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Indie Game Highlight: I Wanna Be the Guy

Welcome to the second Indie Game Highlight. Our last Highlight focused on Noitu Love 2 and now we are going to talk about what is quite possibly the hardest game ever created: I Wanna be the Guy.

Yeah forget those Super Mario Bros. hacks that you have all seen. IWBTG is hands-down the hardest game I've played and trust me because that's saying a lot. The game is a 2D side-scroller shooter much like Mega Man, only your character has the ability to double jump. Oddly enough though, there are hardly any enemies.

You control a seemingly immortal fifteen year-old boy who wants to be The Guy. Don't ask me what that means because I have no clue.

Since there are very few enemies in the game, the developer has to rely on smart and fiendish level design. Indeed, the level design and creativity is off the quality charts in IWBTG. You will die thousands upon thousands of times in this game and despite that, you will just want to keep going to see what the developer throws at you next.

What makes the game so hard is that it will trick you many times. You will frequently, at least in the beginning, underestimate your challenges and then get a rude awakening. One great example, very late in the game, you will encounter a totally empty room.

(Spoiler warning!) You stroll through the room when suddenly the game crashes and a typical Windows error box pops up. Only the game hasn't actually crashed. As the game catches you off guard and you're moving your mouse to close the box, the error box falls down to the floor and smashes your tiny character to bloody bits. To get past this part, well, I can't really tell you this, can I?

There are also just as many challenging events as there are trick spots--jumps that require pixel-perfect accuracy, bullets firing at you from all directions, being chased by the moon through four screens of pure torture, IWBTG is the bane of gamers everywhere, and yet it's incredibly addicting. Every time you die you will say to yourself, "I can do this. Just one more try." Only to die again and again.

You will be angered, you will be tortured (I was virtually driven to tears at one particulary difficult point), but you will love IWBTG because every time you get past one segment you will be filled with an overwhelming sense of accomplishment--you may even jump for joy!

Aside from its cruel difficulty levels, IWBTG also has another thing going for it. It's an almost perfect parody of its repective game genre. With music and graphics taken from popular games like Kirby, Legend of Zelda, and Mario, the game will have lots of old-school gamers yelling "AWESOME!" and humming along to old tunes.

That said, the game also features great boss fights where will you be pitted against the likes of Count Dracula from Castlevania, Zangief from Street Fighter, and even Mike Tyson. The boss fights are just as difficult as the rest of the game and some of them have absolutely hilarious intros (Dracula's in particular).

So IWBTG is pretty much the whole package. It's funny, clever, has tight and responsive controls, and the difficulty helps to create one of the most satisfying games ever created. If you would like to see how well you fare against this game, head over to the developer's website.

Final word: Really hard, really satisfying, really awesome.

Final advice: Download it! Unlike Noitu Love 2, it's free!

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