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Relevant links: game

There’s a movie called Dark Star. It’s a little boring, it moves slowly, but it’s a deserved cult classic for being uniquely weird. In it, a small number of sorely under qualified crew members putz around a spaceship – sometimes goofing off, sometimes trying to fix this or that, sometimes trying to convince their cargo, an overly smart bomb, not to blow up and kill them all. It’s written and directed by John Carpenter and the characters have a style that seems to be common among movies in which he’s involved: they’re not all that likable but at least you can recognize them for their flaws.

I hadn’t set out to talk about Dark Star, but you should watch it if you get the chance. I’m told you’ll enjoy it more if you’re high when you do so.

on the edge of earth 5000On the Edge of Earth: 5000 takes that concept, “poking around on a spaceship is fun,” and makes a video game out of it. (Yes, that is a picture of a guy sitting on a toilet.) It doesn’t move very fast and you don’t do very much, but it manages to be a good time anyway. It does have an actual objective, and that does involve blowing something up, and the developer said that the game was movie influenced (though without specifying which movie(s))… Well, you’re free to draw your own conclusions. What matters is that it’s an amusing little game that’s paced well, and manages to turn boredom into entertainment.

I’m putting this in the point and click category, despite no pointing or clicking. That’s not so unusual, there are quite a few games like this, but they don’t have their own genre and there’s really no need. In every other respect they are point and click games.

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Relevant links: fansite, download

cave storyBy this point Cave Story isn’t exactly obscure. It’s the game that everyone points to when they talk about how great indie games can be, and they’re not wrong. I can’t offer any new enthusiasm for this title, but I’m going to post it here for the sake of completeness. Maybe there’s someone out there somewhere who never pays any attention to anything, but is for some reason one of the two people who comes to this site. It’s possible. If you are that person, you should play Cave Story.

In short: it’s a sidescrolling exploratory platformer which does the exploration part very well, the action part pretty well, and the story part… is just very well presented. Plot-wise it isn’t anything remarkable, but it puts you in an environment on a small scale, with a limited number of characters, and allows you to grow attached to the people and the place that you’re in before it starts to tear that down.

The original game was made by a single person, Daisuke Amaya, over a five year period and was released in 2004. For those of you who can read Japanese, that’s available here. For everyone else the best resource is likely cavestory.org – a fan site with loads of information in English as well as an extensive list of downloads, with the game available in many languages and for many platforms.

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Click here if you just want to watch the thing and don’t feel like reading.

dragon ball z abridgedIf you’ve never watched Dragon Ball Z, that may be for the best. A little background: Dragon Ball was a cute show about an odd little boy with a monkey tail and a gift for martial arts. He goes on an adventure to seek out the magical dragon balls, which will grant a wish when all are gathered together, and along the way meets and befriends a comical cast of interesting characters. It’s a story loosely based on a classic Chinese novel, Journey to the West.

Dragon Ball Z is the successor to that show, and where it all goes weird. It turns out that the odd little boy is actually a space alien from a brutal race of space mercenaries, and he was sent to earth to exterminate all life. We discover this when his adult brother lands on earth to do just that and the odd little boy, now an odd grown man, must kill him in defense of the planet. And… also the next alien who comes along and wants to do the same thing. And the next one. And the next one. Naturally each villain has their own plot device, but the show is mostly about fighting. Lots and lots of fighting. So very much fighting. It’s infamous for that and a few other oddities, but above all for dragg i n g   t h i n g s    o  u  t. . .

Each fight with a main villain lasts for multiple episodes and the more the character gets built up the longer this takes. One particular villain gets a whole season’s worth of hype and bringing him down takes the entire season after that, with just the final fight between villain and protagonist stretching on for, I am not exaggerating here, fully nineteen half-hour episodes. That is not including all the episodes that the villain spends fighting the show’s minor characters before the protagonist arrives.

That said, Dragon Ball Z does have its moments. It can be funny at times, usually in the very brief periods between fights, and the fights themselves are kind of neat in concept if not in execution. The conceit is martial artists who are so very good at martial arts that they gain super powers, eventually learning to shoot fireballs and then learning to fly, and as the series goes on this snowballs exponentially. TV tropes calls this process plot leveling (or sequel escalation, or serial escalation), but I’ve always referred to it as the Dragon Ball Z Effect: late in the series the characters have grown so powerful that they need to make a gentleman’s agreement not to destroy the planet that they’re standing on over the course of their fight, something that they can do with casual ease. From a storytelling perspective this is awful and silly, but if you have an appreciation for just throwing the storytelling rules out the window in an effort to make something as ridiculous and over-the-top as possible then this can be kinda fun. For a while. For a little while.

