And they’ve re-released Octodad in celebration:

In order to properly celebrate this occasion we’ve decided to release an updated version of Octodad 1 with TWO NEW LEVELS! Right now only the Windows v1.5 is available due to some issues with Mac’s Lion OS, but Mac owners can expect their own v1.5 in September. Now these levels aren’t for the feint of heart and are a bit of a challenge, but they do bring a bit of closure to the first game’s story.

2. Gavin’s reflections about narratives in video games plays nicely with a Rock, Paper, Shotgun piece about why single player gamers are a better ilk:

I stress again, I would hate it if I appeared pompous at all when I suggest that single-player gaming, ever-more the forgotten gem of our hobby, is for the more sophisticated, intellectual individual. It takes something more, a different kind of mind, a more educated, refined view, to understand and value the art of the single-player. Let me tell you why.

The worth of single-player comes in the form of narrative. As with any good novel, or a finely crafted film. It is the equivalent to literature. While multiplayer is an ill-informed argument. It has no direction, no beginning nor end, no meaning.

Games are made with intent. Like books, films and television, the finest examples among them are those that both exist to say something, but allow the player to create his own interpretation. And while of course there are any number of poor or stupid single-player games, there is no multiplayer that evenly closely matches the finest RPG or adventure.

Like I say, I would be just mortified if anyone interpreted these words to be snooty or condescending. I’m just saying people who prefer single player games are a better class than people who mostly opt for multiplayer.

3. Owlboy will be released this year. It’s one of the few platformers I’ve actually gotten excited about since Doukustu Monogatari.

The demo should be released on August 20th.

4. The Independent Games Festival’s chairman, Brandon Boyer, calls for independent developers to push the limits of the game experience and for consumers to pay a fair wage:

For too long we’ve been relying on this model that says that games are more or less interchangeable products, marketed and sold as products, and if they’re all just slight variations on the same theme, or if they do little more than give our thumbs something to do in idle time, of course we’re going to be wise shoppers and choose the cheapest among them.

An album purchased on iTunes can cost nearly ten times as much as most people are willing to spend on a game — even when that album itself is actually embedded in the game — [the slide here is of the $1.99 NOBY NOBY BOY app sitting right on top of the $11.99 NOBY NOBY BOY soundtrack] but by and large people don’t buy an album to listen to it once and complain it only took 30 minutes to complete.

People value music more because it adds an emotional pitch and rhythm and color to life, it speaks to something more essential, it reminds them of a place and time, it reminds them of where they were when they first experienced it and who they experienced it with.

And there’s no reason that we shouldn’t also be aspiring to that same exact sort of resonance in whatever small ways, crafting experiences that invite people to return to them, not because it extends a dollar value, but because it feels like a place they actually want to re-visit, or adds that same color and rhythm.

5. Lastly, here is a cinematic trailer for the Guns of Icarus MMO.

—

Andrew Simone is writer, veloist, and video game enthusiast who spends too much time at a social network that isn’t one.

1. My techno-scientific geek brain knows that the devices like airships couldn’t work without some sort of alchemy.
2. The technology often is so advanced, despite its analog bent, that Clarke’s third law applies.*

But after hundreds of cosplay pictures and derivative movies, comics, and video games, the novelty began to wear. Yet one day, about a year ago during a quiet afternoon of unemployment, I found myself playing a game described thusly, “In an apocalyptic steampunk future, you are a privateer ferrying goods across treacherous airspace. Protect your airship and yourself from an onslaught of pirates, and safely reach your destination to reap the rewards.”

Admittedly, by the description, I was expecting something RPG-ish, a simple, stripped down Skies of Arcadia (an exceedingly wonderful Dreamcast game), but Guns of Icarus was decidedly not that and my expectation certainly explains some of the other reviews you can find online:

You’ve already imagined something more spectacular than Guns of Icarus can offer. This third-person action game’s midbattle story panels may hint at such a time and place, but the game itself is a one-note diversion that tips its full hand within minutes of starting your first play-through. As it stands, there is a bare-bones version of the game you can already play for free within your Web browser. – Kevin VanOrd, Gamespot

