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20 Heroes is a puzzle platformer with a unique twist, where players are assigned twenty characters to control separately, in a group, or all at the same time. Puzzles in every area are designed around this theme, and the creativity of the designer really shows after the fifth stage or so.

You can press the down arrow key to activate a character, who will then follow your orders until they succumb to a trap or a fatal injury caused by an enemy. The space key is used to select a menu option, and you can move heroes around the map or make them jump by using the cursor keys. Pressing G allows players to restart the game. Some enemies can be stomped on, while others can only be defeated in numbers or by using a certain strategy.

Note that the game isn't really designed to be played by audiences outside of Japan, as the quiz section in stage twelve is delivered in Japanese and near impossible to beat unless you are fluent in the language. (quiz cheat sheet) Continue reading

Some people really dig genre pieces, works that stick to convention and don't really deviate from the norm. You experience them because you enjoy the tropes of the genre and the familiarity of it all. This game is a standard hop-and-bop platformer, but if you have a platformer fetish like I do you'll most likely squeeze some enjoyment from it. Obake takes elements from Mario and Kirby and mixes them in a not-too-radical fashion, but does it with a decent amount of polish and a fair amount of charm.

You play as the titular Obake (Japanese for 'thing that changes') and take him through a six-world romp. The aesthetic is slightly off-kilter retro, and should appeal to fans of the 16-bit era. In your normal ghost-like form you can only move and jump, but if you press the down arrow you can possess an enemy. When you do so you gain their mobility and attack patterns, each of varying strength. The game takes Kirby's absorption motif a step further by also giving you that enemy's health. This coupled with generally low difficulty makes the game fairly easy, but it's fun to mess around with the various forms and explore the levels. The six worlds go a long way as well, so if you're into this sort of thing there's a lot of content to be played.

Nothing revolutionary, but a nice way to kill a couple hours.

And because I like you guys so much, here's an extra game at no additional charge: http://mogera.jp/gameplay?gid=gm0000000345
You play an albino deer,tripping on some psychedelic, that throws rocks at police. Enjoy.

I used to give away lots of money to homeless people, at one GDC I gave away like a quarter of my travel budget to various hobos, in $20 denominations, because they asked and it was like a cool tourism thing for me. Since living in a filthy, cosmopolitan megalopolis for the past year I´ve become more jaded, at first it was a joy to hand out torn ten peso bills to various street performers on Calle Florida, and to children juggling in the avenidas, but overtime its become another social tension, another point of mental stress in the great control grid of a city. So now we´ve got an "art game" in the sense that its main mechanic involves something social, you play the eponymous beggar who, after getting thrown out of the elite castle, has to go about soliciting aid to survive.

The main mechanic involves pushing the down arrow key to project a radial beam of some kind of vibe. The yellow vibe is something along the lines of "una mondeda, por favor!" or it´s English cousin "got any change?" Other vibes can be unlocked through items which cost money, demonstrating that you can only be free of money anxiety if you already got some. You fade away if you get hungry, which has a double metaphor of your metabolism and also the feeling one has as they starve of being a ghost, of not mattering in the socio-economic system. You don´t want to overdo your begging or people will get hostile and cops hassle you as they are wont to do.

Like The Majesty of Colors or I Wish I Were the Moon, the game´s formal constraints fold it out like an oragami tree with a finite set of endings you can poke around for, each with its own archetypal energy and poetic posture. One of them takes the math dynamic of small numbers ticked up and down linearly and throws it into an exponential bask in big-numbered wealth as you gallivant around, feared but friendless, and that was the most interesting one for me. Simple as it is, it is a good means to meditate on what real value is and how we deal with fear and alienation created by differences in paper units of account. I´m begging for enlightenment but all I get is cheap GMO food and scratchware entertainments.

Monos is a puzzle game with Tetris-style controls and irregular coloured shapes for the players to place inside a well. The level count increases by one for every ten shapes cleared from the screen, and there are a total of fifty levels to play regardless of the difficulty setting chosen.

Your objective is basically to match two or more blocks of the same colour to remove them. The Z and X keys can be used to rotate the current piece in play. Press up to place a block at the bottom of the well immediately, or hold the down arrow key to move it downwards at a slower pace.

In the percent gameplay mode, players are given random shapes to fill a well with. The more shapes you can fit in, the higher your percentage count will be at the end of the game. (direct download link) Continue reading