Upgrade Complete and Achievement Unlocked are a pair of satirical games from Armor Games. They're both playable, and quite different in terms of gameplay -- Upgrade Complete is a shmup while Achievement Unlocked is a platformer -- but you don't actually play them for the gameplay. At least, I don't think you do.

When you start Achievement Unlocked, a little blue "achievement bar" pops up at lower left, saying "Bandwith Exploiter." At least it does if you have a broadband connection. Then the Armor Games logo sequence plays, and another achievement bar pops up "Clink Clash Clink." Then comes a screen with a Play button, and another achievement bar: "Menu Explorer."

You get the idea; just about every damn thing you can do is an "achievement."

Similarly, in Upgrade Complete when you first go to play, you can't even start the game until you "unlock game start." They give you $1000 in game money to get you going. You can upgrade your ship, for sure, but you might also want to upgrade everything else -- like, if you want music with the game. Or a timer. Or a title sequence. Or graphics better than Atari 2600 quality.

TheDustin says: "Traditional gamers have been conditioned in the past couple of years to become junkies to both dubious 'achievements' and 'upgrades,' shitting on command whenever they are given these arbitrary rewards. Upgrade Complete (a vertical shump) and Achievement Unlocked (a single-screen platformer) are strawman arguments against these stale reward systems by providing single dimensional games based solely on said systems, and are a good recovery tool from the dopamine-drip of each respective 'reward.' There isn't entirely that much that could be elaborated on them, outside of Achievement Unlocked implementing a few clever achievements and Upgrade Complete's mildly novel weapon upgrades. Both are easily worth the combined ten minutes it would take to complete."

I´ve been working in a growing game company and reading The Black Swan by Nabel Taleb, and its got me thinking that the root of the problem with the game industry isn´t so much risk aversion, hierarchical inequity and creative myopia, as a radically high amount of "expertise" relative to actual performance. We as an industry suffer from an "expert problem" in the sense that we have too many decision makers with too much confidence in their ability to predict what sells and what makes a "good game".

Mel Brooks once said, "It´s good to be The King," but when he said that perhaps he was not taking into account the long history of abuse, excess, and belligerence that accompanies that title. It took a game to highlight the nuance. Queens is a brief platform game that, in the history of all the other dozens and dozens of genre-bending platform games we review here, uses one of the assumptions of the genre along with a clever coat. In this case, it's replay: every platform game has you trod along until some new thing or a timing issue kills you off, so you start the level over with a slightly refined neural map and maybe get a bit further. Then the next thing pops out and kills you and you keep at it until you get to the next checkpoint. In this game there are no checkpoints and every time you die you´re killing another innocent woman.

The game starts with the King pushing the Queen, apparently a wife he decided to fire for failing to perform her regal duties. You control this woman, being fed a randomly generated name that sounds very queen-like. You can hear the trumpets someone, with the troubadour proclaiming in measured pace: "Queen Anna! Queen Anna! Queeeeeeen Annaaaaaaa!" Splat! On down goes the next one. "Queen Gwenymore! Queen Gwenymore! Queeeen Gwenymoooooore!" Spike! And so on, until like Scheherazad in 1001 Arabian Nights, nimbleness and perseverance lead to a woman´s liberation and the sadistic bastard of a king gets his due. All of this done with four screens of 2d level design and a couple dozen 16x16 pixel art tiles. It's good to be the game designer.

Doom and Cookies is a 1000 Monkeys, 1000 Typewriters game, meaning it's a tabletop RPG created in 24 hours or less (and thus hasn't been playtested). It's a narrativist RPG in which the players are residents of a Victorian orphanage, from which they are attempting to escape as Doom closes in.

Where do the cookies come in? They're used as game tokens in an interesting, and somewhat perverse, way. Before the game begins, the host deposits a bunch of cookies in a bowl. They may be taken and eaten only per the rules of the game. Players may gain cookies by placing their characters in peril; and once a cookie is obtained, it may be used to modify a die roll by one in the player's favor, and then eaten.

In the same fashion as My Life With Master, the game doesn't specify the nature of the Doom or peril that the players face; this emerges during play. And like that game, it provides an emotional tone and structure for the setting, while leaving the players with considerable room for improvisation within that faily open structure. Unlike Master, it still relies on die-rolls for moment-to-moment task resolution.

On the whole, it looks like a game that could make for very entertaining one-session play. As with many indie RPGs, however, I come away wishing that more attention were paid to the setting and tone, and a tad less to nailing down the rules.

