...But since it's me, of course something will. Something always does, and usually in the most unpredictable way possible, so this time, I really think that I will croak in an unlikely way. Let's say Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. Yep. In case I really do bite the big one soon, I leave all my stuff to Zoidberg, or if he isn't around, then the first to loot my possessions will own them for real. Careful you don't grab my debt by mistake. You wouldn't want to loot my corpse of that.
Also it is okay to incinerate my remains. Please spread it over a grave that already bears my name. It is in Hudson, Mass, down the street from a warehouse that my uncle set on fire when he was playing with matches when he was a lad.

But in all seriousness, I'm going to update this tomorrow when I get more time to do so, because I have some horrible things to say that I need to put on the internet before the internet becomes too safe a place to be reading in.

I'll tell you about Kokoromi, Fez, and the problem with weird energy.

And with that, there was a tomorrow that you should know about.
Let us begin with the website itself www.kokoromi.org. Here we have a lot of nonsense, I mean a blog. This blog is about the kokoromi collective, a bunch of game designers in Canada who independantly and collaboratively make games for all the internet to download and enjoy, and play using their xbox controllers.
Don't tell me you don't have one? Really. Hrm.
But let's keep the games for a bit later, shall we?

The blog itself is harmless enough. Black on white, topical, relevant to the collective, well- styled header, header caption links, branding, color, related materials links. As a matter of fact, the whole thing reeks to high heaven of style. Back in the day, when animated gif images were the thing, and including every link you could think of in the body of your links page was the thing to do, every awful looking site ended up a horrifying mishmash of animated images that had nothing to do with each other. They clashed and they flashed and what was the graphic design world to do to bring style back? Why the style sheet, of course. I'm not sure when it all happened, but this blog is what would have happened if people had gone way overboard on the style sheet as opposed to the animated gif. Tone it down a little, guys! It was about the time I realized that the site had all the styling and logography of a pantone swatch that I decided I had had enough of their visuals. Apparently, poorly taken photograph + bad cropping + singleton after effect = artistic visual. So, I have created an adobe batch process that does all this for you to hundreds of images at a time so you can make a site like Kokoromi. This style is carried throughout, and if you're really not certain what I'm talking about when I say " snooty art-fag" then just take a look at their "about" page.
I may harp on that term throughout this.
I should perhaps explain why I had taken an interest in downloading and playing the games available through this site. Someone posted a video about a game coming out called Fez. It looked cool. And good. And fresh. So cool and good and fresh in fact, that I thought whomever was behind it must be a band of genius game designers and they must have a treasure vault filled with other golden gifts for me to take a look at and play and waste time at work playing.
Why I thought something would go right for me, I really can't say. On with the games! Er, art pieces. I'll give them the art review as well, because Kokoromi wants to hide behind that. The idea, I guess, is that if you fuck up or don't finish making a game, you call it art instead and then people can't call it bad. To which I say, fine. I will follow where you hide.

Mr. Heart Loves You Very Much: This was the first game I downloaded and played. You have a puzzle game that revolves around getting your little man from where he is to where the heart is. The levels are saved with excel spreadsheets and the graphics are all gif images that you can hack without restriction, and I may have to do just that. You have basic maze movement in a side- scrolling manner, and can push on walls. If you push on a wall that has empty space next to it, you push the tile into the empty space. You press R to rotate the entire level a quarter turn clockwise. With these basic puzzle solving actions, you get your dude from point A to point heart. Oh, and Mr. Heart isn't so much a goal as an object, subject to the same gravitational rules you are. On the whole a fascinating take on the old maze, and it would have loads of design space to explore if the designers had given a damn about making it. Really, it's short. I was done with the whole game in about seven minutes.
The look of the thing harkens back to old nintendo games, and is hugely pixel-based. I think the whole thing fits in a 100x100 grid or something. There's no sound except your own groans of frustration and cheers of satisfaction, muted as they must be unless you're some kind of puzzle dude for whom all emotional outbursts can be tied to some recent brain-teaser.
As a game, it is pretty good for a beta. Polish up the graphics (you can keep the pixely style all you want and still polish the damn graphics), maybe put a single sound file in there, and release a second game mechanic, and design enough levels to keep people busy for seven hours instead of seven minutes, and then you'll have a game. It is hard to give a complete review without a complete product.
As art, it is pretty good for a beta. The colour balance is harsh and could use some rethinking. The animation is smooth enough, but on the whole doesn't lend to the cohesive idea underlying the puzzle that is chasing a romantic interest. At that, the inter-level captions force this idea down the audience's throat, making it surprising that little else of the game supports this theme at all, as if the text alone is the medium, and the entire rest of the piece is there to support it. By comparison, the caption next to a painting would have the entire message of the canvas, and the canvas itself would be a blank. This is not a good artistic choice. For art that involves the audience, do actually involve the audience: by making the game so short, all communicative merit is undercut, like a sentence that no one bothered to

