Ghosty, by Shensetta, is about our fear of the unknown, our fear of death. Instructions of a most cryptic nature, like a riddle told quickly, sprawl upon the screen at a tortoise’s pace:
Your objective is to destroy the ghost and eyes that over populate the world.
Thus sprach Shensetta; and thusly it was received:
2010, the year that our newborns slide from birth canal to snug monogrammed jumpsuit. The crushing emptiness of space has been hugged into submission by the interstellar arms of man. Your own private mindgarden IGF champions won the prize with the stupid name, and technology has rendered sex obsolete.
However, artistic revolutionary Fiona, if indeed this non-cyrillic pseudonym can be considered valid, has a drastically different vision of the utopian future of the 80′s that we find ourselves in. The entire game is based on a maddening and infuriating falsehood. In Scavenger, the universe has been torn apart by Space-Capitalism. It was the innate nature of man to subvert the laws of Space Eden. Slowly, over the years, a once lush field filled with the endless majesty of the universe gave way to the detritus of the Space Man, which he now wallows in, filthy, the smell of stale recycled Space Urine on his breath, unable to break the cycle. Addicted. Addicted to that which is inherent. Addicted to his own greed.
Politically motivated lies, though they make for a great gamepiece.
Ultimately, the real monster is you
Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back has arrived, and the layman has consumed it, briefly revelled in it, and ultimately cast it aside as a child’s plaything. A mere distraction. Distraction from what? No doubt you’ve noticed in the absence of Pigscene the alarmist talking heads of the Liberal Media informing you day by day of the collapse of the global economy, and all too often the word “crisis” is bandied about. Yet there’s an ethereal crisis that inhabits our mortal realm — invisible to some, proving the existence of the political spectrum as a subset of the electromagnetic spectrum — a crisis Terry Cavanagh sets out to expose.
Therein lies the intricate beauty of Cavanagh’s creation, Atlas Shrugged wrapped in Etch-a-Sketch’s clothing, equal parts genius commentary and puerile, callow indulgence. The player, embodied by the character, seeks escapism from the harsh realities of life, turning to an abstract world free of the laws of man, yet still possessed of the great freedoms The Constitution of the United States of America provides — running, jumping, shooting varmints in the posterior.
Truly, things are just peachy. In your pleasant, pastel surroundings, you gayly hop, skip, jump, bag a few animals, live a life of frivolity. And then something happens. You’re plunged into darkness, enveloped in the crushing grasp of The Invisible Hand, and in this darkness is a spark of illumination. Things weren’t peachy. They were Red, they were just, they were pro-life. (more…)
“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”
- Confuscius
Free will. Choice. The if-else statements that control the program flow that is the human existence — a program that ultimately ends with “return 0;” — a return to naught. To distill the sayings of a character in Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 4 — to boil it and extract the pure meaning of the dangerous poison of the Kojima Frog — one can become ten. Ten can become one hundred. But zero? A zero cannot become a one.
Bernie’s Treasure Hunter Man is a wonderful gamepiece in the Octacamo-ian guise of a petty game about treasure hunter. The main character, Marvin, or shall I say, MArviN (Note the capitalized letters for they reveal my gambit), must embark on a journey of a thousand miles — or at least, a couple thousand kilobytes — a journey full of peril, adventure, and above all, treasures. The role of treasure in this game plays the same role as it does in Passage (an oft cited game in academic gamepiece circles) — mere distractions from our inevitable returning of 0.
Treasure Hunter Man starts with the birth of MArviN — his descent from the heavens and crash landing on an alien world — Port Kruz. Here he is given a binary choice, two roads diverging in a yellow wood; the leftward path — a path off a cliff; and a rightward path; the path of progress.
I’ll not beat around the bush; I am a thinker; an iconoclast; I oppose the flow of the mainstream and choose to swim upriver to its source — the origin of meaning — the spring of the free thought. As such, I made a choice that reflected my attitudes — a destructive choice, to be sure — one that lead me off the ledge of reason and into the chasm of the unknown.
I went left.
The screen did not scroll — there was no hidden room at the foot of that pit, just the absense of level data — NULL, personified.
