Muriel Tramis speaks about her career and the memory of Martinique Essay category

Screenshot from Méwilo

Muriel Tramis has a quiet but powerful legacy in gaming. As a designer and producer at French studio Coktel Vision starting in the late 80s, Tramis worked on about a dozen titles, like the puzzle series Gobliiins. But she may be known best for her socially charged games inspired by her family’s history on the Caribbean island Martinique, such as the colonial mystery game Méwilo and the incendiary slave rebellion game Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness.

Tramis left Coktel Vision in 2003 after the company merged with Vivendi Universal Games, and she’s kept a low profile since then. Now, Tramis is stepping back into games with a remake of Méwilo, her first game, for its 30th anniversary. Tramis launched a crowdfunding campaign for the game last week.

To promote her return to gaming, Tramis unexpectedly contacted me a few weeks ago and, in one of her first interviews in English, shared more about her time with Coktel Vision, the importance of historical memory to her work, and what she’s been up to for the last 15 years. » Read more about Muriel Tramis speaks about her career and the memory of Martinique

3 comments , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Kobo Deluxe Arcade category

Title screen from Kobo Deluxe

Kobo Deluxe rules. It rules because it creates simple, effortless drama with only a few pieces.

The game is a retooling of xKobo, a Unix action game by Akira Higuchi that itself was based on the 1981 arcade game Bosconian. With each iteration, the game has gotten a little faster, smoother, and snappier. Your targets are “fortresses,” these tree branch-like space stations. Blow up one node of a fortress, and the others under it will blow up too. The center node can take a while to reach depending on the size of the fortress.

From Kobo Deluxe

From every direction!

A flurry of bullets, missiles, plasma rings, and spacecraft will pipe out of the fortresses as soon as you close enough to one. (Or worse if there’s two or more.) But instead the focus being on dodging complex patterns of bullets, the better strategy is to duck away from them and then begin another approach. So you launch into a dance, circling in and out of the range of fortresses, searching for an opening to carve away at them until you can pluck out the center node and watch them unravel. Because your spaceship fires out of the front and back at the same time, you’re rewarded for retreating too. (With the funny side effect of sometimes hitting a fortress as you fly away from it and missing the explosions.)

This feels absolutely rock solid to play. Kobo Deluxe is a lean, punchy game. It moves quickly without being overwhelming. It has a clean, crisp aesthetic. It succeeds by being straightforward as hell: the game has one type of target, and the only controls are moving and firing ahead. You could turn on an “always fire” option and simplify it even more!

Once you adjust to the rules, the flow and cycle of the game become an automatic response. I never had to think about dodging missiles; I just did it. It’s that great kind of intense yet easy-to-play game that allows you to get into a zone and space out.

This Deluxe version of Kobo adds a health bar and a meter that regulates the speed of your weapon, but those inclusions take away from the appeal of its directness. The classic mode, pared to the basics, represents Kobo at its best.

Trivia!

Two separate sequels to Kobo were abandoned, a 3D version by Pierre-Loic Herve called zKobo and an overcomplicated followup to Kobo Deluxe titled Kobo II. The developer of Deluxe released a modernized version of the game, Kobo Redux, in 2017.

One comment , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lionel Trains Presents: Trans-Con! Educational category

Title screen from Trans-Con!

The first Transcontinental Railroad opened up the American West and ended the need for dangerous pioneer expeditions. So in a way, Knowledge Adventure’s Trans-Con!, an educational game about the railroad’s construction, is the real sequel to the spirit of The Oregon Trail.

Although the game is licensed by the model train set company Lionel, the actual trains aren’t the focus. Trans-Con! explores what the construction of the railroad was like. The game switches around between modes and perspectives, and while it occasionally goes off-topic, it always pulls from history to illustrate the West. » Read more about Lionel Trains Presents: Trans-Con!

3 comments , , , , , , , , ,

Moraff’s Entrap Puzzle category

Screenshot from Moraff's Entrap

Steve Moraff was a singular game designer. Early in his career, before he exclusively worked on mahjong software, Moraff had independence from publishers, traditions, and standards to create his own games in his own voice. He produced more than a dozen games in a bunch of genres; although a few of those were team efforts, everything from his company MoraffWare bears his name as well as his unusual, technical style. You get the idea that despite MoraffWare being a business, he made games just for himself.

Moraff’s Entrap is unmistakably a Steve Moraff joint – punishing, graphically dense, and strangely tuned, with a dash of huckstering self-indulgence. » Read more about Moraff’s Entrap

6 comments , , , , , , , , , ,

Transarctica Simulation category

Title screen from Transarctica

We can’t talk about Transarctica without mentioning Snowpiercer. According to unsourced internet descriptions, the game was inspired by the French novel series La Compagnie des glaces, though it immediately calls to mind the images of Bong Joon-ho’s apocalyptic 2013 action film and the French graphic novel it was based on.

They all start from the same place. An experiment to combat climate change leaves the earth in an ice age. Centuries later, with cities collapsing, the world’s last surviving infrastructure is its railroads.

In Transarctica, it’s a network of railways, managed under the profitable tyranny of the Viking Union. No one remembers the sun, and the Union likes it that way. From old books, your character learns about the failed climate engineering experiment – and another project that could reverse the damage. All you want now is to see the sun. The Viking Union wants you dead.