There is really no story here at all. Each level has a little postcard before it with some trite description of the hardships of that region, but there is no explanation whatsoever of the main character’s (note that I don’t use the word protagonist) motivations. Why is he delivering cargo? Why does it have to be in a Zeppelin? Who is he delivering to? Why does he commit suicide-by-pirate at the end? Why did he bring cargo with him when he went off to die? No explanation is given for anything, and the entire campaign is over in about 20 minutes. – CB Droege, Icrontic

These descriptions are as accurate as they are misguided. The game was originally developed for a web browser. I have never found a robust story in a browser based game (please prove me wrong), let alone one that lasts more than twenty minutes. Their beauty tends to be in simple, repetitive game machines, something fun to pick up now and again, play a quick round, and then get back to work. If that’s the standard, then this game shines brilliantly.

There are only really two game mechanics, shoot the attacking pirates and repair your ship. Each mission is measured by distance between the two locations you are carrying undescribed cargo to and from. En route you are assaulted, depending on difficulty, by three different sorts of aircraft who damage your will damage your engines (which will eventually halt your progress forward), cargo hold (you get ship upgrades, if you have enough cargo left over), rigging, and the zeppelin (which will make you explode). The longer the route you take in the campaign, the more upgrades you get, and the more prepared you are to go Into The Breach.

You can’t not die in The Breach, the entire point is to survive as long as possible by killing by managing your time killing air pirates and repairing your ship. Your distance meter ticks up, rather than down, and the further the distance, the further the bragging rights. The best part? Multiplayer co-op (up to four) with url-based invites which, combined with Twitter, would make it incredibly easy to have a mid-afternoon pick-up game.

Totally worth it for five bucks (originally, ten for the full version), especially if you can sucker a few friends to buy it on a quiet Saturday afternoon. And, if this game does tickle your steampunk funny bone, you should be aware an MMO is in development.

–

*For the non-geek: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But some time, after hundreds (who am I kidding?) thousands of hours of gaming, if you are like me, you probably have become jaded. Like TV, film, and art, most games just suck and the more you play, the more you cultivate your taste, the more the sucktitude stands out.

Of course, it’s easy to craft a narrative where the old games are always the best games: The Grim Fandago, The Secret of Mana, Masters of Orion 2, the Baldur’s Gate series, Action Quake 2, Shining Force II, the list could go on. But we all know for every great game then, there were five games like Atari’s E.T.:

Atari manufactured five million E.T. cartridges, and according to Atari’s CEO, “nearly all of them came back.” It got to a point where the world’s children refused to take them for free. To put that into perspective, I’ve seen kids buy dead spiders from each other for a nickle. Calling this game a piece of trash is actually scientifically accurate because Atari eventually took their massive collection of useless E.T. cartridges and buried it in a New Mexico landfill. So if you ever lose your mind and want a copy of E.T., or maybe five million, grab a shovel and drive out to the desert. They’re free.

The games industry, of course, is no worse or better off now than it was. The money grubbing media machines is still shoving crap games in our faces and the larger developers aren’t allowing early reviews since it might hurt sales. The indie game scene is also a bit bloated, much of it derivative and boring, and the noise of the internet is making it difficult to find real gems (don’t get me started on the SEO, snake-oil salesmanship) to squeeze into what little time we now have in our adult lives.

I want my games to feel magical. I want to feel like I did the first time I finished Salinger’s Franny and Zooey in my early twenties: delighted, dismayed, confused, and given pause.

That is to say:

“Games aren’t giving me what I feel like I need.”

Done? Good (watching the above video is a moral imperative).

Now do me a favor and send me recommendations of those great games you’ve been playing, while I go out and scour the internet. Let’s not waste our time anymore, let’s fill our days, games or otherwise, with greatness.

Pathos is a strange, but delightful browser flash game/story thing about a boy who is impossible.

At roughly five minutes, it’s better experienced than explained.

The Great Gatsby (For NES)

The music is absolutely top shelf. A retro platformer, from the title screen, Gatsby completely captures the feel of the early NES games.

Of course, that’s because it was an NES game:

I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it’s an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”

I clearly need to go to more garage sales.

The Company of Myself

As a self employed dude who spends most of his day in front of a computer, this game hit a little too close to home. The Company of Myself is puzzle platformer about a lonely hermit who can only rely on himself to solve his problems. The game’s wit is dry enough to make me suspect the developer was British.

