I have not voted yet because I could not get a few games to play. I’ll vote once I’ve played them all.

I suspect that all my problems are related to super-crappy drivers for the “Intel HD 3000” video card in my Win7-64

laptop.

Reviews so far

(**** POSSIBLE SPOILERS ****)

Survival:

Started but was unplayable due to serious physics and graphics glitches. Almost certainly, due to crappy video drivers. Will

try again on an XP box with a real video card.

Megagnat_vs_Ultrapede:

This one ran on the laptop. Nice effort with the scripted in-game intro but I feel that more effort should have gone into gameplay. Also, I didn’t see any directions about what I was supposed to be doing. At first I thought I was controlling one of the monsters and it took me a while to figure out that I was aiming the tanks. There was not much game play in the game. The only thing I really had to do to beat the game was make the decision to split the tank damage evenly between the monsters. It took no skill to hit the monsters so it was just waiting for health bars to run out.

Having said that, I did end up playing though to the end just to see what the Evil Cube did.

Ladybug Massacre:

Started on the laptop. It took me a minute to figure out that I could only move the crosshairs left-and-right. It was pretty hard to aim and all the enemies seemed to be standing still. Also, I was a bit confused that most of the walls were made out of transparent blood-splats.

All-in-all, it had sounds effects, models that were not just boxes, and textures. I think that getting full mouse-look and having some enemy interaction would have made this kind of fun.

Ants: The Great Harvest

On the laptop, crashed Blender trying to load level 1. It did run on my Linux machine with an ATI HD 3200 card but that machine does not have sound hooked up so I’m not sure if it had sound effects or not.

The graphics looked good. Game play had some dimension to it and there was at least 1 fully fleshed out level. Personally, I’m not a fan of the RTS/micro-managing type games but I suspect the right person could have some fun with this. The ant did move slowly so getting the first 4 grain packets to get another ant was somewhat dull. I’m not sure what the point of the pheramone trails were. I was able to just click directly on 4 grain piles and the ant navigated to them in order without my help to turn corners or anything.

This was a pretty complete game. Good graphics, complete gameplay, and in-game help.

Ant Commander:

Also would not run on the laptop (go figure) so I had to fall back to the Linux machine. Again, I could not tell if there were sound effects.

The graphics were decent but the controls were somewhat difficult to make out at first. The in-game options menu that popped up when you hit ‘q’ or clicked on the hive was pretty cool, as was the fact that the mouse cursor looked like the beam of a magnifying glass. Level discovery was kind of difficult. I knew that I was supposed to go kill an enemy hive and protect my hive but at first I could not find my hive and I cheated and just used Blender to see the entire level so I could find the enemy hive. I made some workers and an extra solider but could not figure out how to control them. I eventually went up the ramp and jumped off toward the enemy hive and I think that bugged the game out. My ant seemed to end up floating upside down though I could still move. I got swarmed but didn’t die and I seemed unable to kill the enemies or the enemy hive.

I think it has some potential but seems like there is a bit of work to do on it.

So far I’m leaning toward “Harvest” but the videos of Survival look pretty robust so I’m reserving judgement until I’ve had a chance to play that on a real computer.