Contributions > Descriptions by Echidna Boy (569)

5-in-1 Arcade Hits is a "PlayStation Minis" bundle of five separate games in a single downloadable package. Despite the title, most of the games have little or nothing to do with any traditional arcade-style games.

The five included games are:

Pairs A simple memory game where players must match sixteen pairs of cards. There are three skill levels to choose from. At the easiest level, the cards show pictures of simple objects. At the medium level, the cards show numbers. At the highest difficulty level, the cards show complex symbols. Players are also timed and high scores are awarded for uncovering multiple pairs in a row.

15Puzzle The classic 4x4 "sliding tile" puzzle. There are three levels of difficulty. Choosing the easiest setting assigns a number to each sliding tile and requires players to correctly organize the numbers. The medium and high settings require players to properly arrange a picture. Each session is timed, and the players' best times are saved on a high score table.

Pool An eight-ball pool game for one or two players. Bonus points are awarded for sinking multiple balls in one shot and for "chains" (pocketing at least one ball in consecutive turns).

Solitaire A standard Klondike Solitaire game with two modes of difficulty. The "easy" variant allows players to draw one card from the pile each turn while the "hard" variant requires players to draw three cards from the pile each turn. Additional points are awarded if the player is able to complete the game in a specified time limit.

Tetroid Of all the games included in the compilation, this is the one that most resembles something one might find in an arcade. Tetroid plays like Arkanoid flipped on its side. However, along with having to break the bricks, the play field slowly and continuously shifts toward the paddle as the game progresses. The game ends when a row containing one or more bricks meets the paddle.

All games have their own high score tables. If desired, a unique string can be generated for the player that will allow them to import their high scores onto a global leaderboard when entered on the developers' website.

In this quirky little puzzler, the player must guide ten newly hatched chicks to their home. The gameplay is in the spirit of Lemmings, with the chicks traipsing across the landscape until they hit an obstacle, and then turning tail and going back the way they came. However, unlike Lemmings, which relies on the player assigning tasks to each of the critters, Chicks requires players to manipulate the environment itself by placing springs or barriers in the proper locations. Doing so allows the chicks to traverse the entire landscape, hopping from platform to platform until they finally reach their destination. But be sure to avoid the chick-hungry snakes that inhabit some of the levels!

Chicks features 25 levels, each steadily increasing in difficulty. As in Angry Birds, players are awarded one to three stars if they complete a level. The number of stars indicate how well the player performed.

An all-text port of Alexey Pajitnov's classic puzzle game 'Tetris', written entirely in the Inform 6 programming language.

In this variation, each of the falling blocks are made up of four separate hash marks arranged in the configuration of the Tetris pieces they represent. Upon hitting a surfice, the hash marks change into O's to indicate they are no longer moveable.

The gameplay resembles that of the original game, except for the width of the width of the playing field. Here, players must earn points by composing horizontal lines consisting of twelve blocks instead of the traditional ten. The game continues indefinitely as in most other variants, but this version does not keep track of individual lines or advance levels, and the speed of the shapes' descent remains constant throughout.

In the middle of the night, inside a bedroom in a nondescript building, dwells a frustrated man. He lay awake, unable to fall asleep, his restlessness growing exponentially each passing minute. Something is keeping him up.

It's those damn cats again.

In ZiMAG's Cat Nap, the player controls a person bent on revenge against three noisy alley cats—Puff, Pearl, and Brutus. The cats walk back and forth across the top of a picket fence, meowing constantly and loudly. The player starts with an inventory of six objects which he must hurl out the windows in hopes of knocking one of the felines off the fence, effectively silencing them for a brief period. The protagonist is never actually shown, but is represented by a hand that can be moved left and right between three windows. After selecting an object, the player then positions his hand in front of one of the windows and uses the fire button to chuck the object at one of the unsuspecting kittycats. If the player is able to continuously strike each of the cats within the 5 minute time limit, he wins the game and is finally able to catch some Z's.

But watch out for Scruffy! This lazy dog, who normally sleeps peacefully in the grass in front of the fence, will awaken in a fury of barks if one of the cats happen to fall on him, adding even more noise to the cacophony of meows.

FarmVille is a farm simulation game. Players take control of a novice farmer who enters the game with nothing but a small plot of land and a paltry amount of money. The gameplay consists primarily of plowing land and planting various types of seeds. Each batch of seeds costs money, but your farmer profits when he harvests (and presumably sells) the resulting crops. Furthermore, each crop requires a specific amount of time -- ranging from two hours to four days -- in order for it to grow into a usable (and therefore sellable) resource. If your fully grown crops are not tended to, they will eventually wither, completely eliminating their monetary value.

Seeds are purchased from a farmer's market, which also offers trees, animals, buildings, decorations, vehicles, and farm expansions and modifications. Larger items, such as barns and tractors, cost significantly more money than more ordinary types of goods.

Plowing, seeding, and harvesting also yield experience points, which will advance your farmer to higher levels as they continue to accumulate. As the levels advance, the players will unlock new skills and new items to buy from the farmer's market, each of which earn the player even more experience points. Aside from experience points are "mastery points", which are awarded from each successful harvest. These points are unique to their own crop, and accumulating enough of them will dub you a "master" of the crop in question.

