For Games Unplayed and Unknown
Despite what the title suggests, Deadlock: Planetary Conquest doesn’t actually involve conquering a whole planet. It’s about conquering a region, a slice of the planet made up of different territories. It allows you to get close enough to look at the individual workers on the planet, yet it keeps you far enough away so you can see the regional dynamics that drive the planet’s aggression. » Read more about Deadlock: Planetary Conquest
How many different playable characters should reasonably fit into a game? 10? 20? As high as 50?
H.E.D.Z. from Hasbro Interactive has a preposterous 225 playable characters. That’s 74 more than the original number of Pokémon in Pokémon Red and Blue, released in the United States just one month earlier, and 117 more characters than the famously huge cast of the role-playing game series Suikoden.
…and that’s about all it has for ideas. But what an extraordinarily strange group of characters it puts together. » Read more about H.E.D.Z.: Head Extreme Destruction Zone
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Time for a few updates! July has been an exciting month, and while I was working on all the posts, I’ve also been going back and revising a few older articles that I wasn’t totally happy with. It’s weird to have nine years of your writing (!!!) existing all in the same place, and it’s fun to see how my writing’s grown over the years.
I made two major additions to previous posts that I want to highlight here:
I’m not quite sure where we’ll be going next, which is exciting! It’ll probably be weird. Thanks for continuing to read!
The void is quiet. Silent, in fact. A giant star nicknamed Sunny rests in the center of the void, orbited by hundreds of tiny, glistening planets. Within the empty, lonely world of Crystal Pixels, those distant points of light – the crystal pixels of the title – are like little beacons. They lure you out to the deep with the hope that you’ll find somewhere to visit in all the darkness.
The game was the work of a single person, who created it for themselves as a personal retreat. For anyone else, it can be maddening to play. It demands your willingness to go far, far out into nothing, struggle to reach a destination, and decide your own reason to head there. » Read more about Crystal Pixels
In Wolf, you are a wolf. » Read more about Wolf
A CD-ROM copy of Windows 95. Note the part that says “Do Not Make Illegal Copies Of This Disc”
Once in a while, I update this blog’s Resources section, where I’ve collected links and information about how to find, get, and play old games. Hopefully it’s a great collection! There’s one particular site that I’ve held off including for a while, WinWorld, that enters legally uncertain territory. I want to talk about it a bit, because it raises important questions about how we deal with abandoned software. » Read more about What happens with old software copyright when nobody cares?
Alternate title screen from the demo for Noir: A Shadowy Thriller
Private eye Jack Slayton kept a file on Charles Winthrop, a philanthropist with something to hide. Winthrop’s prize horse Pegasus died, and Slayton suspected an insurance scam. In his notes, he mused, “I’ve had a few horses die on me too, usually in the stretch.” He has the voice of a stock hardboiled detective, cracking a stereotypical case of corrupt wealth, working on a nondescript street in Los Angeles.
As far as Noir: A Shadowy Thriller is concerned, that’s perfect.
Like the name implies, the game is a tribute to the noir genre, the idealized version that pop culture remembers – stories about a gumshoe drifting through decadent clubs and dim alleyways, swept up in the city’s rotten underbelly. For a CD-ROM game especially, it’s a feat of tone and setting. » Read more about Noir: A Shadowy Thriller
Lexi-Cross puts cyborgs and aliens on a 1970s game show. Without the futuristic touches, it might as well be an adaptation of The $10,000 Pyramid.
The game begins in an audition interview with a television producer. When the game show starts, it opens on a shot from the studio audience, an “ON AIR” light blinking as the cameras move into place. The vaguely Bert Convy-looking host, with a perm and a half-metal face, stands in front of an angular, beige set while the program’s brassy theme music plays. The game manual looks like a fake TV Guide, complete with ads for pay-per-view boxing and Chinese takeout. Lexi-Cross fully commits to the features of both the format and the era, transplanted into a future when there’s still broadcast television and primetime game shows.
It also copies the rules of 1970s game shows, and it inherits their pacing, for good and bad. » Read more about Lexi-Cross
Control Monger was free, and then it was gone.
The game was a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter, one of many from the early-to-mid 2000s. Developed at accelerated speed by a group of volunteers, it was released for free in 2005. A few years later, the official website went silent, and the game and its community gradually disappeared.
It has a few clever ideas, incorporating territory control and base defense into the usual first-person shooter template. But to find out what this game was actually like, I had to play it with other people.
Last week, I invited a group of friends and readers to play two hours of Control Monger to get a feel for how it works with a big crowd. (The game can support up to 255 players, which would be a disaster, so we stuck with the default size of 16.) Since it’s unlikely that another large group will get together to play this game, I want to go into detail discussing our thoughts on the game’s strengths, weaknesses, and balance. And to learn more about its development, I contacted Clyde Bielss, one of Control Monger‘s producers. » Read more about Control Monger
Why do we solve puzzles? Maybe we want that “a-ha” moment, when the solution becomes clear and we can suddenly see the whole picture of the complexities we’ve been dealing with. It imparts a sense of mastery.
Heaven & Earth gets something different out of puzzles than the satisfaction of beating a challenge. It finds peace. » Read more about Heaven & Earth
