Posts Tagged ‘indie games’
Ignorance Is Sometimes Awesome (Or How I Ended My Fun with Recettear)
October 18th, 2010 •
Tags: FAQs, guides, indie games, mechanical spoilers, pc games, Recettear, spoilers, strategies, strategy
In the case of machines we come to rely on, there are definite advantages to knowing as much as possible. In the case of videogames, it usually helps me to have much of the inner workings hidden behind a thick curtain of mystery and wonder. I was reminded of this sad fact soon after beginning my third attempt repaying my father’s loan in recent indie darling Recettear.
In order for you, dear reader, to understand fully, I need to tell you a bit about the game — give you some much-needed context. In Recettear, you manage an item shop to earn money used to repay the gargantuan debt left behind by your father. If you make all the payments, you win the game. If you miss one, you restart the game with your current level and inventory intact. No one wins on the first try. At least, no one wins on the first try without help.
By the third go ’round, I was ready to put the game to bed. It’s enjoyable, but I can only take so much of theGroundhog Day-ness of it (read: not a Dead Rising fan). With about 20 hours logged and two attempts blown, I resorted to searching out strategies online. I found some excellent information… and by “excellent,” I mean “thorough”… and by “thorough,” I mean “terrible.”
The game has been available for a matter of weeks. This is the only fact you need in order to understand that the Internet has already discovered every quirk, every eccentricity, and every bit of minutiae anyone could ever glean from it without combing through the source code line-by-line. The Internet is working on that as we speak.
Said strategies told me exactly how to make customers happy with the precise selling prices necessary to gain their trust. Then, they told me when and how to take advantage of this newfound trust to gain maximum profits. That sounds familiar. Gain their trust, then take full advantage when they express gratitude. Hmm. I felt like I was back in sales training at Comcast. This is not a good thing.
Up to this point, the game felt really dynamic. The shoppers obviously had different thresholds for how much markup they could tolerate, but I had yet to discover exactly what those were. I had noticed the little hearts which indicated the shopper was very happy with the price, but I didn’t really even know how (or if) this affected the game. It was the simpler time in the relationship before you discovered she pees in the shower and likes erotic fan-fiction based on The Simpsons. I was enjoying the process of slowly uncovering the game’s mysteries.
This new information armed me with more than enough to complete the game on my next attempt… but I never did. Now that I knew how simplistic the game’s wants and desires were, it was really more joke than game. It was immature like a baby — a simple little bundle of wants and needs without the tools to properly convey them. Sadly, my love affair with Recettear had ended.
Every game has these limitations. We human beings live every day in a world of almost infinite possibility. We want our games to capture as much of that possibility as they can… and they do. Sadly, that isn’t much.
Each choice and branching decision we can make in a game is a developer sitting in front of a computer saying to himself, “Maybe we should let the player do this cool thing!” He codes for a while, and — presto! — we have a facsimile of a tiny choice we might make in real life available to the character, our connection to the virtual world.
Games are sold based on what they have rather than what they don’t. Being proper enthusiasts, we gorge ourselves on all the information leading up to release. We bring home the new game excited about the possibilities. To return to the box metaphor, once we have this box inside our home, it’s hard not to see the box’s dimensions, regardless of how sexy the box is.
The walls of the box are little disappointments, little things we try that didn’t quite work as we had hoped; they are options we would have had in life (if life were like the world of the game) that we now discover are missing.
Some games are worse than others. Perhaps they show you an obstacle that would be easy to jump over, but they didn’t give you a jump button. They show you buildings which are meant to be real, but you cannot enter and explore. Some games shine their light elsewhere and are less concerned with possibilities.
I was never bothered by my inability to jump in Mass Effect. OK, that’s not entirely true… there were probably times that was a little annoying, but since the game is focused on conversation and narrative, it wasn’t really a big deal. Now, when I wasn’t able to say exactly what I wanted to say in conversation… that is another issue entirely.
In games like Recettear where much of the focus is on one or two mechanics meant to compose the fun of the game, the limitations are front-and-center. Haggling in life is dynamic, interesting, and, if you have the proper disposition, fun! I can make an offer and explain why, playing to their sympathies. They may refuse but later call me up and say they decided to accept. The motives of both parties are complicated as are their criteria for an acceptable offer.
On the surface, Recettear appears to have captured many of these traits. As I said, I played through more than 20 hours and was enthralled. Of course, in the back of my mind I always realize there are limitations. They don’t have an army of dudes (and dudettes) sitting around haggling with me on the back-end.
Part of me just wants to forget. I know a computer program has more limitations than life, but I want to get lost in the simulation. My only hope is that the simulation is deep enough that I never actually butt heads with the limits. Ignorance is sometimes awesome.
