Fighter

My brother sits not two inches away from me, our elbows brushing and occasionally jabbing each other. With my laptop appropriately nestled in my lap we lean forward and stare at an abstraction of two grizzled swordsmen locking blades, hunting for an opening. After a quick exchange of blows, all blocked, we retreat to our respective corners. For a moment we wait. Rushing towards the center, I blast an attack his way. With my sword about to connect my brother raises his weapon in defense, only to realize (too late) that I threw a feint. I seize this opportunity and deal the killing blow, splattering copious red stuff across the screen. And my score count just went up one.

Zombie Smashers X2 is an older game by James Silva, who also created the entertaining Elite-style Ninjastarmageddon!. It's a 2D sidescrolling streetfighter in which you play a "zombie smasher" and what you fight are mainly zombies of varying types. There's an RPG-like aspect to it, with missions you complete and NPCs you talk to, as well as a sandboxy-ness to it -- there are restaurants and shops you can buy stuff at, and you can wander about and find things without necessarily focussing on the next quest.

It's something of a shock to see it on Reflexive; hard to imagine what the soccer moms make of this gritty, punk-influenced game with its over-the-top splashes of blood, the ability to pick up the heads of dead zombies and smash others with them, and so on. But of course, incongruity is the source of much amusement.

ZSX2 isn't freeware, though it's a modest $10; we link to Silva's earlier ZSX, which he's released for free, above as well.

"If some sissy chick tried to kick my ass I would say: Hey! Missy! Go knit me a sweater before I slap you in the face!"

-Eric Cartman

What is your stance on gender and violence? Should men use less violence, starting fewer wars and stop raping others? Should women embrace violence so they can bite back at danger or get a stronger foothold in the competitive economy? What about games? Should they be less violent so that players become more civilized? Or should we condone it since games let us play with violence in a safe manner? And should gender have any role in the amount of violence portrayed in games?

Recommended Soundtrack.

Stick Ranger comes from Ha55ii (pronounced "high-five"? Time Will Tell). Ha55ii made the powder game and its extended family, brilliant orgies of process intensity. One of the characters in that game, or elements if you prefer, was a bouncing action man whose feedable FSM mentation provided quite at lot of amusement in contrast to your god-like powers. Going into Stick Ranger, I expect something similarly jubilant, but with classes. What I got was a grind-fest where the mouse control is your greatest obstacle, but which has a remarkably good flow when matched with Hyphy/Electro/Rap.

Paolo Pedercini is best known for excellent, and risky games like the McDonald's Video Game, which takes cruel aim at the international fast food purveyor, and Operation Pedopriest, which takes equally cruel aim at the Catholic Church's proclivity for whitewashing the child abuse of some of its prelates. Faith Fighter is his most recent title, and it would be, well, cruel of us not to review it, since we have written so admiringly of his previous efforts.

Faith Fighter is a classic Street Fighter-style game, in which you choose one of several characters and engage in fisticuffs with another, either a computer-controlled character, or another player whacking keys on the other side of the keyboard. As one might expect, each character has special moves that can be triggered by key combinations. Two falls out of three. What you expect, albeit in Flash, and free.

Sumotori Dreams is a) a goofy but minor little game that's fun to watch but not precisely fun to play, b) an impressive physics implementation in very tight form, c) an illustration of why the demoscene is still relevant: Take your pick.

Slamdance Guerilla Games Festival Finalist
IGF Finalist for Design Innovation

One phrase we love to use but don't often get to is: You have never seen a game like this before. Yea Toribash.

In Toribash, you control a jointed 3D model. You select a joint, and tell it how to move. When you've issued your instructions, you advance the game, one or more frames at a time--and when you want to change the motion of your character, you change the forces at various joints.

According to Kim Pallister, Microsoft's casual game guy, Bible Fight is "the most sacrilegious game ever."

It is a straightforward Streetfighter-style game, in which you and your opponent (either controlled by the computer or by someone else whanging on the other side of the keyboard) punch and kick each other until one or the other achieves victory.

As with other games of this style, there are a variety of characters, each of whom has his own combo moves that do extra damage, if you can hit the right key combination quickly enough.

Except that--the characters are Mary, Eve, Jesus, Moses, Noah, and Satan. And the special moves are things like Mary's Halo Toss, and Jesus's Loaves and Fishes.

Here's what's cool about Lugaru:

It features a hand-to-hand combat system controlled by a variety of mouse movements, that feels vastly more like kung-fu combat than any game that requires you to memorize huge lists of "combo" moves.

It's a fully 3D, action-adventure title, developed (originally for the Mac, forsooth) by a two-brother team with basically no funding--and still looks as good as, well, say, a high-end Playstation 1 title, which is a remarkable achievement under the circumstances.

While many games indeed contain sword-wielding characters, very few make even a cursory attempt actually to simulate the dynamics of sword-fighting, nor yet to impart a sense of how it actually feels to engage in swordplay.

That's what Determinance does. True, what it simulates is less the reality of fencing that the sort of over-the-top dramatic swordplay you'd expect in Highlander or a Hong Kong action flick, but hey, that's fun. What it does, and elegantly, is allow you to control sword motions, body positions, and arm positions with nothing but the mouse and its buttons.