Hey, check it out. We got games.
Have you tried them? Maybe. I don't know. Let's find out!
♪ "Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM ♪
As always, the promise is simply that all of these games have something interesting about them,
not necessarily that they are all good.
But, if you are a designer or an aficionado of the medium,
I think you'll find some interesting novelty here.
I'll be adding a bunch of links to these games down in the description,
and some of these links happen to support Extra Credits—
so, if you do decide to go pick any one of these up,
go give one of those links down in the description a click.
Let's go!
♪ "Friends" by Hyper Potions ♪
Sonic Mania.
Yeah, I just kicked this off with a Sonic game. What are you gonna do about it?
That's what I thought.
Now, the game's design isn't especially innovative or novel,
but Sega's business approach here absolutely was.
A major developer turning to a very small team, (that had helped to port their games before)
and giving them a crack at a new release for a major license, is a pretty wild event in this industry.
But then those indies had proved that they understood the Sonic series in a way that the license holder didn't.
It's a game made by fans of the original series for fans of the original series.
And while I would love to see more innovation creep into that basic old-school Sonic formula,
sometimes you just gotta return to form before you can build on that foundation.
That is what this is.
Sonic Mania is proof to the game industry that good things can happen,
if you're just a little less overprotective of your license.
ARTé MECENAS
I just all night binged on an educational game. What is happening?
I'll tell you what's happening, art!
Arté has the most interesting premise I've seen in a long while.
You play one of the early Medicis.
But instead of fixating solely on wealth or banking.
The game focuses on how your patronage choices influenced the history of art.
And as it does so, it shows the real prestige and propaganda value art held at the time.
Arté plays somewhere between an old trading game, where you're trying to buy low and sell high,
and a Kingdom Management game where you have to manage your relationships with other factions or territories.
And at the center of all of it, is art.
Have you made enough money that you can afford to sponsor Brunelleschi to work on your cathedral dome?
Should you commission some art from Michelangelo to prove your piety?
It is at the end of the day a strategy game
And it's a tough one, even if you CAN ace all of the games tiny little art quizzes.
(Which increase your reputation and standing with a church).
You're still gonna have to be pretty savvy to beat this one.
Now I'm not sure if the game is available for general release yet, or if you have to order it from a school.
But I do know that they at least plan to put out a general public version soon.
And maybe they already have, so, if you ever wanted a strategy game that seamlessly incorporates art history.
You better try to get your hands on a copy of Arté
Star Wars Force Arena.
It just would not be a games you might not have tried, if James didn't try to get a collectible game in there somehow.
And here it is!
There is plenty wrong with this game,
but as a designer, it's interesting to see what they're trying to do with the thing.
They have tried to put MOBA style characters into a Clash Royale style game.
Or I guess to put it another way:
they've tried to make a small-scale MOBA,
where instead of having abilities, your characters can summon specialized creeps from a deck.
If you're looking for an interesting mobile game to help pass the time,
and you want to see a game attempt to combine two well-known themes, this is definitely one worth looking at.
Gary Grigsby's War in the West.
This is the sort of game that 97% of you will have absolutely no interest in whatsoever.
And that's okay.
Of the 3% of you that remain,
2% probably already found this game themselves.
But for you, you, who exist in that last 1%
Boy, oh boy have I got a game for you!
You see Gary Grigsby is a master of the old, old, old school war game.
Not like Panzer General. I mean 70's old.
I'm talking like the old Avalon Hill board games, with maps so big you had to push two tables together to put them down.
Games with so many tiny chits that post-game cleanup takes an hour and a half.
Am I speaking your language last 1 percent?
Are you picking up what I'm putting down?
See, War in the West is Grigsby's take on the World War two invasion of Europe.
It has literally every regiment ever involved in the fight modeled with their own stats and placed in their historical location.
It has got the weather plotted for pretty much every week of the war, for every freaking hex on the board.
And do you know how many hexes are on that board? Guess!
Did you guess 36,000?
Because it's 36,000! And you can play over all of them at once.
So if you're looking for not just a hardcore war game,
but the hardest of hardcore war games,
enjoy Gary Grigsby's War in the West!
Just be prepared to spend a lot of time learning the rules,
and bid your family farewell for at least a week and...
maybe stock up on food.
Kingsway.
