Monthly Archives: July 2016

kiki the nano bot Platform categoryPuzzle category

Title screen from kiki the nano bot

Deep inside a tiny computer lives a blobby little robot named kiki. kiki can glide around and jump and shoot pellets. And most importantly, kiki can make physics its plaything.

kiki the nano bot, a open source project by Thorsten Kohnhorst, has a brain-melting appeal best played rather than read. Describing kiki as disorienting doesn’t do justice to how alien it feels, as if it’s protruding in through another dimension. The game can be difficult to play straight, but its visual foreignness separates it from what a less risky game could do. » Read more about kiki the nano bot

A warm welcome to ROMchip and hopes for the future Blog category

If you’re interested in gaming history – hopefully you are if you’re reading this blog! – consider signing up for the mailing list for ROMchip. ROMchip is a freshly announced online scholarly journal of gaming history spearheaded by three super-great historians, including Raiford Guins, author of Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife; and Laine Nooney, who is currently writing about the history and business practices of Sierra On-Line. ROMchip will include history articles as well as interviews and brief discussions of interesting gaming objects in museum and library collections.

Right now, the popularly told history of gaming tends to be a little scattered and often missing crucial information from the developers’ and publishers’ end. A concerted, thorough, academic effort to discuss game history is a great development.

I’m mentioning ROMchip here because it represents a uniquely formal opportunity to flesh out the corners of gaming history often left out of stereotypical gaming canons. More work can always be done to understand the history behind big marquee names, but I hope that the journal will find space to focus on the stories and experiences of garage studios, experimental developers, outsider games, the companies that didn’t make it past one or two titles, and the unexamined bulk that provides the mortar of gaming.

Green Strategy category

Title screen from Green

Joni Mitchell’s environmental anthem “Big Yellow Taxi” opens with the tragic image that “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Cascoly Software’s eco-strategy game Green introduces itself with that first verse and sounds like a direct adaptation of those lyrics, slightly naive folksiness and all. The villains literally want to pave over nature.

The game’s lighthearted anti-development conceit has the potential to make a fun point about keeping green spaces green. The player’s hands-off role doesn’t feel like an useful, interesting way to wage that war, though, or to stand up for the environment. Both the game and the movement need a better plan than being vaguely irritating. » Read more about Green