Oxeye Encounter: An Interview with Indie Developer Oxeye Games

If you dug around the Steam sale in the 2009 holiday season (or if you followed the gaming section over on Reddit.com around the same time), you might have come across a little known 2008 indie strategy title by the name of Harvest: Massive Encounter being sold for an almost criminally low $2. Personally, I'm sorry to say I hadn't heard of Harvest: ME prior to the sale, but after seeing a bunch of people on Reddit praise its addictive gameplay and quirky personality, I picked it up and was very pleasantly surprised by what I found.

With clear similarities to the tower defense genre, Harvest puts you in charge of a fledgling colony on an alien world besieged by 1950's-style science fiction enemies. All manner of flying saucers and spidery walkers will march inexorably towards your base as you scramble to put up defenses, and gather the resources needed to power them from nearby energy deposits. The gathering and transfer of this energy around the base - and the placement of the defenses it will power - constitute the primary strategic challenges of Harvest, and some truly frantic battles will fill the screen before you're finally, inevitably, overwhelmed.

I got in touch with Jens Bergensten, the project leader and lead engine programmer for Harvest: Massive Encounter, and he was good enough to get the team in Sweden together to answer some of my questions. At their request, some minor grammatical revisions have been made for readability. Enjoy, and if you're interested in trying Harvest for yourself, you can check out the demo on their website. If you like it, pick up the game for $10 either from that site or on Steam.

Q: For starters, tell me a little bit about Oxeye Games. How large is the team, and how long have you been together?

Jens Bergensten (project lead, lead engine programmer): Oxeye Game Studio is a small indie game company located in Sweden. We formed back in 2003, but it took us a couple of years until we started making games more seriously. We are now five members, though Daniel is the only one who works full-time on our games at the moment.
Daniel Brynolf (artwork and sound): Yes, but the idea started forming in late 2002, with Jens' project Whispers in Akarra. Pontus found out about it and showed me, after which we started offering our help over the internet. This was strictly for fun, but for me, this was the start of it all.

Q: Is Harvest: Massive Encounter the first commercial release from Oxeye? Looking at your website I see reference to "Dawn of Daria" (apparently discontinued?) and "Strategist", but it says Strategist is "no longer available from our website."

Jens: Strategist was our first commercial title. We used it as our test project to learn how to build and sell games, I guess. We sold the project to a Dutch publisher in 2007, and they've been working on their own version that should be released this year. They still haven't announced it (and I haven't seen any screenshots yet), so I can't tell you much more about that.
Daniel: Dawn of Daria was a project that was sparked from remembering how much fun it was to work on Whispers in Akarra. We worked on it for a long time, and even released two public alphas which were a lot of fun, but it was eventually canceled due to the immense scope of the project. We still have tons and tons of artwork and design documents lying around, which occasionally get used elsewhere. For example, the trees and cacti in The Strategist are shrunk and reworked trees and cacti originally from Dawn of Daria.

Q: What were some of the influences for Harvest: ME? I feel like I see a little bit of Netstorm in there, and maybe some Moonbase Commander, but I might be just reaching for obscure titles from years ago that only I played.

Daniel: In terms of influences, Harvest for me is one of those game projects where a prototype suddenly creates this awesome feeling, and you find yourself working fiercely to hold on to that feeling. At that point, you don't think of influences, you just go around wondering why it's so fun, and try not to screw things up.
Jens: I've heard the Netstorm reference a couple of times now, but unfortunately I have never played it. The game started out as a mining game. The idea was that you were supposed to build miners to harvest resources and connect them to your main base using energy links. That's where the name "Harvest" comes from in the first place.

Q: What was the result of the massively discounted period during the Steam sale for you guys? I picked up the game after Jens promoted it on Reddit - was that sort of "spreading the word" method successful in getting more people to try the game? If it did increase sales, did that continue after the discount ended?

Jens: Reddit really made the difference for us! I posted there because I was starting to get frustrated that I didn't know how to find more people who would enjoy our game. I knew there had to be somebody, but it's hard to reach out from the back of the Steam catalog, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I expected people to downvote me and was greatly surprised to find my thread with 800 upvotes the next day. Sales-wise this really helped, and we managed to double the amount of money we have made from Steam.
Daniel: We have always been really bad at trying to spread the word in general regarding out games, so I was overjoyed when I found that the Reddit people responded so positively to our link. As a small independent studio without any financial backing from anywhere, we rely almost entirely on the viral factor, and Reddit so far has been one of the most effective ones.

Q: Speaking of the Steam sale, I saw Jens mention on the Oxeye blog that he spent over $100 in that sale, as I know many people did. What did you buy, and what are Oxeye's favorite games to play when you're not making games?

Jens: Hmmm... I bought the ID Super Pack and the Unreal Deal... and Bioshock, Overlord, Aquaria and Braid... and KOTOR. I think. I have duplicates of many of the games, but it's simply so handy to have them on Steam too. Recently I've been playing a LOT of different games because I've been judging the Independent Games Festival, so there hasn't been time to have a favorite. I love to watch Korean Starcraft, though... I do that almost every day.
Daniel: I bought Company of Heroes with the Opposing Fronts expansion, Total War: Rome and Braid. Otherwise, my favorite games to play normally, in counted hours, are Counter-Strike, Starcraft and Fistful of Frags (a Source mod). However, lately I have almost exclusively played our upcoming title. I would like to sneak in a mention of my all-time favorite games, which are: Passage and Fallout II.
Jens: Ah yeah, one of my all-time favorites is Don't Look Back by Terry Cavanagh.
Pontus Hammarberg (artwork, building design): I'm the kind of guy who get all consumer crazy when I see a sale, then change my mind when I'm about to hit the "confirm" button, thinking I really don't need it after all, and then finally end up regretting my decision a week later and buying everything at full price. In other words, I'm the sucker who make sales profitable. This year I bought GTA IV, actually during the last few minutes of the sale. But I compensated that smart move with the fact that I already have GTA IV. There hasn't been a lot of time lately for leisure gaming, except the time I spend playing our own upcoming title... but I guess that counts as development.

Q: Jens, since you like Don't Look Back, have you played Terry Cavanagh's latest, VVVVVV? It's something we've featured on the site and in the [Immortal Machines] podcast - if so, what did you think of it?

Jens: Yeah, I've played it multiple times, it's a great game! I think my "record" is to beat the game with "only" 250 deaths or so. The music is great too, you can get the OST from SoulEye's (Magnus Pålsson) website.

Q: I didn't know that, I'll need to go look into getting the OST. Back on track: I'm a big fan of the enemy design in Harvest: ME - the alien ships feel kind of Mystery Science Theatre 3000-inspired, the sort of thing you might find in 1950's sci-fi / horror movies. How did you arrive at that art direction?

Pontus: Often when we draw concepts or work with prototypes we draw inspiration from movies and tv-shows. In the case of Harvest however I think it started off with Daniel just whipping up a random sprite to use as an enemy in the early concept of the game. It ended up looking like something from a 50's sci-fi flick, so we kept working with that theme. But you're right, it does resemble Mystery Science Theatre 3000, only I'd never heard of that show! Something to remember for the next game maybe.
Daniel: I think the art direction must have been the result of our mood the day we made the first graphical overhaul of the game. It might have been because we had recently looked at "They Came From Hollywood"'s home page. If it helps to understand the chaos, both the prototype and the first graphics were made over a single weekend, so there wasn't much time for thinking.

Q: Was there a time when the "decorative" buildings in the creative mode (living quarters, barracks, a theatre if I'm remembering correctly) served a gameplay purpose? Or were they always just there for flavor? It was neat to make my base feel "lived in", but I couldn't help but wish there was functionality behind them.

Pontus: Personally I think I initially was pretty psyched about adding doodad buildings. You know, to get that cozy colony feel to your base, something worth protecting! But as always, there was more prioritized work left to do and as time went by I just wanted to see the game released. The few buildings that were already done were left in, in the hopes that somebody (or ourselves) would make something of them.
Daniel: I remember the plans... hover-car queues, inhabitants, spaceship landing and lifting off, neon signs, a cinema showing old public domain movies!... the visions. aye!
Jens: Yeah, we didn't have the time to do it ourselves, but we hoped that players would use the mod system to add custom behaviors to the buildings. Like making a small SimCity game or something.

