TO AN UGH-MECK FUTURE
Very much enjoyed this recent column by Chris ‘Save the Robot’ Dahlen on a future of “user-generated, machine-mediated content” in games. Given the examples we’ve seen of the 90-9-1 rule falling short in games like LittleBigPlanet (his implication being that there’s a lot of thumb-twiddling waiting for that top 10 percent to create and share), Dahlen suggests a number of mediated ways to pull recognizably personal content into games:
Ever since Twitter exploded, people have written many programs to parse and analyze and psychoanalyze what people are typing. How about just porting it into a game? In The World Ends With You, players can “scan” the thoughts of the people around them. The canned text written for the game is good, but I’d love to eavesdrop real-time in real Twitter feeds.
– So many games include bathrooms. Why can’t we all write on the walls?
– I’m a sucker for a good Flickr mash-up. If you throw in a few tags and search for photos marked “interesting,” you get fascinating results – for example, my favorite one, Snapp Radio: an Internet DJ plays a song; Snapp Radio looks up the tags for that song on Last.fm; it uses those tags to find relevant photos on Flickr. Sometimes you get photos of the band, but in one case, I was listening to a Clash song and saw street riots, pictures of George Bush, and awful mismatched furniture – the colors “clashed.” It’s a bit of a parlor trick, but I’d love to see more games use pics this way, for a collage effect or just for a headtrip. I understand Little Big Planet will be able to import your pics by right about now. But I’d love to integrate with Flickr as well. Surprise me.
User-Generated, Machine-Mediated Content [Save the Robot]
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THINGS WE LOST IN THE SNOW, PT 2: PASSAGE HIT THE IPHONE
We’ve quipped Jason Rohrer’s low-res memento mori Passage here a few times, and last week saw the surprise release of the game to the App Store.
While the PC version of the game remains freely available, as with PuzzleQuest, there’s something nice about having the game literally on-hand to introduce it to new people.
Still best left mostly undescribed so as not to over-explain the punchline (though you can cheat via Rohrer’s artist’s statement), there’s good reason Passage has become the de facto art-game champion: its circumspect metaphor is perfectly extended by its interaction and the experimentation of repeat playthroughs.
Passage [via Jon Blow, iTunes link]
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HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM OFFWORLD (FEAT. KEITA TAKAHASHI)
Before the site goes any darker and the posting gets even lighter for the remainder of the week, I just wanted to drop off one last little gift, drawn exclusively for all of you Offworldians by (obviously) Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi.
Hope everyone’s having a happy holiday, and thanks for all the smart comments and well wishes we’ve received over our first month here.
See more posts about: Noby Noby Boy, Offworld Originals
THE OFFWORLD 20: 2008’S BEST INDIE AND OVERLOOKED
Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4, Left 4 Dead, Metal Gear Solid 4, Rock Band 2, Mirror’s Edge, Spore, LittleBigPlanet — as we’ve reached the end of the year, the lists have become as plentiful as they have predictable. So, instead of reshuffling the same list of 10 (admittedly amazing) games as everyone else, I’ve taken a different path and put together The Offworld 20.
Covering every current platform (PC/Mac/Linux, PSP, PS3, Xbox 360, DS, iPhone, N-gage), the 20 isn’t just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it’s a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we’ve never seen before, in whatever incremental way.
In it you’ll find time-manipulators, slacker assassins, satellite viewed superheroes, vector vegetation, bubble blowers and balls of tar, techno invaders, spirits of the wind, and, refreshingly, not one single space marine.
I’ve compiled and written up the list in no particular horse-race order other than alphabetical, and included the best examples of gameplay so you can see it in motion — let us know via the comments below if there’s anything you think we missed.
See more posts about: N-Gage, Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
OCTOROC RELEASES THE FULL 8-BIT JESUS
Doctor Octoroc has succeeded in just squeezing by and delivered the full version of his previously mentioned 8-bit Jesus chiptune holiday album by for Christmas. And while it doesn’t have the ‘Metroid title music inspired “Silent Night”‘ we hoped for, he did make good with a similar ‘Kraid, Rest Ye Merry Mother Brain,’ and a ‘Icarus! The Angels Sing’ that more than makes up for the loss.
The album’s available for a free download, or a full physical package for a $15 donation.
8-Bit Jesus: Full Album Release [Doctor Octoroc]
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THINGS WE LOST IN THE SNOW, PT 4: RAPTOR COPTER HIT THE IPHONE
As is probably clear by now, my holiday break was surprisingly (and happily — one less device and one less charger in the luggage) dominated by the iPhone, and Flashbang’s Raptor Copter made up a good part of that. Copter promises nothing more than it delivers: a time-limited high-score trial to snare and package as many raptors as possible, with bonus points for stylish acrobatics.
