Retro Sabotage

An introductory note: I know that this is my second post in a row concerning video games, but you'll have to excuse me because they are a fascination of mine, and the content of this post will be very different from the content of the previous one. Now, on with the show!

Most everyone has played some of the more classic video games: Pong, Breakout, Adventure, Pac Man, Space Invaders, Defender, Asteroids, Tetris, etc. These things have been around since the '70s and '80s and their gameplay is a very pure experience, usually undiluted by things like narrative and control scheme and other such trappings which usually turn people off to the modern samplings of the medium.

In a way they've become archetypal of the conventions we see in modern games. Pong was not only the first video game for a home console, it was also the first game of the sports genre, being a crude approximation of Tennis. Text adventure games such as Zork had been around a while, but Adventure was among the first graphical representations of the genre with which it shares its name.

Tetris was one of the first games of the puzzle genre which has lately spawned sensations in the casual market like Snood and Bejeweled. Space Invaders (along with its relatives Asteroids and Defender) was one of the first of a genre known as shooters which eventually split into several other genres including: top-down (Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaga), side-scrolling (Defender, Gradius), first-person (Doom, Halo), third-person (Grand Theft Auto) and some other minor genres. Each was based on both the player's perspective of the one doing the shooting, and the freedom of the shooting individual.

Whew, after a little history lesson there, we get to the meat: Retro Sabotage. This site does riffs on classic arcade games and explores some of the symbolism employed in each by presenting the classic games with a twist. For example, a version of Space Invaders, named simply Invasion, questions the futility of the mission of the last defender of Earth. A version of Pac Man, which they cleverly title The Morning After, explores the various psychedelic effects of the Power Pills which Pac Man eats that allow him to go after the ghosts that normally chase him. The version of Tetris they have up, called Compromise, allows the player to experience playing two games of Tetris simultaneously using only one controller. Each screen is given different pieces, and the player has to decide where and how to place them on both screens.

They have several others uploaded right now, and the site promises weekly updates on every Thursday. I am adding them to my bookmarks in the hope that I will soon see a version of the Super Mario Brothers in which each of the mushrooms Mario eats makes him hallucinate and think that he is seeing oversized pipes everywhere and that small brown mushrooms are skulking about, trying to kill him.

- Via Neatorama.

Steven Spielberg's Video Game

Good ole' Steven Spielberg. We've learned so much about life through watching his movies. Such as never ever go into water above your knees because monstrous sharks are always lurking just a little outside of your vision. We also learned that aliens are adorable and should be kept in closets and protected from the all-seeing eye of an uncaring national government. Also, Nazis make the perfect bad guys.

One could make the case that Steven Spielberg knows a lot about what makes a good movie. He's been nominated twelve times for Academy Awards and has won three of those times. Not only has he racked up the nominations, but he has done it across four decades: from Best Director for Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 to Best Producer for Letters from Iwo Jima in 2006. This man literally has a lifetime of experience in story-telling through cinema under his belt.

But now, the great film director has decided to try something new. It was announced some months ago that Steven Spielberg had contracted with one of the largest publishers of video games in the world, Electronic Arts, to direct two video games to be published under their label. One was to be a dramatic, narrative-driven game for the Microsoft XBox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3, and the other was to be a physics-based puzzle game for the Nintendo Wii. Few details were given, and much speculation abounded.

Could Spielberg make not one, but two great games that live up to his legacy as a director? Would he be able to direct a game that had very little narrative focus? Would EA shoehorn him into a budget and time frame that were impossible to accomplish like they have done for other developers? Would his games wind up looking like one of the many other craptastic games based on movie narratives?

The essential question derived from all of this is: Does Spielberg's directorial genius translate from the medium of moving pictures and narration to the medium of interaction, competition, and user-creativity?

I will admit, I was highly skeptical about this question for quite some time. No knocking Spielberg, but game design is hard work that few people can do with any success. However, now you can be the judge for yourself as to Spielberg's talent and ingenuity. Below is the very first video for his Wii game. It was released recently with little other information than its title: Boom Blox.

Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, so feel free to leave it in the comments. I believe that the video shows great ingenuity, and that Spielberg will prove he has a medium-transcending eye for design. If the game is released at a lower-than-normal price point, it has the potential to tear through the market as a must-have casual game.

Little is known of the progress of Spielberg's other game, but I'm feeling much less skeptical about both of them after viewing this video. Who knows, maybe he will even go the extra mile in his other game and throw in some Nazis!

Online Game - Fulfillment

I recently Stumbled Upon this little game from The Sect of Homokaasu called Fulfillment. Basically, it's a Tetris-like game of filling a space with uniquely-shaped blocks. There are many difference from Tetris, however, that make this game tougher and fairly addicting. In the first place, the blocks in Fulfillment don't drop from the top of the screen. They sit on the side and you must drag them onto the board within a certain amount of time. You also cannot rotate them. The pieces you have are the ones you have to fit in. The game starts with a 3x3 square and 3 pieces to fit in. The first level is extremely easy, sometimes even having simply three 3x1 lines that you drag onto the board. As you beat each level, the dimensions of the box and the number of pieces you have increase by 1. So the second level is a 4x4 square with 4 pieces. The pieces also start increasingly being more complex than normal Tetris pieces, becoming longer or having weird chunks missing.

I have only reached level 8. The game's difficultly starts ramping up fairly quickly as you get so many pieces to manipulate. Many times all you need to do is just be able to look at so many pieces and figure out how they fit then get them on the board in time, but at other times you will have to place pieces and continually be adjusting and readjusting them to fit them all. Each game only takes a few minutes, because once the game starts, it doesn't stop until you lose.

Fulfillment's taken up a good little bit of my free time in the past couple of weeks, so be careful if you start playing. Another thing it shares with Tetris is how you want to start a new game as soon as you lose one.

Friday's Food for Thought - 2/8/08

This edition of Friday's Food for Thought is brought to you by caffeine. I wouldn't have made it through this week alive without this wonderful little drug. And now for the amazing, the weird, and the just plain interesting!

First, from the San Francisco Chronicle:


British Stores Halt 'Lolita' Beds

"Woolworths stores in Britain have stopped selling "Lolita" beds for young girls after a parents' organization complained because of the name's association with the famous novel about a pedophile."

Second, a quote in honor of Super Tuesday happening this week in the US political scene:

"In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet."
- Winston Churchill

Spoken like a true politician!

Last, but certainly not least, an incredibly interesting video! This video, entitled "The 1K Project II", it is a video collage of 1000 different replays of a car running on the same track in the PC stunt racer, TrackMania. I must admit to never having played this particular game, but the beauty in the presentation of this video transcends mere racing games!



See, wasn't that cool?