Offworld's Notes
Penny Arcade has a video channel. Watching the lads is interesting, especially the mini-documentary, a super intro to their play-work.
For all the things the indies are able to do best -- experiment wildly and allow themselves the infinite creative freedom that otherwise gives stockholders the chilled sweats -- one of their greatest assets is the element of surprise.
Unlike the managed valleys and troughs of the four-year-dev-time hype-cycles, fantastic and wholly unexpected indie games pop up weekly and continually knock us flat on our backs. And so, choosing a list of the games we look forward to the most in 2010 is somewhat a fool's errand, as you honestly never know when another Canabalt is going to land from nowhere in a blinding flash.
But still, there are enough higher-ambition titles -- especially for indies making their bigger-budget forays onto consoles -- that deserve more attention to make this round-up necessary, so find below ten of the games (of a much larger field about which we know even less: I'm looking at you Bit.Trip: Runner) that you'll likely be hearing much more about in the months ahead, as their gestation periods finally end.
DeathSpank [Hothead, PC/PS3/Xbox 360]
Hopes are high for Penny Arcade Adventures dev Hothead's upcoming DeathSpank to be the Brutal Legend of 2010, not for its mechanical or thematic similarities, but rather its pedigree.
The game marks the return of original grump Ron Gilbert, creator of LucasArts classics Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, leading this loot-packing Diablo-esque action/RPG crossed with, well, genuine humor, still one of the things games desperately need more of.
Fez [Polytron, Xbox Live Arcade]
The excitement for Fez isn't just based on its inimitable style or perspective-shifting basics, though both obviously help: in helping to debut the game at Austin GDC I got a much longer look at the progress it's made since its Independent Games Festival debut and couldn't be more excited for the direction it's headed and the aspects yet to be revealed.
Though similarities to Super Paper Mario's dimensional shifts are still being drawn elsewhere, Fez does far more with its z-axis than anyone before has dared, making progress through its world directly reliant on cutting a path through each of its four sides.
Joe Danger [Hello Games, platform TBD]
UK upstart Hello Games came out of nowhere in 2009 -- well, not nowhere, their Voltron-like team is formed of former Kuju and Criterion leads on games like Burnout 3, Black, Geometry Wars Galaxies and Sega Superstars Tennis -- and their indie debut game Joe Danger rose meteorically to many top most wanted lists, especially after its debut at Eurogamer's 2009 Expo (from which the video above was leaked).
Forget the recent World Rally WiiWare remake: Joe Danger is the 21st century Excitebike we didn't know we wanted, with a gorgeous toy-like blue-sky aesthetic and a firm handle on stunt- and trick-jumping that rivals even Trials HD for expert handling.
NightSky [Nicalis, WiiWare]
Apparently lost in deep-sleep stasis somewhere in a cryo chamber hidden deep within Nintendo, NightSky should have been one of 2009's best, but -- with any luck -- will move on to top 2010 lists.
As good a bedtime-story game as we'll probably ever get, NightSky comes from Nicklas 'Nifflas' Nygren -- the same Knytt creator that only weeks ago surprised debuted best-of-2009 champ Saira.
With a firm focus on more physics-based platforming and an entirely original approach to What Game Music Can Be -- the lullabies here provided by Chris Schlarb (part of Sufjan Stevens' indie music collective Asthmatic Kitty) -- NightSky's set to be an instant WiiWare classic, if it could only let itself actually emerge.
Quarrel [Denki, Xbox Live Arcade]
It'll be hard to tell from simply the screenshot above what to expect from Quarrel, and even if I then go on to explain that it's at heart a competitive word game, you might be forgiven for giving it the same pass as you rightly did a number of the lower-shelf family games that were released to no fanfare on Xbox Live Arcade this year.
But this one -- be assured! -- is different. Not just because of the team behind it -- though Denki head Gary Penn has more than proved himself over the years with design credits on the original Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown -- but for the game's more strategic underpinnings, where the actual competitive word battles are simply its substitute for combat in a larger land-grab conquest (which you see above: think DiceWars). Fast-paced, instantly approachable, and considerably and considerately iterated on for the better part of a year, Quarrel is already set to be a game worth yelling about.
Diamond Trust [Jason Rohrer, DS]
It was the least likely design doc surprise of 2009, as Jason Rohrer -- solo dev behind reigning art-game-champ Passage and the Esquire-curated (?!) game Between -- announced he was partnering with casual publisher Majesco to create a DS game based on "diamond trading in Angola on the eve of the passage of the Kimberly Process."
We've only seen the recently released scraps of screenshots (well, and a chick-pea and penny based prototype), but the blood diamond trade is nothing if not a, well, diamond mine of strategic, socio-political, and potential emotional depth, and there are few people other than Rohrer that I'd trust to smartly interpret that in interactive form.
