>>Nostalgia For Infinity

So! The project I have spent the last few months and especially January working on has gone live and the first content is beginning to appear. Check it out!

One thing the internet does not need is another gaming blog. So, here is another gaming blog!

We like to play games. We like to drink (most of us). We like to talk, or rant, or ramble. We slip through our days in ARCADIAN RHYTHM.

Mostly of interest to gamers, what with it being a group blog about gaming, but you may enjoy having a poke around regardless as some of our writers can be quite amusing. Plenty more content going online this week and we have regular updates scheduled for the next few months!

Forthcoming pieces from myself include a response to Jonathan McCalmont’s arguments around the idea of a videogame canon in Futurismic last year, a biographical piece examining the question “why game?”, reviews of indie titles Recettear, Flotilla and The Void, and contributions to group pieces – one arguing the toss about achievements, the other looking forward at what’s coming later in 2011. Plus some occasional fluffy pieces – like one about my naff Minecraft constructions or me bitching about how tough the last levels of Syndicate Wars were.

I suspect that almost everyone reading this has, at some point in their lives, played a tower defence game. They’ve become hugely widespread, especially online, and they’re the ideal sort of game to play during a lunchbreak at work or when killing time on a laptop – being fun and immediately accessible. The problem is that most tower defence games are much like another. Where do you go now, between the classic Defense of the Ancients experience (currently being revisited by both titans of PC gaming, Valve and Blizzard), the high production values and diversity of Defense Grid, and the genre-crossing ideas of Toy Soldiers – which allows players to hop directly into gun emplacements and aircraft, and indeed makes it an integral part of the experience? Not to mention the huge number of titles that can be found on any Flash game website like Newgrounds?

DeTweet offers one answer – it integrates social networking directly into its gameplay. The idea here is that each of the tiny blue enemies that hop along the path you’ve lined with turrets is a unique message pulled from Twitter. When you start a game you enter a keyword which the game will search for and organise whatever it finds into waves of enemies. Speech bubbles pop up above the occasional enemy – sometimes cute, and sometimes depressing, depending on the content of the message, but you can always hope for the stupid and bigoted ones to get gunned down first. Any tweets that escape your killing zone appear on the left of the screen, along with their author’s avatar and a link to their profile – which adds a bit of personality to the end-game experience. Because you will, inevitably, lose.

See, as an idea DeTweet is great, and I’d rather play it than most other tower defence games. The downside is that as a tower defence game it’s not that great. This is partially down to the game’s funding model, and partially down to its design. The former, first: it’s a donation-based game, with its creator promising to create more content, chiefly gun turret types and maps – of which there’s currently only one of each. It’s a good idea but does run the risk of people not wanting to invest in a game which is presently underdeveloped. That said, its creator is currently working on full versions for mobile stores, so the funding model may yet change.

As for the latter issue of the game’s design – tower defence games are easy to put together in principle, but hard to balance – they can’t be too easy or too hard for risk of putting players off, but working out how to strike that balance – particularly when the game’s enemies are being drawn from social networking content – is a tricky proposition. I might also take issue with some design decisions like making initial tower construction very slow, but upgrades much faster and range increases instantaneous. The game’s visuals are also very crude – it would benefit from the work of a dedicated artist – and there are little issues like the ‘expand range’ upgrade button not updating, so you can only see that more range upgrades are possible thanks to the cost going up. Further, on my first game it took me a while to realise that all towers have a minimum as well as a maximum range – so placement becomes extra important. Relatedly, the game limits you to tower placement in certain pre-defined areas, but the way these areas have been chosen seems partly by design and partly random.

Overall DeTweet is a good spin on the tower defence concept and is fun for a few blasts with some current buzzwords, but I’m concerned that the lack of content and unpolished nature of the whole package may not bode well when combined with its funding model. Still, work is ongoing so it’ll be worth checking in occasionally to see if any new content is available.

Play DeTweet

Time Fcuk, aka Time Cufk, aka Time Kucf, aka etcetera, is a Flash game that originally came out last September on Newgrounds. It’s creators are Edmund McMillen (author – also behind indie titles like Super Meat Boy, Gish and many more), William Good (programmer – has worked on a number of other games I’m not familiar with) and Justin Karpal (behind the game’s excellent music, which is cyclic and triumphal and claustrophobic all at once) so it’s something that the indie gaming scene probably picked up on really quickly. My loss circa 2009, I guess!

It’s free to play and is well worth half an hour or more of your time. The basic gist in terms of mechanics are that it’s a dimension-switching platformer – levels have between two and four planes that you can flick between – where the user must puzzle their way out of each room. The controls are limited to left, right, jump, pick up (blocks) and switch dimension. The game starts out simple and gets fiendish quickly with gravity alteration, objects that can be moved between dimensions if in contact with the player avatar, traps and the inevitability of death if the player switches into a dimension where an object shares the same area as they do. The mechanics are dead simple and it’s easy to pick the game up but beating some of the puzzles are challenging – though rarely frustrating, except where stupid player mistakes are concerned.

I’ve already mentioned the music and the same positive things can be said of the game’s limited sound effects. It’s the visual style that’s really eye-catching though. The player’s avatar is a simple silhouette, albeit one which gradually alters as they progress through the storyline (more on that in a minute), and each dimensional plane uses a unique colour to differentiate it from the last. Most objects appear as simple, easily recognisable silhouettes – and objects about to appear in the next plane switch appear fainter so you know what’s coming. The right hand side of the screen, though, is taken up by two things. Firstly there’s a small map of the network of rooms – it’s a rectangle. The route is, essentially, cyclic. Below that there’s a screen with a sinister talking head which shares text messages with you, purporting to be you from a few rooms ahead, or sometimes a few rooms behind.