Dodge Club: We're going in the order I played them for no real reason.
The idea is you have a fireball and an electric spark, and you're a yellow bishojo (someone tell me that's really a word) stuck in a ring with them. You have to dodge them. Your score counts up for each second you are not touched by either one. What I didn't mention is that this is an 8x8 pixel grid, and the terms fireball, spark, and bishojo really mean 2x2 red square, 2x1 or 1x2 blue flashy bit, and 2x2 yellow square. So visualizing yourself dodging stuff to try to survive gets a little farfetched, to say the least. This game failed to occupy my attention for more than an entire minute, during which time I played four games and beat my high score three times.
I guess I'm complaining about the difficulty, except that without any sense of penalty for failure, difficulty sounds like the wrong term. There's no foreseeable benefit for success, either, which is why this game fails to hold interest. Someday when they let me design Hell, there's going to be a place for failed game designers, they'll have to put on funny goggles and play this game at actual size until they cause an overflow error with their score. Just for grins I'll put it on a trinary computer. Enjoy.
As a game, Dodge Club is hard to review. It is meant to give you a seizure, for one. For another, it really isn't a game. You have to make a game out of it, like, your opponent takes a fifth of a shot for every 20 seconds you stay dodgy, and then take turns, the first one to pass out loses.
As art, this was made for a theme of "Small or irregular aspect ratios" so I figure I can cut the designer a little break. Now having cut him an 8x8 break, I still have 1,023,936 pixels of vitriol to dispose with. This basically isn't art either, inasmuch as someone said to make a small game and this guy stuck his thumb in his nose and pulled this one out. Either that or he had to have a submission done in two hours and had to deliver his firstborn on his way to return rental movies to the store, or else suffer a lateness penalty. I promised myself I wouldn't use the far more likely explaination of game designer doped on LSD and missing three limbs. And an eye. And taste.

Dive: In addition to the name, the game's title also serves as your only instruction for how to play it. Opening the readme file revealed to me that I could ping helpful coloured fish to release bubbles that my mans needed to live, which I would have liked to have known the first time. Neutral fish are there to give you a sense of how deep you're going, as well as the gradual colour shift to darkness. Enemy fish are there to make your game experience miserable. Your only tool is the ping, which makes blue fish release bubbles and stuns red fish for a second. I'm not sure what's at the bottom, or if there even is one because once again the game becomes so nerve-wrackingly difficult after a certain point that mustering up enough energy to get good at it seems a task in the first place, and pointless in the second. I could use that energy to build buildings or design ships or create universes.
As a game, Dive has a rule, a mechanic, and ostensibly, a goal. It is a complete game in the barest sense of the word complete. It may someday find a home in some variant on a very small watch. That is, unless game and watch already did something like this with non-pixel LCDs, which I think they did.
As art, Dive doesn't even register. There's no sense of connection with an idea from the artist. Some elements are there, discovery, exploration, the philosophical nature of friend and foe. Why is the protagonist a neutral colour, for instance? There's some incomplete idea lurking here that I think, perhaps, a single sentence or caption may help to explain. Or, at that, fully explain.

Doomed Planet: It was about this point that I discovered that all these games were optimized for an xbox controller. In fact, this one fails to respond to keyboard input at all, and I had to open the task manager to even close it so I could try and find out what the hell was going on. When I came back with my Gravis, the game at least functioned, and I could see the black-and-white pixely graphics in the style of an old movie with the runners on the side and everything. Also random fake celluloid imperfections. Also no sound. You control a flying saucer and try to abduct specific humans from their milling about on the ground. The human you should get has an arrow over his head, which countered my first impression of the game, which was to simply snatch any and all available moving targets. You have a health counter and the humans quickly start shooting at you with little peas. Abducting a human freezes you in place, making you a sitting target for the peas. And since they launch volleys of eight and you have five hits, it usually means you die. When you do abduct a mans, there's a text overlay of some pithy thing the mans in question says before you probe them and mutilate their cows.
As a game, this one came close to qualifying. If not for it being optimized for something I didn't have, and the flying saucer generally steering like a misshapen brick about the screen, there was a kind of exchange of strategy, waiting for the right time to snatch and not get shot. Then I kept playing and it got boring about the fifth or so time someone mentioned Tom Cruise.
As art, Doomed Planet was the first game of the lot to use a rhetorical device. Their choice was allusion, possibly pastiche. In fact the device didn't make a lick of difference on the overall presentation, like a simile with no topic matter.

Sunset Runner: This was the first one that I completed. The rules are simple enough; you start at the back of an accelerating train, and you must reach the front before it crushes someone tied to the tracks without getting squished by oncoming stationary objects yourself. The classic melodrama unfolds as you run, jump, and duck. As far as I've seen, there's no need to go to the left at all, so my strategy for the game was to hold down right all the time. If you like rythm games, you may possibly like this game for as long as it takes to finish it. The colour and theme is inoffensive, and there's even a distance counter that shows you exactly how soon your lover will kiss the cow catcher.
As a game, Sunset Runner comes closest to being playable. I know, I know, Mr. Heart was also playable, but that was a puzzle. This is a real game, one that you couldn't plan out in an excel spreadsheet, or pre-program a logic-linked access database to solve for you (well, you could, but you'd have to actually play it at least once). It has difficulty selection, rules, and a goal; therefore is a complete game. You even get a high scoreboard when you finish, although they score you on how much distance remained to target with largest first. I would make smallest first, making the game one of "how close can you cut it" which would functionally make all the important scoring play happen in the last two or three cars, I suppose. So yes, actually a game, just a boring one that's been done better in every way by other, already made games.
As art, once again we have some forced "love bites" theme going on, as when you're successful the game tells you that your lover only thinks of you as a friend, and that you never have kids. I guess bitterness is a part of the young poet, but I didn't think the emo movement ever made its way into legitimate artistic projects. Which, again, is why it shows up here, I suppose.
Bloody Zombies: I am too furious to give this game a complete review. Any game where the mechanic is to mutilate zombies and use their blood to solve platforming puzzles is one that I would die from stress reviewing.

And there you have it. Incidentally, all these snooty art fags are from Canada and play the xbox, meaning the overt engrish in the Fez preview was intentional, and a matter of style, which is one of the most disgusting things I can think of. For a company whose very existence is creativity, working so goddamned hard to look like they're doing exactly what Japan is doing is anathematical.

Back to Old News