I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game

I'm still trying to finish this little independent freeware platformer, which was created with Multimedia Fusion by a single designer. The game doesn't have scrolling, but otherwise it looks pretty much like an old relic of 8- or 16-bit console days. As a matter of fact, it "borrows" many graphical elements from old 2D platformers and the soundtrack is for the most part ripped off as well (the intro music is stolen from Mega Man, for example).

What makes I Wanna Be The Guy special is quite simply its immense difficulty. Even though there aren't much enemies and you seldom have to use your gun, the game is almost unbelievably hard. What you need is perfect precision: jumps have to be accurate to a millimetre and timed to the split second, otherwise you're as good as dead.

With its very special kind of humor this game at times almost feels as if it was designed for the purpose of driving players crazy. During my sessions I often felt I had delivered the performance of a lifetime, as I had negotiated razor-sharp spikes, deadly apples, deep abysms and whatnot. And just when I was all glad and cheery, just when I thought "Hallelujah! I really made it!", just in that moment something crashed without further warning on my head and killed me. Sudden death without a chance to react.

I actually have the theory, that whether you will enjoy this game is mainly a question of whether you can laugh about your own failure. It simply isn't possible to make it through one of the screens during the first try. You usually have to die several times, before you even get an idea of how to survive. The good thing is, however, that the level design isn't only sadistic, but also creative. Each screen offers something new and using the trial and error method to find a way through it is fun in the end. So, if you have a heart for platformers or keep complaining about the lack of challenge in today's games, I Wanna Be The Guy might interest you.

The World of Western RPGs
This article is a sequel of sorts to the previous RPG article, by Oleg Roschin, which covered the Asian RPGs.

Drunken Irishman has taken up the humongous task of writing the history of Western RPGs, trying to paint a picture of the evolution of the genre, using only a handful of games, which he describes in some detail to see what game introduced what to the genre. You will get to know the founding games that defined the elements we now take for granted, who borrowed a lot and how different titles can be compared in terms of design.

The article has been split up in large sections, covering everything from the early eighties to today's games.