Q: ...I wasn't even aware the game had a mod system, to be honest - can you tell me a little bit about it? I didn't see anything in the in-game menus about it, and the PDF readme that came with the game doesn't mention mods either.

Jens: Heh, that's true. We haven't updated the documentation since version 1.03 or something, and the version you get at Steam is 1.16, so all the documentation is in our forums. Mods are currently only allowed in Creative Mode, but the nice thing is that you can combine how many mods you like. For example you can activate "Infinite Credits" and "Emulate Normal Mode" if you want to play something that looks like Normal Mode, but with lots of money, of course. If time allows it, I'll try to enable mods for the other game modes in the next patch, but limited to "cheat safe" commands.

Q: Are there plans to update Harvest: ME with DLC, an expansion or a sequel?

Jens: We are working on a patch which will add some smaller features and better mod support. We don't plan to release any major new versions at the moment. We barely have enough time to work on our current project!
Pontus: I think it's pretty common among developers that once a project is finished and released, you're pretty fed up with it. ...Actually I have no idea if that is common or not, I'm just basing that on personal experience. With Harvest we worked pretty hard with things that "had to be done," but that didn't necessarily mean fun development time, and it took quite a heavy toll on all of us. Still today, thinking of working with Harvest or any possible sequel isn't accompanied by an "oh that sounds like jolly good fun, mate" feeling. But on the other hand, Oxeye consists of strategy-buffs, and Harvest is a pretty neat concept, so who knows what time will bring?

Q: What's next for Oxeye Games? Feel free to pitch your next efforts.

Jens: Our next game is going to be great! It's going to be a platformer game, and since we're building the whole game in our Lua engine "DaisyMoon," it will allow for lots of mods and even total conversions. We haven't released any screenshots or anything yet, but we hope to do that soon. The plan is to release the game in early 2011.
Daniel: It is very hard for me to describe objectively what it is we are doing since I feel so strongly about it. No matter in which way I think about it, I cannot seem to exclude the word "Awesome". It's a platformer, yes... but it's Awesome! I don't think I can describe it any other way...
Pontus: Once a prototype steps over that boundary of being something interesting to being something you actually find yourself getting lost in playing even though you've spent the past week working on it 24hrs a day, you know you're on to something good. Harvest had that effect on me, so does this game, and then some. Keep in mind that we come from a country where boasting is considered the ugliest of sins, and you have a pretty good idea of how excited we are about our next game.

---

A big Thank You to the Oxeye team for taking the time to chat with me; I hope you enjoyed reading it. Harvest is an impressive effort and I definitely recommend giving the demo a spin to see if it's up your alley. They also sent me the following "meet the team" collage, painstakingly cobbled together from several different pictures (one of which came from the Harvest release party, complete with a custom-made alien invader cake), so I'll close with that.

Cradling the animals: Daniel Brynolf
Cradling the Macbook: Alexander Persson
He of the long hair (without animals): Jens Bergensten
Sitting down and looking annoyed: Jonas Johnsson ("he does a lot of tech research and handles our bookkeeping")
CSI: Miami shades guy: Pontus Hammarberg

This interview also appears on Immortal Machines.

In Which I Am Sad About Ubisoft.

My computer downtime caused me to miss most of the excitement and fury over Ubisoft's announcement that their upcoming PC titles - starting with Assassin's Creed II and Settlers 7, but theoretically extending to all future PC releases - will have a heretofore unheard of level of DRM for a single-player game: they require a constant internet connection, active at all times while playing. No 'net, no game. Should your internet connection drop, you'll be more or less immediately (after around 10 seconds) booted from the game, and won't be allowed to play again until the connection is restored. Of course, logically this will also happen if there should be a connection failure on Ubisoft's side, but naturally they've assured us that such a thing will never happen. Mmm-hm.

Anyhow, I don't want to waste too many words going into the details of the implementation, why I think it's a horrible idea, or why I believe it will fail (quick prediction: low sales for Assassin's Creed II on the PC will still be blamed on piracy, the thing this is theoretically being implemented to prevent). The rest of the internet covered that last week while I couldn't post.

But I do have to take a moment to express regret, because in my view this ends badly for everyone. I've liked Ubisoft as a company for years. A lot of their titles - the Splinter Cell games, the Prince of Persia games (Warrior Within notwithstanding), the Far Cry series, Beyond Good & Evil, the Rayman Rabbids games on the Wii, and most recently the Assassin's Creed games all come to mind - have been really high quality games, and it seemed to me like in most cases they'd been rewarded for those with both critical and sales success. I played Assassin's Creed I on the PC and loved it. It looked better, it came with exclusive content, and it had the typical $10-less-than-console price. My plan had been to re-sell my 360 copy of Assassin's Creed II, and pick up the PC version instead when it came out, so that I could enjoy the game again on my platform of choice.

As it turns out, in addition to the laughable connectivity requirement, the PC version of Assassin's Creed II is releasing at a $60 price point. Never mind the fact that almost all PC games (Modern Warfare 2 notwithstanding - another game I didn't buy) cost $50 or less; ACII in particular can be had right now, brand new, for under $40 on the 360 or the PS3. So this time around, the PC gets a product with no new content, an unprecedented level of restriction, and we're asked to pay almost $25 more than the game's current value on its other platforms. As far as I can see there is no goddamned reason to even consider the PC version if you have access to either of the console ones. You'll get a worse experience, and pay more for it.

To see Ubisoft acting this way towards an entire platform baffles and upsets me. I want to give them my money to play great games. Again, my plan was to purchase ACII twice just for the pleasure of playing it again on the PC, and I was excited about it. But they are actively coming up with reason after reason for me not to do that.

So I won't. And I recommend you don't, either. ...nice job, Ubi.

Temporarily Out of Commission

As some of you may know (and if you didn't, now you will), I live in Pittsburgh, PA, and we had what I believe was referred to on the news as the fourth largest snowfall in the city's history this last weekend. I measured about 20 inches of snow where I live, with several more added on top of that in the days following.

On Friday night (the first night of the storm), my wife and I lost power, and when it came back on Saturday afternoon, my computer wouldn't boot up. There was an period of intermittent success where I got it to load to my desktop, but a couple more power failures later, it was no longer loading anything from the hard drive at all. Clearly, an uninterruptible power supply needs to be a purchase I make in the near future.

For now, though, we narrowed it down to probably being just the hard drive that's in trouble - the rest of the machine seems fine - so I've got a new HDD on order and will probably also take this opportunity to upgrade to Windows 7, which I hear is shiny. I'm tapping this out on my netbook (an HP Mini-Note 2133 I purchased for just such emergencies), but it's not much for gaming, and between the Snowpocalypse and work I haven't been playing much this week anyhow.

So. Hopefully this weekend or next week I'll have my desktop back up and running, and will be back to semi-regularly scheduled programming. In the meantime, go play some games yourself, and stay safe and warm wherever you are.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 32

Hey guys! Remember how last time I did one of these, I threw a big pile of games your way, because there was just too much stuff out there and I couldn't choose? ...Yeah, well, here we go again. But hey, at least it's themed this time! Over the last few weeks I've played a whole mess of clever, simple, or downright weird RPGs - all leftovers that I didn't get to from the Assemblee Competition, from which I featured Realm of the Mad God, and on which voting just wrapped up this week. Rather than pick one to focus on, I've decided to highlight my favorites in... RPG-PALOOZA. Hold on to your wands, kids!

That was a figure of speech. Please put that away.

ro9

A glance at the screenshot above should bring back fond memories for anyone who cut their teeth on the classic Western RPG - the Wizardrys, the Bard's Tales, the Might & Magics. It speaks of taking a party deep into a perilous dungeon, fighting for their lives to gain riches and fame untold. The twist of ro9 is that you aren't controlling a party. You're controlling 9 completely independent rogues... all at the same time.

