We All Fall Down

Jam Together—Thinking Inside the Box

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

A medium goes through its phases. Generally it starts off piecemeal, little snippets of ideas that stand alone, each studying the nature of the medium. What’s possible? How do things look? How do people respond? Later the ideas coalesce into short subjects, often delivered through a reservation in some passing medium. Periodicals set aside pages for short stories. Networks set aside airtime for TV episodes.

Later, as the public becomes accustomed to format and language of the medium and as its authors start to understand its implications and potential, the ideas will get more complex and demand more room to develop. That extra room in turn demands new methods and understanding of the changed space and its implications for communicating. Thus we have long-form subjects — your novel and your Sistine Chapel and feature film and television serial.

Although videogames have been around for a few decades, they have spent about half of their active life spinning their wheels. Part of the problem, I think, is in the eagerness about twenty years ago to move on to long-form subjects before anyone really mastered the short form. If we’re to look to any model for a healthy development of what we now know about game design, that model might be the golden era of television.

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The Game-Maker Archive—Part 13: The World Wide Haystack

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by [name redacted]

Over time Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker may have become obscure, but in its time it was both progressive and widespread. From a small family business in New Hampshire, the software traveled to Russia, to South America, to Singapore, to Australia. It sometimes seemed that every other game was from a new country. This was before the Web, when consumer software spread through magazine advertisements and shareware spread through bulletin boards, so people had to spend some real effort to seek out the software and trade its games.

Then attention shifted to the Web, and those BBS archives started to gather dust. It’s kind of like moving to a new computer; you transfer the most relevant files, then leave everything else sitting around on your old hard drive. Maybe, months or years down the line, you will remember an old file or application and dig it up again. Mostly, you forget. Somehow, despite its pervasiveness in the BBS scene, Game-Maker never quite made that transition.

And yet because of that pervasiveness, you can find echoes of Game-Maker everywhere if you know how and where to look. The Web contains huge unfiltered archives of content gathered from bulletin boards, dumped either directly from those boards or from late-’90s software bundle CDs. Abandonware and DOS software archives, in languages from Russian to Esperanto, are dotted with Game-Maker games. You just need the right search keys.

Obviously it helps to know a game or publisher name. Failing that, you can recognize the Game-Maker file structure at a glance. Every game consists of an unusually large collection of raw data files — some combination of .PAL, .BBL, .CBL, .MBL, .CHR, .MON, .MAP, .SND, .GAM, .VOC, .CMF, .GIF, and .TXT files, with a handful of others. Furthermore, nearly every Game-Maker game contains a few common files: SNDBLAST.DRV, CONFIG.DAT, CONFIG.BAT, CONFIG.HLP, GMHELP.TXT. A few other files pop up frequently enough: GMTITLE.GIF, GMTITLE.CMF, GMSONG1.CMF.

Not every game you find will be a winner, but if you keep poking around you will find a few weird gems. Like, for instance…

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The Game-Maker Archive—Part 12: Cut-and-Paste Opportunism

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

For its time, Recreational Software Designs’ Game-Maker offered users the world over to put practice to their game design ambitions, within certain strict limitations. Mostly this ambition took on an informal shape. Users connected with each other through bulletin boards and shared ideas and resources. They explored how to subvert the engine’s limitations, and how to adapt their own wild ideas to practical realities. A few users, like Mark A. Janelle, took the business implications of shareware very seriously, while still contributing to the overall Game-Maker culture. Other users kind of took the engine and ran.

Instead of seeing Game-Maker an opportunity to explore game design and to make social connections without any of the usual hurdles, they saw it as an opportunity to turn around a quick profit with a minimum of investment. Although I admire a certain ambition, I’m not sure if Game-Maker was really the best tool for the job.

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Nitrome makes you Worm Food

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Not to be mistaken for Unnatural Selection, Fault Line creator Nitrome has unleashed its own subversive worm-based browser game. This one, though, takes more of an arcade route and seems to follow the example of Taito’s Syvalion. Mechanically, it seems to; thematically, it’s… you know those old 8-bit games based on horror movies that got flak because you played as Leatherface or Freddy Krueger? Imagine a game like that, based on Tremors.

In Worm Food you play as a ravenous sand worm. Left and right turn; up speeds up; down speeds down. You can burrow through dirt and swim through water. Doing either speeds you up. You can also use your momentum to burst through and leap into the air. The goal is to gobble up as many villagers as possible within the alloted time, and maybe smash as much as you can along the way. As you progress the game introduces new twists, including spike traps, bottomless pits, and impassible stone walls.

