Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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9 Comments

  1. I’d be interested in your impressions of Catherine once you get into it. It looks a bit schizophrenic, alternating between story and puzzles. Most people seem to be more interested in the story portion than the actual gameplay, so I’d like to see how it holds up.

    As for me, I’m finishing up The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. It’s worth playing if you like Borderlands, but there is a lot of traveling back and forth with no fast travel, which takes some of the enjoyment out of it.

    • So far, I’ve got some stuff that really interests me, and some stuff that really alienates me.

      For what it’s worth: It ain’t like anything I’ve played before…

  2. I bought the Humble Indie Bundle 3 the other day, mainly for And Yet it Moves and Hammerfight. I already own Crayon Physics and COGS and didn’t care for VVVVV.
    AYIM is a really neat platformer concept, though a lot less well executed and interesting than Braid. I’m not sure how far I’ll go with it. I’m going to load up Hammerfight now and see how it goes.

    • If’n you could put together a mini-review of each, it’d be much appreciated by everybody, I’m sure.

      • Sure, I’ll bite.

        http://www.humblebundle.com/
        The Humble Indie Bumble is an endeavor to both sell indie-developed games and raise money for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play. It’s a pay what you want platform and you can apportion your payment however you’d like among the game developers, each of the charities and the management of the Bundle itself (I have no idea who they are). Currently, they’re selling a Crayon Physics Deluxe, COGS, VVVVV, And Yet It Moves, and Hammerfight in one bundle (you have to buy all five, but of course you can pay whatever you want). You can download them for Windows, PC, Mac or Linux and can choose to activate them on Steam or Desura if you’d like (I took mine via Steam).

        With that out of the way, here are my takes on the games themselves. They’re all pretty low power games, so those without ‘gaming PCs’ are probably going to be fine. COGS will require the most powerful machine, and that would be something cutting edge four years ago at least.

        Crayon Physics Deluxe – I actually already owned this and it’s a super concept for a little puzzle game. You basically can draw whatever you want and the objects will behave according to some physical rules. Blocks fall, balls roll, pendulums swing. As usual, the puzzles start to get tougher as you go and you’ll figure out new concepts and how to employ them along the way.

        VVVVV – This is a precision platformer with pre-NES type graphics. Think ( super lo-fi Super Meat Boy). I am not a big fan of them. The conceit here is you flip the world upside down at will instead of jumping. I played the demo and decided not to purchase until it was tossed in here.

        And Yet It Moves – This is another platformer where you rotate the world as you move your character around to navigate the mazes. If you fall to far you’ll die and often you’ll loosen things that roll around so you’ll have to manage your character and those objects. The art style here is very hand drawn, I enjoyed it but not sure if I’ll go back to it as I’m not one for pure platformers.

        In COGS You are given a series of puzzles that involve moving tiles around (think those puzzles you may have had as a kid where you have to move the little squares around to make a picture), those tiles have gears, pipes and other machinery on them. Your task is to arrange them to complete a mechanism. Some of them are flat and some wrap around a cube, it’s a pretty neat game.

        Hammerfight is the main reason I bought this pack. In it you control a little flying war machine that has giant melee weapons attached. You swing them around by moving your mouse in big circles. The game is presented as a story with scenes revealing a little plot between battle arenas. The game is pretty Playstation 1 graphics and music-wise, and the gameplay takes a while to get used to, but it’s a pretty elegant concept. I’ve already put a few hours in and will probably actually see this one all the way through.

  4. I haven’t hung out playing a vidyagaem in front of a television like this since Colorado. Not even for Red Dead Redemption.

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