The Assemblee entry of Justin Smith (crackerblocks on TIGSource), ro9 gives you only the arrow keys and the spacebar [for pausing] to simultaneously control all nine adventurers as they plumb the depths and fight for their lives. It's a fascinating and sometimes infuriating mechanic, as pressing forward to attack with one character necessitates moving each other character forward, even when you really, really don't want to. Keeping your rogues from going down a ladder to a dungeon level they can't handle yet is maybe the game's biggest challenge, but there's a lot of satisfaction to be had in leveling these characters up and watching them trounce their enemies.

A word to the wise - the most surprisingly difficult enemy I encountered? Giraffe.

ro9 is a tiny Windows download that you can find right here.

Bitworld

This submission by "Ivan" to Assemblee takes us a little bit less far back in time, and harkens much more to the straightforward action RPG rush of Diablo than to the more careful tactics of Wizardry. It also took home the honor of winning the Assemblee contest, so bravo to Ivan on that! I think you'll agree that his victory was well earned, after giving this a spin.

Bitworld really is a full package - taking control of a Knight, Wizard or Archer, you'll hack & slash (or magic-bolt, or arrow-pierce) your way through a range of foes on your way to the bottom of an abandoned dwarven fortress. The action is tight, the music is catchy, the classes play very differently from each other, and the graphics are adorable - seriously, you need to download this one just to see the procedural walk animation. It's awesome.

I didn't survive terribly long with any of the character classes, sadly, but I recommend trying the wizard to get the most versatile experience - while the knight can only swing his sword or block with his shield and the archer can only fire arrows, the wizard has both an ice bolt to freeze enemies with and a magic missile for destructive power. I found the strategy of retreating to fire off ice bolts and then advancing my attack really engaging, and the game also employs a perspective-flipping mechanic to keep you on your toes. I wish the lighting hadn't been quite so dim, only because I would've been able to admire the simple aesthetic more, but really, this one is a must-try.

Bitworld is a 12MB download for Windows or OSX - go get it here.

Dungeons of Fayte

With all of the kind words I had for Bitworld, Dungeons of Fayte (which was the 2nd place prize winner in Assemblee) is actually my favorite game out of this roundup. In some ways, it's the most traditional RPG out of all of these games, but in others, it's different from most everything else I've played.

The game's author (against whom I will not hold the moniker "pulsemeat" - we all make bad choices sometimes) describes Dungeons of Fayte as "a mash-up between Zelda: Four Swords and Princess Maker", and as bizarre as that sounds, it's quite accurate and a joy to play. Supporting co-op for up to 4 players, which sadly I didn't get to try, Fayte plays out on a strict timeline. You have four months to prepare your hero(s) for the coming of the evil Bone Lord, at which time you must defeat him or die trying.

Each month, you'll get to choose four week-long actions for your hero to pursue - beat up thugs for the local constable, maybe, or work as a farmhand - which will raise their stats and earn precious coin. You'll then get a chance to tackle one of the game's dungeons, earning you further treasure and letting you try out your class skills (classes may be swapped out each month, for a fee). Build your avatar up enough over the four months, and you may win the climactic battle at the end. I didn't, but you might. Combat plays out differently depending on which of the 12 classes you're playing as, but generally works on a dodge-and-counter mechanic, and there's a wide variety of enemies and scenery to enjoy. Also, one of the training regimens? Drinking in a tavern. How awesome is that?

This game will be staying on my desktop for awhile, because there's a LOT to see here. It's the largest game in this writeup, at 20MB - Windows download here. I recommend running the "DoF (Fuzz Scaling).exe" executable, as the "DoF.exe" one put ugly black boxes around the characters on my machine, but try both and see what works for you.

Mr. Kitty's Quest

I know, you're tired, I gave you a lot to look at, you want to go home and give this all some time to digest. I'm sympathetic to that, but stick around for one more. This one's quick, I promise.

Mr. Kitty's having a lousy day. His owner constantly puts him down, he has no friends, and now he's been told that if he doesn't come back with some milk, he's out on the street. Luckily, he's only a loaned blaster and a somewhat-epic adventure away from proving his worth to the world.

If it isn't clear yet, Mr. Kitty's Quest is the least traditional of the RPG's in this list, though its WASD + mouse-to-shoot control scheme does in some ways resemble Realm of the Mad God from a few weeks back. pgil's action adventure sees Mr. Kitty braving the menaces of Dog City and its surroundings in search of coins to pay off his weapons, macguffins to satisfy pointless quest requirements, and, of course, the all important gallon of milk. Light fun is poked at RPG cliches throughout - I got a chuckle out of seeing a note left on an empty house saying "I'm not home, please don't take all my stuff!" (I took all their stuff.)

Sadly, an alpha transparency bug in Game Maker made parts of this almost unplayable on my machine, and I didn't finish it, but it's still unique and fun enough to be worth taking a look at - hopefully you won't run into the same problem. This Windows download will only set you back a few MB - go pick it up here.

That's it for now - hope you guys enjoyed. I definitely came out of this feeling that Assemblee was an awesome contest, and some really great games came out of it. I'll be looking forward to finding out what the next wacky idea TIGSource comes up with will be; whatever it is, you'll probably read about it here. See you next time.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Immortal Machines. This piece also appears there.

The Legend of Zelda: The War Waker (Darksiders)

Reams have been written and much hot air expended talking about how many gameplay mechanics Darksiders lifts directly from the Legend of Zelda series - specifically the 3D Zelda games from Ocarina of Time on - since its release at the beginning of January. Having put a few hours into it now (I just cleared the first major dungeon and defeated Tiamat, for anyone who's played or is playing the game), I can confirm that this is completely true. You will gain pieces of heart - sorry, skull shards - which will grant you new heart containers - sorry, life skull things - and you'll also get a full one of these every time you defeat a major boss. You will find a boomerang hidden in the first dungeon, and you will use it to carry fire to unlit bombs, which will explode wall pieces to clear your path. You will open small chests containing keys, and take those to conspicuous locked doors. It's absolutely the most Zelda you can get on a non-Nintendo system to date. It's also the most Mark Hamill you can get outside of the Batman franchise... according to the credits, he only voices The Watcher, but I swear there are at least 4 characters in that game that sound remarkably like him. Sorry, losing my train of thought here.

The amount of "inspiration" Darksiders takes from Zelda doesn't bother me in the slightest, really. The Zelda series is one of the longest-running and most successful game franchises in history, and it does a lot of things right. It's remarkable that it took this long for someone in the current hardware generation to imitate it wholesale, and it's a blessing that they didn't make a giant mess of it. Honestly, Darksiders plays really, really well. It's the HD Zelda the world doesn't have yet, complete with a new skin and some tricks taken from more fighting-oriented games like God of War. I'm glad it's out there. But there's another element here, a side-effect just under the surface of the gameplay that I'm not sure was entirely intentional: it shines a bright light on how completely ridiculous the Zelda dungeon formula really is.

The plot of Darksiders is, so far, largely throwaway, so I'm not going to worry too much about spoiling things here, but I guess if you're really concerned you may not want to read this paragraph: a century after the apocalypse has been unexpectedly triggered, War (Horseman War, not God of) has been blamed for it and stripped of his powers. He must search the devastated Earth fighting both demons and angels (Heaven and Hell are fighting over the husk of Earth, naturally) tracking down the one actually responsible for the premature extinciton of man. This largely involves being pointed towards a big bad demon animal (Tiamat is a giant bat, for example) and trudging your way through their lair before destroying them. Pretty standard level-boss, level-boss stuff.

Here's where the disconnect occurs, for me: the Darksiders team clearly spent at least some effort making the destroyed landscape of Earth feel familiar, and inserting at least a little bit of logic into the fiction of the game world. Cars lie abandoned along desolate highways, darkened electronic billboards dot the sides of buildings, and empty department stores have only bare shelves; presumably first looted, then left to decay. It feels - at least at first - like a plausible replica of a modern city, were it stripped bare of humanity and then taken over by mindless creatures who didn't care for its original purposes. I got a strong sense of place as I was leaping between crumbled highway segments, and then highjacked an angel's flying mount for an on-rails sequence that took me between city skyscrapers, then underground, then to Tiamat's cathedral fortress.

And it fits, right? Tiamat, the bat demon queen, hiding out in the rafters of an old cathedral? Sure, where else would she go? Time to get up there and kick her ass! So how do I go about doing that?

