Apologies for the previous (deleted) incarnation of this blog. I did extract everything before trying to play it, but that was rendered moot by gimmicky sylladex software.

Alright, I finally got around to playing everyone's some people's games. Let's talk about them, shall we?

Note that I haven't finished any of these games, and many of them only got a cursory glance. Some of them didn't work for me, so I gave up. I downloaded them about a week ago, so maybe they've been fixed since then. I'm not sure.

The Last Halloween - Yeah, I can see that "BOOKS DONT INTEREST [you]", death. I can tolerate your carefree typing style online, but when there are spelling mistakes all over a game and there are empty "FRIG"s everywhere, I get a little irritated. Nice little game otherwise though. I like the graphical style, and it has a "complete" feel to it.

Candy Rush - Uurgh, installers. This game is pretty solid. Nice work. A few things, though: why can't I shoot beyond my torch's range, and am I supposed to be defending the house (if I'm not, why is it there?)?

Harrowing Lair - This game discriminates against my laptop's short screen¹. Couldn't play it. It's really a shame too, because I already had Python and Pygame installed from uni work. I tried to shrink the screen in the code, but, well, it just shrank the view. Which makes sense, I guess (dirty hard-coder).

Transmission – Intro video was a nice touch, but the narration wasn’t fantastically-written, and I wasn’t really convinced by the plot hook. I mean, the guy gets mind-controlled into driving to some cave? Feels like puppeteering, and that really screws my suspension of disbelief. Also, what do you do after looking at the oval hole in the piano? I wasn’t sure how to stop looking at it.

Operator – This game was freakin’ terrifying². Job well done. Let it never be said that GM cannot create effective 3D games. Slenderman is going to haunt my nightmares.

Little Witch Sayuri-chan – Pretty nice little sidescroller. I can see it’s unfinished, so I won’t complain about aesthetics, as I assume the HUD will be vastly improved in future versions of the game. Good stuff otherwise.

Hell Awaits - Controls in a separate doc? Not a good start. Okay, started the game now. I like the shadowy aesthetic, it’s neat. Makes it hard to see wolves against the background, but that’s probably the idea. But is it a good idea? I don’t know, it’s interesting, but I’m not a fan.

Rooms - First sentence of intro screen has a comma splice. Oh well, skipping past that… That “get itemâ€? sound is really jarring – don’t change it, it gave me fright in a horror game. Sailed across the river… and I died. “I WILL EAT YOUâ€? was quite hilarious.

Monster - The atmosphere here is pretty well done. That said, I got bored with that vampire guy's speech after a while. Some of it was hard to read, and I think there were places where you were given too large a chunk at once.

The Field and The Tower - Ooh, three dimensional! So in the first level, you have to run away, and in the second you have to fight ghosts. This game's pretty neat, but it could use an option to turn off the music, because I reviewed these games with a Skype call in the background, and that didn't work out so well with this one.

Darling Springs - Yeah, this is my favourite one. I was too scared of fat zombies to finish it. The animation's not great (well, the grass animation's amazing, but otherwise…), but the graphics as a whole are great, and I really like the reloading mechanic. Fumbling to load shots into your revolver while a zombie's bearing down on you is pretty terrifying.

I haven’t the rest of the games. I guess I overlooked them when downloading everything. I’d download them now, but I’m currently over my internet quota, so look forward to part two of this blog when that goes down again.

1 - You can turn the music off though, and that's great. Just, why have an entire options screen for one little thing?

2 – Especially the part where you have to put a tape in a VCR… never thought I’d have to do that again. =P Seriously though, terrifying stuff.

I'm noticing a trend here; a trend of awful, unproofread text. For future reference, my proofing services are totally available to anyone who asks. I've been doing rather a lot of this sort of thing lately, and I'm not too awful at it, so swing me a PM if you've got some game-text that needs fixing. Let’s put my annoying grammar Naziism to good use!

Speed reviews aided by (well, more like “actively thwarted byâ€?) modern sylladex technology:

F1ak3r