I was cleaning up my computer and organized my games folder while I was at it. I came across a couple of indie gems that I never posted on the site; here are the latest additions to the freeware section:

Alex Adventure At first, this appears to be a crude effort at best. Give it time, it will certainly grow on you. Venture out through these levels and track down all the artifacts; it’s not as easy as it first seems.

Ancient Tome This game is cryptic but in a very good way. The point of the puzzle is to actually figure out the rules. It’s even cruel enough that you need to decipher some of the game just to figure out how to save. There are no help files, there is no tutorial. Good luck.

Aya A few of you want to get better at Go. I can’t recommend a friendlier program. This program has multiple difficulty settings, tons of options (including taking back moves), and it can carry you all the way to 2 Kyu if you play it often enough.

Bollen This swedish oddity is a platformer. I say it’s odd because you can do everything you normally can in a platformer… except jump. You can’t jump at all and therefore figuring out where to go and how to get past enemies is quite a trick indeed. A very tough game with a bright cheery presentation!

Guxt Pixel gives us this black and white shooter as a follow-up to Cave Story. It feels like a simple Gameboy homage to Ikaruga, although it’s much simpler in it’s design. Rather than have you dodge a million bullets and fire willy-nilly, you actually need to carefully respond to each situation as you can only fire so quickly and take so much. It’s a bit easy, but definitely fun!

Icy Tower Jump! Jump! Just keep jumping! The higher you jump the better your score! This was a popular game many years ago, made by Free Lunch Design. In fact, it’s quite likely you already know about it. For those of you that haven’t, you need to check out this ‘funky’ game pretty much right now.

Nanikura This is a doujin game I came across many years ago. Although it’s only a demo, it offers quite a bit. It’s a modern take on Ice Climbers with a few interesting elements thrown in. If anyone knows where to find the full version, drop us a line.

Poizoned Mind This game was actually made for the B-Games competition on Tigsource. You have been poisoned and you have very little time left to live. Just how will you deal with your last few breaths? It’s an interesting game and one of the few from that contest worth looking deeply into.

Puchi This game is in Japanese and therefore a bit tough to understand. However, it has an interesting puzzle quality to it and it’s backed by a simple presentation (stickman meets loderunner) that will keep you playing for some time. Just make sure you know how to save!

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In other news, I’ve been busy writing AI for a video game of mine. I’m actually getting pretty good at it, which inspires me to try implementing something more complex. Chances are, however, the next idea I work on will be a platformer; I’ll post my current game once it’s done (probably in a week).

Before I get to the main topic today, let me just lament for a few sentences. I’m actually quite sad that EA didn’t buy out Take-Two; I know that sounds weird but hear me out. The fact is, the politicians wouldn’t dare push around EA regardless of the fact that GTAIV has such a huge right-wing bullseye painted on it. Since the game is going on without EA’s support, I can expect to waste every morning for the next six months browsing through anti-anti-GTA4 articles on Kotaku. That sounds like so much fun. Sigh.

According to Microsoft, PC gaming is doing just fine. According to reality, it is not. Apparently sales are down and are continuing a downward spiral that’s been happening for a few years now. And yet, when I talk to my friends and look out into the world, we all agree that PC gaming is as strong as ever.

Clearly, this didn’t make sense. But then I thought about what I had bought for the PC over the last few months and I realized that I was purchasing direct-download games. Apparently these aren’t included in the sales figures. Why aren’t they included? Because economists are really REALLY stupid.

Anyway, this got me onto the topic of my most recent satisfying purchase. Namely, the awesomely brilliant and depressingly short Noitu Love 2. But I never roll by talking about one game. Let’s look at Joakim Sandberg’s ENTIRE LIFE UNDER A MICROSCOPE NO I’M NOT A STALKER.
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First off, Joakim is the few among the indie devs that has actually done legit work. I mean, he’s actually done official art for X-Men 3 and Contra 4 and a bunch of other handheld games. And trust me, this guy is an amazing artist. He’s even done some work with other indie developers like the mostly defunct Fallen Angels. Fortunately for us, Joakim decided to sacrifice his social life in order to really dig deep into game development.

Noitu Love

Try reading that backwards. This was Joakim’s first real effort to elicit some public attention. This game actually won Game of the Week on The Daily Click pretty damn fast. Considering the quality of TDC’s MMF2 games normally, that’s not much of an accomplishment. Let me try again.

This game was remembered even months after it was released. It’s not that it did anything spectacular, but what really caught people’s attention was the unique presentation. Sure it’s a bit slow an action-based platformer, but it had a lot of promise of great things to come.

