Gamebrew / platformers

Somebody on gbatemp surprised me back in 2016 claiming (about School Rush)

HOLY CRAP! I'm surprised to see an actual game here, because usually most DS Homebrew is just shitty abandoned tech demos. Nice job on this! I'll check it out soon.

I dug that one again not so lately after School Rush finally got its Gamebrew Wiki entry and it felt hard to believe given the 1394 other entries the wiki has just for NDS games. There had been some unfinished titles for sure that had just enough contents to rank fairly in seasonly "coding" competitions, but there had also been brilliant titles. It was just after I ran into some "7 best DS games" that would only mention a few FPS and then non-game homebrews... I can't review all 1394 games, but I sure could give the "platformers" category a spin

"Sonic, the game" defines quite well the first category: graphics ripped from various 2D titles in Mario and Sonic series, unfinished physics and uninspired level design and no sound whatsoever. At least it demonstrates scrolling in large levels with parallax effect for the background layer.

Monky. One-screen collect-and-progress game. You'll have to backtrack if you missed some letters on the way. You'll lose all the collected bananas if you get hit. 1 monster type, 4 levels (as far as I can tell). (Unrelated) background music featuring a mod player and a few sound effects.
A nice tech demo using PaLib and graphics ripped from DK Jungle climb GBA game, but not very inspired as far as game and level design goes.

I did not pass level 1 on first play. I missed a key gamedesign element: as you keep moving forward, you'll enter a sort of "run state" where you jump higher. There seems to be 4 worlds of 5 levels each ... that would be worth playing more before rating the quality of level design. You've got sound and music, but if you've played some pinball titles on the Amiga, you'll immediately recognize the style and honestly, it doesn't quite fit the coconut plains of the first levels. 

Temple Topple could have been featured in our "Biloutris" project, I guess. Block falls, they disappear if they line up, but you can't move them (at least, I don't think so). You do have to avoid getting crushed, though. Don't expect much variety as you play. None of the little things that can make such a "climbing" game really funny.

Starting a game has a significant chance of being unfair. Once you're one or 2 screens away from the bottom, there's little chance of getting crushed, and in between, there's a good chance you'll have to wait for the next jump option to show up. I gave up around 1300 pixels high, out of boredom. I would bet on looped WAV/MP3 sample for the background music. It might have been the author's hands-on title for DS Game Maker...

I tried Epic Caveman, too, and understood why the wiki entry only lists the title screen. The title is an endless runner, somehow akin to the "running zilla" game offered when a chrome browser cannot connect to the internet. But here obstacle are quite large, right form the start, requiring very precise timing to clear the jump over them. You can't jump "on" them either, which doesn't seem to make sense in this context. An there will be sudden speed up, requiring you to adjust the tediously learnt timing on the fly. Not even between series of blocks but *within* a series.

There's some sound but nothing really impressive. I'd put it in the category "mini-game of an afternoon, to check you've understood how to use assert import and can structure your project with different screens around the main game screen. Good for a programming tutorial if you had the source, but hardly interesting as a game, although - unlike "sonic the game" - there is coherency and care to detail here.

edit: okay, this is what "sonic the game looks like. and you don't see the fact that if you nearly land on a "platform", it will push you backwards so you can safely fall down instead of remaining balancing on a few pixels. That reminds me why the real sonic has *two* vertical sensors, and not just one. 

(yeah, I hesitated to dedicate 280KiB of blog storage to show that, and I certainly didn't want it to become the post's thumb picture)