IGF

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.

A polished elaboration of Narbaculur Drop, which was a 2006 IGF Student Showcase winner, as well as a finalist for the Slamdance Guerrilla Game Festival in the same year, Portal is a level-based puzzle game with the tropes of a conventional first-person shooter. The game is published by Valve as part of its "Orange Box," which also includes additional Half Life 2 material.

Rückblende (German for "Flashback") is, in essence, a Quicktime art film with mild interactive elements that qualify it, in some sense, as a graphic adventure. It's notable for its unusual look and the emotions it evokes: a sense of nostalgia and poignancy.

An IGF student showcase finalist by a team from a university in Barcelona, Galaxy Scraper is a sort of 3D platformer set on a succession of planets. You're a little spaceman running about a planet, Super Mario Galaxy-style; controls are straight-forward (arrow keys for movement, right-click to kick and left-click to jump, Enter to bring up the menu), but at times awkward, since the arrow keys restrict you to cardinal directions, and the planet is spherical, meaning you can only face in those cardinal directions even when you'd really like to be pointing off-angle.

Empyreal Nocture is a surrealistic blend of a 3D Gradius and Shadow Of The Collosus. It's the student project of just two guys, up in the IGF Student Showcase, and shows both considerably unique aesthetic as well as keen innovation. You control an arrow as it flies through the clouds, accompanied by a flock of little arrow, and stalk down huge hydras made of interconnected orbs.

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.

Clean Asia! is a hardcore shmup that consists wholly of boss battles, carried in what appears to be vector graphics. There are three levels (called Thailand, New Korea, and China, hence the title), with different boss behaviors for each. What's unique and original about the game, however, is that your objective isn't so much shooting enemies as smashing enemies into debris, and then collecting that debris magnetically.

Audiosurf is nominated in three categories for this year's Independent Game Festival Awards; grand prize, audio, and technology. It's an interesting combination of a music visualizer and a match-three game, with elements of a racer.

When you start a game, you're asked to select a piece of music, with the application defaulting to your "My Music" folder (but navigable anywhere, including to, say, a CD in the drive). Once selected, it builds a race track from your music track; I'm not clear on the algorithm involved, but "intensity" corresponds to slope. The point here is that the same piece of music creates the same track, so that if you select, say, "It's Better at the Matinee," the track you're presented with will be identical to the track generated by someone else who selects the same song on his own machine.

Like Toribash and Rag Doll Kung Fu, Triachnid is based on ragdoll physics -- that is, the character you control is a jointed model that behaves according to the rules of physics. In Triachnid, you move your three-legged character by picking up its feet in turn with your mouse, and flinging them against a surface -- since your character is bug-like, the feet can adhere to almost any surface, and you can climb sheer cliffs, or even hang upside down.

Aquaria is a special game, and one of the best games released in 2007 on any platform, at any level of funding or production. It's up there with Portal, Everyday Shooter, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Mario Galaxy. It's a game that is both fun and meaningful. It is a world. It is a work of art.