Scott Pilgrim [Ubisoft, platform TBD]
Here's the wildcard of the bunch: we don't really know what Ubisoft's got up its sleeve for the game based on Canadian comic artist Bryan Lee O'Malley's cult hit comic book series, but what we do know is that there is nothing in Scott Pilgrim's already deeply videogame-influenced world that shouldn't perfectly translate into one itself.
Deep-Throat rumblings about some of the cherry-picked team behind the game have bolstered some extra high hopes that this won't just be a quick cash-in tie-in with Edgar Wright's film adaptation (itself my most anticipated movie of 2010), but with nothing publicly said about the game other than their intention to create it and continual consultation with O'Malley himself, there's nothing much to do in the meantime but scrunch your eyes up tight and hope.
Spelunky [Mossmouth, Xbox Live Arcade]
You say: "God, Spelunky again?" I say: absolutely. Even though we've already spent all of 2009 plumbing its procedurally generated depths -- over, and over, and over, and over -- on PC, the forthcoming console port of Derek Yu's retro-platformer is worth watching for all the ways in which it won't be a port.
Yu's already recently explained that at least graphically, the Xbox 360 version will be a much different beast, relying on a more painterly approach akin to his work on Aquaria, and in general seems to be hinting that it holds other experimental surprises that will separate it from the freeware version it was branched from. To say nothing of the simple fact that now it's Spelunky in our living rooms! Over, and over, and over, and over.
Super Meat Boy [Team Meat, WiiWare]
There's nothing necessarily experimental about Team Meat's super-charged console port of their free Flash original Meat Boy: it's just old-school white-knuckle challenge-based platforming done gloriously right.
The Meat boys are determined not to make any concessions to the white-livered weaker players among us: having run through its first world, I can assure you that there's essentially no such thing as a safe landing in any of Meat Boy's levels until you've reached the end.
It'll be the visceral thrill that separates -- I don't know, the prime cuts from the grist -- and also, unrelatedly, will likely be the most indie-all-star jam packed game of the year, with cameo appearances already assured from Braid star Tim, Bit.Trip protagonist Commander Video, and The Behemoth's original Alien Hominid.
Zangeki no Reginleiv [Sandlot, Wii]
This list was almost entirely conceived to give proper due to this game, which might be completely unfair as it still hasn't been confirmed for a Western release. On the surface it might appear to be any other word-jumble from the subset of Japanese gaming that only two small handfuls of obsessive sub-culture fans in the West can appreciate, but again, let me assure you this is different.
I know this, having seen only as much as the trailer above, because I know developer Sandlot: or rather, I know they are the team behind the jaw-droppingly brilliant and desperately under-appreciated Earth Defense Force games (only one of which has made it to the States as the Xbox 360's Earth Defense Force 2017 -- you can find it for about $10 now and you need to purchase it immediately. Europe was luckier to have received its even more necessary PlayStation 2 prequels).
Originally devised as cheap budget thrills, the EDF series is a fantastically simple setup: choose two guns, shoot at about thirty billion cut-and-paste stock-3D-model giant ants and spiders that all swarm at you at once. But it works, better than you'd ever dream, the true gamer's game.
And then comes Reginleiv, which takes that same formula and substitutes in Norse mythology for all the future-alien-invasion b-movie tropes, hands you swords to Wii-mote slash on top of the firearm stock (here represent, of course, by "magic"), but leaves in all of the overwhelming and beelining enemy forces and, best, the towering demigods (which you can get a better taste of via this too-short earlier video teaser).
Nintendo obviously has higher hopes for this one than all of the budget publishers before have had for their previous works -- they're publishing it themselves in Japan -- and with more ambitious co-op play, this will be the year's biggest tragedy if we don't see it make its way West-ward.
Like a mostly monochromatic mix of Jason Rohrer's memento mori game Passage and Nintendo's Zelda entry Majora's Mask, Every Day The Same Dream -- the latest game from Faith Fighter and McDonald's Videogame creator Molleindustria -- plays at issues of lives led in quiet, soul-sapping desperation by forcing you to subvert your own easy routines.
Created in less than a week as an "Art Game" entry for the ongoing Experimental Gameplay Project (the same that's spawned Canabalt, MinMe and, in its original form, the prototype for World of Goo), Same Dream is as stylish as it is somber, even if it is punctuated by brief bursts of hopefulness and player-led humor.
I won't spoil the ending (except to say that it's not half as powerful as the final lead-up to it) -- and yes, it does have an ending -- but it comes fully loaded with a gut-punch for anyone who has been or is currently a wage-slave office drone, and is already a pretty clear frontrunner for the indie release of the week.
Play it online here, or download a PC and Mac version by scrolling to the bottom.
