Vital Stats:
Super Mario
Crossover

Genre: Platformer
Players: 1
Online: Distribution

Developer: Exploding Rabbit
Portal: Newgrounds
ESRB Rating: Unrated
Release Date: 2010

Vital Stats:
VVVVVV

Genre: Platformer
Players: 1
Online: Demo

Developer: Terry Cavanagh
Portal: Kongregate Games
ESRB Rating: Unrated
Release Date: 2010

Vital Stats:
Monkey island SE

Genre: Platformer
Players: 1
Online: Flash Game

Developer: LucasArts
Portal: InstantAction
ESRB Rating: E10+
Release Date: 2009

Seeing how Steve Jobs is so busy hating on the Flash, it’s probably time for another Flash Roundup. After all, nothing sates the hunger for new technology quite like sour grapes. So if you’re also one of the 299 in 300 Americans without an iPad, won’t you join me in scoffing? They may have 3G wireless connectivity, but if you can’t play Chronotron with it, there’s just no point.

The Flash Roundup is dedicated to the proposition that not all games need require 40 hours and a second mortgage to play. You may not be able to find cheap decent games on consoles any more, but that’s just because they’ve all moved to the Internet. Each installment picks out a handful of unsung and sometimes unpublished games that stand out from the background noise.

This week’s theme is something old and something new. That is to say, developers doing new things with old ideas.

Super Mario Crossover

Fangasm!

Every once in a while, Nintendo comes out with a game that feels like a love letter to their twenty-year fans, but Super Mario Crossover burns straight past love and stops somewhere between obsession and stalking. The premise is simple: take the level design from Super Mario Bros. and let other NES-era mascots match wits and steel with the King of the Koopas. You can guide Mario, Bill “Mad Dog” Rizer, Link, Simon Belmont, or Samus Aran, swapping out characters between levels a la Super Mario Bros. 2 It’s the stuff of playground feuds and Captain N, but with a sophistication that surpasses both.

Flash games are like free apps in the iTunes store: 99.9% clumsy garbage, but the last .1% will make you forget all the others. As you run and jump (and for some characters, shoot) your way through the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario has that natural-feeling inertia you’ll remember from his side-scrolling debut and Simon Belmont has a familiar ballistic trajectory when he jumps. Some concessions were necessary, with the most obvious being Simon Belmont’s new Ghouls ‘n Ghosts-style double jump. However, the few changes were done in the spirit of each character’s game or a similar game that tackled the design problem well. It’s simply a marvel how well everything fits together, and Exploding Rabbit deserves recognition for their invisible stitching.

Despite each character’s mechanical departures from the standard Mario formula, nothing feels out of place in SMC. For example, each character powers up with the super mushrooms and fire flowers native to the Mushroom Kingdom, but effects vary according to each character’s, um, power-oncogenes. So when Link trips shrooms, he gets a white sword and a blue ring, but when Samus goes all flower girl, she gets a wave beam and a bikini. Wardrobe differences aside, Exploding Rabbit balances these powers in the same way they were balanced in their respective games. Samus’s long-range weapon requires several shots to down an enemy, and Link’s short-range weapon is stronger and stuns enemies for a moment.

To wit: it’s sleek and slick and totally worth your time. Well, at least it is if you’re older than ten, and if you’re not, you probably don’t even know what the word verisimilitude even means. For the record, it means awesomesauce, or more formally, sauceomness.

VVVVVV

You’ll need it.

VVVVVV isn’t so much free as it is a demo, but there’s more than the usual Flash game’s worth of content that’s free to play. If you’re up on your retro history, the game is equal parts Metal Storm, Super Metroid, and N+. If you’re not, it’s a free-roaming platformer where you don’t jump so much as you reverse gravity to navigate through a vast space ship. Also, because the ship is riddled with lethal traps, you don’t navigate so much as you die.

Fortunately, there are as many checkpoints as traps. Anyone who tried Star Guard or Super Meat Boy will recognize the feel. VVVVVV perches on the fulcrum between punishment and pushover, and ends up feeling fair.

It’s an impossible balance without impeccable controls and smart design, but VVVVVV comes through on both through sheer virtue of simplicity. The game is a meditation on gravity flipping: you can flip gravity once after you touch the floor or ceiling, and that’s your principle agency in the world. The canny level design explores the mechanic thoroughly, and it isn’t long before you’re navigating perils that originally looked impossible.

Non-linear exploration is usually its own reward in games, but in VVVVVV it’s more of a survival trait. You can pick your challenge level and put frustrating sections of the game aside as you like. There are objectives in every direction, and usually multiple ways to get to each. It’s rare enough in platformers to have some control over the game’s progression, but in a challenge set piece like VVVVVV, it’s practically unheard of.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

Our last Flash game isn’t native to Flash at all, but I guess it is now. Familiar fan favorite, The Secret of Monkey Island SE is bringing adventure games to your browser. Better still, the first twenty minutes are free and can now be embedded in your favorite blog and Facebook for your convenience.

Unless you’re on an iPad. Or any Apple OS, technically. See what you miss out on when you badmouth Flash, Steve?

The Secret of Monkey Island:SE powered by InstantAction

Oh wait, I guess you don’t, actually.