I recently got a pitch from a PR rep offering me a new book to review. The book was pitched as a quirky fantasy story about real-life movie monsters, including Dracula, the Mummy, and the Wolfman, who stop snarking about CGI and modern monster life when the Invisible Man is murdered and they must find the killer.
This sounds… really familiar.
I guess that means they’re hitting their target audience?
New short piece on my New York neighbors, Golden Ruby Games and their new Worm Run over at Indie Game Magazine. Their new game is a casual runner in which players help save space janitor Zeke Tallahassee from a space monster. This is the second game I’ve discussed for IGM in which the protagonist is a space janitor. I have a very weird type.
Worm Run is a KickStarter success story. The game was partially completed when Golden Ruby put Worm Run on KickStarter, seeking and surpassing a modest three thousand dollar goal. With awesome projects failing to find funding, and funded projects disappearing, it’s always really nice to hear about a good KickStarter success.
Also on IGM, I’ve recently reviewed My Cotton Picking Life and Depression Quest. My Cotton Picking Life is a social awareness game that asks players to take on the role of a child worker. An interesting concept, but the execution was way too successful at proving this is something no one wants to do.
But although My Cotton Picking Life succeeds at its state goal of monotony, it fails at everything else. Players click repeatedly on buttons marked “Pick Cotton” until they get bored and try the exit button. Then they’re told that child workers don’t have the luxury of quitting, and told how much money they would have made if they were actually picking cotton and not clicking “Pick Cotton”. The developers say the game was built in a day, and, with one game screen and one player action, it’s not hard to believe.
A game with terrible and boring gameplay to show that the topic is terrible and boring is an interesting thought exercise.
Depression Quest is a much more effective serious game, this time about depression. I wouldn’t call it a fun game, but a very interesting and effective one.
Depression Quest very successfully plays on this expectation by presenting a narrative passage describing the character’s experiences, and then offering several player choices, with a range of possible outcomes, but makes some of the readable choices inaccessible to the player. Players can read options like making the most of a social situation, getting a good night’s rest, and so forth, so it’s very clear that these are possible reactions to the presented narrative segment, but they just aren’t able to choose those options.The player might want to call a therapist or get out of the apartment for a change of scene, but the depressed character literally can’t.
Maybe my type is weirder than I thought.
Links:
Save A Space Janitor in ‘Worm Run’! | Indie Game Mag.
Attempts At Relevancy With ‘My Cotton-Picking Life’ IGM
Battle Depression in Depression Quest IGM
My friend Jerry wrote to tell me he’s working with a new game, and he thought it might be a good fit for me.
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“It’s kind of like you guys made that whole game that for me, isn’t it?”
(They say it’s for kids, but that’s only because the 30+, female, relevant adventure gaming demographic just doesn’t get the respect it deserves.)
Tonight I went to meet with some local game developers in an office complex in Cary. I was very excited to go, but not excited to drive through Cary.
Cary is a special kind of terrible. About a third of the town is made up of brand-new retail and office complexes. There is a lot of parking because you can’t walk anywhere. No, seriously, there aren’t any sidewalks, and you’d have to walk over the manicured grass and perfect planters. Speaking of manicures, every complex in Cary has to have a nail salon, otherwise it will be shut down. It’s a zoning law, I think.
Strangely, even though all the buildings and roads in these complexes are brand-new, the traffic patterns are insane, like in parts of Boston or DC that were laid out before the horseless carriage made its appearance. There are a surprising amount of blind turns and three-way intersections.
Between these brightly-lit commerce hubs are divided highways with lots of nothing on both sides. That nothing is rural backdrop for the people who live in the McMansions on cul-de-sacs to look at as they commute. If you miss your turn, or get confused about which highway by which Target you should be on, or perhaps find yourself on the right divided highway with nothing on both sides, but going on the wrong direction, do not think you can make the first right and go back. Here in Cary, you can not make four rights to return to your original location. Don’t be fooled.
