Expo Exposed

October 30, 2008 · Filed Under Articles, Featured · 1 Comment 

I came away from my short time at the Eurogamer Expo with just the one thought. Is the world really ready for an Indie explosion?

Coming from the point of view of someone firmly ensconced within the Indie mindset, it was an experience to see what happens when people, real people out there in the real world, meet some of the oddities and extremities that the scene produces. To call the majority of the stuff available to play at the Indie Arcade “quirky” compared to the general mainstream stuff on display would be a major understatement. It’s to the vast credit of every developer shown that of the games displayed back to back, not one of them looked even remotely similar - something that certainly couldn’t be said of the display downstairs. From the painted beauty of Braid (shown in its PC incarnation) to the Tron-esque glow of Multiwinia to my very own pixel stretching War Twat - each game sat firmly in its own niche both stylistically and more often than not, in gameplay terms too.

The Comfort Zone

In the hour or so I mooched around the Indie Arcade corner, one thing became clear. Quite a few people were being dragged outside of their comfort zone. For every person that “got it”, there were two more who really, really didn’t. To use War Twat as an example, given that I know it’s quite the extreme - I observed a mixed reaction from a group of lads who stood and compared survival times and went away commenting that they needed their eyes fixing afterwards, all the way across the opposite end of the scale to someone who had the expression as if one had just murdered his entire family then smeared poop across their corpses. One person wandered over, hit start, grabbed the mouse, waved it around for 5 seconds, died and walked away. For those who haven’t tried the game, there’s absolutely no mouse control in it…

I know, when it comes to War Twat that it’s always going to be a divisive game. You’ll either love it, detest it or just plain ignore it. That’s great, I designed it that way. If I told you that there were people doing the same thing with the critically (and deservedly) praised World Of Goo, a game brimming with polish and accessibility, what would you then think? Would you think that perhaps the game just isn’t meant for them? Would you think that World Of Goo does something wrong? Would you think that perhaps, they really just couldn’t care less about the game?

Whilst I’m sure that some of the above may well be the case, whilst I was lurking around I discovered that more often than not people did want to get to know the game, they wanted to find out what it was all about, they wanted to see if it would be fun or not but, and this is a big but, the games aren’t what they’re used to and without much of a solid explanation then they’re not going to actually go hands on. Curiously, when I spent 5 minutes explaining World Of Goo to someone, demonstrating how the game worked - nipping onto the first level to show how to construct a simple tower, ducking back into the Goo Corporation to show off building a big and fancy tower then a small crowd began to gather. It wasn’t that folks weren’t interested, they just needed a little nudge and being reassured that sure, these games may look a bit different to what you’re used to but they’re safe really. They’re not going to bite.

Not Weird

Events like the Indie Arcade give us the opportunity to make the leap from the alien and weird to the “oh, it’s not that weird after all” incredibly easily. Unfortunately, opportunities like this don’t come up often enough. To answer my own question from earlier, yes - in many ways the world is ready for an indie explosion, but for a lot of people, it’s going to take a bit of a nudge.

I stood and watched as people looked bamboozled by Machinarium, contemplated the time bending mechanics of Braid, hit dinosaurs about the face with a large spiked ball, ran themselves into spikes to transfer bodies and built towers of balls up into the sky whilst downstairs, some other folks shot some things, raced some cars and Ubisoft let it be known that they were at the event by being on just about every corner. I don’t know what happened outside of the hour or so I mooched around, but even despite being tucked at the far end of a different floor from the mainstream games and placed roughly to the side of what appeared to be a mind control experiment a la Dr Who, the Indie Arcade was working. People were giving a shit and having some fun, some were intrigued and in some cases, games were played for more than a respectable amount of time.

There were two important things missing from the Indie Arcade, mind you. One of which is not necessarily something that Pixel Lab or Eurogamer would have any control over.