But the Game was not Over.
I continued to fall. Surely such an obvious folly could not have simply been an oversight on Bernie’s part. No. This was purposeful. There was intent behind this action. I sat in wait, staring at the screen, for a minute, then for ten minutes (I did not have the patience, nor stamina, to wait 100 minutes, sadly), waiting for a glint of change, but there was none. Two roads diverged in the a yellow wood (the wood flooring of the first level, is in fact, brown) — and I chose the one less travelled. And contrary to Frost’s depiction of this scenario, it did not make a difference in the world — the world continued — unchanged — unmoved. It did not even bat its metaphorical eye.
Now you are probably clamoring “How dare you write dismiss an entire game on behalf of a single bug?”
Bug? There are no “Bugs”, in life. The “Bugs” that inhabit your garden, for example, are not some oversight by our Holy Programmer — they are intentional and integral to the program of Life (not to be mistaken with the famous Game of Life, which is a shoddy portrayal at best). This gamepiece is a statement on choice, the permanence of human folly. There is no Game Over; no Continue. You cannot Save nor Load. The journey of life starts with a single step, but know this — the wrong first step will cut your journey quite short indeed!
Treasure Hunter Man (Direct Link) by Bernie, 4 MB
World Drawn By Me: Legend of Two Heroes is a controversial new platformer from the aptly named Hell Room. The story is told through a series of comic strips and tells the story of two brothers whose world becomes invaded by forces of darkness. The two brothers are part of a people called “Bigeyes” who are the “keepers of colours.” They have to escape to the “Black Citadel” in order to regain peace in their world. Ahem. Forces of “darkness?” ”Keepers of colours?” “Black Citadel?” Yeah. He went there.
The gameplay consists of getting the “two heroes” (Who are white. Surprised? Hardly.) to the exit. To do this, the two must work together. The older brother is faster (as is made apparent in the second level), and has the ability to push blocks, and throw (yes, THROW) his younger brother. If you want to (and the game tempts you in unspeakable ways), you can even throw the younger brother into a pit. Now, I’m all for video games as an interactive narrative form, but where do we draw the line between narrative and indoctrination? Is this game simply a means of telling a story, or is it training us to throw our siblings into deadly pits? You decide. But know that the answer is the “yes, a thousand times, yes“.
The music, while very well composed, is highly reminiscent of 日本一ソフトウェア‘s 魔界戦記 ディスガイア (Nippon Ichi’s Disgaea for you plebians), a game that unsurprisingly, makes light of satanic behavior. Hell Room (Note the name), you have a lot of explaining to do.
World Drawn By Me (Direct Link) by Hell Room, 14 MB
БдsicдllЧ, Чou reдd post, Чou click liИk.
Little Girl in Underland (Direct Link) by The Ivy, 10 MB.
Erin “The Ivy” Robinson (our only Indie Game Artist Spotlight) has posted pictures of an upcoming game of hers called Little Girl in Underland, which is basically her artist’s interpretation of the relatively underground fairy tale, Alice in Wonderland, which was later picked up by the fat cats at Disney and turned into a stupid mainstream movie. The game features “three secret weapons, five secret levels, killing, capitalism, and magic smiling cat,” and blah blah in Soviet Russia game plays you whatever fffffffff. This game will rule and all but I’m afraid of it pushing our beloved indie superstar out of the indie spotlight and into the mainstream blackhole, wherein no light exists.
More pictures after “the jump.”
Making games about being isolated (Knytt Stories, Untitled Story, hrmm, and OTHER kinds of stories) has become a bit of an indie games staple. But while these games ultimately boil down to platforming in really big, empty worlds with ambient music that fades between levels, JaJ’s Abandoned deftly avoids such comparison by removing any semblance of platforming from the genre. Hence, JaJ manages to create an altogether new genre — the “Mazexploratoidvania” genre.
Now granted these kinds of games have been done before — though Studio Pixel’s Ikachan (one of his last surviving indie works) only fails to meet this criteria due to its implementation of gravity of some sort (a rather clichéd game mechanic by now, to be sure) — but never has a game made me feel so isolated. Consider the fact that I spend most of my days alone in my room, listening to Ratatat and musing on the indie gaming community. Trust me, I know isolation.