The key to this game is patience.

At least a million people are playing it and I suspect, much like my friends, most of them are not hardcore gamers.. Chris Lepine takes a stab at why:

Play, by its nature, is difficult to confine in any strict definition. It includes all kinds of activities, from pushing around Tonka toys in a sand box, to kids building a hidden fort in the forest, to jamming in an improvisational jazz session. There is something playful and unexpected in all of those activities: the child in the sand box is not moving around sand for any serious purpose, the children in the forest are not architects trying to erect an office building, nor is the jazz group trying to perfect a piece that they have all memorized. In all of these cases, people are exploring the limits of their expressive abilities, creating different kinds of social relationships with other people, or discovering new kinds of properties or relationships that things have. All of these involve re-imagining and transforming our spaces with or without other people.

Spot on, IMHO. There is no better illustration than turning to youtube. There are countless of videos of folks showing off their craftsmanship. This, along with multiplayer allows, for a game based on creation and collaboration rather than destruction and competition, a game which taps into a person’s creative side and makes you earn it.

What do I mean by earn it?

Well, here is my modest contribution to Minecraft showoffery, an underwater glass structure that probably took me about three hours to build.

Three hours because I had to scout out an area that I could dive deep enough to survive (you can drown, naturally), gather sand and heat it into glass, create a solid underwater structure and then surround it with glass, then mine up the structure inside the glass, chop down some wood to craft myself a ladder, and mine some coal to place torches inside so I can see it at night.

Pretty cool, huh?

I’ll just let you contemplate the possibilities over a sunset.

Now that I think about it, if you replace the Idler piece with any given project and add a hangover for good measure, you have pretty typical Andrew Simone morning. So, just for fun, let’s imagine I am going about my usual routine but also happen to be a mimic octopus.

Now, if you debachelorize me, give me two human kids and make me a mimic octopus who is trying to hide the fact that he’s an octopus, you’ll begin to get a feel for the hilarious indie game, Octodad.

It is a short game—maybe an hour long—so I am going to avoid spoilers so you can get the full experience. I will, however, mention that the controls are terrible. The middle mouse button toggles between feet and hand mode, the left and right mouse buttons select which “arm” or “leg” you want to move, and the mouse movement manipulates them. And, while that makes walking across the room or picking something up an absolute chore, it also happens to be precisely the point.

The game is the struggle with the controls

This game is quietly brilliant. The developers realized the best way to communicate the times and trials of the modern octopus was to make the man behind the mouse frustrated through the mouse. (All I wanted to do was walk to the kitchen without arousing suspicion!) It’s another case of the game mechanic perfectly fitting the narrative which, as you know, is what I think makes for a worthwhile game.

Octodad is free for the PC

1. Passage

It’s a game about life. Further description, if you haven’t played it, will spoil this 20 minute game. So, after playing it (and only after!), you can go read the creator’s statement. You really ought to play this, if you haven’t, this one made me cry.*

The game is free for all Mac and PC.

2. Canabalt

A one button platformer with a premise as simple as the controls: run for your life. This game shows sophistication is often just that.

You can play the game on the web for free.

3. Minecraft

If you are a gamer and haven’t heard of Minecraft, then you are hiding under a rock. For the unenlightened, however, it could be called a sandbox survival game. There is no narrative or defined goal, however, you just mine, build structures, craft items, and hide from monsters at night. Think digital Legos which, as we all know, is analog crack.

Buying the Alpha pre-release is about fifteen bucks (€9.95), but you can play it in browser for free.

4. ASCIIpOrtal

An absurdly delicious modern ASCII game based on Valve’s Portal mechanics. It’s worth an hour or so of your time if you crave the retro aesthetics of Nethack.

It’s free, but only available for Linux or Windows.

—

*Bonus Game by the same author, same rules for his statement apply.

Yet I also happen to abhor the euphamism “passed” because it seems to defang the reality of the situation (but also because my mind always supplies “gas” after it) and have flat-out wept at far too many contemporaries’ funerals for a man at the age of thirty.

This is all to say that I have a hard time taking any sort of artistic expression about death seriously since it tends to be heavy-handed. Melodrama is particularly unforgiveable in my aesthetic. So, you might imagine my skepticism about the French RPG, Winter Voices, about dealing with your father’s death.