Sonny 2 is in many ways an impressive game -- but I have to note for the sake of fairness that it's also a game of a type I do not particularly like. Others clearly do -- almost 7.5m plays on Armor Games, and over 1m on Kongregate.

Like Final Fantasy, Sonny 2 is a game based around turn-based combat with story elements between battles. The combat is, in fact, very Final Fantasy-esque; when it's the turn of your character to act, you click on the target, then select the type of attack (or buff or other effect) you want. Enemies (and, unlike Final Fantasy, friendly characters) deliver their attacks automatically, and in turn. Between levels, you may use points earned to increase stats, learn new abilities, and so on; there's also equipment to gain.

I don't mind combat systems like this in themselves; they're friendly to the twitch-impaired, and while not strategically deep, there's at least some strategy in choosing which attacks to use, and in what sequence, and in what upgrade path to choose for your character. The problem, from my perspective, is that games of this type are, in essence, movies consisting of cut scenes that are kept apart by boring, repetitive battles. Linearity = 100%, and gameplay limited.

But, of course, people love FF -- and this game -- so this has to be chalked up to a personal preference on my part, not a universal criticism of the game style.

And as for the story elements, they're remarkable polished, for a Flash game pretty much implemented by one guy: decent voice acting, nice Flash animations to advance the plot, and surprisingly good faux-orchestral musing for the combat scenes.

Not that the story is much other than the usual macho thud-and-blunder of most American videogames, but it's well done for what it is. (You're a good zombie fighting bad zombies in a post-apocalyptic world, with a casette tape that may or may not help you restore the memories you lost when you became a zombie serving as macguffin.)

So, you know: Good for what it is, and remarkably polished (and lenghty) for a Flash title. If you like games of the type, you won't be disappointed.

Gregory Weir, not to be confused with the kid from Freaks and Geeks, has come out with another masterpiece-lite. After giving us the inside view on hacking for liberty and the psychology of Cthulhu, Gregory slings us the childhood dream of being a dragon. You get to be a dragon people! A dragon!

You get to grow from a hatchling to an adolescant to an adult and then a god! You get to change your colors based on what you eat! You can cultivate different kinds of breaths and use them in different ways! Interact with people! The people are at least as interactive as the people in Black and White, mas o menos!!! Then you get to be a hero and take yourself on!! Soooo meta! Multiple endings! Dragon!

After returning from a mental regression to the 6th grade, you may notice this game, despite its charms and limited flower bud of choices, is actually just another paper folding pie like Bemergui´s stuff or Colors. The writing around each sort of outcome is a give-away that you´re dealing with a tree structure, which in terms of trying to provide deep choices is like trying to lift a sofa with a tooth pick (nod to Craig Perko). The game does a better job and others of its kind in rectifying the apparent paradox between novelty and shallowness, the algorithmic approach to color change, while ultimately inconsequential, feels like it means something when you first see it. And the platforming vehicle that allows the games options to be chosen gives it a sense of interaction. You can even get wounded when you fight the dragon, just like in a real boss fight.

Ultimately however I want more than boolean variables and fixed outcomes, I want an RPG world complete with procedural content and highly nuanced systems for chroma, genetics, gestation, population. I want the depth Dwarf Fortress with the presentation and accessibility of this game. However unlike Black and White its free and nobody has been hyping it up with greater expectations than it can possibly deliver, and for that I say all is forgiven! Dragons!

The Cherokee Indian is a platformer implemented in Game Maker (and hence somewhat slow loading) in which you play a young Cherokee man undergoing his trials of manhood, which apparently involve platforming. It's evident that quite a lot of work has gone into the game; objectives vary by level (and don't all involve "getting to the end"), and new weapons unlock over time. You start with a hatchet, but can also gain a hammer (for breaking rocks), a spear (useful for spear-fishing), and a bow. Each weapon has its own capabilities.

The developer says he was "inspired by Harvest Moon", though the connection isn't obvious; gameplay is utterly unlike that farm-sim. Indeed, at first I was somewhat taken aback by the gameplay, which involves killing animals, cutting down trees, and so on, that is, destruction and exploitation of the physical environment, which would seem counter to the Cherokee ethos. But then I realized that the trees grow back, and the animals respawn, so you are evidently harvesting resources in a sustainable way.

Serious platform players won't find much challenge here; though it's possible to lose lives, it's difficult to do so, and the physical challenges posed by the platforms themselves are slight. It's somewhat casual in approach, in other words; perseverance more than player skill completes each level.

There are also minigames available at the Cherokee village, and as part of several levels.

Pleasant enough, and suitable for the kids.

