Megamash: retro Flash game requires you to mash up vintage genres to win

Play This Thing reviews Megamash, a weird chimeric Flash game that combines several kinds of play and requires players to figure out how to use the mechanics of each genre to solve puzzles:

At first, it seems like a simple platformer in which you play a bunny collecting carrots and avoiding enemies. But half-way through the level, you pass through a barrier into a sidescrolling shmup, and become a spaceship shooting aliens with the space bar.
In otherwords, the game is actually a sort of mashup of seven different games, and you pass from one to the other over the course of a level. And indeed -- this is the clever part -- you often need to do something in one "game" in order to advance in the level. Thus, in the rabbit platformer, a crate you need is surrounded by impenetrable blocks; but when you fire across the shmup/platformer boundary, the bullets turn into falling fireballs, which obliterate impenetrable blocks, freeing the crate you need.

Megamash review [playthisthing.com]

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MORE: Flash • Funny • Games • happy mutants

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Lobster

There’s another similar game out there somewhere that actually mixed elements of different classic games.
- allium
  
  That would be ROM CHECK FAIL.
cap10wow

i thought it was pretty cool. i played it for about 20 seconds before my nine year old daughter asked me what the heck i was doing.
blueelm

Hahaha! I found this really fun. But I had a completely depressing day today so I’m just glad there was something cute and stupid for me to distract myself with.
dagfooyo

This is awesome! I love how the mashed-up games are similar but not exactly identical to their old-school counterparts – the first level, for instance, bearing an eerie similarity to Super Mario Bros. 1-1. The puzzle-solving required by this is truly excellent – I especially like the way the tetris-clone dynamic comes into play and must be used in an unexpected way. I remember as a kid when a game cartridge malfunctioned, wishing it would do something cool like this. I used to mess around for hours typing random codes into the game genie in the hopes of creating a random alternate game out of my old cartridges.
Nightflyer

It sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out.

Off-topic: I’m still experiencing a bug trying to view this site on my cell phone. It’s a Droid 2 Global, if that matters. I can bring up the main page, but if I try to read more of a story or view comments, I can’t scroll down that page at all. Though the banner ad at the top of the page works just fine, of course. I have no trouble on my laptop.
librtee_dot_com

Characteristically innovative, clever, and fun gameplay from the Nitrome studio.

They remind me quite a bit of the developer ‘nerdook’ – always unique gameplay, distinctive graphics, a good grasp of what makes a game just feel right. Except that he is only one guy!