Writings of Mass Deduction

Some games have obvious acronyms, often inspired by previous games in the series, or unofficial ones used in marketing materials (“GTA”, for example) while still having an official, fully spelled-out title. Then there’s “CTG”. My best guess is that it stands for “combo the grandmothers,” as that does describe the game (believe it or not) and that text does appear (though it’s all lower-case) in the game’s description. Whatever it stands for, it’s definitely different.

The game is kind of like a platformer in reverse. Rather than running and jumping yourself, your goal is to manipulate your enemies (the evil… grannies?!) across the screens platforms and obstacles until they land in one of the level’s available meatgrinders. So this is not a game I would recommend for absolutely everyone, as some will be disquieted for the premise, but if you can look past it (or see some dark humour in it) then read on.

Controls are interesting, with you using high-powered weapons to manipulate grannies to their demise, including a gravity gun, grenades, a mega blaster, and more. Sometimes you can use (for example) the gravity gun or an explosion from a grenade to get a clutch of grannies to a higher platform so that they can walk into a grinder (they never seem to stop walking). But some levels the grannies don’t want to find their way there, obstacles in their path making that impossible. There are yellow things that eliminate destructible elements of the levels, that you must shoot towards the areas you need clearing out, which adds a unique challenge to some levels. It’s an 80 Microsoft Point experiment that feels part Contra, part anti-platformer (as described earlier), and part Bubble Bobble. I don’t know, that description doesn’t really work, but that’s not a bad thing as that shows that this game is truly unique.

Here’s what the developer (DeRail Games) has to say about the game:

“Take on hordes of grannies in HD and make their dentures fly, you get an arsenal of weapons at your disposal: gravity gun, grenades, crazy madness and MEGA BLASTER. Make the grannies fly into the granny grinder when they attack in buses, rascals they even got cannons and kamikaze-allies. You can actually combo the grandmothers into the grinder for more points and awesomeness.”