Chalk

Try reading that backwards. Ha! Now you’ll be scratching your heads for at least five minutes. Go ahead, I can wait.

This game is one of the best concepts for a shooter since Rez. Yes, I hold it in that high of a regard. The presentation is simplistic as it all seems to take place on a chalkboard. The idea is to draw on the screen to block bullets, hit enemies, and eliminate obstacles. It’s a very fun game and I’m willing to bet it went on to inspire this current “let’s draw on the screen with a mouse” craze that a lot of developers have been bubbling about (I’m looking at you Crayon Physics).

Noitu Love 2

Words fail me. But I guess I can try. Noitu Love 2 is my current obsession as it’s an incredibly impressive game. Combining the mousey gameplay of Chalk and Noitu Love’s presentation was a very VERY good idea. The ensuing Metal Sluggy carnage is nothing short of fantastic. The idea behind Stage 4 alone is worth a mere $20.

The bottom line is that Noitu Love 2 is worth the purchase. Like me, you should keep a close eye on konjak.org. Joakim’s unique art style and love of the work makes him and his ilk more integral to the “future of gaming” than those silly economists could hope to imagine.
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Bonus: Tripline is a pretty strange puzzle game that’s reminiscent of Chalk’s presentation. The game isn’t that difficult and shouldn’t take you too long to get through. It’s an interesting distraction if nothing else.

If you feel you haven’t seen enough “OMG I QUIT THIS GAME NOW YOU ALL SUCK” threads on the WoW Forums, then you should be delighted by the following article. For those of you actually paying attention, you’ll see that I pose an interesting puzzle for the would-be game dev.

If you don’t feel like reading it but still want to point out how I should “QQ”, please feel free to “pgDn” and get your flame on!
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First let me make one thing clear: I do like World of Warcraft. And I know a lot about it, because my friends are all obsessed with level 70 phat lootz (and they just love talking about it. Endlessly.)

Just the idea of exploring Azeroth was enticing enough to log on. Sure I had no idea what a ‘rogue’ was or why death knights were mysteriously absent, but seeing Thrall made me as giggly as a Squeenix fangirl. Taking my warlock out and finishing a few quests was a great way to waste all of my free time instead of doing something social or productive. It’s a cheap legal source of digital marijuana.

Yes, like all of you I did realize that there are only two aspects to the gameplay. You either repetitively grind faction and bosses for better loot or honour using Arenas and Battlegrounds. Overall, it’s a simple game that demands very little other than all of your free time and a high tolerance for sameness. And boy, did I have free time to spare. And the fact that you share the sameness with your online friends? Quite nice… for awhile at least.

But then the reality of the game’s design set in. My entire perspective changed when I asked a stupid question.

“I don’t get it. Why does Chris Metzen’s new lore suck so badly?”

So I started asking around and I discovered something in the reaction I got from players. Instead of wondering why Kil’jaeden would come back to Azeroth (I pity the few that try to make sense of current WoW lore), they just wanted to know what loot he dropped. The reasons and the story just didn’t matter.

The truth is, it did once matter. But the plot has since become a mess. With each new plot thread came more complaints about continuity issues. Blizzard wanted everything to be a raid boss, which meant most NPCs “went crazy” to account for the contradiction in lore. It wasn’t long until the game population consisted of mainly two types of people: A) the people who didn’t care in the first place. B) the people who learned to stop caring.

But you know what REALLY gets me about the plot of Warcraft?

Think about a world where nothing you do matters. You complete a quest to rid the Barrens of the centaur threat, and then another noob comes along to do the exact same thing. The politics of the world seem frozen in time; Thrall is still worried about Ragefire Chasm AND he constantly has to travel to Outlands to remind Grom’s son to stop being emo.

And now suddenly, BAM! Kael’thas is holed up in Magister’s Terrace. How did he get there? Why is he there? Did anybody see Kael’thas walk to Silvermoon? Did it ever occur in-game? Did the server population get a chance to stop it?

It’s like every player character fell asleep for a week and woke up after all the plot/patch happened. Everything is past-tense. All we get is a show for beating the boss of the new instance. We don’t really have a part in the plot as anything more than mere spectators. Blizzard expects you to grind faction and gear for hours on end just so you can get in line to watch Kael’thas die. Each and every week.

Blizzard calls all the shots when it comes to how the game’s story develops. Nothing you will ever do will EVER affect the game world. Nothing.

