A 2010 IGF finalist for Excellence in Design, Cogs is a combination of sliding puzzles with mechanical puzzles. You know what sliding puzzles are, even if you don't immediately grok the term: There those stupid little things consisting of plastic squares arranged in a grid with one space left out. You slide the squares around to make a picture. Like a 2-D Rubik's cube, with none of the algorithmic complexity of the cube.
Cogs adds mechanical puzzles; some squares have gears on them. Somewhere on the puzzle is a rotating gear, and you have to slide your gears around to do something -- sometimes simply to get a target gear to rotate, sometimes something more complicated, like arranging gears with hammers on them to strike bells in a particular sequence. Sequencing then becomes a major challenge, because you have to arrange the gears in such a way that the hammers are poised to strike at the right moment, and in the right way. In addition, some puzzle are arranged over the surface of a 3D object, which you can rotate with the right mouse button.
Snood is basically a clone of Bust-a-Move -- an excellent one, and something that has wasted way too much of my time -- but I'm not writing about it because of the gameplay; I'm writing about it because of its history, and its business model.
World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen to talk about climate change, and generating a lot of carbon emissions in order to do so fashionably. It is in this context that we look at Gonzalo Frasca's newsgame on the subject, from earlier this year. Global Warming is a fairly simple Flash where you control a hot air balloon picking up and dropping objects in order to limit carbon emissions and prevent the penguin from becoming lonely.
Frasca was one of the first designers to push the button (or envelope?) of what games can do in terms of political persuasion. I thought his game September 12th was a real benchmark in game design, I played it when I was 18 and my design scope as well as concept of how the world really works were just being cracked out of the shell of fast food, cheap gameplay and Christianity - which combine into an Easter Egg hunt. September 12th demonstrated that you could balance timing and splash radius to create a feedback loop that confounds any amount of skille, it demonstrated that you could subvert the assumptions of a game to make a political point, though Greg had a differing perspective (you'll need to scroll down 3/4th of the page).
Global Warming does not seem to have the same lever of procedural rhetoric that Frasca's earlier work did, it works as a casual arcade game whose balance begins easy enough and becomes rather tight as the difficulty increases, you'll find yourself swinging to cap that last factory right as the ice caps buckle and the world is seconds away from flooding. But still, maybe I'm just kind of messed up in the head, I try to find meaning in it. What I come away with is a concern that this game is, no doubt unintentionally, abetting with distraction a scam that will not only not-solve our climate problems but enrich the usual suspects. The game's dynamic hinges on a cartoonish abstraction of what a future carbon-neutralized economy might portent, factories producing bikes, smog-filters and... firemen, and these things then saving the environment, cleaning up our transportation, and cleaning up the factories, including the factories that make the smog-filters. If you don't know much about the loopholes in this carbon credit game, here's a cheeky video.
By suggesting that rapid replacements of parts of our existing infrastructure, using cleantech-upgrades which in this case are funded by your clicks, but in the real world are funded by a great scam-o-la, I fear that Frasca may be drawing attention away from the real solutions. The music and graphics are lush, calming, like one of those wind turbine commercials British Petroleum was putting out in 2008. Games are good at demonstrating processes that imply arguments, perhaps, but they're just as good at making you feel complacent. If only we had more money, perhaps we could make more of the prior, we'll have to do work-for-hire for advergame clients and save up!
GAMBIT, the Singapore MIT Game Lab, have developed a series of games based on "research questions" from game academics. The inspiration behind Pierre: Insanity Inspired is this question from Jesper Juul: "How does [sic] different ways of communicating failure influence the player’s experience and performance?"
Just when you get jaded about genre derivations and overly "zany" aesthetics from the casual game sector, coupled with a sense of market saturation and imminent collapse oddly reminiscent of the US housing market, something like this comes along. Plants vs. Zombies is the latest hyper-polished, QAed-to-the-max casual fiesta from PopCap, a company whose success is driven by one part design innovation, three parts user testing, and two parts production value.
Andrew Ewanchyna is among a scant handful of people who've been making their living as indie game developers for years; his most interesting title is Starships Unlimited, a rather innovative 4X game, though Starship Kingdom and Battleship Chess aren't bad either.
He describes Loco Mogul as "a cross between Oasis and Railroad Tycoon."
The somewhat dreary history of casual games goes something like: First there was Bejewelled, then there was Diner Dash, then there was Mystery Case Files. Virtually everything successful in the field is essentially imitative of one of those three: match-three games, time-management games, and hidden object (aka "hunt the pixel") games.
Naturally, we do not cover such jejune and imitative dross; Dream Chronicles is, however, original and interesting enough to be worth a look. It does have a "hunt-the-pixel" aspect (there are "dream pieces" in each location you need to find and click on to assemble a "dream jewel," and doing so gives you a clue to a puzzle), but it's not core to the gameplay.
"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.
Splume was created by Steve Swink and Matthew Wegner of Flashbang Studios. It is, in essence, a variant of Bust-a-Move (or, if you prefer, Snood), but with interesting level progression.
Have you ever taken psychedelics? Have you wanted to, but feared the legal complications?
I have the solution for you. Read up on the Hawaiian Baby Woodrose plant. You can order seeds of this legal plant cheaply, and plant them. They are not intended for human consumption. Recommended dose is 4-6 seeds.
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