A beautiful, imaginative gem. Quite short but worth every second, and would have overstayed its welcome if it was any longer. However, this is a game for people who like to watch pretty art and watch interesting things in motion. The puzzles are not difficult enough for anyone who considers themself a puzzle game fan - they're just the right difficulty to give you nice "a-ha!" moments. And the story exists more as a sequence of feelings and emotions than as a sequence of events. If you are looking for a complex puzzle game, or an intricate story, there's a fair chance you'll be disappointed. But if you know what this game is, and you like it, it'll be a brilliant experience that'll stay with you for a long time.
I really wanted to like Jalopy. The concept seemed great. Travel through europe in a beat-up Soviet car. Drive through scenic backroads. Stop at quaint cities and gas stop. Learn about Zen and the Art of Crapsack Car Maintenance. Sterling stuff. For someone whose favourite activity in GTA games is driving aimlessly through dirt roads and who holds Spintires (even the original one) in very high regard, this game seemed to be godsent. Yet it turns driving into a boring, humourless activity. (Which I guess it is, but that's why I play games about driving instead of driving.) There's a bizarre economy in which 'the road provides'. You need to find out boxes in the road and bring them to shops to sell them. But you have a tiny space in your trunk to carry them, space that is certainly not enough to bring the fuel, oil and repair tools you need to keep going - especially since the placement of objects in your trunk is automatic, and you'll usually have to keep taking them in and out until the game realizes everything does fit. This means your car will eventually break down, and if you're lucky you'll have to slug through the next section of the road at 20KPH; if you're unlucky, your car will be stuck there and you'll have no way to proceed other than saving and quitting, which returns you to the last city you visited. But it also saves your car's state, so the fuel you spent and the degradation of your car parts remain; if you don't have money to repair them you'll likely have to restart. The game is also very glitchy. Parts disappear. The car gets stuck. I once parked too near a wall and couldn't get back into the car. The only story there is consists of reading documents your uncle keeps in his briefcase while he sleeps - but he often gets stuck outside the motel, so you can't do that. That's the sad state of the game. There's a lot of potential, but it's unrealized. I really hope someone, someday, creates the game Jalopy could have been. Jalopy, sadly, isn't it.
88 Heroes is a pretty fun and funny game. It takes a lot of inspiration from the kind of mean, unfair games like I Wanna Be The Guy, while still being fair and friendly and eminently playable even by sausage-fingered n00bs like myself. The difficulty in the levels is mostly the sort of thing you need patience to pull of perfectly - and you will eventually run out of patience and do something stupid, and you can only blame yourself for it. Usually. The game is so so close to have perfectly tight gameplay that would make it shine. It's so close that when it slips up, and you fall off an elevator you were clearly in into a spike pit, or get crushed between an elevator and a wall that weren't even close, it hurts way more than if the game was bad all the way through. And this hurts the game a lot more than it'd hurt an easy-going platformer. It adds up to levels that are often complex and confusing (which is good and nice) and lots of different characters with different jump arcs and movement velocities (also good and nice). Another bad thing about the game is that... it ends up being boring. Some of the characters are crazy, and can fly, shoot stuff, float, reconfigure the level in all sorts of ways, and it's excellent. But a lot of them - a real big bunch of them - just jump. So every level has to be able to be completed by a character that does nothing but jump, and usually does that by having a slow, methodical route you'll be forced to take with most character. The end result is that many of them feel the same, and even if they aren't, there's no difference between two attack-focused characters in areas without enemies. However, I still really love the game. It's charming, well-drawn, and can somehow make stupid catchphrase humour really funny. And the characters are so charming, designed with such love, it's a real delight to watch them move and jump and duck (especially try ducking). It's a game that makes me sad for what it could be, but I'm glad it exists.