Its tilt-control (with an additional thumb slider for altitude) combined with Unity’s physics engine make it one of the most satisfying side-scrolling experiences on the platform, and while I’m easily lost to the tug of its one-more-go quickrounds, I’m just as lost in its all-time high score table. Seriously, people, I’m struggling to break even 75k and you’re up in the millions? Someone really needs to share video of whatever high-wire magic devilry you’re working, because there’s clearly a massive gap in my technique.
Previously:
Riding the iPhone's Raptor Copter – Offworld
Raptor Copter Released! [Blurst, iTunes link]
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GIMME INDIE GAME: DEREK YU’S SPELUNKY
There’s an easy way to tell when you’ve got a veritable indie hit on your hands: its TIGSource forum thread goes from 0 to 34 pages in just over a week, before the game’s even been properly finished. So it has gone with Derek Yu’s Spelunky.
You might know Yu from his work as co-creator of the previously mentioned Aquaria, TIGSource itself, or more mischievously from his 2006 freeware gore-em-up I’m OK, a fully playable answer to Jack Thompson’s ‘Modest Videogame Proposal’ (which I wrote up slightly more in depth at the time).
Most easily and commonly described as Spelunker meets Rogue, Yu’s game retains all of the unforgiving difficulty of both (though much more forgiving than the former’s trip-to-death strictness I noted before), but excels at the latter’s sense of procedurally-generated loot collecting and cave crawling, just now in 8-bit sidescroller form.
In your travels downward, you will die — you will die a lot, sometimes within seconds of entering the first level, for stupid reasons and even when you’re at your most careful, but every cheap death is a necessary part of the learning process (its readme.txt implores, “Don’t be afraid to die! But also don’t be afraid to live!”), and the sense of accomplishment for a smart and successful run is one of the best we’ve seen in some time.
Yu hits all the right notes from simply its run/jump physics (not since Cave Story has it felt so joyous to just move), to its itchy-trigger-fingered shopkeeper, destructible landscape and Indy Jones boulder chases, to that burdensome sense of dread that builds with each successive bar of gold you collect, knowing how important it is that this time you make it out alive. His algorithms are able to smartly weave together endless scenarios with those building blocks for players to create their own stories in ways the code couldn’t possibly have conceived.
Now thankfully natively supporting joypads (its somewhat clumsy initial keyboard configuration being the only thing hampering full-on recommendation at the time), Spelunky would have made an apt ‘best indie’ of 2008, but let’s now call it a bar set very, very, high as we plunge into 2009.
Spelunky [TIGSource]
See more posts about: Derek Yu, Gimme Indie Game, Offworld Originals, Spelunky
I GET ABOUT 55 PERCENT OF THESE FAILS
Even though my humor doesn’t quite fully extend to stack memory overwrite funnies, if anonymous-submission game bug/comment/build error blog I Get Your Fail keeps up with screenshots like the above (and the unbelievably awesome black-hole-sun pair), it might become my favorite games-related blog of 2009.
See also: Media Molecule’s beautiful breakdown.
See more posts about: Meta, Offworld Originals
GASBOOK’S TEZUKA MODERNO GOES FULL GAMER-FASHION WITH DS, PSP CASES
Well spotted by Tiny Cartridge and unfortunately just a bit too late to make it to my holiday list are these Tezuka Moderno portable system cases (fitting both a DS or a PSP with an extra cart/UMD pocket) by Gasbook, with a full range of Osamu Tezuka designs from Astro Boy to Kimba.
Just barely less wonderful than the lenticular Astro wallet I carried for many years, I’ve still got a keen eye on that standard CY-MLGP-M1 pictured (left).
TEZUKA OSAMU BY GASBOOK [via Tiny Cartridge]
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LITTLEBIGWATCH, PART DEUX: IMAGE EXPORT, BETTER SEARCH, IN-GAME STORE
In more technical news of the next LittleBigPlanet update, Media Molecule has said that in addition to the Metal Gear pack, the just-released version ‘Roquefort’ adds, for the first time, the ability to export images to the PS3’s hard drive, as well as new search modes for ‘Most Hearted, Highest Rated and Busiest,’ an in-game store, the ability to yield to the cabbie your Halsey Smalley later, and other general bug fixes listed in full on the site.
Roquefort Update 1.07 – Notes [Media Molecule]
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