As it turns out, you go about doing that by solving a series of elaborate lever and switch puzzles, collecting special swords which must be slotted into special statues, hitting bombs with your boomerang to destroy marked sections of wall, and finding key-daggers to stab into eye-locks to open magical barrier doors. So presumably, I'm the first - last - only person to EVER get to the top of this building to speak to Tiamat. She must have been getting seriously lonely up there, and her first visitor came to kill her. That kinda sucks.

Don't get me wrong, these were pretty decent puzzles - even as a Zelda fan who therefore knew pretty much exactly what to expect, I still appreciated the design of some of the rooms. It was fun. But it immediately and totally shattered any immersion or illusion that the game's fiction had crafted up to that point. I was no longer following the story of War, clearing his name and enacting terrible vengeance on the ones who had sullied it. I was controlling Link with really big shoulder pads, trying to figure out which order I had to hit the magic switches in to make the next path open up. There was even a chest with the dungeon map in it. Seriously? Tiamat leaves that lying around in a special chest for her would-be assassins to find?

Maybe I'm expecting too much here - after all, I don't remember these things irking me in the Zelda series, where I've been doing them for over a decade now. But those games are pretty plot-light, especially on the part of the protagonist. You're the hero, there's a princess, you need to rescue her. The rest generally gets fleshed out as you go. In Darksiders, I'm being asked to buy pretty heavily into these characters; War engages in lengthy, angsty dialogue with his foes before taking them down, and there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on between the words they're speaking and the gameplay that transpires around them. In context, I would at least expect him to ask Tiamat how her minions ever manage to come up and collect their paychecks. Or maybe suggest to the Jailor (a miniboss in the same dungeon) that if he really wants to kill anyone who enters his chamber, leaving health bonuses in glowing chests all over his room may be poor preparation.

I guess what I'm saying is, there are certain gameplay elements that have perhaps worked in the past because of the abstraction layers already contained in the game around them. Link never speaks, so I don't have to wonder why his dialogue is out of sync with what I'm doing as a player. And since Zelda dungeons aren't claiming to be repurposed human relics, I don't find myself thinking "Really? They built an elaborate rope and pully system in this cathedral just to haul that giant statue in and out of lava? That's odd." They're asking me to accept less, so they don't have to sell it as hard. I feel like Darksiders asks me to accept quite a bit, and doesn't sell it very well.

I'm still enjoying the game, and I recommend it, at least as a rental. The fighting is fun, the puzzles are good, and the aesthetic is entertaining if not entirely consistent. But I don't think I'm ever really going to be sold on Darksiders' world; not even when I find the ice arrows, the hookshot, and the iron boots. Those boots just don't seem to fit quite right, here.

Completely Nuts Steam Sale Alert - Psychonauts

Tim Schafer (former LucasArts game designer, founder of Double Fine Productions) lost a little bit of gamer love in 2009, I think, by working everyone's anticipation level for Brütal Legend up to a fever pitch, and then releasing a game that didn't really match what everyone thought they had been sold. The blend of action and real-time strategy just didn't work for a lot of people in the context he presented it in, and no matter how excellent the story writing or how funny the voice acting (and by most accounts both were stellar, a rarity in games to be sure), if the game isn't fun to play, all its other accolades are diminished.

I thought it was a shame, because to me Tim Schafer will always be a great game designer, having made Grim Fandango, one of my favorite games of all time and one that far too few people played. If I could do nothing as a gaming enthusiast other than get more people to experience Grim Fandango, that would be worth doing. It was simultaneously one of the best LucasArts adventure games and one of the best-written games of any genre, and walked the line between hilarious and poignant with effortless grace. It's hard to find it these days, but it's worth the effort.

This post isn't about that game, though. It's about the game Schafer made between Grim Fandango and Brütal Legend - Psychonauts. Specifically, the fact that Psychonauts is on sale on Steam right now (and through tomorrow) for the mind-numbingly low price of $2. Two dollars. I'm considering snagging it and giving my boxed copy to a friend, just to share. I don't love Psychonauts quite as much as Grim Fandango, but that's probably just because the 3D action platformer doesn't warm my heart and my childhood memories quite the same way that the adventure genre does. It's still a brilliant game, and another one that criminally few people played at release. Maybe by now you've corrected that misstep, but if you haven't, do yourself a favor and go drop some pocket change on it.

Image Courtesy MobyGames

If you don't know anything about it and need to be sold, it's about a psychic youngster attending a summer camp for psychics, who naturally gets wrapped up in a wacky conspiracy plot and ends up needing to become a psychic secret agent in order to save the camp / world. The game levels generally consist of making your way through the minds of the other characters (rendered as inventive platforming levels where you fight bad dreams, clear away mental cobwebs, and unlock repressed memories contained in "emotional baggage" - literal suitcases in the game, of course). The whole thing is wrapped in some gleefully twisted character design, well-written & genuinely funny dialogue, and miles of charm. You should try it. Even if you somehow don't love it, I promise you've spent $2 on much worse things.

Time Well Spent - VVVVVV

If you've read the "About Me" section of this site (if you haven't, I don't blame you - who reads those without prompting?), you know that the investment of time that I put into a game is at least as important to me as, if not moreso than, the investment of money I put into it. For my generation of gamer - 30-ish, married, working full time, preparing to support or already supporting a family - it seems that generally speaking, it's more likely that we won't have time to play a new release that we're interested in than that we won't have the money to buy it. Sure, nobody can buy every $60 release as it hits the shelves (...well, I certainly can't), but things shift to the bargain bin, or there's Steam sales, or there's Gamefly. Games get pretty affordable pretty quick these days, and I'm lucky enough to generally be able to buy or rent what I want. But playing them still takes time, and nobody ever seems to have enough of that.

It isn't my intention, as I mentioned in my first post about Torchlight, to review games in the traditional sense on this blog and give them scores. Plenty of sites do that, and do it well, and I'm really not interested in the metrics of "this game is better than that game but not quite as good as that one." I do, however, want to call attention to games that reward the player substantially for the time put into them, because few things can endear a game to me more than the feeling that I've gotten a good return on that investment, and few things can sour me on a game faster than making me feel like I've wasted my time. "Time Well Spent" seems like a good label to award the games that excel in this regard (maybe somebody can whip me up a nice trophy graphic? Hint?), and my first such award goes without hesitation to Terry Cavanagh's VVVVVV.

Chances are, if you read enough about games to be interested in VVVVVV, you've already heard about it somewhere else, but in case you haven't, a brief introduction is in order. VVVVVV is a platform game based around a simple concept: rather than jumping, your character reverses gravity. It's essentially a one-button game - well, one button and the directional keys - where the action button "flips" the effect of gravity, from floor to ceiling or ceiling to floor. The change can't happen in midair (at least, not by your doing), so you must find safe purchase either above or below before making your next flip. That's it. The game has one mechanic.

Within this seemingly limited structure, Cavanagh manages to craft some of the most difficult platforming challenges I've ever encountered. There's a set of rooms in VVVVVV labeled "Doing Things the Hard Way - Veni, Vidi, Vici!" that is just phenomenally brutal - check out the video below, if you don't mind having a tiny section of the game "spoiled" for you.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't have the patience for that sort of thing. The player recorded above might not be exaggerating when he says in the video's description that it took him 500 attempts to successfully complete that challenge; I know I logged well over a hundred deaths on it myself. That's a lot more failure than I'm usually willing to endure. A number of careful design choices on the part of Mr. Cavanagh, however, kept me playing through this and every other challenge VVVVVV could throw at me:

1. With very few exceptions, the hardest parts of the game are optional, and can be tackled in any order and at any time you like. The twenty "shiny trinkets" hidden in rooms like "Doing Things the Hard Way" are bonus objectives, and you can pursue them or pass them up at your leisure.
2. To encourage you to try to get them all, though, their locations are all marked on the map after you've beaten the main game, and most of them are within short distance of a teleporter that goes to and from the game's main hub area.
3. No area of the game is ever "locked off" from the player; from the very beginning, you can access any part of the map you have the skill to find and work your way through. There are a few empty "filler" rooms scattered around, but generally speaking the whole map is very gameplay dense. You're always finding something new to try, and if it's too hard, you can go do something else and come back later.
4. This is maybe the most important point: with only one exception I can think of, you're never asked to do anything that takes more than 30-60 seconds without hitting a checkpoint, and - as you see in the above video - death results in respawning instantly at the most recent one, without further penalty. (Aside from the "death counter" on your stats screen, but I learned early to just pretty much ignore that.) Try, try, try, try, try again.

