Sogeking

By: Derek Yu

On: July 11th, 2007

In this Ikiki game, you play a sniper looking through his sniper scope! Use your mouse to aim and press the mouse button to blast the little naked guys (it’s sad, they look so happy) as they bounce over from the right side of the screen. They bounce higher and move faster as you go along. After a few dozen of them pass, the game ends and you get scored. My best so far is 53, which is pretty pathetic.

I don’t know what I’m going to do after I review every Ikiki game out there. I might just bundle every one of his games up into a single zip and set up a bunch of mirrors. It’ll probably be like 30 megs. Which I think is the size of a butt cheek texture in Gears of War.

Teppodon

By: Derek Yu

On: July 6th, 2007

It’s really interesting to see how Ikiki’s games influence one another. Teppodon is basically an upgrade to Teppoman, with some bits from Bimboman thrown in for good measure (like the mounted turrets and having to use explosions to propel yourself). The graphics are much more advanced than Teppoman and the controls are a bit more complex. Now, instead of only having one weapon at a time, you can switch between a knife and two guns of your choosing. Honestly, I have to say that I kind of prefer the simplicity of Teppoman – it’s a bit irritating to have to switch weapons all the time. It’s still pretty good, though, and I liked the boss fight at the end.

One of these days, it’d be fun to piece together a timeline for these games and examine how they influenced one another. Why? ‘Cause it’d be fun, that’s why! In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for this pictorial evolution of the Teppodon, from the primitive Bimboman.

Controls in the extended:

Left / Right – Move

Down – Free Hostage, Open Box

Shift – Jump

Control – Shoot

A – Switch Weapon

S – Drop Weapon

Z – Strafe

J – Suicide

Teppoman

By: Derek Yu

On: July 6th, 2007

I think this is the seventh Ikiki game that’s been posted, but who can tell? I won’t rest until I’ve played them all!

Teppoman is a simple run and gun platformer. Visually it’s very similar to Nikujin in that no one likes to wear shirts or pants. (I wonder what it feels like to wield a gun without pants on? It probably feels pretty good.) The game itself is very straightforward: shoot at everything that isn’t completely naked, and take their gun. Rescue the naked men who are bound in rope.

It’s much more forgiving than either Nikujin or Hakaiman in terms of the difficulty.

Controls in the extended:

Left / Right – Move

Down – Action (Pick Up Gun, Free Hostage, Open Box, Exit Level)

Shift – Jump

Control – Punch / Shoot

J – Suicide

Bimboman

By: Derek Yu

On: June 29th, 2007

My Ikiki obsession continues. I was looking for Teppoman, because I’d heard good things about it, but ended up finding Bimboman (direct download) instead. You know how that is.

It’s a platform commando game, thematically very similar to Hakaiman. In this one you’re armed with a machine gun and a timed explosive. The explosive doesn’t actually do any damage, but knocks people (including yourself) around. You can use it to scale walls and gaps and other obstacles.

It’s good. Definitely not as good as Nijukin or Hakaiman, but it’s fun. The game crashed on me in zone 4 and I didn’t feel like playing through the first 3 zones again so I quit.

3 Ikiki’s out of 5!

(Edit) Controls:

Arrow Keys – Move / Aim

Spacebar – Jump

A – Crouch

F – Fire Gun

R – Reload Gun

D – Throw Bomb

Tarenagasi

By: Derek Yu

On: June 21st, 2007

Still playing through all of Ikiki’s games! This one’s number five for me, and boy, it’s a doozy. I was attracted to it by the small thumbnail on the games page – it looked like a fun game in a cave. You know, maybe something like Spelunker?

Little did I know they were caves of smelly SHIT.

Tarenagasi, which I think translates to “Poo Cannon” in Japanese, has you flinging excrement all over the walls of what appears to be Mario’s house, covering his lovely entrance room with your gut garbage, which is fired in prodigious amounts via a large cannon attached to your bum. That’s basically the entire game.

Is it some kind of commentary on how the commercial games industry craps out sequel after sequel? Who knows. But it’s funny as hell!

Use ESDF to move and Space to jump, while aiming and firing using the mouse. Left-click will shoot a load out of your cannon. Right-click will make your player, er, fill the cannon back up. The three modes you can choose from on the title screen only change the time limit. Mode three is the unlimited time mode, which let me create this masterpiece right here.

3.5 smelly Ikikis out of 5!

Gonbutoman

By: Derek Yu

On: June 19th, 2007

The fourth of Ikiki’s games that I’m trying. Gonbutoman (direct download) confused the hell out of me when I started playing, mainly because I thought it was going to be a lot like Pro Wrestling for the Nintendo. Instead, it’s more like that Japanese flash game Nanaca Crash.

This one’s pretty fun – certainly a lot better than Bokusin. 2 and a half Ikiki’s out of 5! POW!

How to Play: Press Spacebar to start running back toward the ropes, then slam it as many times to build up your power. When you get near your opponent, hit and hold down the button to wallop him. It’s a game of timing and button-mashing. My best score is 64. Which is pretty damn good, I think!