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Theta Games paints the world Orange

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Orange, from Ceramic Shooter: Electronic Poem and Composition Piece developer Theta Games, is kind of like Ed Logg’s Asteroids, if instead of clearing away hunks of space rock you were being set upon by the Blob. That said, it controls more like Robotron — or indeed Echoes. The game also supports mouse aiming, which is probably the way to go.

The storyline sets you, essentially, in the Vietnam War. The amorphous mass that threatens to smother the player’s ship is supposed to be analogous to the jungle, and the player’s shots analogous to agent orange. The game is set to a tranquil soundtrack, though at times becomes tense as the screen chokes up with obstacles.

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Pigeon Racing sends Tipp topsy-turvy

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Courtesy of the mysterious Tipp and the same game jam that brought us Whale of Noise, we have this bonkers party game.

Pigeon Racing might best be described as multiplayer NiGHTS by way of Cactus. It’s an aerial racer supporting up to four players. Player one uses the arrow keys; player two claims WASD; player three, IJKL; and player four is on the keypad with 5123. For any of the players, left and right spin the entire screen; up flies; and down, well, defecates. The game supports computer rivals, and allows the player to set laps before playing. Hit the rings to propel yourself forward and get a score bonus.

The most remarkable element here is the presentation. The game looks and sounds like an assembly demo from the mid-1990s. Even if you’re prepared, it takes a few minutes to adjust to the screen’s motion. Once you have found your gyroscope the controls are responsive and fluid. It’s just a bit of a mental overload.

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Kloonigames Cuts It Out

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You probably know Kloonigames from Crayon Physics. So hey, here’s a pseudo-sequel called Cut It. As with the original Crayon Physics, and indeed most of Petri Purho’s games, Cut It is brief, simple, a bit tenuous-feeling. It’s more a rough idea of a game than a complete and polished project. Then again, that’s the idea behind Kloonigames.

At least once a month, Purho makes a new game. Every game takes seven days to make. He’s been doing this for a while now, and has built up a large and varied back catalog. The point isn’t polish; it’s to throw new ideas at the wall and see what patterns they make. Sometimes, as with Crayon Physics or Sticky Notes Shooter, they’re remarkably inventive. Other times, as with The Truth About Game Development or Grammar Nazi, it’s more chin-stroke fare.

Rough as it may be, Cut It fits in the first category.

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Fishbane Puzzles Absolutely

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Probability 0 designer Alexander “Droqen” Martin has developed a new puzzle platformer for Newgrounds. Fishbane is a little like Miles Drummond’s Jigsaw, except weirder, tougher, and stricter.

You play as… I guess a diver guy, throwing harpoons at walls and collecting incidental goldfish. At the end of every level is a golden harpoon; snag it to move on. The main mechanic involves the harpoon; lodged in a wall, you can use it to clamber up and over surfaces. If you run and jump on the harpoon in mid-air, you can ride it like a broom. The levels will introduce gizmos and complications, but these are the basics.

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Primrose DSi now available

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Jason Rohrer, of all unlikely yet worthy candidates, has been making a few recent motions to the mainstream, with a DSiWare anthology of his early art-narrative games and a hugely successful pay-what-you-want sale for Sleep is Death.

A couple of months ago the Latin America-based Sabarasa Inc. announced, alongside the aforementioned anthology, a DSiWare port of Rohrer’s iPhone puzzle game, Primrose. That port has now materialized.

The game is a bit like a single-player Go or Othello, in that it involves surrounding tiles with tiles of an alternative color. The developer describes Primrose as a relaxing, free-form experience.

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Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part Four: Gobble Gobble

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by [redacted]

To bring you up to speed, in 1976 Breakout came along to refocus Pong as a single-player experience, to redefine the videogame in terms of the player’s relationship with the gameworld, and to inject a remedial sense of narrative.

This had profound effects technologically, in terms of design theory, and in terms of the narrative application of videogames. Three threads would arise: the home PC, and two distinct schools of design; one focused more on the the pure theory, and one more on the storytelling potential of the form.

Two years later, Space Invaders reinvented Breakout as a tense battle between the lonely individual and inevitable doom from above. Suddenly players could reach out and touch the targets, and it mattered if they did. Add in a high score table, and a cultural phenomenon was born. Arcades were established just to fill with this one game. The videogame had become a summer blockbuster, its audience’s emotions and impulses carefully orchestrated for word-of-mouth and return visits.

Yet all was not well. Just as Pong had enjoyed several years as the generic videogame, overnight Space Invaders became the only game in town. Every game on the market, from Galaxian to Radar Scope, was an Invaders clone. And yet its appeal was not universal. Somehow, as the young Toru Iwatani observed, those dingy, smoke-filled arcades were filled entirely with socially-inept males. Furthermore, the game’s bleak tone and the mental state it aroused through constant repetition was a bit worrisome.

