The Brunch Table

Desktop Tower Defense: Design a maze and fill it with cannons to shoot down hordes of cheerful little creatures trying to get through. Simple graphics, brilliant game mechanics, and–if you’re successful–lots of high-pitched squeaking. (If you’ve given it a good try and it’s still driving you nuts, here’s a solution that can conquer even the crazy final levels.)

Red: Sleek, very topical physics-based game where you try and nudge incoming asteroids off course. Great music.

Eleminer: Speaking of asteroids, here’s a version of Snake set in space, adding lots of deadly flying rocks and a few other cleverly-designed twists.

MotherLoad: Dig a shaft, collect minerals, and get back to the surface before you run out of fuel. Actually has a plot, sort of.

Spikey’s Bounce Around: Bounce off walls and hit all your targets in a set number of moves. Difficult to get right.

Virus 2: No-frills matching-colored-tiles puzzle game, where the object is to, I guess, “infect” neighboring tiles with your color.

Sprout: You’re a little seed or bean thing with the power to change into different kinds of plants. Weird.

LocoRoco video at YouTube

LocoRoco is my newest videogame crush—if they bring it stateside, it may be the game that gets me to buy a PSP. The game’s controls are simple: you use the L and R shoulder buttons on the top edge of the PSP to tilt the entire game world left and right, in order to roll your adorable little orange blob to the end of the stage. The main character moves with convincing blobby physics; it clearly owes a debt to Gish. Here’s an interview with the designer, who unsurprisingly worked on Ico (possibly my favorite game of all time). And if you want a clearer version of the video, you can grab it here.

This was a Plastic response to a debate over whether it’s appropriate to make a Holocaust-themed video game. I liked my response so much I thought I’d put it up here:

Yeah, but the technologies and languages behind film are far more developed (I was about to say “mature,” but that might give the wrong idea) than those for video games. For now, that gives artists working in film a far wider choice of emotional possibilities.

I mean, photography, the technological ancestor of all cinema, was invented in 1827; true motion picture film dates from 1895; the language of modern film (in terms of editing decisions, a mix of different camera angles, and so on) didn’t emerge until 1926, with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. So that’s a full hundred years from the invention of the core technologies to an approximation of the movies we know today.

In contrast, computer graphics are still in their “man doing a backflip” phase. We start off with a U.S. military demonstration in 1958; video games themselves follow in 1962, with MIT’s Spacewar. In comparison to film, video games today are stuck in the year 1872 (coincidentally, the year that Muybridge began taking pictures of running horses).

So I think comparisons to film are kind of unfair. Subtlety, emotional sophistication–in cinema, these things require equally subtle and sophisticated technology. Demanding a complex and moving Holocaust video game in 2003 would be like asking Spielberg to make Schindler’s List in 1862. Give it some time…

A couple days ago, my stepbrother and I sat down with a vintage Nintendo to appreciate the classics. He’s twenty, five years younger than me, which might explain why he gave up on it before I did–he couldn’t forgive the old games for punishing the player’s mistakes with replay time (go back to the beginning of the level when you die, and begin all over again when you lose).

It occurred to me–that trick, handy for extending the life of a product, was leaning pretty heavily on the games’ late-eighties novelty. What I took as a fact of life, my stepbrother considers as appealing as a malfunctioning VCR. Er, DVD player.

The New York Times again proves its surprisingly good taste in games with a positive review of Disaster Report, warts and all. I have a half-finished review of my own sitting around here somewhere, but in the meantime, the Times review pretty much nails my feelings on the game. In spite of its ludicrous voice acting, overwrought plot, and technical roughness, it’s definitely the most original game that I’ve played this year. Its rather novel premise of earthquake survival makes for many wonderfully tense moments; you never know when the ground beneath your character will shift, forcing him to scramble to avoid sliding into the abyss or being crushed by a collapsing building. It’s definitely worth a spin if you have a PS2.

It’s just so cheerful, and it’s kind of like nostalgia for our own youth plus meta-nostalgia for somebody else’s. (Like Dazed and Confused…that came on TV the other night; I like it, but I always thought it had this really sour, depressing undercurrent to it, like “Take heed, Martian archaologists, this was as good as it ever got.”)

Man, I loved this game back in the day–though maybe not quite as much as some people. The most charming design elements were the little “nibbley pibbleys” that your snake was trying to eat. They were basically little spheres with a means of locomotion attached–in one level they’d be flying around with little propeller tops, in another they’d be sporting fish fins.