More than any other game that comes readily to mind, VVVVVV goes out of its way to make you feel like every moment you spend with it is productive. You'll never run out of lives and need to start over. You'll never need to re-do 10 difficult things in order to practice the one that keeps fouling you up; there are enough checkpoints that you'll spend time learning to get better at new rooms rather than replaying the ones you can already beat. And you'll never need to trudge through old areas to get back to the one you want to focus on; teleporters are everywhere. I recently heard someone at my office - talking about something else entirely - say "Only the hard things should be hard." I can tell that phrase is going stick with me, and it's very much the design philosophy here.

Cavanagh wants to present you with a variety of genuinely difficult platforming puzzles, and let you get good enough to beat them. That should be hard, and it is. But all the stuff around that - moving around the map, re-trying really tough rooms until you get them right, finding the next area when it's time to move on - is so easy, so streamlined, that it just fades into the background so you can concentrate on the important parts. The game respects your time, and wants you to spend it exploring, learning, perfecting. Kieron Gillen over at RockPaperShotgun, when he wrote about the game, put it well: "Frustration isn't difficulty. Frustration is difficulty cut with boredom." For as hard as VVVVVV was at points, I was never frustrated with it. With myself, maybe. But the game was never unfair. Getting good enough to beat it - which I'm proud to say I did, with all 20 shiny trinkets - was still up to me, but it never hindered my doing so. It enabled me.

I should say that I do have some qualms about the game's price, but also that I feel somewhat bad about having them. In a world where Bioshock can sell for $5 on Steam in a holiday sale, or a few dollars can get you a 20- or 30-hour RPG on the iPhone, $15 for a game that intentionally looks like a Commodore 64 title might seem a bit much. It's closest logical contemporary - Braid - sells for $5 less, and is both much prettier and, I think, somewhat lengthier. (VVVVVV took me somewhere in the 4 to 5 hour vicinity to complete, leaving only the time trials and "beat the game in under <x> lives" challenges undone.) But honestly, can I complain too much about experiencing one of the hardest and yet most satisfying platformers I've played in years for less than the cost of a dinner out? I can't. There's some truly excellent - and devious - level design in VVVVVV, stuff I can't remember seeing in any other game before, and wrapping my head and fingers around it was a delight. I got more out of those 5 hours here than I've gotten out of 10 hours or more in longer games, and I couldn't put it down. It was worth every penny, and minute, I spent.

Go play the free demo (download, or playable in Flash). If you like it, buy it. I think you'll be happy you did.

The Best NES Game You Never Played?

I think it's probably the best one I never played, at any rate. "Gimmick" - or "Mr. Gimmick", as it was going to be known in the U.S. release that didn't happen - was made by Sunsoft, and came out in Japan in 1992 (Sunsoft also did the NES Batman and Blaster Master games, for some context). I had never even heard of the game until this week, but luckily, Frank Cifaldi over on the 1Up Retronauts Blog saw fit to change that with a very well annotated video walkthrough of the game.

It's remarkably impressive. In terms of visuals and audio, Gimmick stands comfortably above almost all of its contemporaries, partly thanks to special hardware manufactured into the cartridge. Its gameplay is 100% classic platformer, with a lot of extra touches [enemies with personality, remarkably consistent physics, brain teasing secret areas] that we usually only associate with first-party titles on Nintendo systems, and sometimes not even then. Had it been released stateside with some marketing support, I can't help but think it would've been a hit.

Sadly, of course, that didn't happen, but I'm glad at least that thanks to the internet this little gem hasn't been entirely lost. I've embedded Part 1 of the video walkthrough below, and the other 3 parts can be watched on YouTube by clicking the links that appear at the end of each segment. Spending a half hour watching somebody else play a 20-year old game might not sound very thrilling, but if you're at all interested in the history of game design, give it a shot. I suspect you'll be impressed.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 29

I can't pick just one for this week, folks. I can't. There's too much. Last week I mentioned that we might have to do another round-up style installment of Free and Worth Every Penny soon, and this week things hit critical mass. There are so many high quality free titles showing up out there right now, I can barely play them all! Which means I need your help. Let's get to work.

Every Day The Same Dream

Paolo Pedercini's "Every Day the Same Dream" has been written up everywhere from RockPaperShotgun to GamersWithJobs to Kotaku, and with good reason. Visually and musically distinctive, quick to play, and uniquely contemplative, it feels like a mixture of Jason Rohrer's Passage and Groundhog Day.

I realize that this means some of you will hate it.

But I really enjoyed my time with Every Day. The game presents you with a situation where your desire to break away from the world's constraints are shared by the character you control, and you have to figure out how to do that - or whether it's even possible - together. It's not a feel-good game, but it made me feel good about gaming.

Realm of the Mad God

Take a top down dual-stick (or in this case WASD+mouse) shooter. Now make it an 8-bit style RPG. Now make it a cooperative MMO. Now embed it in a webpage. Presto: you've got Realm of the Mad God.

Another product of TIGSource's competitive nature (in this case, their Assemblee Competition), Realm of the Mad God boasts a huge world to explore, hundreds of enemies to fight, items to collect, persistent character leveling, and a chat system (as if to further prove that even in a Flash-based game made for a forum competition, in an MMO, hell is other people). This one is brought to us by Rob & Alex of "Wild Shadow Studios", and you can read more about the game here.

GENETOS

Having been in development for at least a couple years now (I can find blog posts about it going back to 2007), and finally seeing a finished release late last month, GENETOS is the story of the shmup genre, told by Tatsuya Koyama in a shmup of his own. Start out in a distinctly Space Invaders-themed opening level, and make your way through the history of shmups all the way to the bullet hell pictured above, evolving your capabilities as you go.

I'm not a huge fan of shmup games, largely because I'm not terribly good at them, but I recently got addicted to Space Invaders: Infinity Gene on the iPhone, which uses almost exactly the same mechanic. I thought it was terribly clever, and was surprised to learn that Mr. Koyama had the same idea years ago, and executed on it admirably - and for free.

Unlike the last two, which were webgames, GENETOS is a Windows download of about 27MB.

Pixel Force - Left 4 Dead

Last one for this week - not because I don't have more, I do, but this is getting long. Besides, I don't want to overwhelm you. I want to let the zombies do that.

A "de-make" of the best zombie apocalypse simulator around, Pixel Force Left 4 Dead takes Bill, Louis, Francis and Zoey and tosses them back to the mid-80's to star in an NES-style version of the game we all know and love. All four of the campaigns are included, playable solo or in 2-player co-op. You'll also find the weapons you're used to, and the special infected you loathe, all modified to fit an 8-bit frame.

Some changes to the formula were obviously necessary - swarms of hundreds of zombies have been removed here in favor of slower, more deliberate gameplay, partly since you can only shoot in four directions, I'm sure (though holding down the fire button switches your movement to strafing, which is nice). But don't let yourself think that fewer zombies means it's going to be easy. None of the zombies go down in one hit anymore, and if they do swarm you, a speedy trip back to the last safe house is in store. Watch your back.

Pixel Force Left 4 Dead is also a Windows download, of about 20MB.

Before I go: Terry Cavanagh, author of Don't Look Back from the very first Free and Worth Every Penny installment, has released his first commercial title, VVVVVV. You can play the 2-level demo online at Kongregate, or download it and purchase it if you like at the official site. It's pretty goddamn brilliant.

That's it for this week, kids. Get gaming. See you next time.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Immortal Machines. This piece also appears there.

Bountiful Indeed.

If you're a fan of the Heroes of Might & Magicseries, you may know that its inspiration was a 1990 game by New World Computing called King's Bounty. You may also know that King's Bounty got a 2008 remake called King's Bounty: The Legend, and that it was very well received (because it's very, very good). You may also know that this year, King's Bounty: Armored Princess was released, a standalone expansion / sequel that reviewed similarly well.

