Browsing category: Overviews
What is the act of play? When presented with a game, is play the participation of the so-called “player” within structures created for them, acting within the choreographed dance laid out before them? Is play the moments in between, where improvisation takes hold, and the unexpected occurs? Is play the times in which you stop clinging to control, to perceived notions of input and action, to simply be within whatever world it is you’ve chosen to delve?
What defines the self? A name? A role? The tasks we are set to? What others perceive us to be? What we perceive ourselves to be? Or perhaps something more? This question has possibly plagued mankind more throughout the ages than any other, but it defines a key conflict in the world of OFF in which we emerge fully-formed, and find our existence immediately questioned. As we begin we find ourselves perceived as little more than a figment of the imagination of a humble cat.
In 2019, to pan for gold in an endless river of free Web-playable Unity releases, one can simply query itch.io. A decade ago, however, there was no such bounty. In fact, in 2008, Unity was only about three years old, and its expansion beyond Mac exclusivity was still fresh in the memories of those who were paying attention at that point. One had to actively seek out releases akin to those that make up today’s cornucopia. Discovery was far less centralised, much as it was for self-released music before Bandcamp made a name for itself (The story of how game soundtracks gave Bandcamp a significant popularity boost is for another time). Back then, it certainly felt as though a larger proportion of discoveries in “neat little games” came by chance, word of mouth, email, or one of many diverse aggregators.
Of course, to be clear, the engine doesn’t strictly matter. Naming Unity is rather: first, to evoke the meta-genre of “neat little games”, by way of the rapid prototyping such platforms permit; second, the setup to a coincidence of microcosmic scale. Unity Web games these days compile to something that can run natively in the browser; back then, it was the now-deprecated Unity Web Player, akin to Flash Player. Enter the “neat little Web-playable Unity game that turns out to be something truly magical”, hailing from a decade before you had a constant stream of that. Enter a path to popularity characteristically idiosyncratic of the era, a game that held top place for a month in, get this, Apple’s Dashboard widgets directory. Enter… Mars Explorer.
The original Moon Patrol was a 1982 arcade game from Irem, likely best known for introducing parallax scrolling [1]. The player operates a buggy, which drives through a sidescrolling landscape while jumping or shooting from its dual cannons, simultaneously firing above and in front of itself. Between jumping and shooting, the player is equipped to take care of myriad lunar dangers, such as UFOs, boulders, or pits. It’s quite fun (and readily playable to this day anywhere from the Switch to MAME), although, being an arcade game, it’s obviously designed to be hard in a way that extracts maximum coinage from patrons.
As with many arcade titles of the time, it found its way onto just about every 8-bit home computer, including the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the TI-99/4A, the TRS-80, and even the IBM PC. However, again, just like its arcade contemporaries, every single port was awful. 37 years later, however, thanks to video gaming’s rich culture of nostalgia, it now has a good home computer release! Enter Yok‘s Moon Patrol.
Long ago, in the era of Netscape and Internet Explorer, I would spend hours surfing the net trying to find any sort of MMO that, A) could run on my brick of a computer, and B) was free. World of Warcraft and Everquest were the biggest thing around, the novelty of online communities uniting so many around common goals. I would pore over articles on Asheron’s Call, Star Wars: Galaxies, Final Fantasy XI, Ragnarok Online… For every game out there, it had another ten beside it, veritable hydras housing universes inside of them.
In a far-flung future, cyber-laden Vapor Trails from developer sevencrane (@sevencrane) presents a sidescrolling action game oozing with style. Weaving a plot of intrigue and mystery, the player fills the shoes of Val, part of a robotic line known as Valkyries, thrown out to waste away in The Deeps for being too adaptable. Your abilities take you far, though, as you find yourself working your way back to the surface for revenge.
Haunted Garage from Games for Ghosts is a short prototype still in development, but it’s already a fun little diversion, full of character.
