20 July 06 - "When I received my ManMelter for use on my trip to the rain forests of Vasplurgia, I blew my left leg off at the hip. Marvelous invention!"
-Major. Alfred Beardlington

kajafoglio

I haven't played a lot of Mario games, my heart 's in Hyrule, but SMS is a pretty fun game. Also, Phil sits around watching me play, singing: "My wife's a Super Mario Lord, Doo-dah, doo-dah", whenever I rip through one of those weird floating-in-space side puzzles. This adds to the ambiance.

In related news, Phil was digging around in the back closet and found a copy of the Nintendo sticker book that he did some work for. It mostly looks like routine pictures of Mario and pre-OoT Link (ugh), but Phil's style shows through in a couple of places. It's...weird.

Frequon Invaders is no doubt the most unique Space Invaders clone I have ever seen. The gameplay is hard to describe, so here are the designer's own words: "...your mission is to destroy each invading Frequons by moving the cursor on top of it. What could be easier? Except for one itty bitty detail: the Frequons are not displayed in the usual spatial domain, but in the Fourier Domain. Frequons look like colored waves. Your "self" is a wave too, with opposite polarity. Instead of manipulating some local point on the screen, you manipulate a global wave pattern. You destroy Frequons by achieving destructive interference with them."

Sounds confusing, right? And it is. This is one of those games that are impossible to describe (unless you happen to be an optical engineer or mathematician) because it cannot be visualized until you play it. So, hmm, I will just end this not-much-of-a-review by saying that if you like Space Invaders and psychadelic swirling colors don't give you a headache, Frequon Invaders is a lot of fun (and educational too - I didn't know anything about Fourier Domain until I play this game). It is fun, original, and strangely addictive once you get used to looking at colored waves, although the extremely high 'geekiness quotient' may intimidate some action gamers from trying it out. Two thumbs up!

2006 Spring Babies! 

Stolen from the St. Louis Zoo.