If you have not yet played either or both of these, they are on sale right now in a pack from Steam for eleven dollars. That is completely insane. They can also be had for $5 and $10 respectively, if you already have one of the other.

These are widely regarded (rightly, from what I've played of The Legend) as some of the best fantasy strategy games of recent years, and they aren't going to get any cheaper or convenient than this. You're also getting a ton of game, for the price. Bill Harris really loved it, I recommend yougo read why if you're not sure whether or not you're interested. He says most of the stuff I would say about it, and probably better.

Seriously.

Just a quick note to let you know that if you're a PC gamer and have Steam installed, and you have any fond memories of first person shooters the way they used to be done - the DOOMs, the Duke Nukems (well, really just the one Duke Nukem...) - Serious Sam: Episode 1 HD is on sale this weekend for under $7 on Steam, and based on the couple of hours I've spent with it, it's worth checking out.

If you didn't play Serious Sam when it was new back in 2001, it was considered a throwback of sorts even then; it's a very different animal from what first person shooters have become. Serious Sam has no cover mechanic, no squad tactics. Most of the weapons don't even have a reload animation, because you just fire them until you're out of bullets. This is not a bad thing. This game is not about sophisticated AI (they're mostly completely braindead), or stealth, or careful aiming or ammo conservation. It's about being rushed by hundreds of enemies and frantically dodging while holding down the trigger until they stop coming.

In that respect, I suppose it might share more with Left 4 Dead than it does with any other modern shooter. But basically, Serious Sam has always been a revampedDOOM, and that's what it still is in this high-def update. They haven't changed the level design, or the bad guys, or the guns. What that leaves us with, though, is all the things that were great about Serious Sam 8 years ago - the crazy enemies, the over-the-top weapons, the absolutely huge outdoor environments - but with much prettier graphics, 16 player(!) online co-op, Steam achievements, Steam cloud support, and nicely implemented ragdoll physics. That's a formula you can't get anywhere else right now, and $7 is, I think, a very reasonable price. It looks good and runs like a dream on my not-top-of-the-line rig, and fighting through it with a friend is time and money well spent. If that sounds like your bag, you've got the rest of today to get it cheap before it goes back to $20 tomorrow.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 28

You know, to be honest, I was a little torn about what to bring out for this week's installment of Free and Worth Every Penny. I really enjoyed the multi-game roundup that Mike gave us for Christmas, and there's already been enough cool looking Flash stuff pulling my eyes to it since the first of the year that we could probably justify another one of those. But I'm going to hold off, let that simmer on the back burner for awhile and maybe let the best flavors rise to the top first. For now, let us look forward. Let us look to Spring.

It's crappy out right now. There's snow and sleet damn near everywhere, and it's cold, and everything's dead. But it won't be that way forever! No, the fine folks over at 2DBoy know better. (Yeah, mention the developers of World of Goo and suddenly I have your attention, don't I?) They know that soon, new plants will tentatively poke out of the soil, ready to stretch to the heavens, devouring people to feed themselves as they avoid falling, exploding rocks.

That doesn't sound like Spring, you say? How little you know. Enter:

Technically, Sunshine is the product of only half of 2DBoy - specifically, Kyle Gabler. Its connection to World of Goo, however, is clear the moment you begin playing. Gabler's visual style is immediately recognizable - which I suppose could be a negative if you aren't fond of it, but since I was a huge fan of the sights and sounds of World of Goo, I'm delighted to have even just a little bit more.

Posted over at the Experimental Gameplay Project (which Mr Gabler helped to create), Sunshine is a tiny prototype of a game, especially when compared to something like Goo, but it manages to pack quite a bit of addictive high-score chasing into a simple concept. Using the mouse, the player controls a vine reaching up from the ground to grow as tall as it can before it runs out of energy, which it continually loses as it grows.

Energy can only be replenished by sprouting flowers - which is to say, by using the mouse to draw loops around the tiny people falling constantly from the heavens like so many human Tetrominoes. Snag more than one at a time, and you're rewarded with a combo bonus and more energy. As you grow higher, the people begin falling faster, making it continually more difficult to keep your energy reserve filled.

In addition, you must deal with falling rocks (which look strangely like explosive mines, but hey, I'm already growing flowers by eating people here, so fine); let one of these hit you, and you're docked energy and points. You can defend against these rocks, however, by sending air bubbles up to catch them - make a loop without any people in it, and a giant bubble is sent skyward to ensnare any rock it intercepts. (Be aware, it'll also catch people, potentially robbing you of points.)

It isn't all that complicated, but there's just enough depth there to hook you for awhile as you try to best your high score with a taller vine and a higher combo count. In addition to the visual style for which 2DBoy so quickly became known, Sunshine's audio also lives up to Kyle's previous work, with delightful music and playful sounds.

Sunshine...

• reminds me of the tower mode of World of Goo, a bit.
• okay, obviously reminds me of World of Goo in several ways.
• still manages to stake out its own quirky identity.
• provided me with a good half hour of fun trying to improve my score.

A gameplay tip: I had much more success drawing tight vertical loops than horizontal ones. It seems the bigger a loop gets, the less likely the game will accept it and grant you flowers for it.

The download for Sunshine is a reasonable 10 MB, and runs on Windows. Go check it out here.

One more quick note before I go: The latest version of Spelunky is out, and you should go get it. If you somehow haven't played Spelunky yet, it's one of the best freeware games of last year (or any year), and you must. If there's ever a "freeware you need on every machine" FWEP feature, Spelunky will be on that list.

Okay, I'm done. Get on outta' here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Immortal Machines. This piece also appears there.

Some Links, Some Promises to Myself

Hello! My apologies for being absent for the last couple of weeks; my wife and I spent the Christmas holiday in Northern PA at the cabin her parents-in-law own, and while I did have internet access, all I had for gaming was my netbook, which honesty can't handle much more than some simple flash games, so I didn't have much exciting to say. I did find a few fun flash games to play, though, and I'll link to those shortly.

Before I get to that, though, mostly for my own edification, I want to make note of some of the excellent games I started and did not finish this year, in hopes that I will wrap them up early next year. They deserve to be seen through to the end.

• Batman: Arkham Asylum - The single best melee combat engine I've ever seen outside of a fighting game, hands down, wrapped up in an atmospheric and well-written game in the Batman franchise, of all places - a franchise known specifically for terrible games in almost every case. One of the best surprises of the year.
• Assassin's Creed II - This one has its hooks sunk deep in me right now, and I was playing it pretty much non-stop before we went on vacation. I'll be getting back into it starting tonight, and will probably wrap it up this week or next. I loved the first game, and while the sequel feels a little less focused, it also expands the fiction in some really neat ways I didn't expect, and gives you so much more to do (and so much of it enjoyable) that in every important way, it's an even better game.
• Torchlight (with at least one character class) - I've written a bunch about Torchlight already, and it's not the sort of game you really finish, but I should complete the main quest line with at least one character just to see everything it has to offer. I'm sure it's one I'll be going back to again, hopefully before the MMO counterpart arrives.
• Red Faction: Guerrilla - I have absolutely no interest in the plot of RFG, or the characters; all of that is generic in every way. But I have every interest in earning all of the upgrades to allow me to wreak havoc more effectively on every building erected on the Martian landscape. For my money, the best use of a physics engine in a game to date - yes, better than Half-Life 2.
• Dragon Age - Who am I kidding? I'm never going to finish Dragon Age. I sure would like to, though.
• New Super Mario Bros Wii - Meghan and I should have this wrapped up soon, at least in terms of beating the standard game. Whether we'll manage to collect every star coin or not, who can say, but it's already been a really fun ride and I'm looking forward to trying.
• The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks - I'm that guy who really liked Phantom Hourglass, even with its frequent trips to the Dungeon of Repetition, so making my way through Spirit Tracks (which has no such thing) is a no-brainer. I wish it didn't rely so heavily on the DS microphone, which I find finicky at best, but that won't keep me from finishing it.

Alright, that's already looking like a somewhat daunting list, especially considering that Red Steel 2 will be out early next year, along with a crop of other stuff I'm not even thinking about right now, so I'll stop there. If I can make it through most of that, I'll feel like I didn't do the games of 2009 too great an injustice.

