Flow

In write-up of Daniel Benmergui's talk at GDC, it's mentioned that a "friend" showed him the poetry mechanic that he adapted for his game. That friend was Agustin Perez Fernandez and I know because I was there in the room rolling a J. His latest work could be his most defining yet, at least in terms of its artistic poise.

El Beso ("The Kiss") is a sort of performance art art-game, you wield the mouse as a lure for a sort of ethereal fluke draped in ribbons of light, trying to kiss against red squares to turn them blue and then grey, harvesting points. The dynamic is that these squares come in all sizes and vectors, overlapping and forcing you to dance your way through them. The opera track highlights this dance while sometimes giving an apophenic sense that the music is somehow responding to your actions, some actual procedural sound would have been an interesting feature to explore but it works. The opera also lends the game a certain air of, as the French say, "I don't know what". It's almost enough to make you pop your monacle.

After your first play through you'll notice some more things that make it come together as being more than just another experimental Jackson Pollack love explosion. The game times your overall session and doesn't really penalize you in a "game over" sense, but instead just slows you down, which affects your performance. So the better you dance with the mouse in-between the cascading overlaps of red squares, the better your score. You are the opera. Give that fat lady a kiss.

Where has a title that reminds one of some extremely obsequious attempt at being avant-garde, it particularly reminds me of Crispin Glover's What Is It?, a film with a lot of mists where he wears Elizabethan garb and worships ennobled people with Down syndrome. Inel's title is more accessible than that, it's fundamentally a maze game with a quadra-partite level design scheme, each of the four corners of the maze allows you to access the congruent corner of one of three other mazes. The aesthetics utilize powerful lighting and procedural animation to give the game a sense of ambient cloud, bathed in varying depths of light, with a maze made up of trans-physical tiles that can be reshuffled by the vacuum like a deck of Mahjong tiles. It evokes the same kind of feelings one can get for paid cash from titles like Flower, but there's a certain simplicity here that bears note.

Cactus gets finished making a vegetable smoothie, he then takes out the trash and wraps a Christmas present for his mother. He thinks, "I have half an hour until my girlfriend comes over, what should I do with my time." He decides to surf the blogs where he notices that Kokoromi is having another contest so he checks his watch, shrugs his shoulders and makes a triptastic, shader-loaded, splendiferous little joygasm, composes an audio track for it, sneezes, and then hears his girlfriend buzz the door.

Simply entitled Gamma 4, Cactus's latest is an exercise in baroque minimalism, that is, the game uses one button (per contest rules), is fairly simple to play, and yet the sync of the music and the shiny, electric visual effects make it feel like a parade. Who would have thought that a game about dancing swastikas (originally a symbol of love) would be so upbeat and poppy? The game is being distributed only with donations, he can't release it for free until March per contest rules, so I'll tease you with some details. You have four symmetrical vectors that leave a trace, if they crash into a wall or a red beam they'll all explode, there are shiny boxes that you must collide with, collide with all of them to move to the next level, press space to change the vectors 45 degrees. Basic stuff, and once you play through the levels the game burns pretty fast, but the real sheen here is Cactus's expert use of the GameMaker engine's visual tool-set, the quadrangular symmetry, and of course, the burn effect where past traces layer onto the blackness of the background. This is the style the man is known for, and he delivers once again. For an outside observer, the game appears to be a procedural visualizer, like an interactive version of Electric Sheep, for the player you tend to focus your eye on one quadrant, I focused my eye on the upper-left, which on decompiling the game turned out to be the basis, the rest of the screen is extrapolated procedurally.

This game is worth the price of $whatever-you-want-to-pay. I dontated $5, which is the sweet spot for "premium" iPhone games, according to a lecture I attended, and this should most definitely be ported to iPhone. Cactus envy is trite but that doesn't stop me from feeling it.

Fig. 8 is nice, it is agreeable, it will not offend and may delight. Like a good friend, it is forgiving; it doesn´t push, it only nudges. The entire design and aesthetic merge together into an exultation of form. You control a bike that is simultaneously an architect´s drawing tool, tracing your way through an elaborate blueprint of a pristine world imagined in design but never realized, a world of trees and houses broken down into figures "a" through "e". The music is pleasantville disco replete with an alternating French resort track and a Catalan guitar chill out. Cruising friendly, that´s the name of the game, until you hit the first black line.

It starts as a vine. You sit back and watch it, chasing the black, diamond-studded sun, and a fluttery golden angel taunts its path. Then you realize that this is the game, and you follow that path with your cursor. The vine curls. As it curls up toward the angel, a leaf sprouts in its wake, catching it, or maybe the angel eats it, then it grows dark. A second vine is emerging. This is going to get more interesting.