Bokusin

By: Derek Yu

On: June 19th, 2007

I continue on my quest to play all of Ikiki’s games and chronicle them. With Bokusin (“Boxing”), I discover that not all of Ikki’s games are created equal. This two-player boxing game must be one of his earlier efforts. I give this one 1 Ikiki out of five, which is about 20 on William Usher’s rating scale.

Still, the title screen music is pretty awesome.

Direct download here.

Hakaiman

By: Derek Yu

On: June 14th, 2007

I had no idea that developer Ikiki is one prolific motherfucker, since all I knew of his work was Nikujin. Check out this page of all this games. Holy hell, this guy is like the Takashi Miike of indie games. And I vow that I shall play them all and review them on this site!

Hakaiman (direct download), the second of his games I’ve played (and considered to be one of his best) is a top-down espionage game. There are six missions in total, that have you stealing the plans, infiltrating the base, etc., with nothing but a machine gun, a handful of grenades, and your gigantic brass balls at your disposal.

Whether you want to go in guns blazing or silently snap necks is up to you, but guards are thankfully quite simple-minded and, unless they see you, will not actively seek you out (and even then, for only a short while). They will also respond to loud noises, like explosions. It’s not very realistic, but it makes the game infinitely more fun and playable.

The lowdown is that this game is really, really sweet, and the many ways you can kill your opponents and yourself make it very replayable. There’s even a high score system that tracks your speed and other factors (types of kills, perhaps?). And unlike Nikujin, which is the gaming equivalent of trying to pick up a glass ball with chopsticks, Hakaiman is totally beatable.

I loved this game so much that I even made a walkthrough for it, with screenshots of every level, before and after the carnage.

(Thanks to raigan and Jon Mak for the link to all his games and for giving me heads-up on this one in particular!)

Controls and hints in the extended.

Controls:

X – Change Weapon (Hands or Gun)

Z – Throw Grenade (hold to prime) or Reload

Shift – Punch/use or fire gun

Ctrl – Hold to strafe

J – Commit suicide (in a giant explosion)

Hints:

Punch a guard from the back or side to snap his neck silently.

Some walls are breakable with grenades.

Turrets can be destroyed if you drop a grenade right under them.

Guards respond to loud noises.

Guards flee from grenades.

On most levels there is a secret item that gives you a 1-up when you complete the level!

Nikujin

By: Guest Reviewer

On: June 11th, 2007

[Guest review by Xander]

Nikujin (direct link) is a bit of an oddity. It was created by a person known as ‘Ikiki’. And that’s everything I know about the creator, except that he created one of my favourite 2D-platformers. In Nikujin you play a ninja, who’s goal is to progress through a ninja fortress of increasing difficulty, utilising your ninja skills to ensure your survival. There’s no real tutorial to the game, so to run through quickly, the arrow keys are your directional movements, Shift is jump and Ctrl is your sword attack. Now, whilst this game looks simple, especially given it’s incredibly basic style, the gameplay gets a little more complicated.

There are special tricks to the game, which you can only really learn through experimentation. For instance, holding down when landing from a height allows you to roll, so that you don’t hurt yourself. If you land on top of an enemy, pressing down will stab your sword into his head, killing him instantly. You can then jump from there to get a vertical boost, from where you can hold up to cling to the ceiling. You can also hold up to run up walls, also achievable mid-jump, or whilst clinging onto the ceiling provided you are very close to a 90 degree corner. It’s certainly easier to learn through practice, as you will meet obstacles that will push you into realizing your capabilities as a ninja. For instance, you run at a set speed, but if you walk into a wall and then immediately run the other direction you will use the force to launch into a continuous sprint gaining you a significant leaping boost. Combat takes a back seat to the platforming, it’s really just a case of slashing the enemy a few times, or killing him before he’s noticed you, indicated by the Metal Gear Solid-style icons above their head.

Now, I wont lie to you. This game is hard. So hard. So very very hard. In fact, despite being one of my favourite games, I’ve never actually completed it. You have unlimited lives, but you restart at the beginning of each level every time you die. Bottomless pits, ninja assassins, leg-breaking falls, bamboo spikes, suicidal powder-keg lugging nutjobs and even a wannabe Musashi are just a taste of what will kill you over and over again until you finally master that level, where you promptly die again and again on the next one. It’s a punishing game, but thanks to an update, the game is now continuable from the start of the furthest level you reached. There are also bonus modes to take your mind off of the main game, such as a very painful time-trial which oddly features hints in the background of the techniques I mentioned earlier, even though half of the TT is actually far harder than a lot of the game. There’s also a survival mode, where an old bed-ridden…someone… is charged under your protection and you have to slay his would-be-assassins.

The music I must mention is pretty fantastic. It’s all midi, all the time, but there are some really catchy tunes in there. The survival mode track is particularly entertaining, and a nice song to slash arteries to. It can be a very fun game, it can also be an incredibly frustrating game, it all depends on how well you’re doing basically. It’s worth a play at the very least, and who knows, you might even finish the damn thing before I do.

P.S. There’s a rumour about bonus levels after completing the main game without continuing. I urge you not to attempt this, as you will undoubtedly find yourself tearing your computer apart with your own feet, unable to explain to your concerned family that the game was forcing itself upon you with it’s devilish trickery. Please, think of the children.