In Case You Missed It, #3
We’ve got a Newgrounds day for you today!
For those of you who have never been, Newgrounds is a website that used to be devoted entirely to flash artists – games, animations, that sort of thing. More recently, they’ve also added the ability for artists to upload instrumental music.
Many of the more popular games and animations and whatnot tend to find their way to Newgrounds, if not originate from there. I may actually be referencing this site relatively often for ICYMI, but here’s some for you guys to check out today:
Egoraptor: Egoraptor is one of the more well-known artists on Newgrounds, and much of his work has also found its way to Youtube uploads and other sites. I haven’t seen all his work, but I’d highly recommend this, this, and these two. The first two are, respectively, parodies of Ninja Gaiden’s difficulty and Gears of War’s insane levels of testosterone, and the latter two are episodes 2 and 3 of a series called “Girlchan In Paradise,” which are incredibly accurate riffs on anime. Even if you’ve never seen a lot of anime, if you just have a general sense about it, you’ll probably get a kick out of those.
This was actually done by a guy named Chris O’Neill, in the style of Egoraptor’s “blanketyblankawesome” series. It’s just as funny.
Tower of Heaven: I’ve seen this game in a couple incarnations, but to my knowledge, this is the newest version of it.
Tower of Heaven is a flash game that is designed to look like an old Game Boy game, and it does a fantastic job doing so (the music is also pretty incredible, and it’s done by Flashygoodness).
It’s also Nintendo Hard. It tells you so before you even start playing, and in case it makes you feel better, I died 62 times on my first playthrough (it keeps track and tells you at the end).
Why is it so hard? Well, the story is that your character is climbing a tower presumably watched over by God, and he gives you rules you must follow as you climb the tower. They start off easy enough – “don’t touch the gold blocks,” but eventually they get to things like, “Don’t walk left,” then make the last stretch of the level a section where you have to get left. The rules are cumulative, and if you violate any of them, you’re instantly killed – on top of the other stuff that kills you, anyway, like gigantic buzz saws.
You’ll die a lot, and there are times where it will feel somewhat frustrating, but I thought it was incredibly entertaining nonetheless. The deaths didn’t feel like the game was just laughing at you because it was cheating, it just sort of points and says, “Whoops, you broke this rule.” In the same vein as Company of Myself, most of the frustration comes with you making mistakes, not the game being a cheating bastard.
Color Theory: This isn’t a game that’s really well-known or award-winning or anything, but it’s a pretty nifty concept. It’s a platformer where all the platforms are made up of 3 colors, and you have to touch differently-colored objects to make some disappear. For example, to make a red platform disappear, you touch the red plus sign.
It probably won’t take you too long to finish, and some people seemed to think it got repetitive early on, but I very much enjoyed all 30 levels. I thought the concept was pretty cool.
The Decline of Video Gaming (also Part 2 and Part 3): The Super Flash Bros were a team that made some of the first animations I saw on Newgrounds. That isn’t to say they’re original animators from the site, but they’re part of my introduction to Newgrounds as a website.
Part 1 takes a look at what video games might be like in the future (such as Final Fantasy XVMXIXIIIIIXMVXIMIVXXIVVII or Mario’s tasks getting more and more mundane, such that the newest release is “Mario Does The Weekly Grocery Shopping”).
Part 2 is a bit of a take on more current games as the group attends E3 – I could be wrong, but I believe Egoraptor makes an appearance as the Evil Company Heads. Part 2 is, honestly, my favorite.
Part 3 involves the crew making a trip to Japan and generally ripping on video games some more.
They’re all pretty entertaining and involve the occasional manatee gag, so if you enjoy random bits of humor and consider yourself something of a broad-spectrum gamer (or just generally a console gamer from a video game generation or two ago), you should definitely give those a look.
Well, I think I’ve given you a couple hours of things to thumb through, so that’ll be it for me today. I’m moving to California soon (actually, I will have probably just moved once this post makes it up), so I’ll be on a bit of a hiatus. My WoW account is currently expired and I’ll probably be devoting a good chunk of my time to job-hunting, so if you don’t hear from me for awhile, I’m probably wallowing in destitution.
See you all later!
U know, this is really not about this post but yeah there it goes.
Its like the 3rd or 4th time im bored of wow, havent logged for more than a couple minutes in the last 2 months, and between updating addons and reordering actions bars i really think its the end of WoW for me. Nowadays with tons of games to play, and tons of games about to be released… an MMORPG just seems to take too much of my time to play so yeah. Maybe when SWTOR or Guild Wars 2 come out ill think of coming back to the MMOs. But for now… playing really good singleplayer games seems like the way to go…