B-Game Competition Ends

Poizoned Mind places 9th out of 29 entries with 15 votes. I was telling myself, "I'll be happy if I get higher than 20th place!" Mission successful. Outside the competition, PM has also acquired some vocal fans here and here - even appearing on indygamer.blogspot.com courtesy of that last writer.

Now let me just link back to the Poizoned Mind page and my monstrous B-game mosaic, before discussing my own favourite entries - all of which you can find in the competition thread. First up, here's the three games I voted for:

Cottage of Doom (1st Place)


B-movie inspiration, B-game implementation, Cottage of Doom is certainly unbalanced and buggy, but it's also enormously fun. Re-enact the end of Night of the Living Dead as you barricade windows and doors in a vain attempt to keep out an endless stream of zombies. This absolutely deserved to place first in the competition - it's the only entry I just can't stop playing.

Hickbilly Bride (5th Place)


A retro-style offering with pixellated graphics and a low frame-rate. You control a gun-toting redneck out to stop his sister marrying his cousin, facing rabid possums and chomping crocodiles en route. Weirdly, Hickbilly Bride turns out to be a puzzle game of sorts, where it's never immediately apparent what you need to do to reach the other side of the screen, but always fun to find out.

Dump Jumper (Joint 17th Place)


A game which in many respects can be considered pretty much broken, it's also got a strong, provocative concept and lots of neat little touches that show the author was really interested in fully developing the idea of pooping on things. To me, that's what this competition was all about (big ideas roughly developed, not pooping - although there was plenty of that too).

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I was pretty sure that I'd be voting for Cottage of Doom and Hickbilly Bride, but picking out that third game to vote for was really hard. In the end I chose Dump Jumper for its pure B-gameyness. But here were the other games I almost voted for instead:

Betasuppe (8th place)


A platform game controlled by text. A brilliant idea, implemented with a lot of character; it manages to be relentlessly cheerful even when the main character is dying over and over again. There are only about three puzzles to solve, though, even if they did seem to give some people trouble.

Toadzilla (Joint 17th place)


A mutant toad is destroying the city, throwing people into the air, eating them, demolishing their homes... You are that toad! Great fun, well done, but in the end, not quite my cup of tea.

Mario Inna Space (Joint 13th place)


The only fan-game of the competition, this is also strangely the most beautiful. Or perhaps that should be 'the most strangely beautiful'. Iconic video game character Mario is on the moon. Unfortunately this means that his incredible jumping ability is now an enormous handicap, and he spends almost all of his time off the ground, floating through space and (apparently) listening to "Across the Universe" by Fiona Apple.

The combination of music (especially the way it reacts to your actions) and visuals (including a lovely NASA image of Earth) is, well, strangely beautiful, as I said. The incongruently typical Mario-style game over is the icing on the cake. Still, it's almost more a screensaver than a game, and completing it would require hours of trial and error.

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Once again, you can find all these games here, and my own entry here.