Shooter

Rocketbirds Revolution is a 2010 IGF Finalist in the Audio and Visual Arts category. It has a totally kickass intro Flash sequence of the protagonist (the "Cock of War") in a jetpack dogfight against three penguins, with appropriately Blue Oyster Cultish-music; the game itself is a fairly conventional platform shooter.

A Colorado Highschool student went on a shooting spree this week in protest of a Flash game posted on Newgrounds, wounding several and then killing himself. Witnesses proclaim that the student repeatedly critiqued the title Columbine Massacre as he fired at random.

"I can't believe someone made another game about Columbine! Its not even very good!" He shrieked as he riddled chalkboards and bookshelves with hollow-point rounds purchased at Wal-Mart.

Distraught students gave testimony to press while fighting back tears:

"He just kept going on about how this web game doesn't treat Columbine with much nuance! He kept saying the graphics were lame and the gameplay was a rip-off of Ninja Turtles 2, and then he shot my friend!"

Police waited outside the school until the all-clear signal was given, after it became clear that any innocent people they might have saved were already shot. Police report hearing the shooter screaming from out a classroom window "at least the Columbine RPG said witty things about Denver city water!"

A teacher who was wounded in the classroom where the shooter took his own life later remarked to press after recovery "his last words were, 'I can't live in a world where the game medium moves at this slow a pace'. After having him in my english literature class for almost a full school-year, I just couldn't understand it."

The shooting comes on the heels of the tragic murder of Colorado third grader, Gordon Stoltski after being mistaken for a truck driver of the same name.

Molleindustria is best known for games like the McDonald's Game and Oiligarchy, games that combine a strong political stance with actual gameplay, something that the games for change movement could certainly learn from. In Kosmosis, Pedercini, Molleindustria's auteur, has done something quite different: it's a five-day game created as part of an Experimental Gameplay challenge (the "unexperimental shooter" theme).

Rake In The Grass has been making very meaty, very polished fusions of arcade spectacle and thinking optimization. The best example was the immortal Jets'n'Guns, which has gotten plenty of replay even though its myriad combinations suffer from some balancing issues. Larva Mortus gives you a similar dish: repetitive action fused with RPG elements, mixed with a horror aesthetic that comes off somewhere between H.P. Lovecraft and the Vincent Price monologue from Thriller. As your revolver bullets tear into zombie flesh, faces of demons flash over screen, psychologically interesting the first time, then eventually an obfuscation challenge. It feels badass like Jets but without the tongue-in-cheek satire; the procedurally generated levels put you in a Sisyphean loop while you earnestly send demons back to hell.

Mechanically the RPG elements suffer from balancing issues but unlike the issues in Jets, the number of components aren´t as numerous so the gaps are more noticeable. You have seven skills that can be upgraded each time you gain a level: health, health regain rate, time affected by status ailments, probability of item drops, damage dealt by the melee weapon, walk speed, and the XP bonus. Now, I´m a finance geek; when I play Tower Defense games and I see bonuses for like a Tesla Tower, a Flamethrower Tower, and then a 10% interest bonus, I´m like "hey, let me at that 10%". The first time through I went for the deferred trade-off of more skill dependence early on for greater power later. The problem is that XP pay-offs don´t scale much between enemies, while the amount of XP you need per level gain grows in a logarithmic fashion (technically it moves in a graded steps, but the regression is logarithmic). So if you invest a lot of skill points into more XP, you can´t really get ahead and end up wasting most of your bonuses. Luck and regeneration are similarly disposable; since the odds can be churned and you can wait to heal for as long as your patience allows, they´re mostly conveniences. The melee weapon is the only one whose damage scales, but it also carries the most risk, so you need to invest the majority of your points into it to get a real balance there. There is therefore a dominant strategy in putting all your points in walk speed and health with a few in status resistance.

Still, the basic gameplay is pretty satisfying, the pathy map generators keep tickling some basic maze-crawler left over from paleolithic evolution, and the leveling and items are compelling enough to keep you trucking. If you´re in the mood for these kind of grind-fests then you regret the trek into the underworld.

