Linux

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.

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.

There is a reasonable probability that a hard take-off event will occur in the relatively near future. A prototype AGI, sitting on a university server, achieves a form of sapience and begins self-directed action. Less than two years later, it reverse-engineers the quantum super-structure of the universe and achieves apotheosis. Everything we know to be true is proven a mere 1 or 0, adjustable at the operant's condition.

Some games become so canonical in game design discussion that it's easy to remember just the groundbreaking things about them, and forget a lot of the nuances of how they play and why they work.

In the world of interactive fiction, Rameses is one of those games. It was released as part of the annual IF Competition in 2000, got a respectable 13th place out of 53, and showed a wide standard deviation on votes: some people loved it, while others thought it was a depressing imposter in a competition for fun things. One person recently described it to me as the work of IF he hates most in the world. Ever since, Rameses has starred in rec.arts.int-fiction discussions about well-characterized protagonists, about the player's complicity in action, about whether it's possible to have a good game in which the player has no significant agency, about interactive narrative as a way to explore the constraints imposed on a fictional character.

Fate is interactive fiction by Victor Gijsbers, the author of the rather disquieting The Baron. Gijsbers is very interested in play (either in computer games or in role-playing games) that challenges the moral decision-making of the player, often by setting a series of difficult choices related to the same theme. In The Baron, this was about how a person should behave when he finds himself to be something monstrous. In Fate, the questions are about what you (as an expectant mother) are willing to sacrifice to save yourself and your unborn child.

Take the protagonist, with related verbs, of every major 80s hit, along with the enemies, the art assets, and the midi signature. Put them on separate, concentric roulettes, and spin. Spin every few seconds. Try to win.

You'll find yourself meta-gaming, you know that as the Defender jet, you can merc those rainbow cascade things pretty well, but in the process of getting over there, there is a good chance they'll turn into goombas, and you'll get hit. Or maybe you'll hesitate, as Link, to walk up that hallway, because you could become the Space Invaders turret, unable to move vertically, and get caught by pursuing Gauntlet ghosts. It's clever, because this is no mere mash, but a full blooded remix, where added depth emerges from the recombinations.

Photopia made me cry.

That's not something I say often. I don't think any other work of art has ever affected me to the extent that Photopia has.

I say "work of art" there partly because that's what Photopia is, a magnificent work of art, but mostly because I hesitate to call it a game. Photopia is very, very linear. It has very simple puzzles. It's barely interactive at all.

Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom tears down all the standard rules of design in its chosen medium, piles them in a heap, hacks the heap to splinters, burns the splinters to ash, and scatters the ashes on a blood-red sea.

The results are pure awesome.

I haven't played Rendition to the end, and I don't plan to. I suspect most people reading this won't want to either.

Rendition is a short interactive fiction about torturing a terror suspect for information. It is both banal and distasteful. The piece provides little motivating background, little to make the player want to commit the atrocities the piece demands; and, for that matter, since the torturer and his suspect don't apparently even speak the same language, there's no possibility of finding out anything of value. The goal is simply to accumulate points for thinking of new areas of the suspect's body to which to apply pain, while remaining within the literal confines of the Geneva convention rules. (The legalistic way it approaches these makes a mockery of them, which is also part of the point.)

The correct response, I'm fairly sure, is to quit.

Click through for video review.