Previously:- Twisted game simulates running McDonald's - Boing Boing
- Games to subvert post-industrial capitalism - Boing Boing
- Free Culture Flash game - Boing Boing
Wired's Clive Thompson on why Duke Nukem Forever absorbed 12 years of development time before its inevitable cancelation: because creator George Broussard forever obsessed over incorporating the latest graphical technology, generating an endless treadmill of upgrades.
It may seem arbitrary lumping the indies and the iPhone together for the second half of this feature on the best games of 2009 (which previously ran down the best retail console and handheld games of 2009), but this year more than ever the lines between the two blurred, as the App Store continued to evolve into a marketplace second only to the web where a one-person team has as equal a chance for success as the biggest publishers in the business.
Granted, that chance still continues to be "slim", and most recently the tides have been turning slightly to top-seller lists reading more like those you'd find on the DS and PSP, but nearly all the iPhone games on this list earned critical praise and top slots in the charts with marketing staff and budgets approaching zero.
Still, I wish this list could be longer. Even moreso than the first half of this feature, where the best games left off the list were the ones that were called out as the year's finest nearly everywhere else, the selections that didn't make the cut here were still at the top of their game.
Releases like the Bit.Trip games, LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias, Bonsai Barber, Words With Friends and reams of other iPhone games (as I've been continuing to cover weekly), and especially Spelunky (which technically is a late 2008 release, though it didn't progress to truly sublime until a few months later) all deserve their high praise.
So then below, the best web, PC, Mac, and iPhone games -- freeware, commercial, and uniquely otherwise -- that sprang from the best of the indie community this year.
Canabalt [AdamAtomic, web/iPhone, App Store link]
Canabalt will probably be the least obscure name on this list, not least for its repeat coverage here in recent months, and in the frequent high-score updates you'll have no doubt spotted in your friends' twitter feeds.
Adam 'Atomic' Saltsman's one-button game was one of the truest "sensations" this year: launched in late August as a knocked-out five-day experiment which took instant storm, leading to fast lessons in social add-on integration and an equally fast but even more compulsive iPhone port, culminating in this week's release of a newly enhanced version, adding more obstacles and more of composer Danny Baranowsky's music, and formalizing an official leaderboard for the game.
And the success of Canabalt simply as a well-designed game was just part of the story: just as interesting was how in that span of time the community truly made the game its own, spawning not one but two fan-made Twitter-scraping leaderboards. Also worth note was Saltsman's decision to not succumb to the 99 cent pressures of the App Store, a move he expounded on at length here, and hopefully one that helps inspire other iPhone developers to move the device toward a more sustainable economy.
Previously:- The Running Man: behind the sketchbooks of Adam Saltsman's ...
- My generation: How Indie Game Makers are Embracing Controlled ...
Captain Forever/Successor [Farbs, web]
You'll be forgiven if Captain Forever's willfully obscure homepage layout led to some blank stares, but it's all in the name of maintaining the underlying 80s-star-pilot narrative that literally binds you (via your webcam) to the seat of your ship.
It's this retro aesthetic and anachronistic faux-command-line inconvenience that helped make Forever a year-topper for many indie devs themselves, but even moreso the way developer Farbs has given his players a window into a so-far limitless universe and asked only that they create something beautiful and deadly.
And its clear that he has no intention of letting Forever slip quietly off the edge of that universe: taking smart cues from the MMO sphere and other online successes like Valve's ever-evolving Team Fortress 2, Farbs is building up his Captain as a brand, charging a project wide 'supporter fee' (which gets you early access to new versions of the game, like the recently upgraded Successor) rather than a per-copy asking price, allowing him to monetize development as he steers the ship in newer and more complex directions.
It's an incredibly strong indie-career starter from someone who less than nine months ago made the leap from full time gainful employment (announcing the departure to his employer, you'll recall, via a version of Super Mario Bros), and one of the projects I'm most anxious to see where it's headed next.
Drop7 [area/code, iPhone, App Store link]
You've either never played Drop7 or the mere mention of its name sends nic-fit twinges through your spine. There is, I've found, no middle ground. One of the year's first best games, Drop7's lethal addictiveness spread throughout the year, aided by late Spring Facebook integration, and since that time I haven't met a single person who didn't follow up "yeah, I've played it," with lengthy praise/condemnation for how much they've played it.
Many games lay claim over the 'minutes to learn/lifetime to master' claim, but Drop7 actually deserves it -- its balance of strategy and randomness is what gives it its compulsive charm, even after a daunting first few minutes struggling with its wholly original numerical premise.
If you haven't played it yet (and if you lack an iPhone, its original incarnation as a web-based TV series tie-in is still available), by all means go, but go warned.
