For Games Unplayed and Unknown
Oftentimes, the simplest games are the most fun. When a formula doesn’t have much nuance or complexity, it can engage the player without being prohibitively hard to learn.
Enter Gravity Balls. There’s nothing brilliant about the design; in fact, the idea is simple enough that anyone could code it. But it’s so goddamn infuriating, and I can’t stop playing it. » Read more about Gravity Balls
If there’s one concept that games have mastered, it’s the futuristic blood sport. Sure, movies like The Running Man came first, but Smash TV, MadWorld, and their ilk turned those fantasy game shows interactive and pretty much left nowhere else to go. Just don’t tell that to Zephyr.
Designed by the team behind the Might and Magic series, Zephyr nails the hubbub of a gleefully televised cavalcade of murder. Nearly every second features a fictional sponsor, a cheesy commentator, and 90s electronic rock music. The ultraviolent vision is top-to-bottom perfect – including the bits where the rookies needlessly, endlessly die. » Read more about Zephyr
Hey boys and girls! I decided that during downtime when I’m busier, I would throw some content up in the form of music highlights! So many of these weird old games have great tunes in them, so it’s worth pointing out some of the good ones.
This first one is the stock music piece “Telecom” used in The Labyrinth of Time in 1993. Whenever people reach out about the music from The Labyrinth of Time, “Telecom” is one of the bits that always gets the most praise. Understandably so; especially compared to the rest of the game’s music, “Telecom” is moving, complex, and multilayered. The last segment of the song richly combines half a dozen disparate instruments into a strange and elaborate noisescape.
The Labyrinth of Time‘s soundtrack consists of a 20-minute-or-so loop of music from the production archives at APM Music. This particular song by James Asher came from the album “Industry 2,” which seems to be filled with the blaring synth music that you’d find in a corporate training video in the 80s. With a few exceptions, the rest of the album is painful to hear. Thank goodness at least one interesting – nay, stellar! – track came out of it.
Quick, name a great edutainment game.
No, not The Oregon Trail again. Think harder.
The game you just thought about probably taught a single subject really, really well. Classics like Carmen Sandiego, Math Blaster, or even Mario’s Time Machine all focused on a single topic – geography, math, history, etc. – and drove it into children’s skulls with the hawkishnses of a car salesman, hoping they’d retain at least a little bit of whatever subject.
The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain is a little more ambitious if generalized in scope. It tackles the subject of brain functions, trying to expand players’ minds in comprehension, logic, spatial cognition, and linguistics. Not only does it work, it’s fun, and I had just as good of a time playing it as a twentysomething as I did as a hyperactive kid. » Read more about The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain
The Greens is an odd duck. The best way to think about this minigolf game is like a real minigolf course. It has a theme, and despite not doing much with it, it still has a hokey charm to it. (Plus its own problems.) » Read more about The Greens
The company Sierra On-Line was once a titan of the adventure game genre. Though their style of extra-difficult, character-driven, third-person adventure stories eventually fell out of favor to the first-person, contemplative solitude of Myst, they took one shot at that new genre mode with Lighthouse: The Dark Being.
On its surface, Lighthouse reads like notes from a committee meeting that tried to nail down what made Myst successful. You visit a bizarre uncharted world where you solve complicated puzzles in a open-ended locales with complex mythology and lots of journals to read. Almost in spite of that copycat-ery, Lighthouse leaves its own touches on how that sort of game can fill its setting with risk and conflict. Its twisted world delights more than its components suggest.
UPDATE: Lead designer Jon Bock shares some insight into the unusual art direction and story for this self-described “science-fiction folk tale.” » Read more about Lighthouse: The Dark Being
In the criminal justice system, the people are harangued by a single figure: the kangaroo judge who tries and convicts for made-up crimes of his choosing.
This is his story. » Read more about Kangaroo Court
Ladder Man has an original idea, but it plays so cumbersomely that it is excruciating. » Read more about Ladder Man
The bizarre and the mundane shine inseparably in The Labyrinth of Time, an adventure game by Terra Nova Development. Mainly the design of artist Bradley W. Schenck, the game throws mythology, retrofuturism, and art history together into an odd concoction that, rather than come out as a disparate mess, heightens the ordinary and grounds the imaginative. The titular labyrinth is a setting of enormous creativity bound into maze form. » Read more about The Labyrinth of Time
It’s understandable that Duracell would produce a game based on their mascot character. I don’t understand what Duracell: Run The Bunny was supposed to be, though. It’s barely coherent as a game, as an advertisement, or as anything. Duracell probably didn’t expect this either.
UPDATE: New unsettling information about Run the Bunny, straight from the developer’s mouth. » Read more about Duracell: Run the Bunny