Newtonica • iPhone • Fieldsystem, inc. • www
The Newtonica games (now already with an official sequel) might not be the richest the iPhone has to offer, but the original was one of the most important. As the App Store launched and quickly saw itself inundated with middle- to bottom-rung quick cash-in dross, former Saturn and Dreamcast developer Kenji Eno and Chibi-Robo creator Kenishi Nishi (two talents with massive cult-cred) were two of the first actual-real-live-Japanese-game-devs to see the potential of Apple’s device and hop on board with their own creation.
Best described as a ’22nd century Game&Watch game,’ Newtonica is a simple design that slowly ramps up to a maddening pace, and does everything it was supposed to do: provide short-burst entertainment, expertly utilize the phone’s touch controls, and look and sound more gorgeous than anything you might find on competing mobiles and handhelds. And it’s plain hard to fault any game that launches with a splashscreen featuring a quote from Baudelaire, and brings changelogs like this.
No More Heroes • Wii • Grasshopper Manufacture • www
Collectively, Grasshopper Manufacture games still have yet to fully live up to their visionary potential, but even their flaws are more glorious than the whole of any number of other games. Designer Suda 51’s attempt to westernize their Tokyo-punk approach didn’t quite turn Santa Destroy into the living world of Liberty City, but it wasn’t at all a bad place to spend the afternoon mowing lawns, poking lightsaber holes in the ground for spare change, or, you know, the usual assassinating.
But it still was entirely its own pure pop culture vision, always teetering nicely between power fantasy and hikikomori slackerdom, and gave us some of the year’s most creatively ultraviolent and challenging boss fights, as well as — arguably, and delightfully — the year’s best kitten.
Patapon • PSP • SCEJ • www
Patapon is essentially the living embodiment of what Offworld is here to celebrate: bringing in visionary outsiders — in this case, French designer Rolito — to help conjure up a world that was entirely unlike any we’d had in games before. It helped, too, that the game design itself was similarly innovative.
Rather than a rhythm game with any kind of direct impact on the game’s world (from as simple as a star-power tilt to Parappa‘s chop-kick-punch), your button presses instead coax and inspire the game’s monoptic warriors, and watching them independently find energy from your good timing and fall flat from your mistakes was a big part of the game’s magic.
Previously:
Praise from Patapon and a passionate plea – Offworld
New Rolito toy: Patapon X our one true heart – Offworld
Rolito unleashes new Patapon toy – Offworld
PixelJunk Eden • PS3 • Q-Games • www
Ah, no, wait, this is the living embodiment of what Offworld is here to celebrate. Again, Q-games (inspired in part by page one’s bit Generation series, which they’d also contributed to) made the very inspired decision to approach graphic designer and musician Baiyon to make a game of his digital organics.
Like Patapon, Eden married its striking imagery with a familiar mechanic (the grappling hook being a reliably satisfying tool and toy in almost all its game forms) used in a new way, and gave us a game as lush and spartan and gorgeous and severe and essential as any we’ve seen all year.
Previously:
PixelJunk Eden patch promises mercy – Offworld
Sony's own inspired holiday sales – Offworld
Reset Generation • N-Gage/PC • Nokia/Red Lynx • www
Nokia desperately needed a game to rest its N-Gage online service on, especially in these post iPhone times, and Scott Foe’s long-developed turn based strategy game Reset Generation perfectly plugged that gap. An entirely too-difficult game to properly describe (‘right, so, like, there’s some Tetris bits but also you’re rescuing princesses, through warp pipes — it’s all color coded, oh, and also there’s things you need to bomb’), that it somehow, against all odds, makes total sense once you’ve played a few rounds is a huge credit to its years of tweaked and iterated design.
Playable cross-platform both on mobile phone and (freely) via the web, some of the game’s smartest bits are the ones that stay hidden and don’t affect gameplay (see: their decision to expand the game’s maps beyond the screen resolution so you’d have something to scroll around and look at while waiting for mobile online lag/other player turns), but the sheer variance of its consistently stunning sudden victories/upsets still makes this prime “just one more round” material.
