Indie
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.
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.
Teasing, groping, and at times abusing the line between gaming and art, Yume Nikki is one of the most beautiful and upsetting games ever made. Little Bo Beep presents a series exploring this slow-burning nightmare.
Increasingly, videogames are striving to imitate the unexplored worlds of human imagination — from barely-probed ocean depths to the stalward nebulae and distant stars of space simulations. The accuracy of recent attempts, however, is remained as far from the mark asd early scifi pulp magazines. More often than not, the ocean depths and voids of space are filled with life, pirates, battles, and immidiacy — immitations that do not depict the true nature of these depths: cold, lonely, enormous and terribly hostile. It's hard to communicate the experience of deep sea diving, or to imagine space flight. A few haunting releases — like Wholfin's video of an underwater squid birth — offer us clues.
Every so often I encounter a game that, in expressing beautiful art direction, stunning animation, and gorgeous visuals, comes across more as a cinematic and visual experience than as a gaming one. The latest release from Damp Gnat, Icycle, does precisely this. The game's premise is delightfully simple: the world has entered an ice age, and you alone inhabit it. You have nothing else to do but ride your bicycle in search of a friend.
Movie poster-inspiring name aside, Captain Forever is a classic 2-d shooter (imagine asteroids) with a twist. All of the ships in the game are built from a simple set of modular blocks, like Lego or the International Space Station. if a ship's command module is destroyed before all of its modules are trashed, the surviving pieces crumble into space, and can be picked up and added to your own.
From the first moments of your existence, something registers as unmistakeably wrong: your eyes open to the blackness of space and you are alone. Then, yawning across the gulf of plangent time, a beeping hits your ears. It is a bitonal register, a dualistic dance, one part auspicious, the other nefarious. Up and down it goes, transmitting - what? Knowledge? Information? Light? None of these things. All you see now are the words: RAM CHECK OK! ROM CHECK FAIL!
