The Color of Doom
Developer: The Guildhall at SMU: Team Overscope
Nomination: Student Showcase
Platform: Windows (Half Life 2: Episode One mod)
Website
Description: Fight an endlessly replicating horde of red and blue robots by shooting them with the correct color of ammo. Invoke the awesome power of the saved game when you inevitably fail.

How to play a Half Life mod:

• Make sure you have Half Life 2: Episode One on your computer. (If you don’t: seriously, the Orange Box is $30 on Steam. 5 games. $6/game. Go buy it.)
• Download the free mod here at one of the student’s websites. (The page at The Guild Hall doesn’t include the download.)
• Install the mod in your SourceMods folder. For example: C:\Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\SourceMods. The installer should automatically select the correct location.
• Restart Steam so it can discover the new content in its folder.
• You should now see The Color of Doom listed under the “My Games” tab.

If you don’t already have the Source SDK, Steam will queue it up for you, and you’ll need to let it download for the mod to work.

Adam’s Thoughts:
The Color of Doom is a patchwork of old action game tropes held together by a smart sense of humor. At its core is a variant of the Ikaruga color-swapping mechanic, where you can toggle between two colors to attack and defend against enemies of the same and different colors. The handful of limited-ammo weapons you can collect (like a spread shot or rapid fire) would feel more at home in a side-scrolling shooter, and the infinite enemy generators arrive straight from Gauntlet. It all ties together into a classic action game feel, by which I mean that The Color of Doom is maliciously difficult. It’s good then that the game is funny enough to be worth playing, because otherwise the engulfing tide of enemy robots might become frustrating. That said, this game is definitely intended for gamers who equate fun with challenge, because everyone else will be ambushed by the designers’ schadenfreude its old school feel.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing new in The Color of Doom. Some platforms are color-coded like the enemies are, and toggling your color will change which platforms are tangible. This makes for some original platforming that, despite the floaty-feeling jumps, is pleasantly fresh. The storytelling is also unusual. The Color of Doom strikes a pulp action comic theme and keeps to it. Your status updates and progress notifications are delivered via sarcastic narrator, and it flows smoothly with the action. All told, the game may not be universally accessible, but it makes strong design decisions and keeps to them. Whether you’ll receive it as a sign of design integrity or a callous disregard for the player will really depend on what you think is fun.

Katie’s Thoughts:
I confess: I play mostly console games. Even when playing FPSs, I tend to find myself playing them on consoles. So the WASD movement+mouse look control scheme, while ubiquitous, is not one that I’m completely comforatable using. Add the negative transfer from the World of Warcraft keyboard movement setup, and you find one Katie who is overwhelmingly dizzied when facing off against an endless stream of blue and red monsters comming to kick her in the shins. Hard.

This game does not pull punches–it drops you into an evil lair full of monster-generators, and asks you to please go turn them off. With your gun. The individual monsters do enough damage that even while moving and jumping around like an idiot (which is okay, because you’re a jester), in the time it takes to burn down a single monster generator, there’s a good chance you’ve taken a significant amount of damage. A few generators in, and console gamers will be dreaming of sitting down and giving the developers a solid thrashing in, say, Super Smash Brothers.

The Ikaruga-style color interaction between you and the world is a cool twist to a third-person shooter that impacted not only what color bullets were damaging to an enemy, but also which color platforms could hold you, and through which vertical walls both you and your enemies could pass.

We won’t know until we have a chance to talk to the developers if they intended the game to be so extremely difficult, even on easy mode. It’s possible that they were aiming at a narrow audience, but it’s also possible that refining a game’s difficulty so that it is not only challenging enough to be interesting and easy enough to not be frustrating is itself a difficult process.

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