If players are dedicated enough, they can expand their farms into a miniature village, complete with houses, shops, schoolhouses, post offices, etc. Most of these buildings are not actually usable, but serve strictly as scenery for your farm/village. However, their lofty prices earn players a large amount of experience points.

Apart from farming crops, money can also be acquired from trees and animals. Fruit can be harvested from the trees for a small sum, and the animals provide valuable resources like milk, eggs, or wool. Unlike crops, trees and animals do not wither or die, but they each only yield a considerably small amount of money and no experience points.

Players are encouraged to interact with fellow farmers by becoming neighbors with them. Doing so will allow neighbors to visit other neighbors' farms and provide extra assistance by fertilizing one another's crops and feeding each other's chickens.

Another entry in HES's extensive line of "2 pak specials". This cartridge contains two reissued games from Imagic: Cavern Blaster and City War.

Cavern Blaster is a retitled version of the side-scrolling shoot-em-up Laser Gates; while City War is actually the classic game Atlantis, also saddled with a new title. As with the other multicarts in this series, the desired game is chosen via joystick from a startup menu.

In this bizarre text-based mystery, you assume the role of John, a mental patient who is being held against his will in a hellish asylum known only as "The Institute". Raving lunatics and taunting doctors surround you, and you are continuously harassed by a sinister psychologist who tries to convince you that you have lost your mind. You are unsure of how or why you ended up here, but one thing is clear: you must get out.

Most of the game is spent lying passed out on a closet floor, drifting in and out of drug-induced hallucinations that reveal key aspects of the protagonist's personality and recall traumatic events from his past. Between bouts of nightmarish, self-inflicted "drug therapy", the player uses the knowledge (and sometimes even inventory items) gained from his dreams to learn more about the Institute and to better facilitate his escape.

In typical text adventure fashion, John must navigate the hospital and interact with his surroundings using a very limited two-word parser. There are some basic puzzles to solve, mostly by using objects found throughout your quest, but the game's focus is more on the darkly surreal storyline and disturbing dialogue than its actual gameplay.

An unlicensed multi-cart from the Australian-based game distributor HES. The two games featured on this cartridge are "Alien Force" (actually a reissue of Imagic's Cosmic Ark) and "Hoppy" (a reissue of Quick Step, also by Imagic). The desired game is selected via joystick from a main menu screen.

An erotic variant of the classic Fruit Machine game. Instead of playing for money, winners are treated to full motion video clips of "five of Europe's most beautiful girls" (as stated on the back of the game's box) disrobing for the camera. The player's goal is to successfully strip all five of the models without running out of credits. The more you win, the more they take off.

Two aircraft (yours and your opponent's) fly over a canyon filled with layers of colorful bricks, a la Breakout. Using the fire button on your paddle controller, you earn points by dropping bombs into the canyon and destroying as many blocks as possible. The player with the highest score at the end of the game wins.

This game is extremely limited in that it is played using only the paddle controller's fire button. You do not control the movement of the planes and helicopters, but rather you must time your shots to do the most damage.

The cartridge includes a secondary variation titled "Sea Bomber" that is a little more interactive. In this game, you deploy bombs onto seafaring ships, but this time you can use the paddle controller's knob to determine the depth of the bombs.

In Germ Crazy, you play the part of a fledgling surgeon who must protect his patient from a debilitating, flesh-eating virus. The disease must be stopped by whatever means necessary; whether by antibody injections, black market drugs, amputation, or all-out germ warfare. Just be sure that your patient doesn't suffer too much surgical abuse or else he will be greeted by Mr. Grim Reaper himself. On the flipside, being too careful may result in the rapid spreading of this hideous mutant virus, and the poor victim will literally rot away until all that remains is a skeleton!

The gameplay is complex and unique, and resembles a more biological version of Sim City. There are six levels of difficulty, but even at the easiest level, Germ Crazy is a difficult game to master. The subject matter, although undeniably grim, is tempered with a sadistic sense of humor throughout.

Schoolyard Slaughter is a simple game (albeit an offensive one) wherein players earn points for shooting school children in the head for sport.

The gameplay echoes that of the standard point-and-click shooters that were commonly being produced at the time, and features crudely drawn children darting across a fixed backdrop at varying speeds. One hundred points are awarded for each successful headshot, along with a brief animation of the unfortunate victim collapsing in a pool of his or her blood. The player receives extra ammo for every thousand points, and the game ends when the player runs out of bullets. After the game, players can qualify to enter their name into the "Sportsman Journal" (a high score list) if their body count is impressive enough.

Based loosely on the famed Greek character, Crypt of Medea is one of the earliest horror-themed games released for the Apple II series. The plot is simple: you are trapped in an underground crypt filled with a variety of ghastly creatures and traps, and you must find your way out before you become just another nameless corpse--just like the ones you encounter all throughout the maze-like mausoleum.

Crypt of Medea is a Hi-Res adventure game with color graphics, using the simple two-word "verb noun" parser that was common in these types of games. In its heyday, it was panned for its graphic depictions of gratuitous violence, but seeing as such material has almost become a standard in today's games, one could argue that Crypt of Medea was fairly ahead of its time.