Fast Play

A Student Showcase nominee at the '08 Independent Games Festival, Mayhem Intergalatic is a fast-playing space conquest game. My first thought was "Risk clone," but it isn't actually; although combat seems to be per the Risk combat algorithm, there's no concept of adjacency (any ship can move anywhere on the map, though trips to distant stars can take multiple turns), there are no cards, and a fleet can only make one attack per turn.

What it really is, is "4X lite"; your only real actions are dispatching ships to target systems, and upgrading your shipyards. Basically, upgrading a system's shipyards increases the number of ships it produces each turn, but doing so forgoes one turn of production.

Chivalry is Not Dead is a short indie graphic adventure with fairly entertaining dialog and cartoony graphics; you play Phlegmwad, the assassin of Lord Horrible, sent to kill the Queen of Everything. When I say "short," there are only about 8 scenes, and if you do the absolute obvious thing (go kill the Queen), you can finish it in about 5 minutes.

From a design perspective, what's interesting is that it leans in the direction of bushiness.

Cactus! Cactus! You wicked alchemist, you mercurial son of a bitch! You're too fucking good!

This is a shmup made in 12 hours that can be played in a minute. It's the latest in a long series of shmups made by this prickly, lone genius that takes a tired genre and deconstructs it with the delicate care of a surgeon back by generous morphine. Have you ever tried morphine? I worked at a hospital one summer... that first minute, its like this game.

Lost in the Static is visually striking game, quite unlike anything you've seen before. As you can immediately understand from the screenshot. Right?

Well, no, you can't. Let's try again. Lost in the Static is a conventional, short, enjoyable platformer with nothing particularly innovative about the gameplay. But the mechanism by which it produces its images is highly unusual, with effective music that (purposefully, one assumes) carries a sense of the static you might get by playing music on an old AM radio or a 45 turntable, providing an interesting and artistic emotional frame for the game itself.

Passage is a special kind of game made by an unusual kind of game developer. Jason Rohrer lives with his wife and child in a cabin in upstate New York. This cabin is specially insulated to maintain heat during the winter; it has means of collecting rainwater and a fully implemented garden in the back yard. As a result, Jason and his family live on around $800 a month. He has an MS in Computer Science and experience doing network applications, but he doesn't play the Corporate America game. Instead, he's free, and he's free to make beautiful art games that, like his house, are technically and experientially tight to the point of self-sufficiency.

Passage is about the literal passage through a maze, but it is also about the passage of time. You begin as a young man; you have a wall fore-grounded directly to your north, and can move to the right or explore the maze to the south. Early on you encounter a woman; if you bump into her you will fall in love and become her companion. Together you walk through life, illustrated as a variation in wallpaper; you age together, you explore together.

FastCrawl is what the name suggests: a quick-playing dungeon crawler, perfect for a way to kill your lunch hour. One of the parameters you set at game-start, in fact, is whether you want a short, medium, or long game; short ones last about 30 minutes, while long ones last perhaps an hour.