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The Adventures of Archie Pegalo Review

Rating:

A colourful, responsive and frustrating platformer for the 17th Ludum Dare competition. The theme of the competition was 'islands'. I'm not quite sure what the theme of this is.

Full Review

I got an email today from IndieReview.tk head honcho, XM, explicitly stating that we had 'too many platformers' and that it was messing up the genre cloud. My limited understanding of it is that if we don't start reviewing other genres soon, the genre cloud will explode all over the front page and ruin IndieReview forever. I think.

The same email also reminded me that the 17th Ludum Dare competition was last weekend, and that I could review some games if I wanted to. Woe be me, there were some platformers in the competition line up. After a short mental breakdown trying to figure out what I should do, I eventually decided that a couple of platformers from the Ludum Dare competition (hopefully) wouldn't hurt.

So here's The Adventures of Archie Pegalo. A platforming video game. you play as a bearded guy, who's been shipwrecked on a tiny island somewhere, as he discovers there are floating platforms all around him, and he must jump his way to... somewhere.

'A' jumps and 'S' hits things. You jump across floating island trying not to fall into the sea below, but also trying to avoid land mines, spiked balls with springs on the bottom, and bears that shoot laser beams out of their eyes. Dying sends you back to the island, and one hit will kill you, but you can hold on to shields which will take a hit for you.

TAAP (as I'm calling it now) looks nice, but it's fairly terrible. The controls are responsive, but the level design isn't fun or even really interesting in any way. In fact, I'm not even sure how this fits the theme 'islands'. There are islands in it, certainly, but islands don't play a huge part in the game's core concept: a rather simple platformer.

However, even though I don't think it's a great game, I had to admire that somebody built this using only 48 hours of their own time.

Technically admirable, but a bit wonky and boring Isn't that what Ludum Dare is all about?

Posted by Joe Gribbin on April 27, 2010 Comments (3)


Zhou Xuanming said at 2010-04-27 10:40:

Nooooooo!! Not another platformer. :)

Actually, there's no danger in the genre cloud exploding (I think), it just... doesn't look so nice having PLATFORMER, and then several tiny others. It also means we love platformers too much and need to spread our love to other genres.


Joe Gribbin said at 2010-04-27 17:41:

I know, I was just trying to be funny :)


Zhou Xuanming said at 2010-04-27 18:52:

(explaination intended for readers actually)

Hehe, but I really don't know what will happen to the genre cloud if we lop-side it too much, guess we'll just have to find out. ;)