Clearly there was something wrong with this picture, and Iwatani set to figuring it out.

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Crack Versus Rift

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Amy Pond is a less developed, less well-performed version of Gwen Cooper. Same character; less charisma. Curious note, then — the romantic situation. Doofy, loyal boyfriend and later husband who is probably the most sympathetic character on the show even as his woman goes around, eyeing up whoever she fancies (particularly the male lead). Name: R. Williams.

Crackles in the Dark

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Another excised bit that I might as well post here. Unsure if I’ve blogged about this before, though I’ve certainly mentioned it to everyone under the sun. So here it is for posterity.

*   *   *

Imagine a proper remake of Metroid II that focuses on the confusion and nervousness of being stuck down a dark, claustrophobic hole where everything looks the same and you can’t see more than a couple of yards in any direction. That’s the way the Game Boy game plays, and that’s why it has always felt the most emotionally authentic game in the series. It’s the limitations of the hardware that lend the game its power. Fan remakes always focus on making the game exactly like Super Metroid except with different levels.

The Jagged Edge of Perception

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

In real life, the edges of perception are where everything starts to kick in. Across that threshold is where our minds and our emotions run away with themselves, struggling to fill in the missing details and so make sense of the world. This is the realm of the uncanny, where objects materialize out of blind spots and scare the wits out of us, where spirits and monsters threaten to live, where optical illusions and magic tricks make us question what we know of the world. It’s these moments that suggest to us that there’s more to life than we’ve been led to understand. How we respond to that notion depends partially on our own personalities, and partially on the context.

Likewise, even in the closed system of a videogame there is only so much that a designer can draw, and only so many variables that a designer can define. Even in the simplest games it’s tough to account for everything and simple for the player to find a thread to pick away at — say, a seam in the geometry or a weird bit of physics. And then the more possibilities that you suggest, the more that the mind will begin to drift and wonder what else is out there, what else is possible.

Technical limitations also play a role, in that they draw a certain line over which the world cannot possibly exist. When the game presses up against those limitations, as in a late-era console game — your Streets of Rage III, your Silent Hill — you get a certain crackly pressure. Subconsciously you can feel the game straining to make its case, due to the mismatch of the game’s idea of reality and the reality imposed on the game by the hardware.

The NES is a fun object lesson, as from the moment it hit US shores it was outdated, its games bending the rules all over the place just to exist. On its own the NES isn’t all that much stronger than, say, a Colecovision. Every new feature that came along — horizontal scrolling, vertical scrolling, cutscenes — meant more custom memory chips. By the early ’90s the average NES cartridge was practically a console in itself; the NES itself acted more as a copy-editor, checking to make sure the input made sense then passing it along to the TV screen. So for most of its life, just about every game for the system has an unnerving glitchiness just under the skin, threatening to break loose and disrupt its carefully argued reality. Sometimes, as in Metroid, those glitches become as much a part of the game as the intended rules, suggesting untold depths that perhaps nobody has ever explored before.

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Shoot First Rocks Your Noggin

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Shoot First is, officially, a “co-op Action Roguelike” by the creator of Action Fist, Beau. If Desktop Dungeons is a cross between Nethack and Minesweeper, Shoot First is a cross between Nethack and the overhead-view stages of Super Contra.

The presentation is dusted with artifacts of retro glam grime. The simple three-button controls (shoot, strafe/use/pick up, and map) are snappy and responsive. Collisions and sound effects are crunchy and squelchy. On a superficial level it’s all very cozy and warm to sink into. Scattered in treasure chests are equipment and various weapons, each with its own uses. As you shoot enemies and collect stuff, your character levels up. As you level up, your weapons upgrade in various ways. Also along the way you can find or rescue followers, who trail after you and mimic your actions rather like Gradius Options.

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Illuminator a Flash of Brilliance

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Logan Ames‘ Illuminator is a side-scrolling survival horror game, which for no particular reason reminds me of Sega’s Ghost House.

You start off in an empty, darkened house, armed with nothing but a flashlight. Flick on the light, and the path before you explodes with brightness. After a few seconds, the light fades and you need to recharge the batteries. Eventually you will start to encounter ghouls. Avoid them until your light is charged, then melt them with a bright flash. As you disintegrate the ghouls, the stitches in a tear in the fabric of reality begin to unravel. Defeat enough ghouls and you can pass through a starry void to the next house.

Along the way you will find night lights, Christmas tree lights, and so on. Plug them in, flick on televisions, and keep an eye on open windows to give yourself forewarning of ghoul attacks. There’s a helpful sound effect and flashing icon to let you know when you’re near a wall outlet.

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