The lack of Indie devs whilst I was there was noticeable. It’s not like most of us can afford to just jump down to London from wherever in the world we are. I know for me, travelling there and back turned into an absolute nightmare of epic proportions thanks to the combined efforts of National Express and Mersey Travel - if you’ve ever wanted to ensure you get hypothermia and cramps (which I did) then I recommend both heartily. However, despite ending up rough as fuck I’m glad I made the effort. I got the chance to explain War Twat to a couple of folks, get a few people interested in a couple of the other games and you wouldn’t believe the difference that can make. I wish I could have hung around longer all told. If you know of an event within reasonable travelling distance and it’s showing off your work, go along and give it some support. Remember, there’s other people out there who play your games not just developers. You don’t have to stick with what you know.

The second problem was that there was no follow up material. It would have been really handy to have a pamphlet or booklet to hand for folks to take away with them detailing where and how they could find not just the games on display, but some more sterling titles. As it is, there may be a few folks inclined to go home and look up the games, but people are people and I wouldn’t be surprised if without something to point them in the right direction most folks don’t.

The first time

The show, as a whole, was not without its flaws mind you. Labelling throughout the entire event, both downstairs and upstairs left a lot to be desired. Often you’d have to squint to see what game you were supposed to be playing, during the afternoon rush there were people hogging games for silly amounts of time, some idiots decided to put on displays of their games outside in the cold, wet London weather. Often, the arrangement of stuff seemed random at best. Given it’s the first time Eurogamer have put on an event, I don’t doubt that a lot of these problems will be remedied next time round. The expo itself may not yet be filed under “an absolute must visit” as a lot of these things made for a lesser experience, but were they to be resolved it’d go from “a nice way to spend a couple of hours” into “absolutely essential”.

From my own point of view though, the Indie Arcade was a success despite my above niggles. More people playing these games, even if it’s only just for those few moments, helps raise awareness and get the word out there that there’s more to gaming than a constant stream of FPS games, RTS games, gunmetal grey and shitbrown.

I’d like to hope that it’s not just me who sees the Indie Arcade in this light, and I’d like to hope that when and if Eurogamer do this for a second time - they’d invite the nice chaps from Pixel Lab to take part all over again. I’d also like to think that maybe, by the time that happens, they’d consider putting the indie titles on a more equal footing and not tucked away in the naughty boys corner. Oh yeah, and making sure the wiring is sorted so that no-one suffers power cuts!

Hopefully, other folks putting on events will look at what Eurogamer and Pixel Lab did and think “yeah, I’d like a bit of that too”. After all, aside from a tiny bit of space - what have you got to lose?

In the meantime, massive thanks to both Eurogamer and Pixel Lab for making this thing happen.

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Indie Games at the Eurogamer Expo

October 29, 2008 · Filed Under Featured, Personal · Comment 

Slightly guff pics I’m afraid as my camera decided to throw a flid.






A huge thanks to Pixel Labs for pulling this off, despite some disappointments with the expo as a whole - it’s a fantastic thing to get a bunch of fucking ace indie games together on public display.

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War Twat Update

October 27, 2008 · Filed Under Development Log, Featured · Comment 

Exciting stuff. Can I stop now?

Mainly visual tweaks and exhaustion. No wait, the latter part isn’t the War Twat update, that’s the toilet training child syndrome. Sorry.

I shall be in London on Tuesday waving my Twat at passers by. I’ll be the hairy one they try and stop on the door.

Short post because my connection has been sub 56k over the weekend and randomly slows to an absolute crawl just as I attempt to do something. Thank you Virgin Media!

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Design Design Design

September 5, 2008 · Filed Under Articles, Featured · 2 Comments 

I’ve mentioned an awful lot of times recently my love for the more simplistic vector approach to graphics, clean lines and high speed gaming is something I utterly adore. When I were a lad and the humble Speccy were in its prime (enough of that - Ed) there was a pair of companies that were responsible for me developing this love.

Whilst I’m sure a lot of people got hooked on the vector look courtesy of Battlezone or Star Wars, this wasn’t for me. For a start, there wasn’t really that much in the way of arcade action to be had in a crumbling industrial town with unemployment on the rise. There was only really the one leisure centre in the town anyway and that had Scramble. We did have an arcade, I might add, but it was more the kind of place parents warn you away from than encourage you to dive inside.

