Free

Fatherhood is a Rogue-like, at least to the degree of being a turn-based ASCII game, with a command-set that will be familiar to players of this type of game. However, it's certainly not a dungeon-crawler -- indeed, there's no combat whatsoever.

The basic set-up is this: on a randomly generated map (some pre-generated maps are also included), some number of rivers are about to flood their banks, and some number of forest fires are burning. You're a Dad, and your three kids are running about the game as well -- they start near you, but have a tendency to wander off. You can halt fires and floods by picking up boulders and moving them to choke points -- and you win by making sure that neither you nor any of your kids drowns or is burned to death.

You can also tell your kids to do things, and yell at them to come toward you, but kids will be kids, and they don't always pay attention.

It's not a deep game, but it's certainly a novel approach to Rogue-like design; it's also fairly easy to win on most maps, unless you crank up the number of floods and fires to a high number during map generation (though you can be screwed by initial placement -- the map is algorithmically generated).

The download includes both Linux and Windows versions -- no Mac version as of yet, but the download includes the source, so doubtless somebody will do a Mac build at some point.

The impending singularity for interactivity is going to be brought on by successively more powerful platforms for rapidly prototyping and designing games. You've heard of the big ones, there's MetaPlace from Raph Koster's company, and in its own way, Storytron from the Crawdaddy himself. Mockingbird is a game-making platform oriented toward casual, spatial gameplay. It has limitations, but it also has tremendous potential for social commentary. (Ed's Note: Also consider Gamestar Mechanic.)

The game pictured is The Last Super Delegate. I made it in an hour or two, it was my first game; now that I know the interface I could make something similar in twenty minutes. Before I started I got lit, figuratively speaking, and dove into the gestalt of hacking the Democratic primary process with distorted found-art and pure cynicism. I started with the background, finding via Google Images a great pic of a brochure for the Pennsylvania Turnpike (this was back when that state's primary was ramping up). The tag-line struck me as perfect for my theme, which I slowly fleshed out as I introduced objects. I decided to go for vertical gameplay, since you don't see that so much. My protagonist was Barack Obama and Raziel, with the power to throw Hillary Clinton at automobilies scrolling up the screen, and then taking the jewels as campaign contributions. I didn't realize it until after I chose the items, but I had a red jewel and a blue jewel, pretty cleanly implying a conservative and liberal voter. I added some planes and jets scrolling horizontally and added a bounce function to them, I also put some cop cars next to the civ cars, made them invincible, and gave them a ricochet effect. The titular Superdelegate was originally going to be Charlie Manson, but I decided to make it David Rockefeller, for reasons that should be obvious to students of deep power. As I playtested and tuned it out, I realized that the process of metaphorically campaigning led there to be no civilian cars left on the road; things effectively become a police state. Mission accomplished.

The next game I started has the working title of Riccitiellovania: Rondo of Cash. I wanted to make a Metroidvania game where you play the current EA CEO, exploring the mysterious HQ and consolidating the shit out of everything you can for mad profit. I was going to lampoon the schiessty-ness of him merging two studios, then buying them after moving back to EA, or the likely arbitrage move on Take Two's stock when he tried to buy them. Once the Stop ability is optimized we'll be able to design these sprawling Metroidvania games, and I'll finish that game.

The latest title I did is called Arbitrage, which was inspired by my researching the word after Micheal Patcher mentioned it in relation to the Take Two cluster-fuck. It's a great word, beautiful and wholly evil, understanding it will help you understand a lot of how power and economy works. So I started playing with this idea, figured I'd do something along the lines of La La Land 2. I started playing around and researching images, and things took off. I ended up doing something about food commodity traders, where you have to "short" the poor people and bounce the food back to the rich fat kids. As soon as a feature gets added, I'll do it.

(Ed's Note: Actually, arbitrage is an important part of any diverse market, and helps to ensure the efficient spread of price signals.)

