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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.

Who else would be inspired by a community debate involving Wal-Mart to make a game that features Kermit-The-Frog-eyed gardeners sharing resources? I don't know about you, but sharing resources isn't what I was raised to do, no free rides. And why else would he make the games' characters all bi-sexual hermaphrodites? What's he trying to do to America's youth? Apparently, gardening is really important to godless hippies that couldn't appreciate the special sauce on a Big Mac if a cow came up and licked them. This game is trying to tell you that we should all just tend the earth, develop permacultures, and "share fruits" with whatever transgendered wingbat comes along. Not in my country. I like my food grown the way god intended, by pouring oil all over a field of genetically modified seeds. And I only share fruits with the ladies, sir.

Jason couldn't decide which platform he wants to code for, so he went ahead and did all of them. Pick a side. And the content is all procedurally generated, fractal plants, genetic hermits (hermaphroditic Kermits), and "randomly" generated landmasses that look oddly like a hammer and sickle. Why couldn't you contract offshore art assets like the rest of us?

The interface is the worst part about it, it's almost as confused as the people who never realized you can walk down in Passage. You'd expect a one-button-mouse interface to be context-sensitive; you'd click and drag to lay down a garden plot, and you'd pick up water and seeds by clicking on them, and so forth. Good, clean, commercial-quality interface design. Instead, you have to awkwardly click a button to do every single action. Sounds like Central Planning to me. Wake up Jason. Central Planning doesn't work.

Over the long-term, the game requires you to limit population growth. In other words, the game is encouraging abortion and birth control. If you grow your garden enough, and share enough fruit, generations go by, eventually completing a gateway that leads everyone into a magical world beyond. All an elaborate psyop intended to make you accept controlled genocide, the portal is to extinction, naturally, otherwise you'd get to keep playing. Fortunately, it's possible to play this game in an honest way, by blighting the land of all the other hermits, starving them out, and leaving you a precious fraction to feed yourself and your family, with whom you'll proceed to have incest. This is the closest to family values that Mr. Rohrer can get. Note that the game has the word "Cult" right in there.

Skip playing Cultivation and go buy a boxed casual game at Wal-Mart - ask for extra plastic. You'll be doing the economy a favor.

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.

Brass Hats is very much a game in the vein of Advance Wars or Military Madness. It's turn-based, you have your guys, you move them around, they attack other guys, they die, maybe you build some more, maybe you don't, and hopefully they kill all the bad guys. If there's something really witty left to be said about this subgenre of game, it ain't gonna be here and now.

What I love about this subgenre is the attention required from you is completely on-demand. Whatever other swarm of media devices you have ongoing in the background, your attention can shift seamlessly between them and this type of game, given its quick, turn-based nature. But games like this can be a little too simple when you have the brain cycles to spare. However, Brass Hats, with some small additions and adjustments to the overall formula, sharpens the strategy to a finely honed point.

The Reprover is a piece of art, and literature, in which the player/reader has the freedom to choose the order in which he experiences new passages. But there is no space for individual agency within the story, no way to make the narrative come out differently. There is also no challenge and no goal, other than the goal (certainly self-selected and individually defined) of getting an aesthetically satisfying experience out of the reading.

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.

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.

Click through for video review.

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.