- Boing Boing

Your Submissions: Latest Popular Most Comments

Recently in Games

Jason McCullough has compiled the ultimate Oblivion mod compilation to end all Oblivion mod compilations. It took him two years to complete. Brush it off, reinstall, and get cracking. [qt3]

Videogame Minimalism

Rob Beschizza at 9:39 AM Fri

By Infinite Continues.

One More Go: Why Halo makes me want to lay down and die

Margaret Robertson at 4:32 PM Fri

There are those who say that when any door closes another one opens. These people have clearly never queued for the ladies toilet in St Pancras Station. Conceptually, though, they have a point. Endings are often beginnings.

The biggest ending of all, however, has long had me beat. As a wet-humanist, I have no big expectations for life after death. A bit of rotting. General blankness. The absence of everything is a prospect I've always found more soothing than daunting. The concept of heaven has always troubled me far more. What would it be like? What would I want it to be like?

For a while I thought my answer to those questions was Phantasy Star Online. Perfect sunsets, nice greenery, good clothes, the company of friends. There was a timelessness on Ragol which would clearly have been compatible with eternity.

Today though, thanks to the slightly underwhelming reminders of ODST, I think I'd like to go to Silent Cartographer when I die. What could be better? It's beautiful, for a start. The moon hanging fat in the sky, and the Halo stretching like spun silver around the horizon. Waves lap on the golden shore, shaded paths climb to airy peaks.

Read the rest

Why I'm going to Indiecade (and you probably should, too): Pt. 3

Brandon Boyer at 4:32 PM Fri

For my final entry this week on why I've decided to go to LA for the Oct. 1-4th Indiecade conference/festival (and why you should come, too): a quick and dirty run down of all the games that have been selected as finalists for this year's show runs below, and continues below the fold.

All of these games will be playable every day from 10am to 7pm at three Culver City locations: Wonderful World of Art Gallery, Culver Hotel Mezzanine and Gregg Fleishman Gallery.

See my earlier entries (pt. 1 and pt. 2) for more information on the star-studded keynotes and sessions that will make up the main Indiecade conference, and see the official Indiecade site for information on attending.

On to the list:

Aether (pictured at top), Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel

Akrasia, Team Aha!

ClassicNight, Akarolls

Cogs, Lazy 8 Studios

Read the rest

Touch me I'm slick: Daniel Johnston rolls toward Laurie in Hi How Are You

Brandon Boyer at 2:26 PM Fri

There's a certain segment of the population that'll will need no introduction to Daniel Johnston -- whether they came to him via the recently released Devil And... documentary, or (more likely) through the Kurt Cobain-sported T-shirt that broke Johnston further into the public consciousness, or -- for the true-blood Texans -- simply the local lore and hometown pride Austin still holds for its long-troubled and simple-souled singer/songwriter.

And if you don't need that introduction¹, then you probably will have by now had the same reaction I had several months back when I heard whisperings that Peter 'Dr. Fun Fun' Franco and Steve 'Smashing Studios' Broumley -- former art and technical director, respectively, at the now-defunct Austin branch of Midway -- were working on a game featuring Johnston's art and music: I've more or less been waiting for this day since the early 90s.

Hi How Are You [App Store] isn't the game I imagined it would be. There's no Punching Joe boxing, there's no tilt-to-Walk-the-Cow, there isn't a single speeding motorcycle to be found. Instead, the game lands somewhere between a Mario 64 challenge level and Q-bert, where you tilt one of four characters across free-floating platforms to flip all floor tiles green.

Meanwhile, you'll be working against the clock (to gain higher level trophies and achievements), dodging any number of Johnston's demons (like his floating devil's eyeballs) and platforming your way through the alternately whimsically-innocent and hellishly-dark landscapes trying to rescue Laurie, the real-life love and muse of Johnston's early adulthood.

On reflection, these abstractions are probably for the best: what Smashing/Fun have given us is Johnston's lore injected into a game, rather than basing a game directly on one of his icons. It's probably a more tactful solution, and one that starts to work as a (very light) metaphor for his own life-long struggles.