That’s when I realized that playing the game was incidental. I would never contribute anything; my character meant something to me and me alone. It was impossible to really share it. Well to be fair, you can log and chat with friends. And that is one dynamic of the game that is entirely controlled by players. The formation and maintenance of guild drama is left up to us. Okay fine, you can’t stop the Big Evil from raining unholy hell in the next patch, but at least you can rant to your buddies about your new Survival talent build. I’m somehow not impressed.
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This does bring up an interesting point, doesn’t it? All MMOs are static in their execution of plot developments. The developers introduce new plot threads via NPCs and we all get to watch.

However, one must ask the question: what would happen if players could control the content? What if an MMO was actually interactive? Would it be a total disaster like Yahoo Answers? Or would it be mostly sane and well-executed like a Wiki?

The trouble, of course, is that there are millions of players. Everybody getting a say might be as bad or as ineffective as nobody getting a say. All I know is I’m bored of a place where my actions count for nothing; is there a way to design an MMO that accounts for this attitude?

MMOs have been around longer than Everquest. Text-based MUDs were fairly interactive; new content was introduced via players and guilds/orders were more highly organized and an integral part of the game (getting their own areas and training facilities and everything). Of course, these MUDs only had a few hundred dedicated players even at their most popular. The scope of MMOs and the player demographic has changed and grown. How indeed would you handle the influx and contributions of a million casual raiders?

Ponder that one for the weekend.

When I want to take a break from reality, nobody whisks me away better than an odd man named Tetsuya Mizuguchi. It all started with a little outfit named Sega. Back before their Dreamcast Apocalypse, they could afford multiple development teams. One in particular, United Game Artists, decided that reality is for losers and they wanted to bring all of the fun of LSD to the public with none of the crummy aftermath.

The first game released was Space Channel 5. It was a rhythm game similar to DDR; this was pretty early in the rhythm genre, so it came without a footpad. Aliens have taken over the world and you must dance to defeat them! You think I’m joking? It was a pretty funky game with a bizarre Jetsonesque take on the future. They even made a pretty good sequel, but it never made it to our shores.

Not content with combining music, rhythm, and funkiness, UGA goes ahead and makes Rez. To this day, this is probably their best work. Rez is what happens when Kandinsky and Alan-1 get together and have a child with Star Fox as the midwife. The game features synaesthasia: the idea that sound, touch, and sight can all be combined and felt as a single encompassing sensation. It’s a beautiful experience and a game that I (like Space Channel 5) wholly recommend. One really neat idea was the trance vibrator that came with the game and vibrated with the beat of the music. And yes it was shaped like a… you know what? I’m not gonna get into it. Suffice to say that you end up with some *interesting* photos if you look for Rez in the Google Image search. The game was re-released in high definition on XBox Live Arcade (this version is truly fantastic), which gives rise to hope for similar treatment of Space Channel 5. Wouldn’t that be great?

Anyway, it wasn’t long before Sega finally destroyed itself. It would later rise from the ashes, but not before losing Mizuguchi who decided to branch out and form Q? Entertainment. After a couple of years, they finally started hitting us with simple but addictive puzzle games. And it worked like Bejeweled worked for Popcap.

Q? first made Lumines, a title surely recognized by many of you. The fact that it caught on like a wildfire despite it being a PSP title, really says something. Too bad the PSP didn’t really fly the first year out the door.

Q? Entertainment apparently noticed and made their next addictive puzzle game for the much more popular Nintendo DS. Thus we were given Meteos, an excellent match-3 game that’s strangely addictive and pretty awesome. It gives the same feeling of controlling the music to the rhythm; something we’ve grown accustomed to expecting from Mizuguchi. The PC online version is looking pretty sweet.

A year later, they put out Every Extend Extra on the PSP (now also available on XBLA). This game is so trippy, I still don’t know the rules even after playing it as much as I have. Can anyone explain this game to me? I think I’m having fun, but I have no clue what’s actually happening on the screen. It’s actually kinda frightening. It’s obvious that by this point, Mizuguchi has mastered the art of “you questioning your own sanity rather than his”.

It’s too bad they had to ruin a lot of that good faith with the bland and stupid Ninety-Nine Nights. And Gunpey unfortunately came and went without notice. I’m guessing that the numerous re-releases of Lumines and Meteos (Disney ate it up) was done to recover funds after that disastrous period. Still, re-releasing their old 3D games for a new generation is a good idea. It’s obvious that their early work was ahead of it’s time; the success of Rez HD seems to suggest that the populace is now ready for Mizuguchi’s special brand of crazy.

I really hope Q? comes out next year swinging; it’d be great to lose my mind once more. And has anyone else noticed that almost every Mizuguchi game is heralded as a favourite by either Gabe or Tycho? Coincidence? I think not!