Like conventional Metroidvanias, the game’s flow is ultimately determined by exploration — getting new items gives you the ability to explore new areas, and then you use the items you find there to explore even newer areas, and basically you’ll descend into the treacherous vicious circle of finding and exploring addiction, which is a lot like how I’ve constantly got to find a new fetish to arouse me in any way, which becomes normalized and thus the baseline to which I must find a new fetish — try to compare this to the games world and you’ll be pleasantly surprised, methinks.
The game starts off a bit slow, but give it bit of time and patience (just as you would the next “big” indie music album [oh the ironies of such a statement...]), and maybe you’ll find something you like. And even if you don’t like it, it’s still good to at least play it so you can pretend to like it.
Abandoned (Hi Quality Version Direct Link) (Low Quality Version Direct Link) by JaJ, 13MB and 6MB respectively
Ropes are in vogue and Forgotten Sky has them in spades. Made by a team of Cornell students, Forgotten Sky is basically Bionic Commando if Bionic Commando’s Bionic Commando’s Bionic Arm was made of rope and not of metal. Basically you swing around on a rope a lot, and the rope is limp, and that in and of itself is a pretty big deal. You can also use your limp rope to pull things like crates, or to fling yourself off of deadly sawblades, or into them if you are self-loathing (and which indie game developer isn’t?).
The story involves a guy named Caelum, who has a rope gun and a “katana-hoe.” I’d like to tell you more about the story, but doing so would marginalize the fact that there is a “katana-hoe” in the game, which is exactly what it sounds like.
This game is so indie not even IndieGames.com has written about it. Indie as hell.
Forgotten Sky by The Dynamite Bananas, 14 MB
As far as artgames go, Blueberry’s Advanced Set The Rope on Fire Cartridge not only takes the cake, but it is the cake. This is art games. This is the single pixel period in the “yes.” that answers the silly “are video games art?” debate (note, the answer is “yes.”).
A play on Mazapán’s seminal work, You Have To Burn The Rope, ASTROFC hits all the right notes. The gamepiece (yes, “gamepiece”) has pixels big enough to offend all but the niche retrocore crowd. Have a fancy HD set? Don’t play this game unless you want to remember that feeling you had when you first got it and realized that things weren’t nearly as crisp as you thought they’d be. This is the kind of aesthetic that reminds us of the superficiality of HD, plasma, LCD, CRT, et al.
The gameplay. How do I describe it? The phrase reductoironic comes to mind. If you have yet to play this game, I suggest you get off your highhorse and do so immediately before reading onwards, as the rest of this post may contains spoilers that could potentially ruin your experience of it. Here you are, given a simple task, to defeat the GRINNING COLOSSUS (a stand-in for the mainstream gaming industry? You decide). You are given hammers, but they are powerless against the grinning giant. Brilliant, a biting commentary on traditional gaming conventions. Your actions seem futile. Turns out the only way to defeat the beast is to take a different approach — to burn a rope, as it were.
Or. That is what we are lead to believe.
In fact, burning the rope only exacerbates (worsens) the situation. Maybe I’m reading too much into this (or perhaps, and more plausibly, others aren’t reading hard enough), but if we are to read the GRINNING COLOSSUS as the mainstreaming gaming industry, if our conventional means of attack — that is, conventional games — are powerless to stop it, we must resort to means that are more, dare I say, unconventional. We must create games that take our understanding of video games and turns them on their heads.
We must burn the rope.
But it is after burning the rope that we realize the follies of playing with fire. Our attempt to undermine “the industry” has only resulted in the creation of another tier of it — the “indie games” tier, a BURNING FIRE SNAKE – which industry giants (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc.) use to hegemonize and encroach on our works. XBox Live Arcade, WiiWare. We are fighting an impossible battle — a battle that cannot be won — and this is a point that is punctuated poginantly and concisely in ASTROFC. All in merely 708 kilobytes. Demake? Hardly.
Advanced Set The Rope On Fire Cartridge by Blueberry, 0.55 MB