Best of all, what it does is serve as an accessible entry point to discovering his art: Johnston's music has been licensed for use throughout the game, and each earned achievement unlocks a scale- and pan-able version of one of his illustration from throughout the years.

While it won't quite reach (and was obviously never meant to) the cultural-rocking level of the playable documentary that is The Beatles: Rock Band, it's exactly the kind of cross-media crossovers we need more of, is as loving a tribute to an artist as I've seen from a game, and if it helps introduce just one more person to Daniel, couldn't rightfully be called anything but a success.

Hi How Are You [App Store link, Dr. Fun Fun/Smashing Studios]

1. ^ [If you do, start with Johnston's Wikipedia entry, move on to his homepage, track down the aforementioned documentary sooner than later, and then move on to his Continued Story/Hi, How Are You and Yip/Jump Music CDs, or ease yourself in with the Beck, Tom Waits, Death Cab, TV on the Radio, etc. etc. covers on Discovered Covered -- use Yip Eye Tunes if you just want the MP3s.]

HCUFS & VMACHIN: the unlikely combo that brought down Scribblenauts

Brandon Boyer at 1:25 PM Fri

'Brought down's obviously an overstatement, but the Occam's Razor trouble with creating a game in which players can do "anything" is that they'll use that anything to skirt the obstacles you place in their way.

In Scribblenauts's case, it's an innocuous pair of handcuffs and a vending machine, the former of which can be attached to the level-goal collectible Starites, stuffed wholesale into the machine, and then dragged back wholesale to wherever you stand, where it will handily dispense your win-condition free of charge.

Luckily, with no online ranking or competitive aspect to speak of, the exploit does nothing but defeat and deflate your own pleasure with the game, should you choose to use it, but it'll be interesting to see if developer 5th Cell respond with more than a smirking shrug over the coming weeks.

Previously:

Gimme Indie Game: the psycho/schizo puzzling of McMillen/Good/Karpel's Time Fcuk

Brandon Boyer at 1:13 PM Fri

I knew Time Fcuk was after my one true heart on hearing the first few melancholic melodica triplets in its title screen theme, which are nothing if not lovingly lifted from Carter Burwell's score for the Coen Bros.' Fargo, and perfectly peg the pathos that begins to unfold as you start your cyclical descent into the game's world.

Created by No Quarter, Super Meat Boy, and Aether designer Edmund McMillen, programmer William Good and musician Justin Karpel -- and described only via cryptically impenetrable blurbs -- at its core, Time Fcuk is a fairly straightforward game to describe: it's a block/switch/key puzzler with a twist of inter-dimensional-spatial-chronological tearing that rips you through layers of the same room you occupy.

What sets it apart, though, is the tone McMillen has set via an in-game one-way communicator that sees an unidentified narrator constantly interrupting your thought processes with ranting inanities, cries for help, and, eventually, more deeply unsettling and I.D.-confusing asides. And there's this matter of the small growth coming from the back of your head...

The effect, if that narrator is you -- and it certainly looks like you -- echoes movies like the previously big-upped Timecrimes or basically pick any of your favorite schizo-persona David Lynch movies from Twin Peaks to Lost Highway to Mulholland Drive.

By being forced into "the box" from which you spend the game trying to escape (which you were pushed into by someone who claims to be you from some 20 minutes in the future) you come to realize that the interruptions more likely are echoes of every iteration of a loop in which you're stuck: 'you's that have been through multiple times and no longer fear your surroundings, newer 'you's that haven't yet figured out what's happening. In the meantime, you -- the you that's playing -- are acting out that transition from confusion to confidence by learning the puzzle-tricks that get you from one room to the next.

All of this is subtle subtext, and that's precisely what makes Time Fcuk so affecting. Add to that its expertly devised level editor -- which takes a page from Echochome's book and gives players a 20-level loop of random player-creations to rate for difficulty and fun, so that essentially no puzzle goes un-played -- and the gang of three have created what is easily one of the best Flash games of the year thus far.

Previously:

Offworld: Gimme Indie Game Archives

Beatles Hell: No Fun's quarter-note dodger Norwegian Wood

Brandon Boyer at 11:59 AM Fri

The new best Beatles game that isn't the other one: Montreal's No Fun Games has created Norwegian Wood, the world's first fab-four bullet-hell dodge 'em up.