Eliss [Steph Thirion, iPhone, App Store link]
Eliss, like Drop7 and Canabalt, is another name I've been tirelessly repeating throughout the year, and it's rightfully earned its place as one of the App Store's best for perfectly encompassing what it means to be an iPhone game.
It did that as one of the device's first true multi-touch games, and by seemingly effortlessly giving us a sense of style -- in its entirely original graphical/musical aesthetic -- that, especially at the time, was leagues above the App Store's standard fare of pastel-shaded and casual-focused design.
For as much as the iPhone has earned a reputation as a present from the future dropped in our hands (a feeling I know I still get navigating any foreign city with it constantly at my side), Eliss should be its ubiquitous Minesweeper: a curious concoction of accessible play and alien origin, unlike any other game and baffling precisely because of its uniqueness, and destined to be the standard of tomorrow.
Glum Buster [CosMind, PC]
Developer Justin 'CosMind' Leingang's labor of love (slaved on for years during off hours while creating similarly overlooked and forward thinking games like the DS's wifi-signal-collector Treasure World) still hasn't quite earned the reputation it deserves but stands as one of the year's best surrealist short stories.
As I've said before, part of that could be in its staunch refusal to speak in the language that game players have grown accustom to: entering its world means learning how to communicate all over again, even if its goals and navigation feel like standard platforming fare.
But that's precisely what gives it its magic, and a thrill of exploration that comes not just from the sights you'll see, but the way you'll interact with its inhabitants. It's an adventure into weird worlds, and its an experience that still begs for more careful attention.
Machinarium [Amanita, PC/Mac]
Long-time followers of Amanita's work wouldn't have been surprised that Machinarium ended up as one of the year's best: studio founder Jakub Dvorský has proved and re-proved himself as a creator that sees -- and constructs -- realities unlike any other, via his original cult hit Samorost, its commercial sequel, and a set of other short-form commissioned side projects.
What was surprising is in how much more rich its interactions were: gone were the simple pixel-hunt-and-click-to-mo
One of the few developers left keeping the point and click torch lit, Amanita -- in an ideal world -- gave a new generation a taste of what it was that lends warm nostalgia to our own pasts.
Previously:- Everything but the Game: Behind the Sketchpad of Amanita's point ...
- Keeping Point-and-Click Adventures Alive - Boing Boing
Rolando 2 [Hand Circus, iPhone, App Store link]
Hand Circus's followup to its landmark original -- one of the first iPhone games that caused the wider industry to sit up and take notice of the device as a true competitor -- stands a bit at odds with the rest of the games on this list, if only for how blindingly polished it feels next to the scrappy, experimental set aside it.
And that's certainly not without good reason: publisher ngmoco was surely dead set on giving the indie dev the time and resources it needed to deliver a game that looked and felt like it could stand next to those on handheld gaming's more established hardware, and on all counts it did.
For every part that felt slightly safer than its prequel, that formula felt doubly refined. It was smarter, flashier, and hit all the right notes that should have made it the iPhone's signature mascot platformer franchise, its Mario or Sonic -- should the studio continue to go down that natural path.
Saira [Nifflas, PC]
And then, from nowhere, came Saira. Making a surprise touchdown on PC just days ago (after originally being teased as a potential WiiWare game from the same team that are working on the console's gorgeously serene bedtime-story platformer NightSky), it didn't take long to recognize that it was going to leave a mark on the year longer than the year's last few weeks would otherwise allow it.
Part of that was simply the developer's legacy: Sweden's Nicklas 'Nifflas' Nygren is among the highest regarded indie dev within the community for his work on the Knytt series, a freeware franchise of tiny (by pixel count) worlds that are as stunningly expressive and atmospheric as they are austere (think: the lonely landscapes of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus creator Fumito Ueda).
And unlike the more physics-based puzzling of NightSky (Knytt's true chronological successor, but still maddeningly yet unavailable), Saira stays very close to Knytt's formula of exploiting the basic joys of exploration, and ups the ante considerably by connecting all those worlds via starships (with, wonderfully and unexpectedly, an onboard-playable pinball machine) and by introducing a photo mechanic that sees you hunting for clues in the landscape itself that are later used to unlock planetary defense mechanisms and allow you deeper into its twisting caverns.
With everyone still caught off guard and dazed by its sudden appearance, it's a game you should be hearing much more about in the coming weeks, as the holidays settle and everyone returns with reports on how it was the best way they spent their 2009 Christmas vacation.
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [Tiger Style, iPhone, App Store link]
Like Eliss, Spider is the perfect example of the type of game that should be dominating the App Store: a brilliantly crafted mix of arcade overtones tooled specifically for the device (its flick-jump alone remains one of the year's best character control schemes), a beautifully vintage children's book style that instantly set it apart, and, at its core, a mature story that reclined quietly and let players ask all the questions of it rather than imposing itself on you.
