PC

You're a Japanese record promoter, trying to recruit cute teen anime-style girls, train them artistically, and make them "idols" -- the Western cultural analog would be, of course, that you're hyping manufactured boy bands. Idolcraft is built using RPG Maker, though, so it's an interesting combination of a classic console-style RPG, an adventure game, and a resource management sim. You run around town, trying to make friends with cute girls and persuade them to sign with your studio, then training them, and trying to release as many successful CDs and DVDs featuring them as possible before the timer runs out.

Meeting and recruiting each girl (there are 12 possibles) requires solving adventure game-style puzzles -- some inventory based, and some more convoluted (there's even a Sokoban-style puzzle in which you need to shove fans surrounding a girl out of the way in precisely the right order to get to and talk to her). Even once you've signed some "idols" however, you still need to train them up, which requires money, which you can gain by exploring the map and performing odd jobs at various places there.

RPG Maker is not a sophisticated development environment (move with the arrow keys, space for all object interactions, 16x16 sprites), but this is a quite original and sophisticated use of its limited capabilities (only Aveyond, of games I've seen, exploits it better); and, begorrah, it's fun to play.

Though the graphics and sound are Japanese, used with permission of their creators, the developer is American; I suspect Americans will find it "very Japanese," though I suspect Japanese people will find this American reflection of their own culture off-kilter in an amusing way (just as Miyazaki's depiection of European culture is, to my eyes, charmingly not quite right). But that's a digression; Goodman is using the tropes of an alien culture, but producing his own offbeat gameplay as a consequence, and good for him.

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.

Fans of the beat game genre will instantly recognize the familiar look and feel of the cascading note style at the core of Synaesthete's game play. This mechanic itself is very reminiscent of Konami's Beatmania IIDX series in both style and pacing. For gamers who are acquainted with the home brew Dance With Intensity and Stepmania games, binding the controls for the notes to the directional pad may come more naturally than the default J, K, and L keys.

Hitting the three different beats is only half of the game play. Players must navigate their Zaikman through various platforms, avoiding the enemies they encounter while simultaneously zapping them with well timed key clicks. Only after clearing every enemy available on a plane are players allowed to progress further or regain their health. While this all may seem daunting at first, there's a handy tip to know about hitting the notes. Though players are obviously penalized for hitting notes off key, they are not necessarily penalized for omitting them altogether. Players can choose to hit only one track, rather than attempt to nail all three. Even though this makes the game more accessible and allows players to avoid any combo penalties for mistakes it does limit the player's fire power. Players who are able to hit the maximum amount of notes are greatly rewarded for their effort.

The rest of the game is neatly tied up by an entrancing sound track, lovable names like Count Stabbington, and glitzy, euphoric special moves.

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.

It is 1928, and it is time for the glorious Soviet State to crush the Kulaks and bring the CCCP dragging and kicking into the Century of the Fruitbat, I mean, the 20th century. We must collectivize, industrialize, and electrify, Comrade, lest the forces of capitalist reaction overwhelm us in the inevitable world-struggle to come!

Created by Ed Bever, one of the original Microprose developers and now a history professor, Stalin's Dilemma is a little economic simulation -- little more than a spreadsheet, really -- in which you design three five year plans, spanning the period from 1928 to 1943. Your objective is to increase Industrial Capacity to 48, Military Effectiveness to 66, and Political Stability to 1.0 while suffering fewer than 10 million deaths due to unrest and starvation. The structure is simple, but 'winning' is not -- I've yet to do so, in fact.

Your peasants and tractors produce food, and you have a choice of how to extract it from them in order to feed the rest of the populace -- voluntarily, that is, bribing them with consumer goods, or forcibly, that is, by collectivizing agriculture and setting quotas. The former is basically a no-go -- you don't have enough industry to produce sufficient goods (though you might try expanding oil production enough to export and purchase goods). Thus, the peasants will suffer for the greater glory of the Soviet state, but what of that? The future belongs to the industrial proletariat, surely.

You use your surplus food production to feed your industrial workers, miners, and oil workers, as well as your soldiers, of course. Oil and metals are transformed by factories into production, which you can use to build more factories, as well as tractors, oil rigs, mining equipment, and weapons. The game tracks "Standard of Living" (SoL) for each sector of the economy -- you can improve it by making sure everyone gets enough to eat, and perhaps reluctantly allocating some small quantity of consumer goods -- and the worse the SoL, the more people die.

Despite the sparse--well, non-existent--graphics, this is a bleakly humorous game, a sort of noir version of Hammurabi in which your only hope of victory lies in fervent imposition of stringent tyranny. But we have no choice, Comrade. If you fail to play, the terrorists, I mean the Nazis, will already have won.

Cactus is, it appears, unstoppable. He's a craftsman, and a living testament that it only takes a short time to design a game. In the indie game community, the 22-year-old Swede is looked upon as the gold standard of agility and style, with many being periodically infected with a disease known as "Cactus Envy". Now is an interesting time to review his work in that light, since a wave of content creation engines will allow less multi-talented designers to be cured of their Cactus Envy, and make similarly idiosyncratic games on similar time-scales.

"Fairies in Arcadia" is something of a pun here, since "arcadia" is a term we use to mean "games of a style you might find in the arcade" and, of course, has the conventional meaning of a place of peace and simplicity. It's apt in both senses, since The Great Tree is a simple skill and action game with a charming aesthetic -- and more depth than most games sold into the casual market, though without the degree of challenge that core gamers might prefer.

Remember a few years ago when there was a spate of animated movies featuring bugs? There's a reason for that, actually; it's fairly easy to animate chitonous creatures in 3D, since the body sections are rigid. And it's also fairly easy even for an indie developer to use 3D, if what they're animating are bugs. Which no doubt was one of the reasons Wahoo/NinjaBee chose insects for the heroes of this title. The choice is a fortuitous one, though, since it lends itself to the developers' light humorous touch -- which was very evident in their earlier (and excellent) tycoon game, Outpost Kaloki.

Take some 8-bit graphics, a generic placeholder of a plot, a few well sprinkled cameos, a dash of masochism and what do you get? I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game. Players are taken to the year 200x, thrust into the shoes of The Kid and given the immense task of becoming The Guy. This candid plot, however, serves as little more than a means by which Mike “Kayin” O'Reilly has designed a near impossible platform adventure game.

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.