What's Different/.flow/Yume Nikki

Yume Nikki was a bit of an oddity. It didn't really have any action, or any puzzles, or any plot - all it had was a huge, strange dream world for the player to wander. And that was all it needed: its focus on exploration and its unique atmosphere made it a cult classic. Some compared it a horror game, but it didn't exactly try to scare the player. It just presented them with a variety of strange environments and let them decide for themselves whether to be amused, amazed, or afraid. It did, however, inspire many "fangames" with similar formats, one of which was more clearly a horror game...

Complete with unsettling beeping noises.

What's Different/Mibibli's Quest/Megaman Series

The original Megaman has been around for over 25 years, and to this day, many platformers still take cues from the first six games in the long-running series. Fans have created their own takes on the Megaman formula, Capcom itself has continued to make games in the style of the original, and other seemingly unrelated games have learned from the mechanics that Megaman pioneered.

One game in the latter category is Mibibli's Quest: an independent game which (just to be clear) is very good (for those who enjoy platformers) and available for free or for any price you care to name.

It looks a little bit like this.

Mibibli's Quest has a lot in common with Megaman, and yet it also has some interesting differences (which gives me something to write about). I won't try to list every way in which Mibibli's Quest defies Megaman convention - I'll just pick some of the discrepancies that seem like deliberate design choices, and write about what those choices do.

What's Different/Explanation

Here's an idea.

I could look at recent or unusual video games and talk about how they compare to older or more "standard" ones. That way I would have specific differences to focus on and wouldn't end up trying to sum up an entire video game in a single blog entry.

Of course, this has been done before, (see, for instance, Sequelitis) but I don't think it's been done all that often, and regardless, I think it can be rather useful.

First attempt to come.