Hello, sunshines! Welcome to your Link Dump Friday! We've missed you ever so. And today is a very special day, because it is the day after the first day of October, and you know what that means! It's 29-Days-Until-Halloween-Mas! Have you decided what you're going to be on this most cherished upcoming night of candy banditry? Well, allow us, your humble servants here at Jay Is Games, to help you decide!
Hey Wizard! Quest for the Magic Mojo - So we were cleaning out the closet and we found this old pointy hat, and we were thinking maybe you could go as a titan of the arcane forces! You know, you could have an awesome sense of style, new spells, a really quirky sense of humour, and a luxurious beard! But, you know, we hear wizards don't jump, and they have really bad hit detection, and they always have to chase after their hats if they don't want to die. But hey, at least you'll look cool, and probably get the most pity candy!
Icycle - [Warning: Features cartoon nudity.] Well, hey! We've got this tiny bike here! That gives us an idea. Why don't you pretend to be a naked man traversing frozen terrain by memory? No, come on, it's a fantastic idea! You can visit gorgeous locales, and catch soap bubbles! If it sounds both bizarre and addictive, and the sort of thing that would be suggested by roughly a dozen people within the last week, that's because it is!
When Penguins Attack - TD - Okay, okay. How about you dress as a penguin? Oh, but then I suppose you have to worry about people building defensive towers on open ground to keep you from reaching them. No, it's not your fault. These other penguins have been giving everyone a bad name, you know, with their tanks and air forces and path-finding A.I. and appearing in tower defense games. Nobody is willing to given penguins a chance anymore!
Lint - Or, look, you could dress up as a... as a... hm. You know, we're not actually sure what this is. But it's bouncy! And cute! And it is a short little platformer that features deadly traps! Yes, this is a very traditional costume, you can ask your parents. We're sure they went as... uh... jumpy... little... grey... thingies when they were your age. Uh... huh.
Head Spin: Card Quest - Tricky customer, eh? Well how about you go as an adventure-puzzle-spot-the-difference game? Yeah, we were surprised too. It doesn't sound like it would work, but it actually does! Sort of. I mean, sure you'll be a little repetitive after a while, and yes you won't have much replay value, but darned if you won't be interesting and fun while you last!
Icycle: Irritatingly hard. Please don't start me from the beginning every time I hit a spike, and by the way, there are too many spikes.
Lint simply had the smoothest, most enjoyable platforming engine I've played in a long time. I really wish the designer would do more with it. The game here seems too much like a prototype.
Headspin Card Quest didn't come with quite as engrossing an atmosphere as Headspin Space Race did, but it's still an entertaining challange! Having everything neatly lined up dampened a lot of the difficulty, and I was able to beat this one first try (no doubt due to having just recently played the last).
I really enjoy the concept of Icycle; and a clever play on words for the name. What gets people thinking about these sorts of things...?
I look forward to Link Dump Fridays, and not just because they fall on a Friday. Thank you intelligent girl with glasses (does anyone know her name?).
I have to say that although I first found Icycle a bit infuriating as Z did I realised that it was bacause I thought the game was about speed but if consider it more about timing it is one of the best games I've played for ages and the rewards of the artwork are worth it.
Each stage asks you to pace yourself and remember the patterns of timings and you soon realise that since you should be able to get every bubble then the bubbles are actually there as an aid to suggest when to jump and when to stop/slow down.
Having said all that there are some utterly devious bits in it. Stage 8 has to be the pinnacle of this.
I also loved the story which is told so tenderly.
Well done Mr Millidge, you are a star!
Icicle
(Unusually good sound and good atmosphere:).
Annoyingly there's no kill button, so if you get stuck you must redo all levels. (there's a restart game button).
And I'm stuck on level 6. :C
I'm past the moving platforms but stuck levitating in the shaft beyond. huh?
Never mind, discovered:
levels 6
you can use up&down also.. to gain momentum
Icycle: kinda frustrating. I'm on the 8th (last?) level, and keep dying at some point,
whether it's the building falling on me in stage 3 because I can't brake soon enough, or the sharp, impassable wedge moving up and down over a tiny gap (with a small pointy thing at the bottom) in stage 4, or (in the same stage) that one time I managed to get past, only to die as I reached the icy, jagged passageway.
I give up. Time to sleep...
Icycle...
Just great, addictive, artistic, fun, hard enough to push you to try further.
Added to my all time favorites!
Lint is a knock-off of Knytt. They even sound the same.
Aaah! I can't make it through the last bit on the last level of the last stage of icycle! D:
Wohoo! I finally completed icycle (I was *so* close to a ragequit) but the end was sad. :( Poor naked cyclist. :(
I could've sworn "Hey Wizard" was already featured on jayisgames once before. Or maybe some younger version of it.
Some of the spell combinations seem to glitch back to the meteor spell, but fun game overall. So was Lint.
zbeeblebrox: Hey Wizard was indeed featured here once, apparently back in February. The game "Hey Wizard: Quest for the Magic Mojo" seems to be a second installment in the series.