If you want to hear me talk about some other games of the year, the most recent episode of the Immortal Machines podcast has, I think, some good discussion on the topic, and the one we just recorded last night about the completely insane sales Steam, Direct2Drive, etc have been running this month should also turn out worth a listen when it gets posted, so keep an eye out for it.

And now, for suffering through my rambling, your reward: if you haven't found these little time-wasters on some other corner of the Internet yet, consider them a late Christmas gift, and enjoy.

Santa Fu

A pretty hilarious re-skin of the NES classic Kung-Fu, this will probably only entertain you for 20 minutes (unless you really liked Kung-Fu, and hey, nothing wrong with that), but I think I can safely say it'll be a good 20 minutes.

Mountain Maniac

I wasn't aware that Adult Swim made videogames, but I guess when they're not making extremely inappropriate cartoons, this is what they do. Fine by me - two parts pachinko, one part Grand Theft Auto (well, just the part where you evade cops, really), Mountain Maniac sees you wreaking havoc on a mountain village by chucking boulders down from the peak. Strangely, more than anything else it reminded me of Atari's Crackpots, the game that probably cemented my hatred of spiders forever.

Goddamned spiders.

And finally, an oldie but goodie...

Winterbells

Pretty much everything over at Orisinal is delightful - they have a ton of very well crafted Flash games, and I recommend you check all of them out. They've been around for years, but surprisingly few people seem to know about them. For the season, though, Winterbells is a joy to play. Peaceful and relaxing, while still being challenging to the point of mild addiction. Don't worry, the bunny will be safe even if he falls.

To give credit where it's due, some of these gems were dug up by Mike Bellmore over at Immortal Machines, and I thank him for passing them along. I hope everybody has a great New Year's celebration this week; see you in 2010.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 25

Hey everybody! Usually, this is where I introduce a new freeware game to you, but this week I have a different idea: let's take a roadtrip. I mean, it's the holiday season, I'm sure we've all got vacation time saved up at work, or time off from school if that's your thing, and none of us are getting any younger.

I hear Oregon is nice this time of year. Yeah, Oregon! I've got this covered wagon sitting out back that isn't getting any use; we could hitch an ox or two to that thing and I bet we'd be there in only a few months. Sure, some of us will probably get dysentery, and fording some of those rivers can be a bitch, but once you get there... hunh. You know, actually, I never really thought about it, but once you get there, you're just in Oregon. I mean, you risked disease and death in a rickety stinking wagon for months, and you went to Oregon? Tell you what...

This is going to be a brief writeup, because there isn't a whole lot you need to know about F* Oregon, Let's Go Find El Dorado (which from this point on I will abbreviate as "So Long Oregon", which is what appears in the window title when you launch the game). It's the touching story of Pa, Ma, Boobell, John-Boy and Zeke - yes, really - a hapless wagon-bound crew desperately in need of your protection on their journey, which plays out very similarly to the quite familiar classic, Oregon Trail.

...Okay, that was obviously a complete and total lie. So Long Oregon plays out the way Oregon Trail might, if it were actually a reskinned version of Excitebike. A randomly generated set of mountains, towns, Indian villages and rivers present themselves on a scrolling track, across which you will haphazardly bounce your way to success or - much more likely - dismal failure.

Tipping your wagon upside down and being unable to right it again will lead to an injury for one of your family ("Pa has broken an arm!" or, much harder to connect with an upside-down wagon, "John-Boy has typhoid!"), but the absurd and hilarious physics engine ensures that your hundreds-of-miles-per-hour 720-degree flips will land on their wheels as often as not. Also hilarious: the oxen noises whenever your wagon has a particularly harsh landing, or hits an obstacle it can't surmount. Poor oxen. The towns, trading posts, etc along the way will help you... unless they don't. Survive long enough, and El Dorado awaits! Or so you've been told. I don't want to spoil what you'll find at the ending.

So Long Oregon was a competitor in the 16th Ludum Dare contest, in which a game must be entirely completed in 48 hours. It was the entry of Justin Smith ("crackerblocks"), who also wrote Enviro-Bear 2000 for TIGSource's Cockpit Compo, if you happened to catch that when the internet was giving it love earlier this year (and if you didn't, you should). Voting on Ludum Dare entries is currently ongoing, and I am not eligible to vote - only competitors are - but while I haven't played most of the other entries, I have to imagine this is a strong contender.

F* Oregon, Let's Go Find El Dorado is...

• absolutely ridiculous.
• good for several laughs.
• occasionally frustrating, but over too quickly for it to matter.
• a tiny download you should not miss, especially if you grew up playing Oregon Trail.

The download for this will only set you back a few MB - Windows only. Go check it out here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Immortal Machines. This piece also appears there.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 24

As gamers, it's understood that we usually sit down at our monitors, TV's, controllers, mice and keyboards looking for a challenge. We want to finish the level; conquer our neighbor; beat the boss; kill the bad guy; win the race; collect all the Pokemans; hit the level cap.

Video games have trained us to do these things from their earliest incarnation, and certainly many of the titles featured in Free and Worth Every Penny - especially recently - have been pretty challenging affairs. Between the frantic pace of RunMan and Igneous, the kill-or-be-killed Darwinism of Captain Forever, and the 8-bit punishment of Star Guard, I feel like maybe we all need to take five.

So let's relax. Sometimes all you want to do is be an elephant gardener, you know? ...Maybe you don't know. That's okay, that's why I'm here.

We've got another Digipen release for you this week, though compared to our last selection from them, it's a horse of a different color. Or rather, an elephant of many different colors.

Once upon a solemn day,
Rosie the elephant awoke in dismay.
Stumbling up from the cold barren ground,
She rubbed her eyes and peered all around.

Standing small, just ahead,
A tiny tree stood—not quite dead.
With nothing but raindrops and seeds at hand,
Young Rosie set out to bring life back to the land.

Kabloom presents the player (and Rosie) with a desolate wasteland, several barren islands floating in the sky, strung together by platforms and bridges. Only a tiny tree sits in the center of the largest island, and a single drop of water falls to terra firma, this strange and lonely land's last hope.

Using a basic but effective physics engine and some very straightforward controls, Rosie is tasked with turning this barren landscape into a teeming paradise of the player's design. Blowing water drops into trees causes them to grow; a large enough tree will drop a seed. Take the seed wherever you like and plant it, and a sapling sprouts, waiting to be watered so the cycle can repeat. Before long, empty dirt is replaced by waving grass and flowers, and majestic trees begin to produce fruit, the acquisition of which is the game's only tangible goal.

Now, to be honest, there isn't a whole lot to do aside from the mild exploration and the creativity of filling in the space, so it's a good thing that it's over pretty much whenever you want it to be. Collect one of each type of fruit, and you're done; this can take an hour or 10 minutes depending on how long you want to mess around. (A warning: the moment you've collected all the fruit, the game ends, so avoid doing that if you want to keep planting new trees.)

There isn't much else to say, really. Kabloom feels a bit like the FLUDD levels of Mario Sunshine, if only because of the spraying mechanic and the fact that you're taking something ugly and making it prettier, but the simpler, more accurate analogy is probably that of a coloring book: you are given a blank space, and you fill it with color as you see fit. It isn't demanding, isn't frustrating, isn't particularly goal-oriented. I played through the game twice, once very quickly and then again to make sure I'd seen everything, and while I probably won't go back I was glad for the experience. The five-man "Death of Games" team from Digipen clearly had free-form, player-directed gameplay as their design edict, but it is a shame their sandbox doesn't have more toys in it.

Kabloom is unquestionably a casual game, a short zenlike experiment of a title, and you could easily make the argument that it's more for your little sister or brother than for you, but I found it unique and enjoyable enough to share. This is neither a deep nor a difficult game, but it is a pleasant one. Sometimes I think that's good enough.

Kabloom is:

• charming and whimsical.
• leisurely paced.
• creatively engaging.
• over quickly, which would make me sad... if there were more there.

Kabloom is an 80MB download for Windows PC's - go check it out here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Immortal Machines. This piece also appears there.

I'm Sorry, Other Games.

