GDC 14: A Wild Indie Mega Booth Appears

alking through the West Hall at the Moscone, I was delightfully surprised to see one of my favorite exhibits appear at GDC; that’s right, the Indie Mega Booth. I settled myself in, and took it upon myself to get familiar with all the games showcased; here are the games that I believe will make 2014 the best year in video games yet.

In some capacity, be it the more standard childhood nostalgia when Fox Kids was a thing or allegiance to the much more dedicated Super Sentai following, Power Rangers has touched most, if not all of us at some point; Behold Studios is developing a love letter to the phenomenon with a unique twist to the tactical RPG genre to top it off.

As I walked up to the monitor, I saw the familiar emulations of the famous five teenagers with attitudes and an “audience” meter—I discovered that clearing out all the bogus monsters won’t mean a thing if I don’t entertain the crowd watching my performance. The process of delegating the most practical actions to take doesn’t cut it as you’ll have to perform specific actions in order to amuse your audience into allowing you to still be on stage. In between the episodes, you’re breaking the fourth wall and managing the conditions of the stage and equipment or hiring and customizing different actors that will be more effective to take into the subsequent episode; the fan service for the Sentai culture is in full force from the Meta perspectives of both the fans and the industry that broadcasts it, in which gives Chroma Squad a surreal but enchanting charm. The title is already available on the Humble Store and is currently awaiting approval on Greenlight, we’ll have more about it in our review.

Puzzle platformers tend to tool around with certain aspects of physics, but very few mess around with the idea of gravity, and even less with gyroscoping; Airscape: Fall of Gravity does both.

Starring a strange and yet adorably lost baby octopus, Airscape will have you leaping through a mix of grassy knolls and death lasers, atop planetoids with their own field of polarity that the little tentacle dude will fling in and out of when in range; essentially a 2D side-scrolling Super Mario Galaxy, only crazier. Airscape’s levels have a design that suggestively propels you through it, with terrain that can hinge anywhere on screen ready to be accessed, and then there are the floating bodies of water for our tiny octo-hero to swim through—the physics of swimming are completely different with the velocity capable of peaking speeds on levels of sheer insanity—with full gyroscopic movement no less.

With an adorable aesthetic and a surprisingly complex stage layout, the Airscape is equal parts wacky and challenging, and if you can’t take my work for it, the development team did a real solid by including the demo for it on their site, check it out and up vote it on Greenlight afterwards.

In an age where independently developed games were largely obscure, one little gem managed to make the rounds on the web and become a cult classic: Barkly Shut Up and jam Gaiden—and after all the mystery surrounding the sequel that was announced a while back, it’s playable at Indie Mega Booth.

The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 - Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie - Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa (or Barkley 2) exchanges it’s turn-based Japanese RPG roots for a western RPG inspired twin-stick shooter, and it’s just as, if not more ridiculous. As I wandered the town, I began to pick up quests from the vagrant denizens of Neo New York as Hoopz Barkley, and conviction for the narrative and the preposterous fiction it’s founded from is even more intense, and thankfully, a bit more tongue in cheek this time around. Surprisingly enough, when I descended into the sewers and entered into hostile territory, the well of depth within the combat was much deeper than I had initially perceived considering the suggestive genre alluding to a more action oriented affair. HoopZ arsenal consists of guns that can either be used in succession or as mod to an entirely different gun, and allow for various damage boosts or status effects or they even granted additional powers that play in a variety of ways like timed-button presses or rheumatic command input.

Taking shades of Borderlands, Paper Mario, and the warped nuances of JRPG storytelling, Barkley 2 may be steering in different directions but it’s brilliantly exploring all of the best strengths from the style it liberally borrows from and should be on everyone’s radar later this year.

Falling victim to my penchant for all things adorable, I stumbled upon an alpha iOS game called Robots Love Ice Cream, and within seconds, the hook of tower defense meets Missile Command on a spinning globe cleanly dug into me, and it only got deeper.

Manning an Ice-cream truck like the deadly assault vehicle that it is, gameplay involves moving between the left and right defend against the sweet-toothed invaders that are after the planet’s cache of ice-cream. Advancing through levels opens up the field with perks and passive power-ups that will change up your ammunition with a number of different bullet spreads or effects that you’ll need manage against enemies that steadily get tougher to take down. Four levels in and I was straight navigating some serious bullet-hell shit on all sides.

While the response of the touchscreen controls are slightly iffy, the game’s also positioning itself to provide micro-transactions for the same passive power-ups going into levels, the balance of addictive systems dressing with incredibly attractive graphics will put a smile on anyone who downloads Robots Love ice Cream when it hits the app store in late 2014.