Rocket Boards Review

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'd like to say that I'll (probably) be offered a full copy of the game I'm reviewing by posting this. Sadly, I doubt I'll play it much.

The game in question, Rocket Boards, looked like it had a lot of promise. BinarySun games advertised it as "Inspired by Nintendo classics like Super Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing". The screen shots looked pretty cool. The demo download was small. In short, it looked too good to be true. It was.

I've found a few faults with the game, but theres only one really important one: It's boring.
After four laps or so, you begin to wonder if there's anything more interesting to do. The entire demo consists of powering forward, steering around obstacles and other board racers. That's it. No jumping, no power ups, no guns, nothing.
Something, anything to do besides surf would make all the difference. I almost wonder if it's aimed at little kids, but the controls seem much too touchy for that.
It almost plays like a complete tech demo without a real game wrapped around it.

In short, I don't recommend buying "Rocket Boards". Instead, go check out "Miko-san's Miracle Board". Fans of hoverboards will be much happier, I promise you.

Update 4-5-06: Home of the Underdogs is back, and the Miko-san game link now works. 

Katamari Damacy 2

Yep, you read that correctly. Apparently, for some completely random reason, We love Katamari was not Katamari Damacy 2.

The developers, upon realizing the horrible mistake they had made by not including “2″ in the title, began to panic. I imagine it went something like the following.
“We can’t release Katamari Damacy 3! There has not been a 2. What will people think?”

But then, there came a man. A man with a copy of Macromedia Studio. Actually, it was probably several men. Possibly women, too. They slaved away to create the work of art you are about to see.
Check it out: Katamari Damacy 2

It’s pretty much what Katamari would look like if it was made twenty years ago. As a little web game. In Flash. Or something.

…It’d really help if I could actually read Japanese.

Update: It’s gone. Sorry. I’ll post a link here if I find a mirror.

Triglav

Do you like Diablo? Are you too cheap to buy it? Are you running Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows 2000 or above? Then check this out.

It’s a neat little Diablo clone written entirely in JavaScript. Not very useful, even by JavaScript game standards, but pretty cool nonetheless.

StarCraft Brood War Spawn Howto

Yes, you read the title correctly. It is indeed possible to “spawn” Brood War for LAN games. This is a bit kludgey, and it won’t work over Battle.net, but it falls under the “good enough for me” catagory.

More free Guild Wars fun

The sad truth of the matter is, people can’t read. I don’t have any Guild Wars keys. The free offer ended over a year ago. Stop bothering me about it. Just go and freaking buy the game; it’s only like $30 now. Thank you.

– Teh Management

Longtime readers of my old blog (and I’d like to thank both of you for reading that long) may remember when I talked about the World Preview of Guild Wars. Pretty much, they let everyone run loose for a weekend in a few areas of the game. It was a lot of fun, but it was over pretty quickly and a lot of people missed out. Well, now that the first Guild Wars expansion pack is coming out, there’s another weekend of free fantasy insanity. It’s the weekend of January 20th.

So, anyway. There’s more info on the website, but heres the quickie version. Apparently, everyone uses the same key, and ArenaNet is urging people to “distribute like crazy!”
American key: 888D9-H27PG-NM72D-PLHJ1-2HG11
European key: 66DG9-C4RHB-9FKD6-287BJ-LRGCJ
Download the client (Only like 80kb. Fits on a floppy!)

I will likely be lurking around some place as Frem Underhill, so be sure to ping me if you read this!
Have fun!

Overgod: great shooter with a stupid name

Slashdot recently ran a review of some of the lesser known holiday season “must have” games. Their conclusion? None of them are that great.
However, buried in the comments, someone gave the name of a nice little freeware game that was too good not to be noticed.

It’s called Overgod. It doesn’t seem to really have an official website, but you can get it here. It is, to quote the Slashdot poster, “hours of blasty fun”.