t had anything like the same care lavished on it. There’s barely a skeleton of a game here, with most of the player’s time occupied in simply wandering around the school, looking in cupboards. Unlike Skool Daze there’s no need to actually attend classes – if you fail to show up, nobody bats an eyelid, and you can have free run of every room in the building. All classrooms are empty except the one you’re supposed to be in, and even if you do decide to be a model pupil (attending classes and answering multiple-choice questions is the only way to reduce your lines tally), you’ll have a job finding the right room before the end of the lesson, given the absence of any maps, signposts or helpful arrows.

It’s a shame, because there are undoubtedly the beginnings of a really neat game here. As it stands, however, it’s barely more than a tech demo. Indie Zone’s recommendation, then, is that you keep a close eye on the website and hope for revisions. A-ha ha.

PC ZONE VERDICT Could do better. 44%

http://www.serialgamer.com/direct-170754.html

Good luck finding where “Art” is.

FREE PLAY - LIGHTNING BREAK

Of all the games we’ve brought you since this column started nine months ago, this is the one that’s occupied most of Free Play’s own time, and the one that’s been most popular with all of Free Play’s friends. It’s a (loosely) snooker-based game, and it’s a work of genius. On each of the game’s 20 levels, you’re set a particular task – say, pot two red balls and two coloured balls – and given a time limit to do it in. Potting the wrong ball or the cue ball, or not hitting any balls at all, knocks four seconds off your time, and that’s pretty much it for rules. The control system is incredibly simple (aim with the mouse, hold down the left button to set power), the implementation of the laws of snooker is extremely forgiving (you can hit any ball you like at any time, you’re only penalised if you pot them), and there’s all sorts of potential for setting up clever stuff like combo shots, whereby you can save time by sinking several balls at once.

As you move through the levels the challenges get more inventive and more cunning, culminating in Level 20’s challenge to score a 147 break against the clock. (Don’t worry, it’s not as daunting as it sounds, thanks to the lax rules and the big pockets.) The game keeps average and high scores both for individual levels and the whole game, and if you’re anything like Free Play, you’ll be playing it constantly for days, first to work through all 20 stages (after 20, the levels repeat with tighter time limits for extra challenge) and then to better your scores. Lightning Break is a work of art in 300K of Flash code, and if you have more fun with any PC game this month, free or otherwise, you’re probably lying.

http://www.maniacworld.com/Lightning-Pool-Game.htm 

Do you love the sound of this level? Ho!
 

INDIE ZONE - ISSUE 149 (Christmas 2004)

Atari’s Occasionally, viewers, Indie Zone does wonder if anyone's actually reading this page. After all, month after month we feature games of types that never usually show up on the PC. This month, for example, we've got a game about a hamster rolling down slopes, and a game about jumping on arrows in time to music. Neither of them feature realistic simulation elements, foot-thick manuals, or World War 2 scenarios. Do you even care about them? Are you even reading these words, or have you all skipped excitedly forward to news of the latest mods to make all the walls in Doom 3 dayglo pink so you can see WHERE THE BLOODY HELL YOU'RE GOING in it? Is there anybody there? Hello?

HAMSTERBALL
Raptisoft, £7.14
Min spec: none specified

Marble Madness. Let’s just get it out of the way nice and early, shall we? Hamsterball is an unofficial remake of/sequel to Atari’s legendary 1984 coin-op, copying the “roll a ball down a chequered 3D pyramid thing” exactly but replacing all the level designs with new ones. You get 12 geometric mountainsides to traverse here rather than the original five, you’re a hamster in one of those perspex exercise balls rather than a marble, and there are a couple of new features (such as the Escheresque “Odd Race” where the perspective changes from one floor tile to the next, and the circular saws which suddenly slice half the floor away from under you), but basically this is Marble Madness 2004.

It’s a beautifully-executed job, though – gorgeous to look at and fiendishly designed. Almost too fiendishly, in fact, as it gets quite staggeringly difficult by around the halfway mark, and Indie Zone suspects that a large percentage of PCZ readers will simply never see the last few tracks, which seems a terrible shame given the effort that’s clearly gone into designing them. Even in the game’s “Pipsqueak” mode, which boosts your time limit and does away with all the moving enemies, and is great fun for young kids, time gets absurdly tight later on, and the mode doesn’t unlock the various courses for time-trial races anyway. Turn the enemies back on and a few of them (including the aforementioned saws, and the seemingly arbitrary and unavoidable giant mallet) seem a tad unfair too, which is a bad flaw in a game where every second counts.

On the upside, there are multi-player battle modes to discover, though to make the most of them you’ll need a full complement of control devices (mouse, joypads and for one unlucky sap who might as well just give up at the start, keyboard), and Hamsterball is so loveable as to allow most of these faults to be forgiven. For those up to the challenge this is a fantastic game, and the asking price is an absolute bargain. Once again, though, Indie Zone has to sadly deduct 20% for the shameful way that the developers of a blatant remake have failed to even passingly acknowledge or credit the original game whose ideas they’ve copied. Tch.

PC ZONE VERDICT Did anyone say “hamsterrific!” yet? 66%

http://www.raptisoft.com/hamsterball.shtml

My rats live in a setup not dissimilar to this.

FREE PLAY - STEPMANIA

Konami’s arcade dancing game Dance Dance Revolution (aka the much less snappy Dancing Stage over here) has been one of the company’s greatest-ever moneyspinners, largely due to the fact that each iteration of the series features only a couple of dozens songs, of which you’ll only ever have heard of a small handful (the rest being made up of in-house Japanese Eurodisco soundalikes). By this simple but cunning measure, Konami can keep releasing pretty much the same game over and over again, in a manner that makes EA Sports look like models of artistic restraint and leaves dance-loving gamers frustrated at the need to load up eight different versions just to get all the songs they like in one session. Thank goodness, then, for Stepmania.

A stupendous collaborative work, Stepmania is a PC remake of DDR which implements every feature of even the latest incarnations of the real thing, and which is produced in an open format enabling anyone to create “step files” (the sequence of arrows you have to dance to in time to the music) from any piece of music they feel like. Every track from every version of DDR has been converted, but also countless hundreds of other songs, and you can compile playlists comprising only your own personal favourites.

Contributors have also created background pictures, commentator files and every possible other addition necessary to make precisely the DDR game you always wanted. Oh, and incidentally, if you can’t bring yourself to entertain the idea of leaping around on a plastic mat in front of your PC, Stepmania played with the cursor keys is actually a brilliant old-school arcade-type reaction and co-ordination game. You don’t need to dance to enjoy it.

http://www.stepmania.com/

Only try this with a chaperone. Ideally one who's also a paramedic.? WoS Forum