This is where the game excels. The writing is genuinely funny and faintly paranoid; there’s a palpable sense of mystery as you progress further and… something starts growing on your head. Is it talking to you? What is it? And why the hell did you climb into this box in the firest place? The story, such as it is, never intrudes into the core gameplay except in benign ways, and players can ignore it if they wish, though it’d be their loss as it’s half the demented charm of the game.

Play Time Fcuk yourself to experience it firsthand; suffice to say that it’s delightful.

I was hoping to have my review of Four Lions finished today, but at the moment it’s still just a bunch of notes and half-baked ideas. So, instead, here’s a short review of something I played t’other day.

The Terrible Whiteness of Appalachian Nights is a web-based indie game from increpare games, a one man outfit with a portfolio of unusual, sometimes controversial and sometimes conceptually interesting titles.

Terrible Whiteness is based around the suburban life of a housewife, with the sub-heading “night terrors”. She’s been married twenty years and has two children and a loving husband. What the game contrives to do is demonstrate the nightmarish aspects of her life: housebound, literally unable to leave, there is “nothing to do but sleep”. Between every nap the game suggests tasks to undertake: play with her youngest, speak with her husband or daughter, and so on. On each occasion the player character is rebuffed as an irrelevance; “Jack is watching TV”.

There is nothing to do but sleep.

This banal but disturbing experience is underpinned by glitchy, stumbling, paranoiac music that wouldn’t be out of place in some Lynch-inspired industrial music video. The game itself is ASCII-based ala ancient PC titles or more recent indie efforts like Dwarf Fortress. Shifting colour tones and occasional animated effects also help maintain the sense of unbearable, pointless tension.

Unfortunately, perhaps for lack of anything more to say or perhaps to shock the player, after several days and nights the ASCII section of the game ends and the player is confronted with crude drawings of clownish faces with swastika eyes and a needlessly crass cock-sucking game mechanic. increpare apparently has a habit of trolling the player, or more kindly toying with their expectations, but the shift here doesn’t accomplish anything beyond seeming childish. Perhaps it’s a lashing out at the kind of banal suburban angst the game initially portrays, but that’s the kindest conclusion I could reach.

Still, the game’s worth playing because those first 5 minutes are genuinely quite nightmarish, and the balance between the game’s visuals, sound and mechanics is skilfully struck.

It would have been hard for Cyanide Studios to mess up Blood Bowl; after all, all they had to do was port the well-established board game’s rules to a digitised format and then dress everything up with pretty graphics and sounds. In fact the short version of this review is… yeah, they’ve done that. Job done, move along.

More?

Oh, okay: yes, the game is an accurate port of 5th edition Blood Bowl rules and makes reference to the game’s unique lore (mostly background fluff, that, like “McMoot” sandwiches and other hilarious puns). The board game, for the uninitiated, is a fantasy take on American Football with the violence ramped up to 11 (some entire teams are built around the strategy of injuring the opposition to the point where they can no longer muster an effective defence).

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I did say that I wasn’t going to review this, but unusually I’ve polished it off in under a week and a half. This in itself speaks well of the game. I’m not going to review it so much as geek out about its strengths, its flaws, areas that interest me, plus some speculation for the next game. Apparently I’m not yet so cynical that I can’t yet get excited about a work of fiction with a shitload of money behind it. Master, I’m ready to suck that corporate cock now…

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Quit yawning at the back: turns out this serious racing simulator is actually fairly good fun. Go read my review if you’re inclined to find out why.

I’ve been ill and housebound for two days. As per usual this has meant I’ve been playing quite a few videogames. It would have been nice to read, but my house lacks nice places for sitting and reading. Oh to have an armchair in my room. Also, focusing on a game seemed to result in less sneezing.

Anyway, I’m feeling better now, and am able to inflict my opinions upon you once again. So here’s what I played.

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My review of charming Ninty DS JRPG Dragon Quest IV: The Chapters of the Chosen has, as promised, gone live over at the Den.

Since writing that review I’ve picked up a cheap copy of Lost Odyssey, probably the strongest and most universally appealing JRPG available for the Xbox 360. Thus far I’m finding it an entertaining experience. I’m glad to have found this and the DC series fun, as Final Fantasy XII, the Blue Dragon demo and the mediocre Enchanted Arms had left me quite jaded with the formula (to be fair, the combat system in Enchanted Arms is its saving grace).

My review of the PC port of ObsCure II, Hydravision’s 2007 horror survive-’em-up, is now online at Den of Geek. It’s replete with cheap shots, predictable “jokes” and dull analysis of stupid ideas – so quite a lot like the game itself!

This is a sequel to 2004’s ObsCure, a multi-platform survival horror game that saw a disparate band of assorted high school students – possessed of improbably unique and useful skills – fight their way through hordes of spore-infected classmates to uncover the truth behind a daaark secret. Not an uncommon survival horror premise. The game’s most unique feature was the ability to play through the game co-operatively, something its sequel also boasts. Unfortunately I’m reviewing the PC version, and found myself unable to convince anyone to play it with me. Crowding around a single keyboard isn’t quite as fun as using your own control pad, after all.

Read the full review at DoG… if you dare! Wooooooooo!