San Francisco at night becomes a neon-lit real-life version of a Tetris well (well, -ish, a bit more Pent-tris, actually). Music by E*rock, thanks to .tiff!

RAGDOLL METAPHYSICS: GAME RESEARCH, GHOST STORIES, ALAN MOORE, AND ACADEMIA: THE FAR REACHES OF EDUTAINMENT

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9.23.2009

Jim Rossignol

17 Replies

Academia has thrown up a bunch of interesting game projects over the past few years. As more gamers get into positions of academic usefulness, so that trend grows. Of course university and research groups have long been creating games with educational purposes in mind, but they’re now handling increasingly hefty budgets.

One of the most high-profile projects (and most obvious recent failures) was Indiana University’s Arden: The World Of William Shakespeare, which reportedly had a grant of $250,000. It was an experimental MMO which came about via the work of Professor Ed Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds. Castronova wondered whether the creation of a genuinely educational MMO was possible, and set up the student development project to find out. Having spent thousands of dollars on Arden it was shut down. Castronova cited “a lack of fun”.

But I don’t suppose that was the only reason. Games don’t necessarily have to be fun to be engaging. Indeed “fun” seems like a trite expression in the face of some contemporary projects: games can provoke more than simple enjoyment. Look at the terrifying crypts of Stalker, or the strange sadness of Shadow of the Colossus. To realise that games ride on more than fun only takes a quick glance at the bigger picture.

One game researcher for whom “fun” seems inappropriate is the academically oriented team The Chinese Room, who are games researchers working for the University Of Portsmouth in the UK. Their medium, for now at least, is the Half-Life 2 mod, and the experiences they’ve created are peculiar investigations into the emotive possibilities of game design. They’ve realised that 3D games, with their claustrophobia and their immersive properties, can be spooky, scary and deeply evocative. (more…)

There are few things in life that bring me joy more than doing my best, making new friends, trying new things, triumphing over adversity, and running real fast, and I get the strong sense that Matt Thorson and Tom Sennett’s RunMan — coming to PC October 1st — just might satiate every one of those desires.

GIMME INDIE GAME: THE PSYCHO/SCHIZO PUZZLING OF MCMILLEN/GOOD/KARPEL’S TIME FCUK

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9.22.2009

Brandon Boyer

4 Replies

I knew Time Fcuk was after my one true heart on hearing the first few melancholic melodica triplets in its title screen theme, which are nothing if not lovingly lifted from Carter Burwell’s score for the Coen Bros.’ Fargo, and perfectly peg the pathos that begins to unfold as you start your cyclical descent into the game’s world.

Created by No Quarter, Super Meat Boy, and Aether designer Edmund McMillen, programmer William Good and musician Justin Karpel — and described only via cryptically impenetrable blurbs — at its core, Time Fcuk is a fairly straightforward game to describe: it’s a block/switch/key puzzler with a twist of inter-dimensional-spatial-chronological tearing that rips you through layers of the same room you occupy.

What sets it apart, though, is the tone McMillen has set via an in-game one-way communicator that sees an unidentified narrator constantly interrupting your thought processes with ranting inanities, cries for help, and, eventually, more deeply unsettling and I.D.-confusing asides. And there’s this matter of the small growth coming from the back of your head…

The effect, if that narrator is you — and it certainly looks like you — echoes movies like the previously big-upped Timecrimes or basically pick any of your favorite schizo-persona David Lynch movies from Twin Peaks to Lost Highway to Mulholland Drive.

By being forced into “the box” from which you spend the game trying to escape (which you were pushed into by someone who claims to be you from some 20 minutes in the future) you come to realize that the interruptions more likely are echoes of every iteration of a loop in which you’re stuck: ‘you’s that have been through multiple times and no longer fear your surroundings, newer ‘you’s that haven’t yet figured out what’s happening. In the meantime, you — the you that’s playing — are acting out that transition from confusion to confidence by learning the puzzle-tricks that get you from one room to the next.