I'm sorry, Dragon Age. I'm sorry, Left 4 Dead 2. I'm sorry, New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I'm sorry, Majesty 2. I'm sorry, Borderlands. I'm sorry, every other great game that I should be giving my attention to right now.

But the simple fact is that on Saturday morning, my resolve broke down and I picked up a copy of Assassin's Creed II. And as much as I may love you guys, none of you scratch quite the same itch as it does, and all of you will still be there in a week or two. In the last 2 days I've finished about 25% of the game, and - much like the first Assassin's Creed, which I loved - it looks like I'm probably just going to power through all the way to the end. (That's right, I loved the first game, the one everybody said was crap. So imagine how much I'm liking this one.)

And I guess I'm also sorry for anybody reading this, since the whole internet has already told you how good AC2 is and why, which means you certainly don't need me to. Go read what they said, it's all true. You should play this game.

What's also true, and what you might not have read too many other places, is that New Super Mario Bros. Wii may be the best same-screen multiplayer game since the 16-bit era. I plan to write about that soon, because I've also been playing that a lot - with my wife and her siblings over the Thanksgiving holiday and then more with my wife since then - and it deserves examining.

But right now, Ezio's almost ready to buy another upgrade for his villa, and those rooftops aren't going to run across themselves. Arrivederci.

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 22

It's Black Friday, and man do I have a deal for you. Just for reading this - just for being here - you get a game for FREE! For nothing. Nada. Zero dollars. Gratis. On the house. It's comped. And you didn't even have to get up at 4AM and wait in a big line! Do I know how to treat you guys or what?

It appears that I've been on a speed kick with my free games, of late. You may remember that in Issue 20, I brought you RunMan, the heartwarming story of a little star-shaped dude who wanted nothing more in the world than to run like the wind; to get the high score; to win the race.

Igneous, on the other hand, is a slightly less heartwarming but considerably more pulse-pounding story about a tiki totem who wakes up one day to find that his entire world is collapsing in fire and brimstone, and if he doesn't seriously book it, he is toast so move your ass. It's like RunMan, as directed by Michael Bay.

Whipped up by a group of seniors of the Digipen Institute of Technology (for more products of Digipen students, check here), Igneous is about tension, and panic, and looking really good, and sort of about physics, but primarily it's about speed. Out of control, oh-God-where-do-I-go-now, just-barely-surviving-each-jump speed. Did you play Mirror's Edge? (If not... play Mirror's Edge.) Remember the parts where Faith would be running from 20 soldiers, and a helicopter, and you knew that stopping meant instant death so you just threw caution to the wind and ran, taking each jump as it came and praying that you landed somewhere safe? Igneous is a whole game of just that. Those prone to anxiety need not apply.

If there's a distinct problem with this sort of level design, it's that it can become overwhelming. When everything is a huge overblown spectacle, overblown spectacle quickly loses its impact. Luckily, Igneous is polite enough not to overstay its welcome - it's a tasty dessert of a game, over after just three insane levels, leaving you perhaps not feeling exactly sated but definitely glad you indulged. The last level does lend itself a bit to requiring memorization, but with a game this short I can't really complain. "Normal" and "Impossible" difficulties are offered - on Normal, the game is lenient with letting your tiki make some missteps and still survive, but on Impossible, you'll need to be pretty much flawless, especially on the last stage.

A final note: this game is beautiful. Not "for a free game", just beautiful, period. Colored lighting and heat distortion are used to great effect to represent the crumbling volcano you're rushing through, and the physics system allows everything to fall apart around you, creating new paths and destroying old ones in an instant. Screenshots really can't do it justice; you should see this game in motion. The developers recommend an XBox 360 gamepad, as do I (sadly, other gamepads won't work unless you have key-mapping software), but mouse and keyboard can be used if that's what you have.

Igneous is:

• blazingly fast.
• incredibly pretty.
• quite the challenge, on "Impossible".
• a bit of a tech demo, but well worth your time.

Igneous is for Windows PC's - go check it out here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Immortal Machines. This piece also appears there.

Oh, I Really Want to Play Assassin's Creed II.

I was one of the people who loved the first Assassin's Creed. That game took a lot of crap for being too repetitive (which was a fair complaint) and for having a somewhat obtuse storyline and a not-super-likable main character (which didn't bother me as much), but I really enjoyed the repetitive things I was doing, so I didn't mind being asked to do them over and over.

The free-running and environment climbing was superbly done, and the combat was the most cinematic I'd seen in a game, bar none. I would get into fights just to watch the fantastic counter animations play out - and to feel like a badass, a feeling the game provided readily.

Assassin's Creed II appears to trump the first game in pretty much every possible way. The video below is lengthy, but if you have a half hour and any interest in the game, I recommend watching it. The guys over at Co-Op always put together a good show (you should go visit them over at Area5.tv, and subscribe in iTunes if you do that sort of thing), and this one is entirely focused on Ubisoft's newest entry in what will now, I'm sure, become a headline franchise for them.

So why am I not playing it? Largely because I'm stubborn. I have an XBox 360, but no HDTV yet. I played Assassin's Creed I on the PC, and it looked fantastic at 1280x1024. I want to play ACII the same way, but the PC version doesn't hit until March of 2010. March! So I'll probably bite the bullet and pick up the 360 version, but I haven't yet. In the meantime, I'll watch this video again. You should, too.

Get On The Bus

Already know what Desert Bus For Hope is?  Awesome, you can skip this post. It's going on right now, go give those guys a few bucks.

For the rest of you, if you've been reading about video games online for any significant length of time, you may well have heard of Desert Bus, the most (in)famous part of Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors minigame collection on Sega CD. If you haven't (and didn't immediately go read the Wikipedia page I just linked), here's the important bit:

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph. The feat requires 8 hours of continuous play to complete, since the game cannot be paused. The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other traffic on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends). Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance holds out. Some players who have completed the trip have also noted that, although the scenery never changes, a bug splats on the windscreen about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light does fade, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights.

It looks like this:

Obviously, it's a joke - a prank played on the player by a notorious set of tricksters. Nobody in their right mind who wasn't being paid to do it would sit for hours at a stretch, staring at an endless desert scrolling by their screen as they kept a virtual bus on an empty virtual road, right?

Well, as it turns out, torturing yourself is a pretty swell way to raise a bunch of money for charity.

The fine folks over at LoadingReadyRun (Canadian comedy troupe putting nerdy hilarity online since 2003) got the idea a couple of years ago to see if they could convince people to sponsor them to play Desert Bus, the way "normal" folks might get sponsored to run a marathon or dance all night in a gym somewhere for charity. All donations would go to Child's Play, which I won't describe in great detail right now but probably will eventually because it's amazing and inspiring. The more people donated, the longer they would play, 4 of them switching off, 24 hours a day until the money stopped. Thus began "Desert Bus For Hope."

The punchline: Year 1, they played for 4 days, 12 hours, and raised over $22,000. Year 2, they played for 5 days, 5 hours, and raised over $70,000. That's nearly $100,000 of charity for children's hospitals raised by a few arguably crazy Canadians with a website sitting around playing a game that barely even qualifies as a game. It's ridiculous, and sort of stupid, and awesome.

As I said at the top, Year 3 is currently in progress. They've been playing for about 1.5 days right now, and have raised about $28,500. Go check this thing out, and if you have the available income, make a donation of whatever size you're comfortable with. These guys may be nuts, but I can tell you firsthand that Child's Play is a worthy cause, and what they're doing is obviously just crazy enough to work.

A Musical Interlude

Sometimes the internet brings very incongruous things together. For example, there is a gentleman on YouTube who posts under the username "PoopPoopFart." It's a little hard to envision the circumstances under which one chooses that for a handle (perhaps we should pretend that he must have lost a bet, or something), but harder still to predict that among his videos would be lovingly crafted classical guitar renditions of Nintendo themes.

For your listening pleasure, Super Mario Brothers 2:

And the Overworld Theme from The Legend of Zelda:

Both lovely surprises to wake up to this morning, which I am doing quite late so I'd best go figure out how to get a jump on the day. Thanks to Violão de 8 Bits for pointing me to both of these videos - I highly recommend subscribing to their Twitter feed if you're on that service and this sort of thing is up your alley. I don't speak Portugese, but I do love classic game music, and they keep it coming.