Kingsway makes it on the list, just because I love it conceptually.
it's a fairly standard RPG, if the interface for a fairly standard RPG was old-school Windows.
They do some clever things with this gimmick, both in combat and in the general management of the game.
But it's one of those where I would love to see somebody take this even further.
Just check it out. You'll see what I mean
Contradiction.
Alright, so the potential uses for FMV in games just continues to fascinate me.
Not necessarily because FMV is good,
but because the challenges and the possibilities that accompany FMV are just so utterly novel.
Especially if you're somebody who's mostly worked in traditional video games.
And Contradiction follows one of those paths that seems the most obvious choice for an FMV game: the murder mystery.
The gameplay is all about finding the contradictions in people's statements.
And admittedly the system for doing that is far, far, far, from perfect.
There are a lot of times where you will want to call somebody out on an obvious lie, but the game won't let you.
But the story is filled with cults and small-town secrets.
And sure the acting is a bit campy.
And much of the gameplay is arguably a simplified version of the old Sega CD Sherlock Holmes game.
But, contradiction is still good for a lark with some friends, if you're all interested in the idea of FMV games.
Because a few iterations down the road, one of these could be killer.
Sub-surface Circular.
Since we're on the topic of mysteries:
the fellow who made Thomas Was Alone has quietly released a strange Science Fiction robot mystery game,
and the premise is great!
It's the near future.
You are a detective, a stranger approaches you on a subway, and tells you a crime has occurred.
A disappearance, and you decide to take on the case.
The twist is that you are a robot, in fact, everybody you deal with is robots.
In this near future, robots of varying degrees of sentience exist in a society controlled by human governments.
As such they are all controlled by laws.
And you, a highly sentient detective are geo-locked to a subway train making a perpetual loop.
You must solve this mystery without ever leaving your train car.
The game itself is basically one of dialog trees.
You ask questions, and you discover new possibilities to ask questions about, until finally you come to the truth.
You're in for a lot of reading if you pick this one up, is what I'm saying.
But it is well-written, its world feels fully realized despite only being viewed from a single subway car, and it is filled with colorful characters.
I just love how a robot programmed for accounting, thinks and responds fundamentally differently,
Than a robot programmed as a tour guide.
If you're looking for a unique mystery and are up for a lot of text,
I definitely recommend picking this one up.
Children of the zodiarcs
Years ago a designer walked up to James at GDC and told him all about a collectible card dice tactics game
He was working on and now it's here
children of the zodiarcs the story and the characters are a bit weaker than I had hoped
But the fundamental idea is solid so if you're thinking about ways to innovate on a tactics game
Or if you just want to see card and dice mechanics
integrated into more things take a gander at children of the zodiarcs and in doing so maybe give them the funds to iterate and
Refine this concept even further
Mandagone I think how do you pronounce this?
Really I just wanted to show this on screen for a moment. It's a fairly straightforward
Platformer that'll take you less than an hour to beat
But the game is also free and the love that went into the world and the music and the story and verse really makes me
Want to include it here, but perhaps most of all it's the fact that Mandagone
I hope I'm saying that right really feels less like a game made for the player than as an expression a way to
Wrestle with grief it deserves a few minutes if you're ever looking for something simple and gentle and slow
Ultimate general Civil War
So just between us
There is a long lost episode of games you might not have tried that just sort of fell off the schedule years ago in it
We were going to mention a game called ultimate general Gettysburg, which James recommends for its innovative RTS movement system
But at the time we lamented that the game lacked a full fledged campaign with army management and unit experience and leader growth
turns out
ultimate general civil war has a full campaign with army management and unit experience and leader growth ten points to Gryffindor I guess if you
Are a strategy buff and enjoyed the original at all this is absolutely one to check out?
And finally dream daddy a dad dating simulator
We don't often recommend the dating Sims here, but I will gladly recommend this one. It's well-written. It's funny the music's happy
It's just a wholesome. Good time look life is hard and sometimes
You just need a game that makes you smile
And it's not perfect the mini games while amusing are clunky as all get-out
but at the end of the day dream daddy is inclusive and positive and just
charming and that is great and I gotta say for all the games in recent memory that have me playing a parent figure with a
Kid to protect. I have never cared as deeply for those kids as I have for Amanda for real
I want everything for this kid she deserves the world
Anyway, I hope you have seen something today that catches your interest and if not maybe next time maybe next time see you next week