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| The Basement Collection Review Saturday, October 13, 2012 5:06 pm — Posted by FlashMarsh |
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General Information
General Information
Time to Beat (Standard): 8 hours
Time to Beat (Completionist): 10 hours
Time to Beat (Speedrun): N/A
Difficulty: Varies greatly, but pretty average if you ignore the bonus levels for Meat Boy and Time Fcuk
Price: £2.99
Genre: Lots and none (wtf is coil's genre?)
The Basement Collection is a compilation of free flash games from Edmund McMillen, creator of Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy. This edition also contains a tonne of bonus content varying from Bonus Levels to Concept Art. But we'll get onto that later. There are 7 main games in the Basement Collection (there's a couple which no-one should care about, eg. AVGM, a game about how people are willing to do mundane things for hours in a video game, just like in MMOs, Runescape). I'll list the paragraphs about each game in order from best to worst, and I'll give you my order beforehand.
1. Coil
2. Aether
3. Triachnid
=4. Spewer
=4. Time Fcuk
6. Grey Matter
7. Meat Boy
So, let's start with Coil. To put it simply, this game blew me away. It was like Portal in the Orange Box - It wasn't that well known, and it was certainly not the flagship game of the bundle, but it was absolutely amazing. This game is extremely short - Only about ~30 minutes. It gives you no instructions throughout the game, and it leaves it up to you to figure out what the hell you have to do. You play as a small fetal-thingy throughout it's life, from conception to death. Although every stage is very simple once you know what to do, it really does shine due to the way which you work out what to do, and the aesthetics bring it to a whole new level. The music is stunning (link), and I would definitely advise listening to it. It really fits the theme, and although it won't be to some peoples tastes due to the incredible weirdness, it fits in with the game. The art style is the classic Edmund McMillan Adobe Flash drawings, but with a bit more graded colour and without the thick black outlines.
dafuq
Aether. Another fairly abstract game. It was made in a very short amount of time for one of those game jam things (I think it was 48 hours?). You play as a boy riding an alien-octopus thing (yeah.) who uses his tongue to grab onto clouds. You can use the clouds to propel yourself into space and visit various planets. On each plane, everyone is sad. When you try to solve their problems however, they don't get any happier. When you solve all of the planets problems, you return to earth, however oyu just break it in two and fall through it. It gives a little bedtime-story like poem at the beginning, which is a nice touch. Again, fantastic soundtrack, except this time there are three soundtracks (!!), all of which are great. I think that Tyler Glaiel's soundtrack is the best of the three. This game isn't without it's problems. It often experiences major frame drops due to it being made in Flash, despite the simple graphics, and the controls are simply not the great, and I think that they'd work far better with a gamepad. I think that the reason I loved this game so much is because it gave you a very unique world, and let you do whatever you wanted from the very start. Even though it isn't the biggest world, it felt like you had as much freedom as something with a world hundreds of times larger.
Triachnid. I probably played this the least. I like the aesthetic, and the mechanic was cool, however the mechanic made it incredibly frustrating. I haven't told you the mechanic. The mechanic the game was based around was that each of the three legs could be controlled individually to allow yourself to move. It was alright.
Spewer. Game based around throwing up. Mhm. You can use you vomit essentially as water, and you can throw up different things as you get through the game. You can throw up glue, and so on. You van eat moar fruit to refill your vomit. It's getting hard to review these. This game again ran pretty slowly due to Flash being bad, and the controls often felt a little dodgy, and the movement seemed very floaty. The fluid didn't always act how you'd expect it, and the glue was exceptionally annoying to deal with because it was so unpredictable because your vomit spewed out everywhere... as the title of the game would suggest. The puzzles weren't that difficult in terms of working them out, more that they were really annoying to actually do.
spewing
Time Fcuk. Should probably be third, but I was making this after an exceptionally frustrating run of Time Fcuk, so... The visuals are very pixel arty but looks great, unlike certain other games in which it just seems like an excuse for bad graphics. I am not looking at any specific game. I am not looking at any specific game. The gameplay revolves around you using gravity switches, keys, crates and spikes in typical puzzle-platformer style, but with a twist in that you can swap between two dimensions. The music sounded very annoying to me. Probably because I hate accordions.
Grey Matter. Crap game in my opinion. You kill stuff by running into it, but avoid the flashing stuff (eg. enemies tails, bullets). Make a triangle out of three enemies you just killed to kill everthing inside the triangle for super duper bonus points. The game is really difficult, but because it is really boring and didn't grab me at all, I just gave up after a couple of deaths. The only redeeming feature was that the music was some great electronic stuff.
Meat Boy. Absolutely abysmal. The controls were terrible - Especially the wall jumping. It lacked a sprint button or any of the sticking to the walls of Super Meat Boy, making it seem like a gigantic step back - Because it was. The levels were never as nicely designed as Super Meat Boy, the menu's were terrible (I mean come on, they used comic sans on the title screen. WTF.), the music was low quality, as in the actual sounds weren't recorded very well. The bandages were OK. That's all I have to say.
In terms of Bonus Content, most of the offerings were pretty much rubbish, with the exception of the deleted scenes from Indie Game: The Movie, which were very, very interesting, and offered a lot of insight into the actual games that they made. The one on Coil was especially great, and acts as almost an afterword from the author in a book.
But is it worth the money? No. The bonus content is all pretty bad, with the exception of the IVGM Scenes - But they canbe found on YouTube! All the games are on Kongregate and Newgrounds for free. There is literally no reason to spend money on this unless you want to support the developer, or if you want added convenience.
User Comments (1)
| Quirvy | ||
| Â Â Karma: 655 Posts: 7753 Gender: Male pm | email |
Lol I don't think I'd ever pay money for a collection of free games. I haven't read all of this, but I noticed you mentioned the game Time Fcuk, and I actually have played that before, and I'm pretty sure I beat it after like 2 separate attempts. I remember it being pretty confusing, and the background-music being the type that's so bad that you just don't listen to it at all because it doesn't even deserve a chance. I remember liking it in the "that was a pretty good game" way, but not the "I want to play it again!" way. I think I played the game at school at least on one occasion. This also reminded me of some other game I remember stumbling upon at school. Not sure of it's name. Anyways, since this is a list of free flash games, I'll probably read this later when I have some free time, and then play some of the ones you mention.  spooky secret | |
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