petri-purho posts

Not a lot of games utilize real-life objects to create interesting graphics. Imagine a game where the enemies are comprised of photos arranged in a mosaic, for example. Post I.T. Shooter is one of these rare games, but it's not unusual to see this sort of game from Petri Purho, who is best known for Crayon Physics. While the gameplay is nothing special, the catch is that everything is rendered in Post-It Notes. It's an interesting twist, and the pixel art is well done, if simplistic. The music is also hilarious, as it is some sort of mixture between a voice-over and lounge music.

You move around with the arrow keys, and attack with space. The only scoring is how many enemies you defeat before dying. You die in a single hit, so you must dodge every enemy shot. Enemies get tougher over time, and move faster as they get damaged. The hitbox for enemies is relatively small, and your hitbox is large, so be prepared to die quite a bit.

There have been genre changes in games before, but none quite like this. Petri Purho, creator of the irresistible Crayon Physics and the rather odd Evolution Shmup, has released his next monthly freeware title. This new game, Planet of the Jellies, utilizes hand-drawn Space Invaders enemies in a puzzle atmosphere. You click on an enemy to move them towards the bottom of the screen. Match enemies in rows or columns of 3 or more to clear them and add to your score. It's as simple as that! The download clocks in at about 6.3 mb, and can be gotten from Petri's blog.

[Via IndieGames]

While we here at Big Download do love a good shoot-'em-up, the genre does not exactly innovate in any amazingly great fashion. Most gameplay improvements are iterations of previous games, whether the improvement is moving in a new dimension or the addition of bombs. Which is why, naturally, Evolution Shmup took us completely by surprise.

Featuring gameplay systems that are randomly generated, Evolution Shmup is a social gaming experiment to create a shmup through darwinistic gameplay innovations. The engine randomly creates the parameters of a gametype and then allows the player to attempt to play it. After playing several gametypes, the engine starts to randomly mash-up the elements of the games played the longest by the players, creating a strange sort of natural selection aspect. It's more interesting as an experiment than a game, as some of the gametypes are literally unplayable, but it's still worth a try.

[Via IndieGames]