Management

Flashbang is back with a flash and a bang, the staple physics-based viscerality, and the staple removing dialectic of destruction vs. capitulation. Instead of being Taurus trying your hand at entreprenuership, you´re a lazy entitlement-jockey trying to do the bare minimum to get through the day while collecting guaranteed pay. Your job is to man a crane, though man-handling it is more accurate. The controls, like those of Minotaur In A China Shop, are intentionally difficult. There´s an inherent delta in where you move the mouse and how the crane follows, and they tuned the gamma up real high, it makes running in the original Super Mario Bros. feel like walking in The Legend of Zelda, by comparison. This sloppiness is amplified by the inability to directly control the height of the crane hook. There´s something in the noise.

I got my start with Storytron, it was my first real trip into professional development, and let me tell you, I´ve seen this thing delayed more times than the Bush administration lied. Wait, let me tabulate that... no nevermind, Storytron was delayed roughly thirty times and the Bush administration lied over 900 times, but you get the idea. I´m happy to say that Chris Crawford has finally delivered, and the great messianic engine bears its promises with grace.

Primrose is a deep game, it's an homage to Go, Othello, the best of the Match-3s, and maybe to the burgeoning trend of threading user content creation into gameplay with seamless poise. Like most of Rohrer's work, you start out a bit unclear as to what to do, but through experimentation you stumble upon that moment of enlightenment where both the rules and the system's depth become clear. This time, Jason has traded his ambition of redefining our vista of the human condition for the ambition of making a system so deep that autistic savants will fecklessly try to sprint up the leader boards. It turns out to be a profitable trade.

I found this unassuming little bag of assumptions playing along in the Microsoft set at Games for Change, with the 360 controls awkwardly bounding what works just fine with a mouse. City Rain is not a game about the enviro-economic benefits of rainwater capture, but rather, about blocks of city raining down in a Tetris/Sim City tango. I´m all about South American developers, and I could tell from the narrator´s Scandanavian-with-a-twist-of-lime accent that this was from either the Southern Cone or Brazil. It´s won a bunch of awards, and now has a downloadable delux version available for purchase.

One of those "better" games from the Global Game Jam, Move Mouse to Fulfill Destiny is a short Flash that tackles logistical management with a loose, Benmergui-esque stance. You simply move the mouse around to dictate what your man spends time on over the course of his life. Holding the mouse in one box has you build stuff up, while the other squares have you growing food and entertaining guests. You grow old and based on what you´ve done, you die with varying levels of community support. Calling it "a cross between Agricola and Passage" or "hyper-Harvest Moon" both smack about right, but there´s something distinguishing in the actual gameplay that leaves these descriptions a bit off.

Maybe I´m tapping into something fundamental about the human animal, but riding a bastard sword through a guy´s neck is fucking satisfying. It´s like the thwack of a Wii Tennis ball, the chime of a Tetris, the clink of gold coins being collected, the closing of a profitable trade; carnal base-hormones are triggered, edifying the beast, galvanizing the spine. This is core gameplay at its purest, an unceasing reinforcement exercise, like the thrust of procreation pushed on endlessly, taking lives away rather than risking new ones. Real visceral kind of fun, just like our ancestors used to have when they ran each other through with long swords over land and women, back in the day. When I made another pass on my horse and cut down two blokes in a row, I turned to my chica and said "this kind of thing happened a lot back then." At least, it feels like it should have.

Step 1 - Sell China, Step 2 - ???, Step 3 - Profit!

Minotaur in a China Shop is a harrowing study of the underlying psychology behind global capitalism.

Moloch, the bull god, epitomizes both mechanization and fervor to dominate, it is the symbol of Merryl Lynch, the underpinning of a "bull market", and the principle that would enslave you. It is one entrepreneurial Minotaur trying to keep his shit together. Trying to maximize revenues while minimizing risk, and when that doesn't work, bring in the financial derivatives.

Billy Suicide is the flagship title of Mike Lasala, who has the trademark style of featuring a protagonist who may as well be him, with photoreal frames circa the 3DO era. This game is somewhat similar to a game I wanted to do back in 2007, except in my take on it your suicide was inevitable and the things you did beforehand would determine how people behaved at your funeral, and the resulting aftermath. Billy doesn't dig quite as deep as that causal model may have, but the episodic structure of this game suggests that the one-day-at-at-time model could bear out in interesting ways.

The Free Culture Game is not up to the standards of Paolo's usual propaganda, but the angle of this particular piece kinda puts you in a meta-statement mood regarding the analysis of games as propaganda, otherwise persuasive, and how games about markets and social systems can sometimes also be about games in general, both phenomenologically and in terms of the metaphysical boundaries of what games can be.

Budget Hero is a game about the US Federal budget. In the game, you raise and lower the budget by cutting or funding particular programs (in the form of cards), and your aim is to reach a budget that matches your values. For instance, if you tell it that you value education, and spend a lot of money on education, you're self-consistent enough to get the education badge.