The basic premise thus far is that you pan around a single-area point-and-click environment, looking for characters or artifacts, ultimately in the service of acquiring musical instruments. You then go through the magic door in a free-standing wall, back to your boundless isometric white room, where you set down these instruments and configure them. Some allow you to write a melody. Others are droning instruments where you just select a pitch; others yet are drums, which let you tweak their sound and step-sequence them. They all sync up, and the general course you take is finding one instrument, setting it how you like, and returning to the point-and-click environment, where the means to uncover yet another instrument have just been unlocked. You go back to your room, make your loop a little more interesting with another instrument, then repeat until you’ve found every instrument the game offers thus far.
The instruments themselves sound quite pleasant, although the granularity of sequencing is a little limited if you’re trying to do anything rhythmically complex. Then again, this is just a toy, and a truly charming one at that. Beyond the fun that can be had composing, and nearly anything with a little thought put into it sounding decent since the instruments are almost all in the same key, it’s such a delightful world to poke around on the other side of the door. The way interactable elements animate under your cursor, the strangeness of the conversations and of the characters’ desires for trades, the faint hint of your loop that you can hear coming from the door when you’re outside, and the stylistic contrast between the grayscale “outside” and the stark monochrome “inside” all make for an experience that’s candy for the eyes as much as it is for the ears.
It’s a great little prototype so far, and I look forward to what may come of further iteration. If I had to give one piece of feedback, it would be that it could do with some optimisation, as even natively it has a tendency to lag, which can really suspend disbelief when the animations of the instruments desync from the audio.
To that effect, a point of advice – give the Web version a miss and download the native executable for your platform instead. Even a modern browser on a fast computer can’t help JavaScript to keep up with the audio side of things, and audio is crucial to this lovely little thing.
Among legendary shows that have become fixtures of pop culture, Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion is a beast in a league of its own. Airing nearly 25 years ago in 1995, it maintains status as a foundational mainstay for anime fans and something of a go-to for those who wish to explore the “mature” side of the medium. Exploring themes ranging from what free will truly is, to transhumanism and the mental ramifications of religion, Eva plunges deep into its characters’ psychologies and the plight of the human condition.
Of course, this is all well-documented and understood at this point. End of Evangelion has long since come and gone, leaving us stranded in an LCL-drenched liminal space, waiting on Anno to finish the Rebuild series, a reimagining of the show as he (supposedly) originally wanted it to be, unconstrained by technical limitations or budget restrictions. Regardless of opinions on the three entries thus far, it’s hard to deny the fact that they have fueled the hype train of Eva‘s insanely devoted fanbase like nothing else. Not unlike the original show, Rebuild has spurred all sorts of spin-off material, including but not limited to: pachinko machines, an expansive section at a Japanese theme park (complete with giant Eva-01 statue and Lance of Longinus), crossovers with Godzilla and Transformers, and, of course, video games.
So many video games.
Oblique et coupant l’ombre un torrent éclatant
Ruisselait en flots d’or sur la dalle polie
Où les atomes d’ambre au feu se miroitant
Mêlaient leur sarabande à la gymnopédieSlanting and shadow-cutting a bursting stream
Trickled in gusts of gold on the shiny flagstone
Where the amber atoms in the fire gleaming
Mingled their sarabande with the gymnopaedia.J. P. Contamine de Latour, Les Antiques.
Excerpt published alongside Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1.
Modus Interactive has a way with destructive architecture, with digitized runoff and detritus left over from the transmutation of deterritorialized cityscapes. With A Broken City comes yet another imaginative vignette of comfortable desolation, where Satie’s Gymnopédies haunt you distantly as you traverse urban esoterica.
Networking, whether you do it consciously or as a side effect of enduring social work events, is something we’re all familiar with – or at least the concept is. Often seen as a necessary evil, it has routinely demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be so craven. Our complacency with common structural vulgarities like crunch, poor planning, and fearful avoidance slowly and gently acclimates us to unsustainable modes of being. The industry is, and has demonstrated that it is, capable of doing better. When used tactfully, jaded dark humor can be the very signal flare we need to draw our attention to the desperate need for change.
@corpsepile‘s Networking Event Simulator takes that idea and warps it into a deliciously hellish liminal space. One part cynical piss-take on mundane repetition and one part exhausting omnipresence of cookie-cutter social behaviors, it’s a game that puts you in the position of climbing your way to the top through one of the most passive-aggressive sports known to humanity.