All of this is subtle subtext, and that’s precisely what makes Time Fcuk so affecting. Add to that its expertly devised level editor — which takes a page from Echochome‘s book and gives players a 20-level loop of random player-creations to rate for difficulty and fun, so that essentially no puzzle goes un-played — and the gang of three have created what is easily one of the best Flash games of the year thus far.

Double Fine art director Lee Petty takes you on a slightly more consumer-focused — and very much more condensed — version of the tour he gave at this year’s GDC through the basically jaw-dropping sights and sounds of the world of Brütal Legend.

Traces of Death Race and Cannon Fodder permeate what appears to be a you vs. zombie horde game from the ever-prolific and re-inventive Cactus, and I sincerely hope that map view is showing the blood-smeared/cleared areas where you’ve totally eliminated the threat.

WICKED WEARABLES: HIGH-CONCEPT PAC-MAN/TETRIS SHIRTS

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9.22.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Geekologie is apparently having a hell of a time tracking down the original creator of this pair of very smart wares, and even a TinEye search didn’t help. If you or someone you know can track down the designer, please let us know, as we’d like to help hook them up with a manufacturer toot sweet. [via GamOvr]

OF WORDS AND WOOL: THE MAKING OF DENKI’S XBLA WORD-BATTLER QUARREL

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9.22.2009

Margaret Robertson

1 Reply

I have a favourite new gaming peripheral. It’s 16 bits of mounting card, 48 four-square bits of Lego, the men from 14 games of Ludo, 100 tiddly-winks, three marker pens, some wipe-clean grids, a laptop, 280 pounds of human flesh and a roll of kitchen towel.

This peripheral is otherwise known as ‘playing the board-game prototype of Quarrel with Gary and David from Denki’. Denki you ought to know from the majestic Denki Blocks, and Gary Penn and David Thomson (pictured top, L to R) lead the team there who are currently turning that prototype into the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade version of the same, which you may well have first read about on this fine website.

The most reductive way to explain it is as a cross between Dice Wars and Scrabble: up to four players compete to dominate a map divided into a dozen or so different territories. Each player’s men are randomly scattered in squads across the map, occupying a share of the territories. Each turn, a player can have a squad attack any adjacent territory, triggering a two-player battle – against the clock – to find the highest scoring word within the same eight-letter anagram.

What makes this harder is that the total number of letters you can use is the number of men you have on that territory: so if you’ve had your squad of four attack a neighbouring squad of six, your opponent has two more letters and hundreds of thousands of more potential words to play with. It’s a highly narcotic mix of sleek strategy and good wordplay, as I found out when I spent a very happy day doing a spot of consultancy on it at the Denki studio last week.

But although I was supposed to be spending the day thinking about Quarrel, I ended up spending a lot of it thinking about the value of physical prototyping. On one of my own projects at the moment – a two-player online co-op confection – we’re at the paper prototyping stage. Paper prototyping online co-op, I can exclusively reveal, involves a great deal of running up and down corridors with post-it notes stuck to your chest. So arriving at Denki and discovering they had board-game prototyped Quarrel got me thinking, and rapidly got us playing. (more…)

ON GUARD: TEAM FORTRESS 2 PROBABLY NOT GETTING A DOG

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9.22.2009

Brandon Boyer

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The best part of the recent Team Fortress 2 Guard Dog class mystery — in which this entirely convincing but not-Valve-hosted website emerged, followed by this official and also amazing TF2 blog post riposte — is that the Valve team have become so adept at both fast community awareness and response and opaque meta-updates that from now on it’s honestly kind of impossible to tell who’s snowjobbing who.

WOLF PARADE: KYOZO KICKS’ CUSTOM OKAMI SNEAKERS

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9.22.2009

Brandon Boyer

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New master of games-related custom shoes Kyozo Kicks returns with his latest Okami-la-den (get it?) sneaks, quite possibly the finest he’s turned out to date. Purchase them, or any other in-stock sets here. [via SuperPunch]