Chiktionary: The 'intelligent girl with glasses' is called 'Dora' on this site. Her (user)name is right under the tags list, above the header image. :)
>>Lint is a knock-off of Knytt. They even sound the same.
@fuzzboxer: First, it's pronounced as it's spelled. Second, Knytt focused much more on the atmosphere, the goal in lint was to get through as quick as possible.
That said, I enjoyed lint. I like the ninja-like and smooth engine that it had, particularly the ease in which I could scale walls. It was sort of buggy though, as sometimes when I touched a simple wall I died. And I couldn't finish it because I
jumped at the wrong moment and got stuck in the giant pounding thing in the last scene, and couldn't get out or reset.
Toberian. You didn't look very hard. Click the skull and crossbones twice to kill him off.
Chiktionary, the reviewer's name is Dora, and she is a SUPERB game reviewer (the best on the site, rivaled only by Jay), and she is the amalgam of colloquiality and elegance perfected. I am planning on proposing to her.
Some great games there, had a brief run through hey wizard - certainly will eturn to it when i get a chance,
But i loved icycle and the penguin TD, although the latter was pretty bloody easy in the end.
Icycle is a geat idea, well executed and i eckon deserves a full write up (5 stars)
i clocked it on my first run through with 50 deaths, 229 bubbles
Actually, I like "Intelligent Girl With Glasses". It makes me sound like I have credentials, or at least like an extra in any recent blockbuster movie.
Also, also! I am very happy Icycle has been received so well. It is easily my favourite. I'm actually terrible at it, but I love, love, love the "cut-out" style visuals, and I look forward to more from its creator. (Maybe even one I won't stink at?)
And thank you, Roseate, but I'm only one cog in the machine here. Also, I'm very high maintenance, I snore, I think peanut butter should be considered a food group, and there's the fact that I must slip into the darkness one Wednesday a month, and take a single human life. Thankfully, Jay and my husband work around these little quirks. Or at least pretend to ignore them.
Actually, Hey Wizard: Quest for the Mojo is quite different from its predecessor. In the original, upgrading was a fetish unto itself, with your wizard dude capable of customizing almost every aspect of gameplay (except of course, his ability to jump, which I explain away by asserting that he has bad knees, and if you could use a magic wand as a means of propulsion, wouldn't you?) Here, though, there is no customization of experience outside of the ability to mix and match your spell 'stones' to achieve various effects. There is still the essential mechanic of acquiring experience in your magical spheres by killing things, rather than overall use (which stinks with the Stone of Ice, with its most useful application being a defensive sphere--an absolute must in this game--garnering no experience points), and as you free the 'magic mojos', they join you, opening up spaces in your slots so that you can create new spell effects (a bit like Sin Mark). The problem is, of course, that by the time you max out each stone at 300, there are only three effects you'll use on a constant basis, making the other effects rather redundant.
The three in my case were Fire (for getting around...lightning is too haphazard), House of Lightning (made insanely useful because it can be cast on the other side of a wall, eliminating foes before they can eliminate you), and the aforementioned sphere spell
The enemies are a little different, and two at least will fill you full of the requisite dread. The first is the mini tessla, whose silhouette is reminiscent of a Seussian monstrosity and, from time to time, spews out a lightning bolt even if it is off screen. This can occur even when the creature is frozen with the three-stones-required Icicle effect. The second is the mini gobbie, who seems like a drop of blood with an adorable homicidal leer etched into its face and has ENTIRELY TOO MANY HIT-POINTS!!!
Speaking of which, a major difference between Hey Wizard! and this game is the number of hit points the player has. In the first game, you could upgrade your character to have insane levels of health. Here, you have one, and it's in your hat. Get hit, and your hat flies off, and must be retrieved. Get hit again before you catch up with it, and you've died. Now you know why the Sphere spell is so essential. It basically gives you another hat, or at the very least it duct tapes the hat to your head. This means the game is far more about avoidance than the former (which rewarded not getting hit in a level with a special trophy), but I have a general sense that there are far fewer projectiles coming at you. It does radically affect game play, however, and coupled with the lack of a precision upgrade system (which I missed at first but now do not) it makes HW:QftMM more of a stylistic sequel than an sequel with more of the same.
Anyone else having running into an issue with Hey Wizard where it won't let you pick up the little statues? I've done everything in the game except pick up the statues on level 7 because of it, and my completionist drives are threatening to explode.
Icycle is fantastic!
I played Icycle a few days ago (like, the very day this was posted) - I seem to recall finding it fairly fun, though having to start from the beginning each time was annoying.
Just played Lint... Simple, fun, nice music, not too long - I like it. Sometimes I'd die when I thought I'd hit a normal part of the wall, not the spikes next to it, but all in all, not bad. :)
I agree with bladestorm, if ever there's a gap in the JIG review programming I'd love to see a more in depth review. I must have played it twenty times by now and the soundscape and art are superb. - I LOVE the bits when he calls out 'helllooo...?' and the squeak of the bike.
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