Dadaists Gone Wild is a surrealist platformer. That is, much of the time it's a typical platformer, but quite often you encounter a "powerup" that changes the nature of the gameplay drastically for some time.

For example, the next time you jump after getting the "hat" in the image above, you fly upward indefinitely, and must maneuver to avoid obstacles along the way -- and to get to the powerup that changes the game back to normal play.

The surrealist nature of the game is compounded by the nonsensical text (e.g., "I am Hat, here me roar" does nothing to impart information about what happens next) as well as the oddness of the obstacles you encounter -- weird snake-like things, floating eyeballs, invisible platforms, and the like. There's also a Messhof-inspired truck level.

In its own peculiar way, Dadaists is everything an indie game, or at least a certain style of indie game, should be -- unpolished, primitive, offbeat, and curiously charming.

So as of today, I'm shutting down Manifesto Games.

We started in September 05 because we thought that a combination of trends made it feasible to create a market for independently developed games outside conventional retail. The spread of broadband makes digital distribution even of quite large games feasible; growing disenchantment on the part of developers with the conditions of the mainstream industry mean many are looking for any possible alternative path to market; and the casual game market had already shown that substantial businesses could be built around selling games online -- games with characteristics quite different from those offered by the traditional industry.

Clearly, we haven't succeeded in realizing that vision. There are a host of possible reasons why; perhaps we launched with an excess of naïve optimism, through of course a surfeit of optimism is an entrepreneurial necessity. We did not achieve the critical mass of support by independent developers that we had initially envisioned (some of whom, bizarrely, viewed us as a competitor), though we appreciate the strong and enduring support we received from some. We always knew that the essential problem we were trying to solve was a marketing one, but we never figured out how to crack the marketing nut, at least with the minimal financial resources we had available. We failed to raise substantial venture money, despite engaging with many VCs over time. And of course, the recession doesn't help.

In the years since we started the company, there have been hopeful changes in the independent games market; Steam has become a profitable and viable channel for some developers, XBLA and WiiWare for others, and the iPhone for still others. In addition, the casual game market has started to experiment with a small handful of titles that break the inordinately restrictive genre mold of that form. Attention paid to independent games by the games media has grown (though why is it that the Independent Film Channel covers the AIAS awards, and not the IGF awards?)

These are all positive signs, but they are dangerous ones, too; Apple, Microsoft, and Nintendo have complete, monopolistic control over distribution through their proprietary channels, and while they may, today, generously grant a high revenue share to developers who sell through them, developers are in the final analysis utterly at their mercy. There's no question in my mind that ultimately the channel owners will someday use their total control to demand an increasingly onerous share of revenues -- a pattern we've already seen in the casual game market, and through channels like IPlay/Oberon. The same is true, perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree, of Steam.

In short, if a viable business ecosystem for independent games is to be established, it needs to be established on the basis of open systems and open markets, not proprietary channels. And that, I think, is inevitable; the whole history of the Internet shows that open systems and open channels rule.

Perhaps we didn't figure out the right way to crack this nut; and perhaps we were simply too early. "Being too early" is, in fact, much of the story of my career; I designed the single most successful online game for its time -- in 1989; and founded one of the first North American mobile game companies -- in 2000. In both cases, four years later would have made a world of difference.

I suspect (and hope) that this will be true of independent games as well -- that within four years, it will be a large, fast-growing, and highly successful segment of the game industry. In other words, Manifesto may be dead, but in many ways this is an excellent time to be an independent game developer, and the potential we saw when we founded the company remains.

I am grateful to all of the many people who helped us over the tumultuous years of our existence, but in particular to the people who worked directly with me -- Bill Folsom, Nathan Solomon, Eleanor Lang, and Johnny Wilson, each of whom contributed literally thousands of hours, almost all of then unpaid, to the venture. And also to Eric Goldberg and Kathy Schoback, both of whom were generous in sharing contacts and advice; and to our lawyer, Don Karl at Perkins Coie, who took us on knowing we were an unfunded and highly chancy venture and stood by us stalwartly.

To those who cheered for us and shared our vision of a thriving game market that rewards creative vision instead of licensed drivel and repetitive 'franchise' remakes, a place for exploratory design to uncover the true capabilities of the ars ludorum, a commercial channel where imaginative game creators can make a reasonable living on a far smaller scale than the conventional market, a future for more than the handful of genres the major publishers deem worth funding -- don't give up the faith. It will happen. One company's loss won't change that. The creative heritage of games will endure.

N.B.: Play This Thing! will continue; and at least for now, the Manifesto site will remain up. Payment functionality has been turned off, however, and all demo download and buy now links lead to the developers or other places the games on the site can be found.