Nemesis Macana: This is the best (and funniest) instance of breaking a butterfly on a wheel I’ve seen for a long time. I love the overblown purple prose. I love the impassioned, moralizing angst. The companion essay is brilliant. I wasn’t aware of the background for the game coming in, but it doesn’t take much imagination to grasp the idea of epically deconstructing an utterly broken little porn game.
Cronenbergian booty horror
inspiration: “The Black Riders and Other Lines” by Stephen Crane (if you haven’t read this, you’re cheating yourself of some of the funniest, bleakest romantic poetry put to paper) | books written before people knew a lot of stuff
art: andre de freitas and my friend Erin‘s new painting
a game where you’re a cyborg undercover cop and you have to calibrate your system between CYBORG and HUMAN, cyborg is super strong and has hyper-expanded senses, but human is necessary for picking up body language and vocal cues, as well as not fucking shattering the shot glass you’re holding in your hand when you’re trying to chat up the locals at a bar. if your cyborg reflexes are too low, you might not be able to react as quickly to a suspect fleeing the scene or someone trying to kill you, but you don’t want to reveal your inhuman gait and lack of affect to the people you’re trying to ingratiate yourself with. one misstep could lead to crushing someone’s hand during a handshake, or courteously opening a door only to tear it from its hinges like a piece of cardboard.
Someone made a game inspired by, among other things, my post “The One Time I Went Hunting”. Play Brainpan!
The best part is when the (spoilers) ants are eating away parts of your brain so you start to hallucinate and cycle objects in your environment. The breakdown of perception from slow, agonizing brain damage is what i’m ALL about. Also big fat ant abdomens bouncing on your lobes.
A thought: it is not always a “good” game that should be posted, but sometimes a flawed game wrapped around a certain idea that deserves to be promulgated. Games I don’t think people will necessarily enjoy, but will make people want to create, or the idea should be simply be known.
May contain spoilers.
Nebulous Hero: Singapore-Mit GAMBIT Game Lab experimented in a similar concept with their game Afterland. The interesting thing about these games is that the designers don’t rely on altering the physical architecture of a level to progress the game, they only change what the player knows. This is a powerful, immersive technique when done correctly. How elegant to store the greater part of your game in the player’s mind, instead of anything so crude as material reconfiguration. Other things I liked: the massive teeth of the friends (a sly jab at player expectations), the music (fun, triumphant).
an index of every possible cruel act found engraved throughout a planet of mountains
it is difficult to read because of the traversal necessary to navigate across the index (broken stones, steep inclines, chasms), not to mention the low light and the thin engraving and the dark stone, but it is interesting
Designing an introduction to a genre for people unfamiliar to the genre does not mean making that introduction boring as fuck or infantilized. It should make them hungry for more, not turn them off.
