Blogs - TigerClawTV

So today, I bought Vox from Indiegamestand. This marks the
third Minecraft clone-ish style game I have on Desura. (Guncraft and Sky
Nations are the other two.) I have really been enjoying checking out how each
developer puts their own spin on the whole block building style.

One of my more intelligent friends told me that there was a
time when all FPS games were called “Doom clones”. The point is, there is a
line in which those games stopped being clones and started being a new genre
all together. My question is this: where is that line? Are we approaching this
line with Minecraft clones? I must say I dislike using that word since I am
enjoying my Desura block builders, whereas I can no longer enjoy vanilla
Minecraft.

So what should this new genre be called? Voxel based block
builders? Voxel block games? VBGs?

And so in a moment of impulse, I dropped 10 bucks on two
Desura games. They were “Ocean City Racing” and “Sky Nations”. Sky Nations was
an easy choice. I am a hopeless Minecraft addict and I must play all the block
based games. This one appears to be doing some things with airships I guess. I
played it once. It’s still in alpha and seems somewhat complex. The couple
minutes I played were totally in the dark. Hmm… I figured maybe I would wait
for a couple updates and try again. Such is the case with alpha games.

Ocean City Racing made me really sad. It didn’t work. The
game initially loads up fine, but when I actually selected to start the action,
all I get is a black screen. It sure looks nice. I was really into the idea of
getting another bargain racing game after how much I enjoyed “Little Racers
STREET”. Ah well. Such is life. Just a heads up for anyone thinking about
buying it, it won’t work with an integrated graphics chipset on a laptop. The
devs confirmed this in an email. *sigh*

Paranautical Activity is pretty cool though. Looks like my
best Desura games are coming from Indiegamestand.com

So I finally bought a game from Desura that didn't come from a bundle or from IndieGameStand.com. I must say, samurai_jazz is a neat game for three bucks, but it's unfortunetly getting overshadowed for me since I bought it the same morning as Wizardry 6 & 7 off of GOG.com. I have been waiting a couple weeks to play those games.

So what do I think of samurai_jazz so far? Like I said, it's pretty neat. The tone seems very much akin to the Gameboy Color days. (I think the dev may have mentioned that this was something he was going for. I Don't remember.) The gameplay is a bit simplistic. There is really only one attack and a block. There also seems to be no real penalty for death. The player just restarts in the room left off. Difficulty is maintained by pitting the player against stacked odds and forcing redos until the player gets it right.

The real charm comes in the exploration. The scenery is really well drawn. The sprite work, particularly the heroes walk cycle, is also really nice looking. Overall I like it so far. I'm still playing through it. My only real complaint is the name "samurai_jazz" is how it appears in my library. It would have been nice to have properly spaced and capitolized letters. I guess that's nitpicking though.