FATE

• Made by: WildTangent
  
• Cost: $20
  
• Where to get it: WildTangent Website

The gaming industry is one that loves to take the innovative ideas of others and bludgeon them to death with their own shoddy implementations. After Halo introduced the automatic-refilling health meter, for example, every game had to jump on the bandwagon. Earlier, when Sonic the Hedgehog showed the world that ugly cartoon animals could have ‘attitude’ and kids would love it, every single game developer had to make their own, culminating in the amazing brilliance of a duck with an extension cord sticking out of it’s arse.

FATE proudly continues this tradition by not just ripping off one or two key points, but the entire design docs of Diablo and Diablo II. More precisely, it takes ideas from both of those games, mixes them together and adds a few innovations. This kind of thing would be unacceptable were it not for 1) the fact that the Diablo series was brilliant and 2) FATE executes all of these concepts perfectly and sometimes even a little better than its predecessors.

You create an adorably diminutive character, choosing a name, gender and look and start in a village that happens to be right next door to a curiously massive dungeon. You’re given the task of going deep into the dungeon and taking out some baddie that lives there, presumably minding it’s own business. You delve into the dungeon, kill monsters, gain levels, collect loot and work your way towards being an unstoppable monster-slaying midget. 

If this sounds a lot like Diablo, that’s because it is. The inventory system is the same, the controls are the same, even some of the sound effects are very similar. 

Okay, so you know that it’s similar to Diablo. What sets it apart? Why should you pay 20 dollars for it?

FATE has a couple of neat innovations that I wish were in Diablo as well. The most significant addition is your pet. In a nod to NetHack, you can choose either a cat or a dog to accompany you in your dungeon delving. In the beginning, your pet is more powerful than you are and will help in battles tremendously. It also has an inventory, and you can load it up with loot and actually send it up to town to sell it all and return to you with the earnings. This helps cut out some of the back-and-forth drudgery that dungeon-hacking games tend to have. You can also feed fish to your pet that you catch to change it into different beasts, making it more powerful and giving it special abilities. 

Another innovation is the lack of character classes. As a feature that is surprisingly deep for a ‘casual’ title, skill points are used instead of classes to define your characteristics. You’ll spend them on magic abilities, melee skills or other aspects of your character. You’re free to spend your points in any way you see fit. I made a dual-sword-wielding summoner and it was fantastic: I ran around the dungeon with two massive Orc cleavers and six Olwbear minions following me and attacking everything in sight. The flexibility available with this system is impressive. 

There are many other cool little things about the game, like character retirement and the unusual way the game handles death, but I’ll leave them for you to discover. One of the best dungeon-crawler games ever is an indie game. If that is your kind of thing, this will be like heaven.

Mini-Review: Mondo Agency

• Made By: Cactus Software
• Cost: Free!
• Where to get it: Indie Games.com

Okay, so maybe Mondo Agency isn’t going to set the gaming world on fire. In a purely technical sense, the game does absolutely nothing that hasn’t been done before. But if you take it as a piece of art, like an independent film or surrealist painting, then you’ll have a freaky, unique experience. 

It plays like a standard FPS, complete with WASD keyboard and mouse controls, with standard level navigation, shooting and puzzle solving. It sounds run-of-the-mill, but as soon as you start playing, you’ll know immediately that this is something far different than your usual FPS. This is, by far, one of the creepiest, flesh-crawliest, just-plain-wrong-feelingest games I’ve ever played. Technically, nothing really scary happens to you; no monsters jump out, no blood appears, no dark corridors to stumble through. Yet every second of the game is dripping with a sense of dread and wrongness. It feels like playing through one of your own nightmares. 

Why is just about the whole game presented in grayscale? Why is the screen covered with film grain? What is that horrible rhythmic breathing sound? What is with the psuedo-philosophical broken-English and backwards dialog in between levels? What does it all mean?? 

Every bit of this game creeps me out in a way I can’t really describe. It probably won’t win any awards or go down in history for innovative or even great gameplay, but playing it was an experience I won’t forget any time soon. Major congratulations to Cactus Software for making such a bizarre and thought-provoking experience through the gaming medium. 

Mini-Review: Quake Live Beta

• Made By: id Software
• Cost: Free!
• Where to get it: Sign up for the Beta at quakelive.com

I know, I know. Ben, you say, Quake Live? What kind of magical fairy dust are you snorting? This is a site for indie games. Look at the facts, Chuckles: It’s free, it plays in a browser, and it’s made by the guys who arguably started ‘indie’ development and have remained this way all these years. Stick that magical fairy dust in your pipe and smoke it.

Anyway, I got in on the Quake Live Beta a couple weeks ago. This is essentially Quake 3, for free, in a browser, paid for by ads on in-game billboards. If you don’t know Quake 3, it was one of the last remnants of an old age of first-person shooters, an age when weapons hovered above the ground like angels waiting to be claimed, ‘camping’ was a veritable faux pas, CTF was the epitome of multiplayer gaming, in-game life lasted but a few seconds and death was merely a temporary annoyance. Ninja-like reflexes, surgically precise aiming, level memorization and resource control were what put you on the top.

The whole package is all very simple. You install a browser plug-in, endure a quick tutorial and play a one-on-one with Crash, a bot who after the match determines your skill level. After that you customize your settings, look at a list of servers (which also show how your aforementioned skill level matches up with the rest of the group already playing) and click on the one you want to join. It’s very elegant and works perfectly. The game tracks all your stats too and allows you to add friends and such, just like you’d expect from a true Web 2.0 product.

Quake Live has no grounding in reality, nor does it bother with any semblance of context. If you’ve been raised on Halo or Rainbow Six, this might put you off, but if you have fond memories of playing any of the Quake games, then this will be like Christmas. Imagine getting a bunch of friends together and not having to spend an hour getting everyone’s installations up to date just to get a match going. Rejoice when this goes public.

Mini-review: Gravity Hook

• Made by: Adam Atomic
• Cost: Free! (Though I think this may just be the beta)
• Where to get it: here!

Gravity Hook is a game I found through The Escapist’s Indie Developer’s Showcase, and so far it is my favorite of the bunch.

This game reminds me of a lot of the great old Atari games like Kaboom, in that it has one mechanic and it excels at it. You use the mouse to click on randomly arranged floating nodes. A cable appears that attaches a little guy at the bottom of the well to your chosen node as long as you hold the mouse down. The cable contracts and pulls the character up. Using this, you can slingshot poor fellow up and up, trying to get as high as possible.

The catch, however, is that each node is actually a mine, and once the cable contracts too far and the character gets too close, the mine explodes and it’s game over.

That’s it, that’s the whole game. But man is it ever addicting. When you start out, you tend to be very cautious, moving slowly up on long cables. As you get a little more experienced, you’ll find yourself slinging the man around with alarming speed, continually seeing brief flashes of the warning signal as he spins around. I’ve yet to really get into casual games, but now with this I can understand the appeal of having this simple game available anytime in your browser. In fact as soon as I’m done here I’ll be going back to play some more. Can’t… stop.