For me it was the games of Realtime Games and Design Design that got me hooked on vector graphics. Now, Realtime’s 3d Tank Duel I still claim is the most impressive home port of Battlezone that existed during the eighties but Design Design? I’ve just realised that I don’t think I’ve mentioned the beauty that is Simon Brattel’s Dark Star on this blog before which is quite forgetful and unforgivable of me. The sheer speed of the fucking thing at the time was (well, I guess still is) fucking amazing. No, don’t just listen to me here - have a go yourself. (I’d normally do a WoS link, but I can’t get the site to load right now so have something a bit more competitive).

One of the truly wonderful things about Dark Star (aside from just being plain phenomenal) was the amount of control over the game Simon Brattel built into it. As much as is possible is user configurable. You have 4 game variants, 6 difficulty levels ranging from easy to “pretty damn devastating”, you can configure the brutality and frequency of the enemy missiles all the way from none to (again) “pretty damn devastating”, varying levels of sound effects and even have different display modes. It also features a wonderful high score table and one of my favourite sets of instructions ever:

Fly around the universe. If it moves shoot it. If it doesn’t, shoot it anyway. If it’s square - fly through it.

Utterly fantastic. Even if the tunnels were cunts.

Anyway, the purpose of this post isn’t just to eulogise over how fantastic Dark Star, Design Design and the work of Simon Brattel is/was (although that is something more people should mention, honourable props to the Good Reverend Mr Campbell for his YS Top 100 write up many moons ago) but to also mention that Mr Brattel has now dug out a ruck of his old source code for the games and put them online. Which is awesome.

Also, have some related links:

Design Design Source Code
Crash Interview
Noddy’s Guide To Game Design

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Strange Attractors 2

September 3, 2008 · Filed Under Featured, Reviews · 1 Comment 

It’s national sequel week on this blog it would seem. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially with two incredibly high quality sequels released within 7 days of each other. People of the gameiverse, you spoil me (and cost me a fortune).

Strange Attractors 2 is, weirdly enough, the follow up to Strange Attractors. For those not in the know, the product of a previous Retro Remakes competition** to produce a one switch game - naturally enough I have a special interest in this for the aforementioned two blatantly obvious reasons*

Set in a series of Tron-esque glowing arena’s (you can see I’m half sold already at this point, can’t you?), the aim of the game is really quite simple. There are a series of magnetic objects placed about the arena and you use the left mouse button to draw yourself towards them and the right mouse button to repel yourself away from them. Using these you have to collect a series of stars and make your way to the exit.

Whilst it’s a simple concept, the depth comes from the level design which gets increasingly devious and mind bending as you progress and trying to wrap your head around rooms filled with different sized magnetic balls in order to achieve your goals can take a bit of thought. Finally getting that tricky series of manouvres correct in order to throw yourself out of the door and into the next arena is quite the satisfying thing indeed, which, of course, is what matters in this sort of thing.

Whereas I found the original game a bit lacking in the fun department, SA2 more than makes up for any issues I might have had. Although I do have one pissy gripe and that’s it takes a good minute to load on this box, which is quite cringe inducing and I dread to think of the time it would take on a lesser box than the Bobbeast.

I can’t leave this review without giving special props to the great soundtrack either, it certainly adds to the slight headfucking nature of the game, especially when the little laser shooting twats first start to appear.

All in all, it’s a damn fine effort from Ominous Dev and one of the most polished one switch/three switch games that I’ve seen in a long time. For that alone, I’d applaud them. The fact they’ve pulled a rather sterling game out of the bag to boot means they get a small standing ovation. Small because I’m only one person, obviously.

Strange Attractors 2 is $14.99 and available through Greenhouse it would seem.

*In case you’re a bit thicky, I run Retro Remakes and I organised the competition in association with Barrie Ellis in the first place.
**Incidentally, our latest competition is running now. If you haven’t joined in the fun, do so!

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