The prologue sets the stage for the first installment of the series. Literary in tone, I can’t help but wonder how the French would feel or whether the ending will come off as silly as Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. (Alas, je ne parle pas français.) Still, after nine hours of play, whatever literary ham-fistedness existed was forgiven or, at least, justified since RPG actually means more than just turn-based combat with number crunching.

The game begins just after your father’s funeral. I found myself wandering in my small, northern, childhood town talking to childhood friends and neighbors. My humor attribute was high, so I had a number of dialog options ranging from laughing to cold and stern. (There is actually an acheivement named Les Aubes Sont Navrantes: “Sob or Sniff 20 times.”) And, while I haven’t determined whether or not those responses actually change the game or your character, I did find myself wanting to make my character contextually aware and consistent.

I spent a couple of hours wandering around the small town trying to piece together the NPC relationships (daughters, sons, wives) and how I know them. The Lisakkis, for instance, were nice people. Magnus and Maija offered their condolences and the elderly Jesper was exceedingly kind to me once I reminded him he attended my father’s funeral yesterday. Even Stig was kind, despite the obvious distaste his wife, Kati, has for me (I should have known better than to talk to her, she’d alway been a bitch to me, apparently). Fed up with Kati’s bitchiness, I decided to go visit the foreigner and friend of my father, Olov, to piece together a little more of who my father was.

Two things then struck me.

First, I actually wanted to roleplay. I became involved in her relationship with the town. I didn’t select dialog options that were more expedient or beneficial for “the best ending.” (I not sure if there is such a thing and I am pretty sure I don’t care.) And it didn’t feel like the “I need to talk to everybody” new town grind. Tell me. When does that happen?

Second, the way that Winter Voices actually handles bereavement is brilliant.

When I think about days past, when dear friends were lost, and the days following the news, I recall a short term near-schizophrenia. Laughing and fine one minute, a turn of phrase, a peculiar movement of a hand, a familiar place would unpredictably force old memories of the person in my head. The pressure would be unbearable, the condolences meaningless, and joy dead. There was not way to beat these feelings, you just had to let them pass.

While simply interacting with people yields experience [points], the traces of those conversations or places you find yourself may, themselves, evoke memories (encounters). Persistent Memories or Negative Feelings hound you, slowly draining your energy, and the ground itself may contain Buried Tramas (traps). The goal, consequently, cannot be to destroy or kill (memories always persist!), but to survive. If you do, you gain experience [points], but if you don’t, the game simply continues without any bonus since you learned nothing.

The primary survive skills are Repel, which simply pushes memories (enemies) away, and Anticipation, which mitagates the damage received. But, as you level up, your skills do become more sophisticated. For example:

Betrayal: “You deny your own personality in favor of a better one. This skill prevents enemies further than 4 tiles away from you to attack you. This skill lasts until you are damaged
Coolheaded: “You assess the situation and handle problems one after the other. All enemy are pushed back except for the closest one.”
Consolation: “You find solace in what is left, which makes you gain Energy. This potency of this skill is based on Charisma.”

And your character’s attributes are equally interesting: Humor, Will Power, Memory, Perspicacity, Charisma, and Intuition, each of which has a very important role in encounters. My favorite, Memory, is of chief importance since the better it is the more experience you get, but also makes you more susceptible to damage.

Are you beginning to see the internal logic here? There is no magic or technology overlayed on the world (yet, anyway) to make the game “fun” or the near-meaningless game mechanics of [insert JRPG* here]. The game mechanics themselves are not only analogies to real life experiences, but also perichoretically interact in-game in ways appropriate to their names out of game. Every encounter is not simply a way-point between cutscenes, but an integral part of the story: the game is not analogically separate from narrative. So, if there is any way to call this game innovative**, that’s it. The game design and narrative are shaking hands.

If more game studios played by Beyondthepillars‘ rules, the narrative junkies of the game review world wouldn’t know what to complain about. Games would feel whole.

The first episode of Winter Voices is available for Mac or PC on Steam for five bucks.

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*For the record, I am an unabashed JRPG fan.

**For some reason, any glowing game review made online about an indie game must contain the nearly vacuous phrase “innovative.” This is me fulfilling that quota.