Between is the latest full game from Jason Roher, done in his idiosyncratic style of OpenGL cross-platform and bit-wise read .tga files. The game requires you to play with a friend, and generally plays with your expectations of multiplayer interaction. At first you'll experiment with the controls, trying to get an idea of what it's all about, as you do you'll begin to create new patterns, building a great structure in a multiverse between dreams and waking life. As you do a sense of creeping solitude is fuddled by the strange adjustments to the landscape, things you did not plan, and the sense that the person you had to network with as a requisite for starting the game is lurking around like the Christian God or a more mischievous sort of invisble man, depending on the level of altruism. You then realize that Instant Messaging functions as both a philosophical sutra and a transhuman sort of prayer.
My problem with most cooperative FPS games is that they are not, well, cooperative. The mechanics of your average coop FPS are in fact setup to encourage players to act competitively. Infinite respawns and high-score lists mean most players are just charging ahead, trying to pick up all the ammo and shoot more monsters than everyone else, so that their name appears at the top of a list.
My idea of coop is taking your time before entering a room, communicating, and making sure no one on your team dies. I like to feel like I'm on an adventure with my buddies, overcoming challenges together. So imagine my joy when I stumbled upon a game that delivers just that, and gave me an excuse to play through Quake 2 again.
No, wait! Come back! I know its old, but Quake 2 is still a damn solid shooter from the good old days when a reload key was considered a bit flash. I'm not talking nostalgia here... go and dust off your old copy if you don't believe me. Thanks to freely available modern versions of the engine such as Quake2Max it's still pretty easy on the eyes too.
Vanilla Quake 2 coop has always been a blast. Back in 1998 I sat down with four other guys on a LAN and we tore through the entire game together in one five-hour sitting. Great stuff. We still look back on that Sunday afternoon with fond memories. Coop or Die is not whole new game. It just takes the same core gameplay and adds a bunch of new features that really tighten up the cooperative mode. Gone are infinite respawns, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit and wait until the next map if you screw up. If any player dies, you must restart the level. So suddenly there is a reason to protect your teammates and share resources. Gone too is the scoreboard. You get no extra recognition for storming ahead and getting all the kills. You succeed or fail as a team. Other neat features include the HUD upgrade that shows you the location and health of your teammates and a central server that stores a team's inventory and progress. Also worth mentioning is the death tracking, which creates corpses where players died in other sessions. Walk over them, and you get the players name and how they perished.
However, the feature that really sold me on this mod is challenge mode. As a masochistic gamer who likes to be, quite frankly, abused by Rogue-like games, I am always looking for new games to torture myself with. Put your Coop or Die profile into challenge mode and suddenly you have only one life, for the whole game. That’s right, Coop or Die doesn’t care if you and a friend have spent the last four hours playing; step on a grenade or fall off the wrong platform, and its back to Mission 1. N00b. Suddenly, this shit gets serious. Everyone is focused, even on the easy opening stages. As someone who worshiped at the altar of Quake in the nineties, doing Quake 2 without dying was something I knew I had to do before I could look myself in the mirror and call myself a gamer. And what would be the point of doing it without bragging rights? Thanks to the central server, players who prove themselves will be rewarded with recognition on the website and a number of shiny gold stars on their profile, depending on how many players they completed the game with.
I've watched the community grow steadily over the last year. Though the forums may seem quiet, there are plenty of active players. I've never had a problem finding a good team, and at least two Steam groups exist to help people organize sessions.
So, you think you are a Quake ninja? Think quicksave is what is making this great nation weak? Join me on Stroggos, I still have stars to collect.
N.B.: I have heard people having problems getting Coop or Die to work with the Steam version of Quake 2. So before you run off and purchase a Steam copy just to play this, check if it is going to work first!
This past Game Developers Conference, Synaesthete took home the Independent Games Festival's award for Best Student Game.
Synaesthesia, for which the game is most likely named, is a rare condition in which different sensations run together. Basically, a person with synaesthesia may be able see a word in colors or be able to taste a sound. Mind blowing, isn't it? True to its name, Synaesthete's visuals achieve an almost blurring interpretation of the synaesthetic process in its unique combination of both audio and visual stimulus. The game's abstract quality perhaps surpasses that of Rez, the acclaimed trance rail shooter that Synaesthete so fondly reminds me of.
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