But these are just my pretentious expressions, you might want to make a game about how your wife gets on your case, or how much airline food sucks. Whatever. The beauty of it is, it's casual, it's like having a one-night-stand and making a baby right after you finish, but then being able to edit the baby in real-time, without any bioethics concerns. As the features get more numerous and robust, I think it's going to get really interesting. Sure, you've got PopFly and Game Brix and whatnot, but these don't let you design and play in real-time. Once sound uploading becomes supported, you can hear a song you like, have it inspire a dynamic in your mind, upload a clip and then go at it. I recommend being lit; lit with inspiration.

As a mile high wall of dust and moldering flame devours mountains behind me, frenzied stamped stumbling at my feet, meteors knocking out a stegosaurus, boulders crushing eggs and trees, I take the instant to thrash the neck of a small lizard, consuming it whole, and gallop toward the distant call of salvation. The meteor has hit. I have a window of seconds, no mistakes. I am a velociraptor, an agile predator. As I attempt to beat Dino Run on Insane difficulty I'm listening to footage from the latest World Economic Forum, discussing the role of private equity and hedge funds. The irony is not lost.

Dino Run is the kind of game that reminds you why you started playing games for the first time (assuming you belong to this blog's primary audience demographic). It's pure, simple, its premise has that certain geektastic wetness that games used to have before they sold out for every shade of brown and two flavors of protagonist (grizzled dude and power armor). You're a velociraptor trying to outrun the infamous extinction event. The aim of the game is focused on streamlined bio-survival consciousness. Go forward. Escape your doom. Do not let anything deter you, not the environment, not other life forms. Smaller animals are food that boost your speed. Eggs somehow magically go to a DNA clearinghouse that allows you to invest in stat improvements. Pterodactyls give you lifts. Everything can be turned to your advantage, all to that simple, inescapable reinforcement -- forward, faster.

This game is also a great psychological consolation for the troubles of our times. If you think surviving global fuel and food shortages, inflation and a looming panopticon are difficult, just think of what our reptilian masters had to go through. They outran an impact wave. Note the alien egg on level 5. It's clear that this game, like Raptor Safari, is yet another subtle exploration of the plain fact that raptors evolved into Quetzalcoatl-like avians who then cross-bred with hominids to create the shape-shifting master race currently ruling this planet. And now, I have total sympathy for them.

You're a Japanese record promoter, trying to recruit cute teen anime-style girls, train them artistically, and make them "idols" -- the Western cultural analog would be, of course, that you're hyping manufactured boy bands. Idolcraft is built using RPG Maker, though, so it's an interesting combination of a classic console-style RPG, an adventure game, and a resource management sim. You run around town, trying to make friends with cute girls and persuade them to sign with your studio, then training them, and trying to release as many successful CDs and DVDs featuring them as possible before the timer runs out.

Meeting and recruiting each girl (there are 12 possibles) requires solving adventure game-style puzzles -- some inventory based, and some more convoluted (there's even a Sokoban-style puzzle in which you need to shove fans surrounding a girl out of the way in precisely the right order to get to and talk to her). Even once you've signed some "idols" however, you still need to train them up, which requires money, which you can gain by exploring the map and performing odd jobs at various places there.

RPG Maker is not a sophisticated development environment (move with the arrow keys, space for all object interactions, 16x16 sprites), but this is a quite original and sophisticated use of its limited capabilities (only Aveyond, of games I've seen, exploits it better); and, begorrah, it's fun to play.

Though the graphics and sound are Japanese, used with permission of their creators, the developer is American; I suspect Americans will find it "very Japanese," though I suspect Japanese people will find this American reflection of their own culture off-kilter in an amusing way (just as Miyazaki's depiection of European culture is, to my eyes, charmingly not quite right). But that's a digression; Goodman is using the tropes of an alien culture, but producing his own offbeat gameplay as a consequence, and good for him.

Lucidity takes place in the world of dreams -- a world filled with Dreamers, real people who dream without awareness, and Lucids, those few who understand where they are, have a sense of self, and can learn to manipulate the dreamworld to their own advantage. The players, naturally, are Lucids.

