Racing

Chaser invites you to follow it at first, you're thinking its another lo-fi arcade game where the emphasis on extremely iconic entities makes the simplicity of the controls stand-out and gives you something to meditate on as you fail over and over. It is that. It is more. But it won't tell you just yet, you've got to chase it.

My favorite pick out of the recent Ludum Dare was Broken Cave Robot. You have a limited amount to time to navigate a space closed off by black walls, darkness, and a thatch of illogical spaces that cause it to wrap around. You must, I imagine, get all the jewels, and it's really hard. There's no exit, instead you must master the information pattern of how there is no exit. You have to draw your own map and trace paths, remembering which route was the most efficient. I bet if you get all the jewels the illogical spaces turn into an actual exit, but I haven't been able to pull it off yet.

When you first start playing Super Laser Racer, your first thought may be "Oh, it's Wipeout 2D." And indeed, there's a lot of similarity. Like Wipeout, SLR has a driving techno score, along with powerups that let you shoot opponents, lay mines, and so on, in the context of a track racing game.

Racing games are the most egregious example of what might be called the EA playbook: throw money at development and push the graphic bar higher and higher to crowd out less well capitalized competitors, while rarely, if ever, actually innovating on a gameplay basis. Video clips from racing games under development are a staple of demonstrations at industry shows, because they show off the most rarified and advanced techniques -- the reflective glint off a highly-polished hood, the physics of crumpling on impact, a level of detail and polish that produces a sense of marvel that we've gone from Pong to here in a single generation.

Overdrive is another MySpace social game designed by Steve Meretzky (who also contributed to Nightfall: Bloodlines and is, of course, famous for his text and graphic adventure work). It's similar to other games of the style, with energy and health regenerating slowly, missions to level up and attacks on other players, an incentive to invite others to the game, and optional payment for faster advancement.

Normally, new reviews appear in full text on the front page -- no need to click through for more. In this case, I am going to post only the first part, however, with the rest below the fold, because this is a 3-minute game (actually, a 2 minute and 10 second game, precisely), and almost anything I might say would amount to a spoiler.

In other words, play it first, then read the rest of the review. Failing to do so is a lot like hearing the punchline before the joke.

When I went to play Downhill Bowling, my assumption that it would be an easy "pass," meaning I wasn't likely to review it. Bowling games typically have the same "direction and force" UI as golf and pool games -- stereotyped and dull; and bowling is typically adopted as a theme by people playing with 3D for the first time, because you need a very limited number of models that needn't be high poly. Add a primitive physics engine, and the game practically writes itself. So, you know, most bowling games suck, though occasionally you run into one (like Large Animal's Rocket Bowl) that at least uses the basic tropes in a novel and entertaining way.

So does Downhill Bowling,

It isn't really a bowling game; it's a race game, of sorts. Each level is a track in a 3D landscape, down which your ball rolls; all you really do is left-and-right arrow to try to stay on track, ala a racing game. Down the track are coins, and the feeling is something like a 3D Sonic as you try to grab as many as possible en route; there are also occasional power ups and racks of bowling pins, which you want to try to hit at the right point to gain a strike. You can either play simply for points, or in "timed" mode, in which you try to get through the level as quickly as possible while scoring as many points as possible. High scores get uploaded to a server.

It's surprisingly engaging -- and also swift and responsive, an impressive demonstration of the superiority of Unity as a browser-based 3D platform over Flash, certainly.

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.

H-Craft Championship looks surprisingly good for an indie racing game--after all, major publishers spend millions polishing the graphics for games of this type, and its impressive that a small team was able to produce something that looks so nice.

It's science fictional, in that the racing vehicles are hovercraft that apparently tool along great superhighways in the sky. Also apparently, in the future, road safety is not a major concern of the authorities--perhaps the world is overpopulated and they want people to plummet to their deaths--so that failure in steering doesn't mean, as in other games, that you go off road and lose speed, but instead lose the game.