We come back to that problem of dragging things out… You might enjoy something like this in principle, but chances are good that even if you like the concept you are not a time lord and willing to sit through hour after endless hour of dreary repetitive fight scenes. Well now you don’t have to: a group of fans got together and started re-cutting and re-dubbing the original episodes, removing an awful lot of cruft and adding a lot of their own humor. Dragon Ball Z Abridged (Youtube link) is not just a vastly improved version of the original series, but is great all on its own. The shell of the same story remains, they hit all the high points of the plot, but the characters have been satirized for comic effect and what used to drag on interminably is now reasonably paced. The aforementioned fight which lasted for nineteen half-hour episodes now takes only three, each about ten minutes long.

The abridged series is less serious than the original, clearly preferring comedy to drama, but to be perfectly frank the original had emotional impact more-or-less on par with professional wrestling: they needed excuses to fight, and that’s about it. The abridged characters are probably better described as caricatures but in that respect they have more character, and this gives the few tense moments a little more weight. Not a lot, it’s still a comedy.

At any rate, fans and others who have watched the original show certainly have the most to gain from the abridged version, but it does tell a complete story and so should be accessible to anyone. If you’ve never heard of Dragon Ball Z before now, this is still the version which I would recommend.

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As of right now, A Dark Room is the only idle game which I’ve ever played to completion. I’ve played a decent number of idle games mind you, I’m not speaking from ignorance here, it’s just that the genre is awful. Seriously, it’s alarming to me that people are enjoying these in a humorless way. We all had a good laugh when Progress Quest came out: “Ha ha,” we said, “the game plays itself, giving you the thrill of victory and upgrades and progress with none of the work. There’s probably a lesson to be learned from this clearly ironic spoof on the way in which people are currently wasting their time.”

Confusingly, horrifyingly, the lesson that seems to have been learned was: games should have less of that annoying “playing” in them, it only gets in the way of a constant stream of rewards and positive attention. Let’s cut that part out and give everyone a pat on the head while they sit still and do nothing.

::sigh::

That’s another topic to write more about later. A Dark Room manages to stand above most idle games in a few ways, but primarily: it’s not just an idle game. a dark roomAs you progress through it the game changes in mood and content and play style. It’s pretty slick how this happens and I’m not willing to spoil it, but play at least until you get the compass in order to see what I’m talking about and what the game is really offering.

Of course, being adverse to spoilers presents something of an obstacle to talking further about the game, but I will say that I admire its sense of scale. It’s starts very humble and grows to something much greater as your progress through it. It’s a commonly used device, but seldom done very well.

Also unlike most idle games: A Dark Room can easily be completed in a single day.

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the marriageThe Marriage was developed expressly to be Art. It isn’t fun, exactly, though like any work of art there’s some pleasure in experiencing it and discovering what it means to you, as well as guessing at the intention of the artist.

There’s a lot to say about it, but I’m not going to be able to say it any better than the developer does on the game’s web page. Read it and give it a try, it’s not a long game.

I will say something about the circumstances surrounding the game though: the idea of an “art game” might seem boring now, what with plenty of well publicized games having taken the concept and driven it into the dirt, but back when this was released in 2007 the idea that video games were an expressive medium had spent the last several years being challenged over and over again in court by a number of grandstanding individuals, and in particular by a lawyer from Florida named Jack Thompson. Many people who play and work with games saw this as a preposterous situation – how do you prove that water is wet?

Rod Humble, who developed The Marriage, took this in another direction though: what is it about games which makes them uniquely expressive? The Marriage takes the assumption that games are an art form and explores it by trying to express something using only that which is unique to games – interactivity. In other words, the rules of the game are themselves art.

Thompson was disbarred in 2008 and the public controversy surrounding games has died down a lot since then, and there have been a ton of artsy fartsy games released since that time (a few of which are pretty good) so this doesn’t seem like a big deal anymore. The Marriage had some modest significance when it was released though, and it continues to be interesting as an exploration of the medium. Most games still emphasize fancy graphics or moody audio when they’re trying to make a point, a reductivist game like this one shows us what it is that makes games special.

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QWOPThere have been a bunch of goofy games over the last few years about attempting to do some simple task using ridiculously difficult controls. e.g.: Surgeon Simulator, Where is the Button for Love?, Realistic Kissing Simulator, Soccer Physics, etc. This all started with QWOP. In it, you are a sprinter running the 100 meter dash and getting to the finish line is your only objective. There is nothing in your way and you have no competition, nor any time limit. Literally all you have to do is not fall down, and it is really difficult.

QWOP gets its name from it’s controls: keys Q and W flex your thighs and keys O and P flex your calves. This makes a sort of sense on a QWERTY keyboard, and makes you wonder why every game isn’t controlled by flexing individual muscles. It’s so obvious.

QWOP gets its charm from your own fumbling ineptitude. It’s bizarre how much fun it is to be terrible at walking, but turning something so ostensibly easy into an almost insurmountable barrier allows you to laugh at your own inability without the shame of failure. It’s clear from the outset that you’re not supposed to be good at this, or even competent, and freed from any expectation of success you can enjoy some pratfalls and goofy fun.

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