Yet "a sense of self" only takes you so far; the Lucids have snatches of remembrance from their former life, and the process of character creation is, in fact, a matter of deciding how many memories you sacrifice for the sake of power and sanity -- and what things you do remember. You can bargain with the Dream King (that is, gamemaster) for some additional memories, by taking disadvantages in exchange.

Because the world is, literally, such stuff as dreams are made of, you can attempt to shape it, creating 'dreams' within it, and moving from one 'dreamscape' to another. There are, naturally, monsters -- both Dreamers' nightmares, and 'dreams from outside,' Lovecraftian extrusions into consensual reality. And there is danger -- the danger of dying, of losing your memories and ultimately your lucidity -- and perhaps the danger of 'waking.'

As with many short RPGs, Lucidity offers little more than a character generation system, a conflict resolution system, and an evocative background -- but the background here is very evocative, and something that, in the right GM's hands, could easily create a compelling and disturbing campaign. Something more is needed, I think -- an story arc, secrets of the dreamworld to uncover, the connection between this world and the waking one but Prahl, perhaps sensibly, does not try to provide that here -- after all, if it's in the game rules, then it's canonical and available to the players, which obviates the mystery of discovery.

Unlike many indie RPGs, Lucidity is not playing with the nature of narrative and its expression through play; instead, it's taking roleplaying into the world of dream-logic, the sense of epiphany just around the corner, always delayed by the stream-of-conscious permutation of one event into the next through a sort of magical connection that defies logical analysis.

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.

Fans of the beat game genre will instantly recognize the familiar look and feel of the cascading note style at the core of Synaesthete's game play. This mechanic itself is very reminiscent of Konami's Beatmania IIDX series in both style and pacing. For gamers who are acquainted with the home brew Dance With Intensity and Stepmania games, binding the controls for the notes to the directional pad may come more naturally than the default J, K, and L keys.

Hitting the three different beats is only half of the game play. Players must navigate their Zaikman through various platforms, avoiding the enemies they encounter while simultaneously zapping them with well timed key clicks. Only after clearing every enemy available on a plane are players allowed to progress further or regain their health. While this all may seem daunting at first, there's a handy tip to know about hitting the notes. Though players are obviously penalized for hitting notes off key, they are not necessarily penalized for omitting them altogether. Players can choose to hit only one track, rather than attempt to nail all three. Even though this makes the game more accessible and allows players to avoid any combo penalties for mistakes it does limit the player's fire power. Players who are able to hit the maximum amount of notes are greatly rewarded for their effort.

The rest of the game is neatly tied up by an entrancing sound track, lovable names like Count Stabbington, and glitzy, euphoric special moves.

Rod Humble recently commented in an interview that someone should take another look at Cultivation and it's a good thing I did. Replaying this game has proven to me something I should have seen a long time ago: Jason Rohrer is a commie.

It is 1928, and it is time for the glorious Soviet State to crush the Kulaks and bring the CCCP dragging and kicking into the Century of the Fruitbat, I mean, the 20th century. We must collectivize, industrialize, and electrify, Comrade, lest the forces of capitalist reaction overwhelm us in the inevitable world-struggle to come!

Cactus is, it appears, unstoppable. He's a craftsman, and a living testament that it only takes a short time to design a game. In the indie game community, the 22-year-old Swede is looked upon as the gold standard of agility and style, with many being periodically infected with a disease known as "Cactus Envy". Now is an interesting time to review his work in that light, since a wave of content creation engines will allow less multi-talented designers to be cured of their Cactus Envy, and make similarly idiosyncratic games on similar time-scales.

Take some 8-bit graphics, a generic placeholder of a plot, a few well sprinkled cameos, a dash of masochism and what do you get? I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game. Players are taken to the year 200x, thrust into the shoes of The Kid and given the immense task of becoming The Guy. This candid plot, however, serves as little more than a means by which Mike “Kayin” O'Reilly has designed a near impossible platform adventure game.