Satire

The impending singularity for interactivity is going to be brought on by successively more powerful platforms for rapidly prototyping and designing games. You've heard of the big ones, there's MetaPlace from Raph Koster's company, and in its own way, Storytron from the Crawdaddy himself. Mockingbird is a game-making platform oriented toward casual, spatial gameplay. It has limitations, but it also has tremendous potential for social commentary. (Ed's Note: Also consider Gamestar Mechanic.)

Paolo Pedercini is best known for excellent, and risky games like the McDonald's Video Game, which takes cruel aim at the international fast food purveyor, and Operation Pedopriest, which takes equally cruel aim at the Catholic Church's proclivity for whitewashing the child abuse of some of its prelates. Faith Fighter is his most recent title, and it would be, well, cruel of us not to review it, since we have written so admiringly of his previous efforts.

Faith Fighter is a classic Street Fighter-style game, in which you choose one of several characters and engage in fisticuffs with another, either a computer-controlled character, or another player whacking keys on the other side of the keyboard. As one might expect, each character has special moves that can be triggered by key combinations. Two falls out of three. What you expect, albeit in Flash, and free.

Well, why not toot my own horn today?

The genesis of Violence was a conversation I had over lunch with James Wallis some years ago when he was in New York for a visit. He asked if I had any desire to go back to designing tabletop RPGs, and I said "not much"--but mentioned an idea I had for a wholly satirical and very likely unplayable game intended mainly as an attack on both the business practices and unspoken assumptions of RPGs. I believe my original title was "Bloodshed." We chortled a bit, Wallis went away, and a few years later wrote saying he was launching a line of short, brief, experimental RPGs by the likes of John Tynes and Robin Laws, and would I be interested in doing that repulsive game idea I had. Well, good company to be in, anyway, and I had some time between projects.