Fucked

Rohrer's Passage has always polarized gamers; either you appreciated its attempt to elevate the medium past primal urges or you thought it was pretentious fluff. Developer Lurk falls into the latter camp, and did the most indie thing you could do in response: make a parody game poking fun at it. While Rohrer's piece is heartfelt and earnest, Lurk's anti-Passage is absurd and nihilistic -- and elicits a chuckle or two as well. While he claims that games can never be art he inexplicably made a game that would qualify as such, albeit in a satirical Dadaist sort of way. If you've ever participated in one of those "iz gaimz aart" arguments in a forum (or here!) it'll whack your funny bone.

No, you aren't going crazy. Yes, that picture is accurate. That is Mario, and he is indeed fighting an MS Paint shit monster. I should add that a MIDI rendition of The Phantom Menace battle music is played throughout this scenario. I should also add that this boss fight is broken and obtuse, and so far I can't figure out how to pass it. I think this segment encapsulates the experience of Mario's Adventure for me, and is pretty fucking hilarious. Super Marco (Mario's autistic cousin) is also entertaining in the same MST3K kind of way, and is tantamount to playing a platformer made by Andy Warhol circa 1986. Today is an exploration of amateur design, a meditation on the earnest and unintended Shit Games out there.

The latest from Edmund McMillen and Alex, Time Fcuk is another platformer noir like the incidentally titled Edmund and a whole rash of other surrealistic 2d bastard children that Miyamoto left to drown in the pacific. The game is, surprisingly, not about time or fucking, but about shifting between two planes to solve puzzles. This mechanic comes loaded with a highly subdued character design, subdued for McMillen's standards, the craziest you get here is a simply drawn circular head that takes cyanide and explodes, or a second circle demarcating a siamese twin.

I Have Candy Get In The Van is a game about touching the lives of young people. It wobbles in an uneasy, feverish, barely restrained balance between trying to paint a humane and serious portrait of the psychology of abuse, and between being a shock-baiting TIGS contest entry. If you read the author's forum thread, you get a fairly interesting journey of difficult passion and ultimately, ambivalence.

Take the color palette of The End of Evangelion mixed with the stench of industrial rock and foribly graft it onto the flesh of run-and-gun platformers replete with the WASD/mouse combo. Spice it with the end of the world, perhaps a few scenes from The Invisibles and a first person plural writing penchant adapted from System Shock 2. The result is All Of Our Friends Are Dead, a hell of a good way to spend an hour and a must add to any tripper´s playlist.

"I wanna play Mind Fuck!" she says.

"Yeah, we can play that."

So we play.

"What am I doing?"

"Points accrue every second or so, the first person to push shift gets the points."

"Like this!?"

"Si."

When Tim Leary died, his last words were "why not?" This game is basically an expression of that. Total insanity giving way to refreshing mechanics and surprisingly deep arcade gameplay. See, you´re a garden gnome, or maybe a building, and you use tether physics in conjunction with left/right movement to knock these little bastard Christmas elves off of you. If one can climb up and get in your chimney, like a Santa of doom, then you lose. Each wave gets more crazy and loaded with elves, then they get the flying sleighs out and the black cats you never know quite what to do with. Then there´s this guy´s face popping up in moments of hysteria to reward you with a bonus token and a perpendicular sound effect. All in all, a wholly aesthetic mosh.

09 IGF Winner for Audio

Digital Eel makes deep games about weird stuff, going so far as to name one of their better games Weird Worlds. Then they went ahead and outdid themselves.

Brain Pipe is an experiment to see if a game can be designed to evoke feelings that are alien to the human condition, a design to evoke feelings that cannot be designed or accounted for. Apparently the answer is yes, we can do that.

From the maker of game game game and again game, and Alarmingly These Are Not Lovesick Zombies comes another zany freak-fest. While game... again game used platform mechanics to explore philosophical concepts in level design format, this game is a bit simpler on the level-design side, and instead turns the aesthetic of information-overload-as-internet-culture to 11. Headlines mash together, T.Boone Pickens holds money, the friendly merchandising of Boing Boing is lampooned with each writer having their own literal column. A secret exit along the way will put you towards a "true ending", otherwise you´ll hit a dead-end. Controls are the simple arrow keys and space-bar affair.

I nominate Edmund McMillan as the Aleister Crowley of games. The man is a master of molesting fine sensibilities, using a yoga that combines gameplay with warped aesthetics. His meditation on human sexuality turned genitalia into projectile-lobbing warships, his platformers delightfully revel in needless violence with a twist of the absurd, like the eskimo-skinning revenge of Clubby the Seal.
He also turns around and does totally whimsical, non-offensive work, like Gish or Aether which evokes the pure spirituality of dreams. I can only conclude that his aim is throw conflicting symbols of obscenity and friendliness, gameplay and absurd aesthetics, to tease a fraction of the audience into premature ejaculightenment -- and Meat Boy continues the tradition.