Happily, it did enjoy the chart-topping success it deserved for a time, lending a sliver of hope that iPhone development does reward more than the lowest common denominator, and is always patiently waiting for something smarter to come along -- a sentiment that hopefully will be stirred again when the Tiger Style team release their upcoming 'Director's Cut' update and move on to whatever love letters they've got squirreled away in the dark corners of their future.
Windosill [Vectorpark, PC/Mac/web]
And finally, Windosill shares an important trait with a number of other entries on this list: it let us explore the make-up of a world entirely unlike our own and entirely representative of its sole creator, here multimedia/interactive artist Patrick 'Vectorpark' Smith.
Unlike those other surrealities, though, Windosill is made up of some manner of mathematical magic that lends a truly remarkable tangibility to its unearthly toy-box components. Even its most bizarre creations move as they "should", react believably to our prods and pokes, and, at their best, seem so alive and driven by a spirit of their own that it feels unfathomable that they're the product of code alone.
All of these are, of course, Vectorpark hallmarks, and have earned him his reputation over the past several years, but Windosill was important for promoting his work beyond the usual interactive/Flash appreciators and into the wider gaming sphere -- so much so that the game landed Smith his debut on no less a mass-market service than Valve's Steam, momentum that we can only hope will be carried through into the new year.
Allow me to dive in over my head here-- countless BB readers know way more about games than I do, and I want to learn from them/you. I'm fascinated at how complexity emerges from certain initial conditions, and independent actors competing within those conditions-- i.e. from a game's rules and its players. It's a magic meta-formula that underlies a zillion things.
Some day we may discover a formal test for playability-- whether a setup will go nowhere or explode into interestingness. (Which is probably also a function of mental capacity-- a greater intelligence might find chess as boring as we find Tic-Tac-Toe.) If and when these meta-rules are understood, and we can do things like simulate evolution to levels of real-life complexity, it should convince at least a few more evolution deniers. In Darwin's day, when timekeeping was a leading geek-magnet, theologists described God as the Great Watchmaker. If there is a God, I think "The Great Game Designer" would be more accurate.
I'm mainly talking about paper games here. In the same way that mathematical formulas distill and express universal laws of nature, simple board/card games capture essential social phenomena-- this is a major avenue of research in Economics right? Is there a game like "Monopoly" that distills the phenomenon of an investment bubble growing and bursting? Or a game in which competition between players creates an ever-expanding complex that grows to require all available resources, and constantly presses to extract more? If so, the rules of this game should inform legislation that might increase the efficiency of medical insurers, military contractors, and the like (which is what competition is supposed to do, but in these cases, there seems to be a rule or two missing that takes the systems into another direction).
There are many phenomena I would love to see or come up with essentializing games for, and most of them seem to fall under the categories of consensus, hierarchy, group affiliation, and mating. For different aspects of these, I have numerous half-baked notions about what a group of players in a room could do. For example, draw a new Tarot card every round, and then have to agree on a single narrative that includes all of them in order. Or build the most accurate model of what other teams know and don't know about a selectively concealed array of random numbers, communicating only through severely limited bandwidth.
Hopefully I'll get serious and actually create and try some such games, and although much can be done with things like cards, dice, and paper, I've also been dreaming up a simple platform that would enable more party games and related experiments. My current notion is a small microprocessor-controlled,
Assassin's Creed 2, The Beatles: Rock Band, Borderlands, Brutal Legend, Dragon Age: Origins, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii. There, are we done? For the majority of top 10 of 2009 lists spreading fungally across every site covering games, probably, and they're not at all particularly wrong.
But 2009 was about a lot more than that handful that we knew would top their respective Metacritic charts (and retail sales lists) six to nine months before their release date, and -- as I did with last year's Offworld 20 list (with a near-identical intro, I've just re-discovered, woops!) -- this list for Boing Boing will instead focus on the games that left their own strong mark on the year, just, sadly, a mark that in most cases went mostly overlooked.
Split into two sections, the first part of the Boing Boing 20 list will focus on console and handheld releases, while next week's will round up the ten best indie and iPhone games, organized alphabetically rather than by any arbitrary ranking, with plenty of room in the comments for your own additions to your top gaming moments of the year.
Without further ado, then, the best collection of pre-adolescent royalty, retro revivalism, at least two kinds of rhythm, stretchers, scribblers, and succulents the year had to offer, and one bona-fide blockbuster that managed to rise above the rest (it's the one not listed above, can you guess before you reach the end?):
Little King's Story [Marvelous, Wii]
Little King's Story was a true left field surprise this year: a game about managing a township unwittingly put under your control, about protecting them and conquering the things they fear, a game about expanding your reign through exploration and field conquests, and a game that managed to do a better job of the mini-micro-management of your troops than even Nintendo's re-released Wii-control Pikmin that must have inspired it.
