Category Archives: Digital Games

Murder and Red Faction: Guerrilla

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I just got finished playing Red Faction: Guerrilla. It’s an excellent game; the breaking-stuff gameplay is so fun and natural-feeling that I anticipate disappointment when I play all the other games where you can’t knock down a wall to get to the enemy on the other side. It strikes a nice balance between open-world and narrative styles of gaming. There’s something else about the game, though. Guerrilla makes me uncomfortable with its violence.

This is something that I haven’t experienced outside of so-called “art games” like Jesse Venbrux‘s “Execution.” When I play Guerrilla, I feel a disconnect with the actions my player character is taking: not ludonarrative dissonance, but a genuine case of disagreement with my character’s motives and callous lack of concern for human life. I’m a pacifist. Alec Mason is not.
Continue reading Murder and Red Faction: Guerrilla →

Procrastination Released

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My final game of the year is done, and boy did I delay it to the last minute. “Procrastination” is an abstract experimental game, my attempt to communicate purely through game mechanics. It’s my tribute to Rod Humble, if you must.

Play “Procrastination” at Ludus Novus.

Astute fans will notice that I have only released eleven games this year, despite my resolution to do a game a month. Fear not; the twelfth game is done, but “Babies Dream of Dead Worlds” will wait until it is sponsored before it gets released. Does it still count? Sure it does. I set the rules for this thing.

My other work-in-progress, the procedurally generated metroidvania with the working title of “Millions of Space Stations,” will be released in early 2010.

A Chain of Fake People

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Any creative work is a sort of conversation between two people: the author and the reader. Except it’s not.

Books, movies, music, video games, and so on are created by one or more people, and then are consumed by one or more people. The work in question (let’s call it a game) serves as a medium by which the player communicates with the authors or developers. One can imagine an experience analogous to digital gaming where two people sit in a room, one telling the other what’s happening and the other responding with their actions. This actually wouldn’t be too different than tabletop roleplaying.

But playing games doesn’t really work like that; there’s this big thing between the authors and the players called a game. The authors and the player can be in different states; they might not speak the same language; the original author might be literally dead in real life. But the work, the game, spans this void of time and distance to allow a sort of mediated communication. And in the middle there are a bunch of imaginary people existing in a series of nested universes that make the exchange possible. Let’s meet them, shall we?
Continue reading A Chain of Fake People →

Backup Released

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I’ve put together a game! I guess this is my November game, as the space station game would be October’s, and it’s still under construction. “Backup” is an Interactive System Failure about killing.

The Prosperity Commission transportation facilities are designed for the utmost safety and reliability. They are equipped with weapon dampening fields, highly-trained security forces, and four redundant computer cores. You are the third backup computer core for a facility under construction. You should never have to wake up. Something is wrong.

Download “Backup” from Ludus Novus.

To play the .zblorb file, you will need a Z-machine interpreter, which is like a media player for interactive fiction. If you use Windows, I recommend Gargoyle. If you use Mac OS X, I recommend Zoom. If you use Linux, I recommend the Linux version of Zoom.

This game is heavily inspired by Gun Mute. It is a (potentially) violent piece of interactive fiction with multiple endings set in a science fiction world of robots, plasma swords, and intergalactic finance. I’ve attempted to create something that rarely occurs in interactive fiction: a game that requires tactical thought as a challenge rather than puzzle-solving. In-game instructions and hints are available by typing HELP in-game. “Backup” is written in Inform 7. Let me know what you think in the comments!

The Ending of Prince of Persia 2008

Blogs, Digital Games

I beat Prince of Persia 2008 last night, and I’m still thinking about it. This is a very well-crafted game. Although many folks derided it for being too easy, it’s actually not. The game is very challenging in places; it’s just not punishing. I found myself struggling at certain points, especially boss battles, and there was a genuine sense of accomplishment when I succeeded… without any frustration from having to endure cheap deaths or repeat long sections of the game. Additionally, this game has the best implementation of quick time events that I’ve seen. It’s always clear when you should expect one, and the button you need to press is either obvious from context or random for effect. The only annoyance I had with the system was when I came back to the game after a break and forgot what the “block” symbol meant, especially when it is so similar to the “grab” symbol.

But the most interesting thing for me about the game at the moment is the ending. There will be spoilers. Continue reading The Ending of Prince of Persia 2008 →

Always Down for that CO-OP Action

Blogs, Digital Games

This post is long overdue. At the beginning of the year, The 1UP Show was cancelled, which killed the best traditional games journalism work on the net. Shortly thereafter, several of the people who made The 1UP Show great, including my personal favorites Ryan O’Donnell and Jay Frechette, started a show called CO-OP.

It’s basically The 1UP Show, but in an apartment instead of a cube farm, and it’s complete with a catchy opening theme and charmingly tongue-in-cheek episode plotlines like “some team members are suspected of having nerd flu” or “let’s try out local restaurants.” CO-OP discusses the games they want to discuss, honestly, enthusiastically, and without any number ratings. If you want to know about interesting new games or decide whether to buy something, this is what you should look at. My only criticism is that they do not review every title that comes out ever.

Check out CO-OP and throw a little money their way with the Paypal link on their page. Their homegrown ads probably pay the bills, but they deserve all the help they can get.

Words (Active Sketch 03) by axcho

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axcho pointed me to a game prototype of his that’s in the vein of my Silent Conversation. It’s called “Active Sketch 03: Words.” It uses text as an environment, but has a different game mechanic than Conversation. It’s very interesting, and definitely more “gamey” than my game. It’s easier to focus on earning points and increasing multipliers, and it gives the player more control over the speed in which the level is traversed.
Continue reading Words (Active Sketch 03) by axcho →

The Mold Fairy Released

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Well, that didn’t take long. My August game, The Mold Fairy, is released. It’s a game about mold, magic, and death.

Once upon a time, there was a fairy for everything. One for frost, one for cobwebs, one for dew… and one for mold. When the fairy queen Titania decided that humans had lost their respect for mold, the mold fairy was sent down to teach them the power of the fuzzy fungi. Did the fairy brighten the humans’ lives, or curse them with poisons and spoiled food? Only you can decide.

Play The Mold Fairy on Armor Games.

This is a game in the vein of “Majesty of Colors” and How to Raise a Dragon; there are choices, and they affect outcomes. In this case, the choices are what to mold, and the outcomes run the gambit. This is my most explicit use of the “achievement” concept so far; I think it works for this sort of game.

Let me know what you think of The Mold Fairy!

Paladin 0 Released

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My September game, “Paladin 0,” is released. It is a three-day prototype about virtue.

VIRTUE IS INSUFFICIENT. DESTROY EVIL. AVOID CORRUPTION.

Play “Paladin 0” on Ludus Novus.

Astute readers will notice that there appears to be a monthly game missing. My August game, The Mold Fairy, is finally complete and should come out very soon. Hey, I’m willing to bend the rules of my New Year’s resolution if you are.

“Paladin 0” is, in part, an experiment using the Flixel framework, which is a library designed to help with making pixelly games in Flash. It is very slick, as you can see from the amount I was able to achieve in just three days of work. If all goes according to plan, my October game will be a procedurally-generated Metroidvania done with Flixel.

If you like the music in the game, it’s available through Creative Commons and is part of Ozzed‘s album Lesser Than Three.