See, the part of Cary that isn’t brand-new retail complexes is made up of brand-new housing developments. If you make a turn off the highway, and it’s not into a shopping center, you just turned into a brand-new housing development. These can be spotted because they have names likes Windsor Pines and Preston Fields, but by the time you can see the name, you can also see the No Outlet sign and the speedbumps. There are always speedbumps to help residents transition between the highways and the cul-de-sacs.
The whole thing is terribly depressing. There are plenty of other reasons I might have been so unhappy there — I couldn’t find a job that wasn’t waitressing, I had very few creative outlets, and I was pretty much constantly worried about money — but a lot of it was waking up every day in that sea of ugly. If I were being tortured in Room 101, it would be Cary, North Carolina. And I would immediately tell the Ministry of Love all my secrets.
The weirdest part of awful Cary is that it routinely makes lists for Best Places to Live. Year after year. Apparently people who aren’t me really love it! I hear about the great “quality of life” in that area, and I just wonder what that could possibly mean.
My editor at Geek sent all the writers a group email suggesting that we all feel free to go over our wordcounts whenever the subject warrants a longer piece.
I responded with a longform essay on serious, indie games, because who doesn’t want to read a thousand words on obscure and serious games? Building to a very hopeful conclusion on the future of serious indies, and why people who aren’t me should care.
I’m really happy about the chance to discuss such an awesome and overlooked topic, but I don’t really expect my editor will say that again.
New piece over on thalo about Peggy Riley’s amazing new novel, Amity & Sorrow
Editor: Anyone want a rush fee for covering the end of Google Reader? Cover the news, and suggest alternative feedreaders, due as soon as possible.
Meg: Don’t we have someone under 30 to do that? I’d still be on Bloglines if I could be.
I’ve talked a lot about text-based games like Heroes Rise, To The City of the Clouds, Choice of Romance, Choice of The Vampire, Choice of the Dragon, and now, I’ve got a new piece on Geek talking about Star Captain.
Choice of the Star Captain is a new text-based adventure for iOs, Android or web browsers. In this ChoiceScript game, players take on the role of a young pilot, recruited for a special secret mission for StratComm in the space battle of humans versus Blob.
…
The player is almost immediately recruited by Salazar, an agent at StratComm who has some, uh, unique recruiting methods. After taking a crazy aptitude test, with questions like how gravity smells or how many fuzzy Thursdays are purple, your player is recruited to join the war against the evil alien Blobs! Salazar doesn’t seem surprised, but everyone else in StratComm find the player is an unusual rookie.
Via Text-Based Space Opera in ‘Choice of the Star Captain’ on Geek Magazine.
“I found my extra copy of A Torn Page when I was packing,” I told Harold, “I think I might give it to your mom — she was asking me about my work, and a fiction anthology is probably better than insisting I really do write brilliantly on obscure games for unfamiliar publications.”
“Oh, that’s nice, she’ll like that.”
“Except now I’m not sure about it, my story is about a woman cheating on her husband. I don’t want your family to think I’m a terrible person.”
“I gave your parents Screamland.” Harold said.
“So?”
“It does include some monster porn.”
“You win.”
While I was in Brooklyn, I went over to the NY Gaming demo at Microsoft, checked out the games my NYC neighbors are building, and wrote it up for Geek Magazine:
New York Gaming tends towards electronic games, so I was surprised to see an offline game presented. Nika is a boardgame from Joshua Raab and Chris Hernandez. The game is a turn-based strategy game inspired by warfare between Greek city-states. Players build phalanxes, and attempt to conquer their neighbors. The game can be played by 4 players, forming 2 cooperative teams, or by 2 players, each controlling 2 city-states. Nika is greatly influenced by historical battles, but seems well-balanced, giving players of all city-states a good chance at winning, regardless of historical military advantages. (I’m looking at you, Axis & Allies.)
Nikhil Sinha’s Facebook game Spell or Die blends the familiar mechanics of asynchronous online Scrabble with aggressive attacks, like explosions. If you can’t out-spell your friends, just blow them up!
Via New York Gaming, February Games Demo on Geek Magazine. (Also on Geek: Five Indie games you shouldn’t miss.)
