Articles by Chris Donlan

Still Playing: Batman Arkham City

Asylum had its fair share of classic Bat-world cameos, perhaps, but here there are familiar faces on every street corner, and, ghastly as it all is, it makes me feel at home. There’s Two-Face, over by the courthouse, where he’s dangling Catwoman over a vat of acid. And there’s Calendar Man down in the basement – a minor player, perhaps, but an absolute favourite from the garish days of the late ‘50s. Way across town, I can already spot – well, any more name-dropping would constitute a spoiler, I suspect, but pick a perp, and they’re probably in there somewhere.

Ludwig Von Beatdown demakes Johann Sebastian Joust for Flash hipsters

Hold onto your artisan raisin loaves: Ludwig Von Beatdown might be the most voguish and hipster-centric videogame yet crafted. It’s a lo-fi demake of Die Gute Fabrik’s wonderful – and distinctly trendy – Move-controlled parlour game, Johann Sebastian Joust, and it’s made by Dr Pippin Barr, whose previous works include PONGS and Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment.

Still Playing: New Super Mario Bros 2

Super Mario games have always been filled with coins – but they’ve never truly revolved around coins before. The cash that litters the plumber’s colourful fantasies is handy for health-regeneration and vital for path-finding, yet it’s generally just one mechanic amongst many. In New Super Mario Bros 2 that’s all changed: this is a game about gold, and a game about coin collecting. It makes for a strange first impression, in this respect. At times, it looks like a Super Mario adventure with no genuinely new ideas to add. At others, its fixation on a single piece of the series’ legacy actually begins to feels like a new idea in its own right.

Kumo Lumo: Blitz Games’ latest explores the entertaining side of the water cycle

Remember Godfinger? It’s an iOS game in which you’re God, and God is, well, a finger. You move slowly across a curved, scrolling world, tending the land and pleasing Your followers. Kumo Lumo’s a little bit like that at first, except that it’s less of a sim management game and more of an arcade experience, with levels broken down into discrete challenges. Also, you’re not a god, and you’d never be mistaken for one. You’re a cute little cloud with Pac-Man eyes and a cheeky smile.

Somewhere In England, 1928: cool restraint meets Cthulhu’s tendrils in this free Flash adventure game

Adventure games are spaces where designers often tell fairly strange sorts of narratives, stepping away from world-shredding drama to explore comedy, surrealism, and even tragedy. They’re perfect places for short stories, since, like the saying goes, they’re also rooms on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted.

Somewhere In England, 1928, is filled with doors, actually: secret doors, blocked doors, locked doors. It’s also a fascinating artefact: a very compact adventure game about a couple of angsty young fops in Georgian England, trying to escape from a many-tentacled monster.

Espoir: a short Flash platformer that casts a surprisingly long shadow

A light serving of miserable dread, Espoir is probably best described as a mash-up of Limbo, What’s the Time, Mr Wolf, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s marvellously weird novel House of Leaves. It’s a frantic monochrome platformer in which you’re chased through strange, shifting environments by something many-toothed and indescribably horrible, and it’s going to kill you again and again over the length of its three short levels. ‘Espoir’ means hope in French, of course. Ha!

Treasure Park: Vita’s social Minesweeper

Treasure Park is one of those games that seem quietly emblematic of the hardware they run on. Like Sony’s PlayStation Vita, it’s stylish, smartly designed, and surprisingly entertaining to mess around with. It’s also arrived on the scene with little or no obvious fanfare to support it.And, as with the Vita, that’s a shame. Treasure Park’s not an astonishingly brilliant game, but that was never its intention: it’s a playful, sociable toy of sorts, and as free downloads go, it’s well worth checking out.The closest parallel is Minesweeper. Treasure Park presents you with a brightly coloured 5×5 grid, and your job is to tap away at the squares uncovering medals and a huge diamond, while avoiding bear traps and bombs. The first two items add points to your running score, and the last two remove them, and while you have five taps to use up on each grid, uncovering the diamond – or the bomb – will end the game instantly.

Influenza: a free, chaotic take on Elevator Action

Influenza, by Robert Shenton, looks a bit like Taito’s classic platformer Elevator Action at first. It offers side-on views of complex buildings with stacked floors and plenty of doorways, and it’s almost impossible to glance at the screen without trying to pick a path from the bottom of the building to the top. There’s a fairly significant…

Hot dogs and rubber chickens: Chair Entertainment brings out the Vote!!!

The US election season is almost with us again, so why not slap on a few bumper stickers, bone up on campaign financing, and then attack Mitt Romney on the South Lawn of the White House, wielding a frankfurter on a fork? All of this is funded, as those cheery attack ads like to say, by the good people at Chair Entertainment, who have achieved the near-impossible: a topical political game that’s actually worth playing.

Zineth: a free homage to Jet Grind Radio

Jump, glide, grind: Zineth is a skating game in the spirit of Jet Grind Radio – and it’s not hard to spot the Sega influence. Smilebit’s sweet-natured classic is there in the rails that are strung across the expansive non-linear environments, for example, and in the fabulously lurid cel-shading that delivers a futuristic 3D wonderland for you to race through until you get dizzy.