Vampires

Photon Baby is an excellent puzzle platformer, with NES-ish graphics and an interesting puzzle style. You play a little fellow with a sort of gun; while babysitting, the child you were caring for was kidnapped by a vampire bat, and you evidently have to fight through thirty platform levels featuring vampires and bats to get the brat back.

Vampires wear differently colored capes; some surfaces of each level are colored lines. You bullets are gray when fired, but take on the color of one of these lines; and a vampire can only be killed by a bullet the color of his or her cape. This is where the puzzle aspect comes in; you must figure out how to slay each vampire, given the organization of the level, and the positions of the colored lines.

Rijn the Specpyre is an old-school action RPG, currently under development, but with Windows and Linux demos available now (and a Mac version promised). In it, you play Rijn, a vampire, whom the local townsfolk have asked to rid them of a local "specpyre" family -- specpyres are apparently some kind of specter/vampire hybrid, and vampires are cool while specpyres are nasty.

The game is played entirely with keyboard; arrows to move, and left-CTRL/space-bar use left-hand weapon and right-hand weapon. You start with a sword, but can gain a crossbow later, and can wield torches as weapons. There are a limited variety of enemies, but each has its own attack pattern, and the most effective way of dealing with them varies.

In my review of Grey Ranks, I expressed my feeling that the game was capable of creating, in players, the kind of emotional response we associate with art of power; that playing the game can be a worthwhile and important experience, but that this kind of experience cannot reasonably be classifed as "fun." My phrasing was "fuck fun." Coincidentally -- or perhaps not coincidentally, since I believe Gijsbers is attempting to get at something similar -- the rules to his game Vampires says that it "transcends fun." (Gijsbers also created Fate, The Baron, and Stalin's Story).

So a game I designed with Steve Meretzky launched today. It's a "social network" game, developed by You Plus, and is currently available on MySpace. A Facebook version is now live will follow later.

Dracula Twins is a charming little sidescroller in which you play either Drac or Dracana, the twin children of Count Dracula, it seems. Graphics are cute and cartoony--apparently, vampires are the good guys. There's a little comic-book intro (a nasty vampire-hunter has got hold of old Dad, and you have to fight your way through various environments to rescue Pater), but of course, story isn't really the point of a sidescroller.