Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!Tabletop Tuesdays: Oddly Enough, an Important Game | Submitted by costik on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 00:41. |
"Perhaps I should write about Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!," I mused. "But of course they can't play this thing, since it's not only out of print but incredibly obscure, and basically no copies are available anywhere."
No problem; I emailed JFD and got his permission to put the game up here.
The BaronParsing Motivation | Submitted by EmilyShort on Sun, 10/14/2007 - 22:27. |
The Baron is a provocation, both in form and in content: in form, because it requires the player to choose not only actions but also an ethical philosophy; in content, because it asks what moral options remain for a person who recognizes himself as monstrous.
The design uses -- and takes full advantage of -- the text adventure format. Many parsed commands are followed by a multiple-choice question, asking us why we've made the choice we made. The motivation then colors the description that follows. Killing a small animal out of sadism is shown as a very different from killing it as an act of mercy.
Operation Pedopriest"Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for such is the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matthew 19: 13-14) | Submitted by the99th on Wed, 10/10/2007 - 04:12. |
A while back, in the wake of my article Why You Owe the Columbine RPG, I had the pleasure of being shat on by an old conservative game designer who was convinced that a) games that tackle uncomfortable issues are hurting the ability of upstanding game designers like himself to make entertaining product and market it; and b) I was shamelessly hogging the spotlight.
Super Columbine Massacre RPGTragic, Controversial, and Curiously Moving | Submitted by costik on Tue, 05/22/2007 - 15:09. |
Why Is Super Columbine Massacre Controversial?
Super Columbine Massacre is controversial for one reason only: Because our culture continues to assume that games are "mere entertainment," that a game based on so horrific an event must ipso facto be in bad taste. Games are fun, Columbine was a tragedy and never the twain shall meet; a game on Columbine must by nature trivialize or cynically exploit the event. Q.E.D.
Yet we do not make the same assumption about any other medium: a documentary on the Columbine massacre, or a novel, or a New Yorker essay would, a priori, be treated with respect, at least until the viewer or reader had experienced it, after which a judgment might be made as to its merits. And if the work proved insightful, somber,and respectful of its material, the world would consider it unexceptional.
You can think of Flatspace II as a sort of shmuppy Elite by way of NetHack. Like NetHack, the universe is randomly generated each time you start a new game; like shmups, starship combat is fast and intense; like Elite, you're a starship captain exploring a huge universe--and there are a whole slew of different roles you can take (trader, mercenary, bounty hunter, assassin, police officer, or scavenger).
Flatspace II is a space trading, exploration, and combat game. Initially, you begin with a small starship with limited capacities, and have to work your way up by earning money and purchasing better equipment for your ship, and later on new and larger ships. Money can be earned in a wide variety of ways: trading the many commodities available in the Flatspace universe, performing missions (which are many of the Fedex variety), performing assassinations, tracking down criminals, mining asteroids, and so on.
