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'Splodation Studios, the Indie game developers who scored big points with last year's popular Iphone downloadable "Prank Caller," have done it again with their latest offering: Tetriste. These days it doesn't take much to find a glossy, sometimes three-dimensional (sometimes perspectival) Tetris mod, but Tetriste hearkens right back to the good old days when Alexey Pazhitnov cranked out his cult 8-bit classic. Tetriste does little to update or gloss the graphics, and offers almost nothing in the way of gameplay innovation. But the sheer genius of Tetriste does not derive from the ivory-tower esotericism of complex design, and neither from the inspid Bourgeois fascination with all the spatial dimensions that has brought us a contemporary glut of 3D gaming.
There is nothing hypocritical in asking the question, "Are games frivolous?" The answer is obvious: of course they are. But so is every conceivable manifestation of human intellect that does not directly contribute to the so-called human weal. It might also be said of intelligence that it is the rarest of things. Consider the immense size of the universe and the incredible fortuitousness of the circumstances that gave rise to carbon based life here on Earth. It does not take much contemplation to see that any consideration of genius must inevitably become a memorialisation: all life is doomed from the most hopeful moment of inchoate birth to the ineluctable tragedy of death. Why then do we not gnash our teeth and bury our heads in the sand? Certainly we do none of this with regards to the many apocalyptic distractions of culture: but as beings of intellect, we are so rarely called to take heed of the incredible, artistic phenomena of the everyday business of entertainment.
The invocation of etymology might be considered a paean to the wisdom of our predecessors. It is nevertheless true that when we encounter from a distance things once close and dear, their familiar unfamiliarity can strike an unsettling chord. Nostalgia now means a wistful longing for home: by which I an inspired to imagine men and women drifting through the fey valleys of their youth, yearning tears distilled on the points of their noses. I can't deny revulsion at this turn towards saccharine insipidity. Break the word down from its modern husk and you find some startling constituents. Johannes Hofer coined the term in 1688 from a combination of the Greek words nostos, meaning "homecoming", and algos, meaning "pain, grief, distress". Together, you get something a lot closer to, "extreme anguish at an inability to return" than our trite modern rendering.
How we in the West perceive the past reflects more often than not a bias for the glitter and gimmick culture of modern times. It is easy to disparage ancient traditions by dint of their being old; how rarely is the fact of their survival (as in the case of Yoga, which made it through 5,000 years of history and is still going strong) considered an attestation to their worth? Naturally, society will fulminate in both directions, and a healthy counter-cultural taste for the “retro” prevails to give the lie to my words: and so much the better! To fully appreciate the old requires first the abandonment of an inherent sense of progress through time, and secondly the recognition that all the cultures and peoples of history engaged with the raw stuff of life with an equal capacity for genius.
M. John Harrison said it beautifully in his strange and underappreciated first novel, The Committed Men: they had altogether left the maps he had known. This simple statement encapsulates the halting, terrible moment whereupon the speaker recognizes he is no longer in familiar territory. He has crossed the line, as it were, into the Weird Places. And there ain't no going back.
The 2010 Indie Games Festival is here! The finalists for the best indie games are in. Take a look! You might also check out Boing Boing's coverage of the Festival. Some of the entries look absolutely stunning.
Every January Jayisgames compiles a list of the best casual games of the preceding year. These include primarily flash and hidden object games, with a few exceptions for escape the room puzzles and miscellany that defies any genre classification. It also happens to be a sweet concentrated dose of gaming goodness! So check it out!
I am Goombax, son of Goombor the High Priest of the Goomba, and this is my story. It is the tale of a war, of a grave and unrelenting enemy: the nefarious slaughter-giant Mario, and his perverted brother Luigi. Ultimately, it is a story of revenge. It began on the Sacerdotal Festival of the Long [...]
The early Hominidae who walked the earth fifteen million years ago, our first ancestors to deviate from the family of lesser apes called the Gibbons (Hylobatidae), did not traverse the oceans or fly. But we could walk before we could reason; and more to the point, we could also run.
When I was a child I harboured a secret from the world. It concerned the places I couldn’t see, but knew of in a way that didn’t really avail itself of words. I am talking about indistinct realities. But then again that doesn’t really do them justice. They are not simply indistinct, or emotional; they are, properly speaking, beyond.
One of the most famous images imparted by the ancients to posterity is that of the eternal Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill without rest. The conclusion of the parable is well known: steps away from the summit, Sisyphus, through some fated contrivance of the Gods, loses his hold and sends the boulder tumbling back to its nadir. He sighs heavily, and Sispyhus returns to begin his task again, bearing a symbolic weight far in excess of the load he is forced to push. Sisyphus earned his punishment by defying the Gods (and specifically Hades), and his lesson is clear: by the work of day you will find yourself rewarded — or punished — in the longish night of death.
I am writing principally to inform you, Mr. S_____, that your proficiency in the ascendancy of various and differential rock formations is highly desirous to us, particularly with regard to the area of, ahem, "human resources" and, ahem, the betterment of certain of our... "assets". You see, my agency conducts business of an occasionally clandestine nature...