The mission is bleak. Long stretches of nothing are punctuated with violent loss. You rarely know what direction to head in and could feasibly go in circles for hours. And still the journey has a sense of fierce dignity, of perseverance and hope despite the evidence – though that’s undercut by a bad moral compromise you’re supposed to accept. » Read more about Transarctica

One comment , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gridz Macintosh categoryStrategy category

Title screen from Gridz

NetSpace. ToolBots. Home domains. Gridz speaks the stupid made-up language of cyberspace. With its tactile, rubbery interface and bubbly synth music, it looks and sounds like the weirdo Y2K-era future that never came to pass.

Gridz is also a strategy game, of course, and a clever one. Real-time strategy games have an element of territory control underlying them. Gridz makes that aspect explicit. The physical control of NetSpace has a mechanical role in the game, and Gridz supports the idea with the unfamiliarity of its juiced-up cyber setting. » Read more about Gridz

7 comments , , , , , , , , , , ,

Puppet Motel Multimedia category

Title screen from Puppet Motel

In her spoken word performance “White Lilly,” Laurie Anderson remembers a feeling that can’t be easily distilled: “Days go by, endlessly, endlessly pulling you into the future.” Not good or bad, simply a recognition of time going forward, clumsily.

Laurie Anderson’s only game, Puppet Motel, is like that quote – an observation, not necessarily a judgment, of the world moving and dragging us with it.

She recites that quote in Puppet Motel as part of a longer scene. The next time we see the artist, she’s facing us, sitting down in a starkly lit room to tell the story of Plato’s cave, the allegory of people who, “just like us,” can only see shadows of real things. Those two moments don’t share an immediately clear relationship. They are fragments of a larger, blurry picture, pieced together from excerpts of Anderson’s work and original multimedia art, a convoluted reflection on our changing relationship with art, technology, time, memory, and each other. » Read more about Puppet Motel

6 comments , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Caper in the Castro, the first known LGBTQ video game, available again after 28 years Adventure categoryBlog categoryMacintosh category

Caper in the Castro, a Macintosh HyperCard game from 1989, was the first known LGBTQ-themed video game. As the author CM Ralph explained in an interview from 2014, the game follows “a lesbian detective investigating the disappearance of a [drag queen] in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco.” It pays tribute to the San Francisco LGBTQ community while also going for jokes like a villain named Dullagan Straightman.

The game was released as charityware: in exchange for the game, Ralph asked that you donate to an AIDS charity.

You can read more about Caper in the Castro at the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, which includes extensive coverage of the game, discussion with Ralph, and a copy of an article about the game from The Washington Blade from 1989.

Until just a few days ago, this game was thought to be lost. However, thanks to the Museum of Play, digital games curator Andrew Borman, Adrianne Shaw, CM Ralph, and the Internet Archive, a copy of Caper in the Castro has been recovered and is now available to play for free in your browser. In fact, it’s embedded in this post!

LGBTQ games and players have always existed. Caper in the Castro is an important piece of that history, “a labor of love for the Gay and Lesbian Community,” now freely accessible for everyone. (Also telling about gaming culture is Murder on Main Street, a straightwashed version of the game to be sold to a broader audience.)

Huge thanks to everyone involved in recovering this game!

3 comments , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Learn about game preservation (and play Mac games) at Super MAGFest 2018 Blog category

MAGFest 2018 logo

Hey, I’m coming back to MAGFest!

Super MAGFest 2018 is right around the corner on January 4-7, 2018 in National Harbor, MD. It’s a unique, freewheeling experience and my favorite gaming event.

I’m so excited to share that this year, I’m hosting the panel Preserving Video Games and Gaming History.

We’ve brought together an incredible panel of experts for you, featuring game archivist Rachel Donahue, International Center for the History of Electronic Games curator Shannon Symonds, and Video Game History Foundation director Frank Cifaldi. We’ll go over the basics of game preservation, some of the trickier questions, what’s being done right now, and ways that you can help.

The panel will be at 4pm on Friday, January 5th in MAGES 1 as part of the MAGES educational panel track. (I’m still sort of in disbelief that this is happening! Huge thanks to the panelists.)

Also! I’m curating a selection of Macintosh games for the MAGFest Museum. My goal was to get a range of moods, styles, and genres. Attendees will be able to play a variety of titles including The Journeyman Project, Theresa Duncan’s Smarty, Bungie’s early shooter Pathways into Darkness, the zesty RPG Realmz, and a whole bunch of educational games. (And, at long last making its debut at MAGFest, Catz!). It’ll be lots of fun to bring these games to new audiences.

If you’re going to MAGFest, please come to our panel! And at any point over the weekend, reach out if you want to talk about Mac games or just to say hello.

Leave a comment , , ,

Liquid War 5 Strategy category

Title screen from Liquid War 5

The minimap in a strategy game shrinks a huge war into the size of a small window. At such a large scale, whether set in ancient Rome or a distant planet, any battle will look like thousands of multicolored dots running around. In a way, it boils the strategy game genre down to its most basic pieces – fighting dots.

Liquid War 5 totally embraces that reduction and runs with it. You control a liquid made up of hundreds of particles, fighting against other liquids. (Maybe it’s more like those web games where you play with a fountain of powder.) It gets the beats of a big battle in the simplest terms, mixed with the weird sensory experience of being a puddle of goop. » Read more about Liquid War 5

3 comments , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 … 12 13 14 15 16 … 30