April 4, 2006
Wet-on-Wet Games, To Kill the Radio Star, and more
- A Bob Ross “Joy of Painting” videogame. Oh dear, I hope we don’t have to shoot at happy little clouds and bushes…
- Awesome — Game Music Radio. (Ah, we’ve got to submit our Façade soundtrack files to the station, especially the rare bizarre Noh-drama tracks that only occur 10% of the time you play Façade…)
- Irascible blog commenters out there, you should like this new freeware game… Flamewar!
- Intel Game Demo Contest — win $30K or more!
- Opening April 13 at IIT in Chicago, ben f. laposky: the 1953 electronic abstractions exhibition: restaged and remixed
- April 6 at the Atlanta dorkbot meeting, see a presentation on generative art by Philip Galanter.
- MASSIVE: The Future of Networked Multiplayer Games, UC Irvine, April 20
- Cool new game zine, The Gamer’s Quarter.
April 15th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
I enjoyed the review of Psychonauts in the most recent issue of The Gamer’s Quarter. Psychnonauts is the last game I played (I haven’t had too much time for playing lately). The review does a good job of describing the interesting and creative twists on platform gaming that Psychonauts achieves. Unfortunately it takes 10+ hours of gameplay to get to the first level that really pushes beyond standard platform game fare (Lungfishopolis). Like the Gamer’s Quarter reviewer, I was particularly taken with The Milkman Conspiracy, with how platform game mechanics are hijacked to create a game space that humorously depicts the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic. It’s unfortunate that you have to wade through so much standard gameplay to get to the innovative portions of Psychonauts, but it’s worth playing to see how Tim Schafer and crew bend and warp the spatial conventions of platform games to make the gamespace itself depict states of mind.