The point? Escape the synchronized notes escaping from each corner's guitar/bass/sitar/mic as the disembodied head of John Lennon, gaining multipliers the longer you can manage to outwit the notes.

The catch? You'll have to supply your own original MP3, for obvious reasons (and beware the internet's false positives), but once you do, it's a surprisingly engaging experience, complete with an online high score table (of which I've been completely pushed off, after pegging #18 on my first go).

Download the game for PC, Mac and Linux here.

Offworld Gallery: Say Hello to Hello Games

Brandon Boyer at 9:52 AM Fri

Less than a week away from announcing their first game, a little introduction to Hello Games: you may have spotted -- especially if you were on the GDC Austin show floor -- Hello's recent appearance in Edge Magazine, where they talked about their decision to leave gainful employment elsewhere to set up shop for themselves and prepare their debut PC-, 360- and PS3-bound title.

If so, you may also have spotted (though only in print) the accompanying concept sketches by Hello artist Grant Duncan, which was basically all I needed to see to realize that the team was laser-targeting my one true heart (particularly with the cube-head at top) with whatever they had in store.

The dev team at Hello is made up of (from L to R) creative director David Ream (formerly of Kuju, where he helped expand the Geometry Wars universe with Galaxies), managing director Sean Murray (former Criterion tech lead on Burnout 3 and Black), artist Duncan (formerly artist on Sega/Sumo's Virtua Tennis 3 and Sega Superstars Tennis), and programmer Ryan Doyle (also of Kuju, where he was lead programmer on the aforementioned Galaxies), and while none of the art sketches give too much away on the group's debut game, it does give a distinct (and ultra-sweet) flavor of the direction they're heading.

Below the fold then, four pages from Duncan's sketchbook to let you get to know Hello. After you've taken it in, visit Hello's website to read more (see esp.: this post, in which each of the team have been morphed into collectible diorama characters of their respective top games).

Read the rest

Formerly known as: Dyson opens pre-orders, ask for new name

Brandon Boyer at 8:48 AM Fri

IGF grand prize nominated strategy game Dyson has just partnered with digi-distro Digital2Drive to open preorders for the game ahead of its October 20th release, and at the same time are announcing a new contest to let fans give it a new title.

The devs say the game -- originally titled in tribute to "the work of theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson" -- will be re-titled to whichever entry "best encompasses the mood and themes of the game," and the winner will receive both a copy of the game and two additional Direct2Drive downloads.

See the contest page to enter, and visit the dev's official home page for more information on the game.

Previously:

A little Love: Quel Solaar's impressionist MMO gets test client, character

Brandon Boyer at 8:30 AM Fri

The best news I've heard in quite some time: Eskil Steenberg's abstract painterly MMO Love is prepping a beta release possibly "just a matter of days" away, and has let loose a test client to gauge performance on various machines. While the client tantalizingly won't let you connect to a server, it is the first opportunity to see the game running, finally, on your own hardware.

At the same time, Steenberg's just released a batch of new screenshots that show, for the first time (so far as I've seen), the procedurally generated characters that will populate its world. More of those below the fold.

Read the rest

Retro Remakes: What Offworld readers want

Brandon Boyer at 7:35 AM Fri

No one emerged a clear winner in our straw poll to see which games Offworld readers would like to see remade, though a common thread did appear to emerge. System Shock was actually the first game to garner more than one vote, which is hard to disagree with: Looking Glass's brand of sci-fi horror has yet to be matched in the 15 years now since its original release.

The second game to come in with multiple votes is Apogee's shareware classic platformer Commander Keen (re-released via Steam), alongside the original 2D Duke Nukem games, both minor ground-breakers for bringing console-style platforming to the PC.

And finally, the no-brainer of the bunch: there's almost no one who wouldn't like to see a Monkey Island revival of more classic LucasArts adventures, particularly Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion.

Check the comments in the original thread for dozens more suggestions.

« Featured | Main Index | Archives | Get This »