Dressed to Digress: Tux Gaming, "Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers"

Searching for sustainable gaming within the perilous digital wilderness that is Linux. Amidst open source, black pants studio's Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers is an encouraging beacon of hope.

Before installing Ubuntu on my first netbook, I had little idea as to what Linux really was. Today my understanding is novice at best. However, I remember installing SuSE on my mom's old Toshiba Satellite (266 mhz Pentium II processor, and 64 MB of RAM!) and being pretty impressed with the results -- that is, until I had to touch the terminal.

Even today, I find myself asking teh Googles what I need to do when it comes to tapping out command lines into the terminal. However, with so many relatively user friendly distributions of Linux out there, the community has grown substantially, and its layman userbase along with it. There are a slew of helpful forums out there to supplement the already adequate documentation. Linux is becoming more accessible, and the diversity of applications you can run in the various distributions is impressive.

Gaming is no exception. Last week I let you guys in on my gaming experiences with Studio Pixel's Cave Story. Since then, I've successfully installed Valve's Steam content distribution client and played a couple good rounds of Team Fortress 2. However, neither of these examples are really Linux games so much as unofficial ports.

Cruising through moddb.com's Linux game library, I ran into a lot of games that reminded me of the blackmarket NES titles I played in the Philippines: they looked really wonky, and appeared completely satisfied in emulating or imitating titles that were established on other more popular platforms. That is, until I ran into Germany-based indy developer black pants studio's demo of Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers. So, you're probably scratching your head and asking yourself, 'What the hell's with that title?' No, it's not the result of a shoddy German-to-English translation. The game revolves around the adventures of the game's protagonist, Tiny, who chases the mischievous Big through a perilous wasteland in order to reclaim his grandpa's underpants that grant the wearer the power of teleportation.

Absolutely. The plot is a little weird. But let's leave it at that.

The good kind, folks.

The game's opening screen is a configuration utility with some nice illustrations of the game's characters. I have a soft spot for the artwork in this game. The designs are somewhat post apocalyptic, and the characters are adorably hideous in the same way that a baby bird is adorably hideous. I mean absolutely no offense to the artist, because I really enjoy the aesthetic which is effective and quite obviously deliberate. The game's graphics reflect the art style pretty well, too, as the textures all appear to be colored ink drawings with lots of crosshatching and simple shading. The overall appearance of the game is that of a comic book, with dialog bubbles carrying on character conversation and large polygonal renderings of onomatopoeia that burst onto the screen very naturally.

The loose line work reminds me a little bit of the art from Rocko's Modern Life.

Perhaps the most impressive element of the game is its physics-driven gameplay. The demo equips the main character, Tiny, with a cutting laser and grappling hook. With these tools and Tiny's own two hands, the player can cut, push and pull objects throughout the game's environment. The player is able to destroy and arrange obstacles throughout the demo to help Tiny maneuver his way through the environment. With the exception of the level's principle foundation (i.e., the ground), Tiny & Big's environments are completely destructible.

Neat tutorial set up at the beginning of the demo.

That's not a hat, dummy!

The demo's sub-subtitle is "Up That Mountain", in which you guide Tiny up a rocky spire as he pursues the impish, underwear-hat clad Big. The level design is satisfying, both in graphic presentation and puzzle design. There is often more than one way to cross any given obstacle, and it's fun to explore Tiny's abilities by hacking up every which rock and pillar in your path. The main hazards in this episode are pitfalls, but each major obstacle is preceded by a save point to keep the player's frustration at a minimum. Between its physics, art direction, and level design, this demo has all the makings of a fun game whose simplicity is both refreshing and innovative.

However, being that this is essentially a beta preview of the game, Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers is not without its hiccups. With the game constantly generating new objects in the form of destroyed structures, particle effects, and 3D text, my system seemed to have a hard time keeping up in higher screen resolutions. I found that the -- what would normally be -- painfully low resolution of 1280 x 720 worked best in full screen mode. (Note that, being a Linux novice myself, it's entirely probable that I just don't know shit about optimizing my GPU).

Thank you, Jesus!

Graphical woes aside, I did find myself having a hard time platforming over obstacles, as Tiny's character model would often get snagged on a piece of crumbled pillar, or knocked back by an invisible chunk of rock. Similarly, flat-faced inclines would cause the walk cycle to stutter, as though the physics engine was having a hard time deciding whether to let me scale the object or make me slip to my doom. There were also other seemingly intuitive features that were surprisingly left out, one being the ability to swing by your grappling hook or climb up its rope. There were several occasions where I tried to save myself by latching on to a cliff in mid freefall, only to find that I could either simply dangle futily for eternity or plummet into oblivion. Considering that Tiny has the ability to drag tons of stone around, I would imagine he should have the strength to climb up a length of rope.

Nice view.
For now.

This is a demo, after all. Perfection would be an unfair expectation, and being that it looks like black pants will be releasing the game episodically, there is plenty of room for both debugging and new features. I really look forward to the official releases of the Tiny & Big saga, because few games -- particularly big-buck triple-A titles -- have such a strong sense of individual direction. black pants is an indie developer worth keeping tabs on, and because of that I insist you give Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers a go. Despite the weird name.

Afraid of Linux? Me too. But do not fret! Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers is also available on Windows and Mac OSX. Follow the link below!

DOWNLOAD! Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers>>