Its crayon and pastel fantasy surely didn't help curry any favor with the gaming hardcore, which is a shame mostly because it a.) belies the surprisingly challenging and strategic game underneath and 2.) be honest, lends the game an undeniable storybook charm. Truly one of the year's best adventures that too few have played.
Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes [Capy, DS]
Coming in as the year's best 11th-hour surprise, Toronto indie Capy's puzzle/strategy/RPG take on the Might & Magic universe was just covered here on Boing Boing, so I'll reiterate that here:
Like Puzzle Quest -- Infinite Interactive's similarly dangerously time-devouring puzzler -- before it, Clash overlays its fantasy RPG tale with battles that play out via color-matching vertical lines of troops to create, fuse and link attacks launched against your enemies, and doing the same horizontally to put together defensive lines to guard against theirs.
Its ruleset is so intricately devised and delicately balanced that it'd take an article in itself to explain them fully, but for all its richness and complexity, it's a system that takes only minutes of practice to mentally snap together, and all your remaining hours of the day to happily master. If you have any proclivity toward brainy puzzling, do not hesitate to pick this up: it's got all the trappings of being one of the handheld's underdog classics.
Noby Noby Boy [Namco, PS3]
Those that said that Noby Noby Boy -- the Katamari Damacy follow-up from creator Keita Takahashi -- had no point themselves missed the point. While it's true that the design of each individual play session is as lackadaisical and boundless as the BOY himself, its overarching goal is an achievement in itself as gaming's most massive massively-multiplayer undertaking.
Underneath the surface is a story of, ideally, countless BOYs (as of this writing we're just ten players shy of 100,000) all vying to impress the universe's only GIRL by doing the only thing they were put on Earth to do: swallow and stretch their coiled bodies as far as they can. By converting those impressive and hard-earned meters into the love that propels her own body further into the solar system, in real-time, she unlocks the planets she reaches for all the players in the world.
So, yes, there is a goal, and there is an end-game, which we'll only see if and when our PlayStation 3s (or, very soon, iPhones) are still functioning in the time it takes to push her the remaining ponderous distance from Jupiter to Pluto.
Is it a willfully and near-recklessly devised design, particularly for thrusting hugely delayed gratification on a generation of players accustomed to instant/constant feedback and reward? Absolutely, and that's exactly what makes it one of the year's best.
Plants Vs. Zombies [PopCap, PC/Mac]
It would be easy, and cynical -- and more importantly, wrong -- to assume that casual powerhouse PopCap simply rode the crest of tower-defense and zombie-lust that defined much of gaming in 2009. Instead, it appears to have brilliantly anticipated it, having started and been in production nearly two years ahead, and could be instead seen as instrumental in propelling both memes into wider consciousness.
Going viral by nature of its basic premise alone, and then again by Laura Shigihara's perfectly ludicrous music video, it would have been disastrous if the resulting game couldn't fulfill expectations. Thankfully, it did, giving the tower defense genre a much-needed shot in the arm of accessibility without uprooting the core entirely, and the imminent move to iPhone -- letting us finally take the game away from our desktops -- is still one of our most anticipated.
Retro Game Challenge [Namco, DS]
Publisher XSEED had an unenviable task on their hands in bringing Retro Game Challenge to the West: taking a game that's inextricably derived from Japan's best games-related TV show that the rest of the world has never seen (Game Center CX), and is soaked through with references to Famicom nostalgia rather than the U.S.'s own NES nostalgia, and somehow making it relevant to us.
So we'll forgive them in going a half-step too far in shoe-horning in the 80s of Max Headroom and Valley Girl, and for working in 90s era U.S. game magazine references that flew over the heads of all but about ten people outside journalist-circles, because in the end none of that really mattered.
Well, the nostalgia does, because that's precisely what Retro Game Challenge is a game about: that once-every-three-months-a-
Challenge is at heart a collection of remade early-days NES classics that never were, and your task (as goes the title) is to work your way through a series of prescribed challenges in each, whether it be finding hidden warps or defeating RPG bosses, and it manages to perfectly evoke that nostalgia that we thought only emulators could manage to do these days.
The sad news is that even as one of the year's most original and rewarding games -- a game that overtly celebrated the games culture that made up its target audience -- sales don't seem to have been up to snuff for the publisher to consider Westernizing the Japanese sequel, leaving a whole other legacy of first-gen Game Boy and 16-bit era "classics" behind.
Rhythm Heaven [Nintendo, DS]
Rhythm Heaven probably won't be showing up on near as many 2009 lists as it should, not because it's not brilliant -- it is -- but because it took so long for Nintendo to finally bring it to the West that it feels like ancient history (in digital years, obviously) to its core supporters who had imported and impotently raved about it long before.
