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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.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei; Latin for "the voice of the people is the voice of God." An odd title for a Flash game, but it's fitting enough. Not because this is a Marxist title by any means (it does channel some dystopian vibes from its gray industrial background, akin to Canabalt) but by virtue of the fact that the name is just as off-kilter as the rest of the game. You're a blue ninja attempting to save the woman who broke your heart from werewolves. You do so through stealth mechanics and by ripping the lycanthropes apart in a bloody fashion, like a Hunter from Left 4 Dead. Oh, and to top it off there's no background music. Say what?

Premise alone can only carry a game so far, so I'm happy to report that the gameplay holds up fairly well. The game introduces various mechanics throughout, but doesn't really commit to any of them outside of the visceral combat. When you leap on the wolves it's a weird role reversal; you the primal hunter, and the wolves your anthropomorphic prey. Your slashing and rending is brutal to the point that it feels personal. Intimate even. Not having music is actually a plus here, since it makes the wolfs' cries your sole auditory experience. While the level design is hit or miss, it incorporates enough variety that it'll keep you entertained. A particularly awesome bit was when I leapt at a werewolf at the top of a building -- I rode him in the air until he splattered onto a car a couple floors below. The other end of the spectrum occurs near the end, after you save your jilted lover. The two of you ride a slow moving elevator together in silence; all of the aesthetical elements, along with your lack of interaction, come together rather nicely. These alternating extremes of humanity and brutality somehow make the game seem honest.

The ending is poignant, but kind of hampered by the "To Be Continued" emblazoned at the top of the screen. Hopefully the sequel will either be another person's story told in the same universe, or a retelling of this game (in a Hobbit-to-LOTR kind of way.)This game definitely has its faults and the occasional annoying screen to pass, but it's off-beat (and occasionally gruesome) enough to warrant a playthrough.

Time Gentlemen, Please is what they say in English pubs when one of their statutory and inexplicable closing times is approaching, so everyone can buy a last round. It's also the name of a Lucasarts-like adventure game from Dan Marshall and Ben Ward, a sequel to their superb Ben There, Dan That.

The earlier game was free; Time Gentlemen, Please is not, but at five bucks (or three quid), it's the best deal in for-pay adventures since The Shivah. I also do have to say that I liked the earlier game a bit better, mainly because of its greater variety in settings.

The somewhat nonsensical backstory to this game is that Dan and Ben, having screwed up the timestream in the earlier game, tried to rectify things by going back in time to prevent the coathanger from being invented, but merely screwed things up more; they wind up in an alternate London in 1945, where Nazi dinosaurs have conquered Britain, led by Hitler in a gigantic combat mech. Naturally, the characters have to try to undo this.

As with the earlier game, the dialog in Time Gentlemen, Please is both well written and funny; the puzzles are perhaps a tad more obscure (but if you get stuck, the developers will provide hints on their forum, and Jay is Games already has a walkthrough up). It's off-kilter, charming, and a bit gross at times -- one puzzle involves a fairly repulsive use of Hitler's poo. But at least for those not easily shocked, it's excellent fun, and reinforces my belief that the best work in modern adventure games is being done by indie developers.

One aspect I particularly like is the presence of two embedded adventure games, one a text adventure and the other a graphic adventure ala 1988 or thereabouts. Playing these games is essential to solving some of the puzzles, and they interact with each other at times in interesting ways.

This recent edition of Taiwan's Famitsu Weekly has a very surprising cover, featuring anime-style artwork of BioShock 2's Big Sister and Little Sister. It's an interesting interpretation, very different from the characters' Western designs -- the same is true with this previous anime rendition of Bioshock.

Speaking of Big Sister, 2K Games has posted more of senior character designer Colin Fix's concept art for the BioShock 2 antagonist (which I previously featured here), as well as a podcast with an in-depth discussion on her art progression.

"The Big Sister plays a key role in BioShock 2 and is integral to the past, present, and future of Rapture," says the studio. "Creating her look and feel did not merely entail building her suit and animating some movements -- everything the Big Sister was, and everything that had happened to her, needed to be conveyed in her physical form."

According to 2K Games, some of the concepts were created to explore Big Sister's personality, while others were focused on figuring out her final form. The company invites gamers to pick out the prototype character's details to figure out their deeper meanings in BioShock's story.

In the podcast, Fix shares some of the suggestions that were thrown around for Big Sister's suit:

""One of the ideas was that she’s essentially basically pilfered a bunch of Big Daddy suits and used those to make her own costume, so the idea is that a lot of the parts were too big for a teenage girl to wear, so they’d be sawed-off and repurposed and cobbled together, and just personality-wise, she’s kind of a twisted, sad soul, so we wanted a lot of the look to have a…nothing on her was to be symmetrical.

Constantly, we’re wanting things to be off-kilter, so with her helmet, she does have the main portal, which is the first read, but she has some smaller ones, and their size is sort of random, and again, asymmetrical in design."

This sketch shows the final design for Big Sister:

You can listen to the podcast, which brings together senior character designer Colin Fix, community manager Elizabeth Tobey, animation supervisor Jeff Weir, and animation lead P.J. Leffelman, here.

[Via Superpunch]