The theme of the 14th Ludum Dare competition was "advancing wall of doom," and Sir Henry was one of the top-rated games to come out of the 48-hour development challenge.

09 IGF Winner in the Audience Choice and Technical Excellence Categories

This is retro. It's a sidescrolling combat game with graphics that look out of the early 90s, a very classic look in turn-based strategy (which this is not), with little soldiers gunning at each other in what at first glance looks a bit like a cannon game, but isn't.

This is novel. Everything is destructible, the control system is original, you can switch bodies instantly while setting other bodies to routine tasks (like patrol or defend), and the physics feels real.

Coming straight out of Buenos Aires, another indie auteur by the name of Agustin Fernandez a.k.a. "Tembac". Agustin's work encompasses genres, where he tends to take established mechanics and completely reconstructs the dynamic into a new mold. The other half of his work splatters into gleeful experimentation with music and visual stimulus. He aims consistently and squarely for the mid-hanging fruit, and he almost always gets it.

Avant Garde is a shooter similar in aesthetic and one mechanic to another game, Mondrian. This one has a bit more depth, and since Tembac works in Game Maker, it's probably obligatory that he'd do an expressionist shooter.

Legends of the Middle Ages is a puzzle game like Zuma meets Loopz. It's not particularly mind-blowing but has great depth, you'll find yourself drawing geometries tactically in tune with the timing and positioning of the tokens. The game could use a constraint on the number of non-contiguous angles involved in each shape, as it stands you can thread lines and rapidly dispatch tokens. However it's as polished as a casual game that would have sold pretty well in 2004, and it's free.

2 Minute RPG does what it says on the tin. There are no hit points or levels, no THAC0 or random variables. Combat is a moving sword you click at the right time. The name of the game here is in time management, you have an usual formal constrain, only 130 some turns, and certain actions (traversing swamps, exploring caves, fighting bosses) take more than one turn. Since you can't lose, you have nothing to lose, and it becomes a focus on optimization of activity. It doesn't deconstruct the aesthetics and psychological motives much, though the end is kind of poignant when you fail to achieve specific quests, and instead just slay dragons and take their gold.

Las Adventuras de un Pixel is a platformer where you play a pixel roaming a surreal world of cyber-stuffs. It sings of Mark John's Standard Bits meets Catcus' Psychosomnium. It suffers from a few control issues, but is otherwise quite lindo.

Milliones de Sonidos could be described as a dancing game played with a mouse. Randomly generated squares move around a space while your mouse cursor leads a smaller square around. The goal is to duck and jive through the squares, getting as close as possible without actually colliding with them. It's emergent rhythm and it works, the feedback loop in size and points only consummates the crazy loosening up your experience.

Full disclosure: this guy helped me solve some bugs I was experiencing on a Game Maker prototype.

The first thing I thought was "what are those, ninjas?" It turns out, there were not ninjas.

When I first heard of Muslim Massacre I figured I'd pass. It was only after Danny sent me a link, in light of his parley with the creator, that I decided to give it a serious look. The game is dank, addicting, well crafted in its Robotronic glee.

I advocate the use of certain mind-altering substances, particularly in collision with art. I'm open about this because I believe I'm right, the enrichment of the mind and spirit from these experiences vastly outweighs abuses in less meaningful contexts. The experience gains a holistic value from the altered chemistry, and the perspective is presciously unique. I once asked Mark Healy (of Rag Doll Kung Fu fame, now Little Big Planet) why designers seemed to do drugs less, on average, than other kinds of creative magnates.

When I was a sophomore in high school my friend had this theory that you could say something totally obscene in a public setting and immediately start clapping compulsively and making funny noises, and the transgression would be overlooked by the greater distraction. I decided to test this theory by calling the new girl we knew a particularly offensive word, all in the name of science. I approached, she said "Oh hey Pat!" and gave me an M&M. I ate the M&M.

Offensiveness reserved for after the break