Heaven's the truest example of a music game that's purely about rhythm, and not just about Simon Says-ing patterns or following bars down your screen to the tune of your dad's favorite classic rock. It's about rhythm as an unbroken line, or (at its best) an unbroken agreement between performers, about teaching and keeping steady tempo.
It's also one of the year's funniest, and desperately deserves some December love, if nothing else than to prove to Nintendo that a game this non-traditional can still find a wide, appreciative audience.
Rock Band: Unplugged [Harmonix/Backbone, PSP]
Though clearly overshadowed by its big console brothers and their new friends The Beatles, Unplugged -- and to a slightly lesser degree the DS version of Lego Rock Band -- were semi-shoutouts to the fans that made developer Harmonix the stadium-supergroup headliners they are today.
Take away its hard rock 'performance' and replace it with looping techno rave-up ambiance and you're right back where the developer began: flipping back and forth through lanes of sound, trying to keep each alive in sequence to make the parts a whole song, just as they pioneered in their PS2 originals Frequency and Amplitude.
You didn't need to know this, and you don't need to care, for Unplugged to work its magic: you just need the willingness to escape into music without the fake plastic mediator in between.
Recent news that Harmonix would no longer be converting its massive library of original recordings for Unplugged DLC stung fractionally harder than the bait and switch of offering only a five-song Lite version as the PSPGo's pack-in, with still no full download available on the PlayStation Network (which has to be down to digital publishing rights for particular bands and not willful neglect, right?), but for those still clinging to Sony's UMD-laden past, this is one of the UMDs most worth clinging to.
Scribblenauts [5TH Cell, DS]
Alongside Plants Vs. Zombies, Scribblenauts was the game that carried itself best throughout the year on a tidal wave of viral acclaim solely for its premise alone. But what a premise that was: it promised to let players conjure essentially any object imaginable -- krakens, keyboard cats, Gods, time-traveling robot-zombie-smashing T-rexes -- to solve puzzles via the furthest-most outer-reaches of our imaginations.
Did it work? Errr... yeah, I mean, mostly: developer 5TH Cell will be (and overtly has been) the first to acknowledge that its very touchy touch-based controls could have used some refinement. But even more surprising (for me, anyway), was in just how limited my own imagination was when it came time to put it to the test.
Need to rescue a cat off a roof, or wave away an angry bee? Much to my disappointment, I found I was just as apt to use, you know, a ladder and a bit of bug repellent, rather than any flights of fantastical fancy.
But its essential magic -- even if that 'magic' was simply the fortitude to sprite-sketch their way through untold reams of dictionary entries -- remained untouched, and it's still a thrill to try and stump the system and learn that they've got you covered.
Shadow Complex [Chair, Xbox 360]
Shadow Complex was the best retro revival this year that had no predecessor of its own. For once, it wasn't lazy to give the game the comparative nod back to Super Metroid: it was unabashedly right there in front of you, in its color coded barriers, in lead character Jason Flemming's tight crawls through narrow passages (here just crouched, rather than rolled into a morph ball), straight down to a 'Justin Bailey' referencing achievement.
And yet even the ones most prone to cry foul -- to call the game out for taking some of Japan's best classic design and running it through a Western mill until its plot and characters were offenders of the worst nameless, faceless, bottom-shelf would-be Tom Clancy degree -- had to admit: fair enough to that, but the game turned out completely wicked.
Harnessing the full power of Epic's Unreal Engine 3 for charmingly/ironically yester-year ends, this was exactly where we thought our 16-bit games were headed at the time: recycled but beloved design with drastically improved fidelity. We were wrong then, of course, but Shadow Complex proved maybe we shouldn't have been.
Uncharted 2 [Naughty Dog, PS3]
My pithy one-liner to encapsulate Naughty Dog's blockbuster adventure? It's the finest rollercoaster of the year that makes you climb off the train and rebuild the engine at the bottom of every hill.
Uncharted 2 easily managed to outshine the rest of the year's big-budget bids and managed to make a true believer even out of me, even if what it did best -- giving you some of the most hyper-vivid, lush and gargantuan ancient ruins and relics any developer has offered to let you explore -- was punctuated by over-technical firefights with your constant trigger-happy pursuers.
That's not to say the shootouts didn't work well on their own -- they are, probably, some of gaming's most realistically modeled, with every unwilling and amateur participant pressed firm against or dancing between cover and skittishly hazarding the occasional shot -- but the frequent breaks to dispatch another round of guards felt at times at odds against the relentlessly cinematic flow of the exploration.
In the end, you pressed through, though -- you had to -- guided by the promise of an even greater cliff-hanging thrill than the one you just narrowly scraped through, and the game never left that promise unfulfilled. Just next time, please, Naughty Dog: less of the shoot-shoot-bang-bang and more of the clamber-climb-marvel-amaze
From Ross Sutherland's Eco-esque review of Atari's 1985 arcade game, Gauntlet:
Wizard, as an ironist, you alone receive some sense of subjective freedom. Your outré dress sense deprives your surroundings of a finite degree of cognitive reality. In this manner, the dungeon can never truly hold you.
I love it when people read between the lines of old video games, imagining a backstory and motivation for the likes of Pong or Asteroids. But those early titles are so abstract that a certain kind of humor seems intrinsic to the project. So it's delightful to see someone with the same fetish I have: extrapolating literary pretensions from later games that offer more to work with, but whose hardware nonetheless imposed a ruthless minimalism onto the design.
Of those, Atari's Gauntlet always seemed most pregnant with possibility. The doomed, infinite quest is filled with pathos--if the protagonists are not dead, they are certainly already in hell. Most references, however, lean toward pop culture citation. For example, check out Five Iron Frenzy's song, "Wizard Needs Food Badly," a phrase from the game whose variations have earned a place in broader culture. There is even a Cafepress site devoted to it.)
Here's my contribution to this very tiny genre: Such Bravery, a short story which places Gauntlet as a strange, myth-addled event from the Baltic crusades, itself hazily remembered by Thyra, the 'Valkyrie.' Twenty years on, our aging heroes are uneasily reunited at the old man's funeral, only to find he still has some tricks up his sleeve. Fans may get a kick out of the cute references to the game.
It's such a shame that after Gauntlet II, most of the sequels have been mediocre. An iffy-looking DS remake is apparently complete, but seems to be stuck in a dungeon.
If my Twitter stream and Xbox Live friends list is any indication of wider gaming trends, most everyone seems to be riding out the temporary lull in big name holiday releases before next week's launch of Spirit Tracks (the DS return of The Legend of Zelda) by occupying themselves with Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed II, or, in my own case, digging even further into Ubi's back catalog via the war-torn savanna of Far Cry 2.
But there's one game in particular out this week that's slipped under far, far too many radars and deserves your undivided attention.
Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes [Capy, DS]
There's obviously something magical being sprinkled in Toronto's water, as local indie Capybara Games has found themselves rapidly moving from hit to hit. Just over a month after the release of their previously featured and gorgeously remade PS3 puzzler Critter Crunch, the studio quietly teases Heartbeat, a sparse but stylish IGF-entered upcoming rhythm game for the Wii, and a collaboration with rustic-pixel illustrator Superbrothers and musician Jim Guthrie (half of would-be indie darling Human Highway, and probably best recognized as the man behind the nation's now infamous 'Hands in my Pocket' CapitalOne commercial) on Sword & Sworcery, a cryptic but already stunning iPhone audiovisual 'EP'.
And then this happened: the studio unleashes Clash of Heroes (top), a side-story spinoff of the Might & Magic RPG series that takes the very basic match-3 mindset of Critter Crunch and turns it into one of most satisfying and addictive strategy-puzzlers on the DS.
Like Puzzle Quest -- Infinite Interactive's similarly dangerously time-devouring puzzler -- before it, Clash overlays its fantasy RPG tale with battles that play out via color-matching vertical lines of troops to create, fuse and link attacks launched against your enemies, and doing the same horizontally to put together defensive lines to guard against theirs.
Its ruleset is so intricately devised and delicately balanced that it'd take an article in itself to explain them fully, but for all its richness and complexity, it's a system that takes only minutes of practice to mentally snap together, and all your remaining hours of the day to happily master. If you have any proclivity toward brainy puzzling, do not hesitate to pick this up: it's got all the trappings of being one of the handheld's underdog classics.
Continuity [Ragtime Games, web]
Elsewhere, the week's free web game gathering the most attention comes from Ragtime Games -- a Swedish team of students from Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University -- with Continuity, their entry into the Student section of the Indie Games Fest.
The screenshot above tells you everything you need to know about the game, though maybe not at first glance. In essence, it's a lo-fi platformer that only asks that you pick up a single key to unlock each level's exit door, but split and laid out across a deck of cards that have to be shuffled like a classic slide-puzzle to match the entrance and exit out of each section. As smart as it is simple, it's a winning concept begging to be fleshed out further for a commercial release.
Hook Champ [Rocketcat, iPhone]
And finally, you might recognize Hook Champ from its initial recommendation over a month ago, but this week saw the release of a key update to the game that makes it worth noting all over again: a feature that lets you challenge your friends with your best cavern-crawling and -looting runs by racing against their ghost (a mechanic you might recall from games like Mario Kart).
The update also adds a number of new challenge levels, items, achievements and a new unlockable player character and comes at a new discounted price to celebrate the update launch -- don't miss this one now if you skipped past it the last time.