Once those limits are apparent, having been revealed to you either through play of the game or from above (i.e. the Internet), the game loses something. In a game like Recettear where a big piece of the fun is in haggling with shoppers and trying to figure out what makes them tick, losing that sense of mystique is damning. The game is about that discovery. I hope, for your sake, you acquire that omniscience through play. If so, you have gotten from the game what the designers intended. Take the information when its handed to you on a silver platter, and — trust me on this — you’re only hurting yourself.
Gaming’s underground: an indie games primer
February 16th, 2009 •
Tags: games, Gaming, independent games, indie games, Xbox 360, Xbox Community Games
Like most commercial artforms, video games have a vibrant community that exists outside the commercial realm. People are making games that are less influenced by the marketability of the graphics, the concept, and the gameplay conventions—and in many cases they are not influenced at all by these factors. This gives developers and artists a blank canvas to create games that you could never find on the shelf at GameStop.
For years, indie gaming has been primarily a PC affair. Console development has had too many barriers for small-time developers to be able to even consider as a viable platform. Of course, there have always been the stories of the game developed by the guy in his mom’s basement that was discovered by someone and turned into a full-fledged console release, but that is the exception not the rule. In the past year, this has started to change slowly. Microsoft has released its development kit and launched Community Games on Xbox Live which is a platform for indie developers to release and sell their creations. The iPhone has also offered a successful and accessible platform for indie developers. Most indie games are still on the PC, but the industry has seen the value in indie games and is making inroads to having them on a multitude of platforms.
GemCraft is a deep tower defense game built in Flash and playable in the browser
Possibly the most popular platform of all for indie gaming is the web thanks to the Flash browser plugin. There are hundreds of sites that focus solely on providing a Flash gaming playground with titles spanning every genre you can imagine. Because of the ubiquity of Flash, these games are accessible to almost anyone with a computer of any kind. They reach levels of sophistication that are very close to that of applications native to a particular hardware platform and offer something for casual and hardcore gamers alike.
Within indie games are represented a number of popular genres of old that no longer receive exposure in the mainstream. There are still die-hard fans of the point-and-click adventure genre and the shoot ‘em up genre, but there aren’t enough of them to justify big-budget boxed releases outside the oddball title once every year or two. The indie scene has stepped in to support fans of these genres, and developers release a steady stream of these titles all the time.
Counterstrike started life as a Half-life mod
Indie games also invent new genres that often make their way into the mainstream. Popular PC shooter Counterstrike began its life as a freely-distributed game mod for the original Half-life. A loose genre that has gained popularity as of late is the “arthouse game.” This genre label doesn’t really describe a particular set of gameplay conventions as many do but instead refers to an underlying philosophy present throughout games in the genre to a greater or lesser extent. This genre bending and stretching often even stretches the definition of a “game” to encompass interactive works of art (drawing the ire of some).
Speaking of game mods, they too are a major part of the indie gaming community. Modern PC games often ship with sets of tools that allow players to more easily modify and extend the experience of the original release. Even before these toolsets were common, users were still known to hack together modifications of popular games. These mods can be as simple as a new map or weapon or as complex as a completely new game with entirely different sounds, weapons, characters, and levels. Modders have even developed completely different genres of games on top of existing ones.
By nature of their being not as commercially viable as big titles on the console, they are also less visible. So, where would you go if you wanted to find some cool indie games? Try these sites:
Bytejacker- Bytejacker is a twice weekly video podcast that focuses on downloadable games in general. Of course, the WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade titles profiled are still big—too big in most cases to be classified as “indie,” but the show also covers indie PC games and iPhone games. It is currently one of my favorite podcasts and is certainly a fantastic source for indie goodness.
Indiegames.com Blog- This blog covers the hottest releases in the PC indie scene. You’ll often get video footage along with the descriptions to further entice you.
The Independent Gaming Source- Indie PC games are also the focus of this long-running blog. Subscribe to this feed and you will surely find a plethora of awesome games you would otherwise have overlooked.
Game Tunnel- Accessibility to developers is a double edged sword. In the indie scene, you will find some gems packed full of originality. You’re also going to find a lot of crap. If reviews of PC indie games are what you’re after, this is your place.
Slide To Play- My current favorite iPhone games review site. Sure, the iPhone is starting to get noticed by major developers, but it is still a largely independent playground.
Kongregate- This is the killer platform for Flash games. Kongregate hosts a ton of games and has site-wide acheivements ala Xbox 360. Completing an achievement in a game that supports them (many do) will add to your site-wide score. You can also complete certain acheivements to earn cards for use in Kongregate’s Flash-based collectible card game. The site also enables you to chat with other players while playing. I’m raddevon on the site so, if you join, look me up!
Newgrounds- You might call Newgrounds the birthplace of Castle Crashers since the game’s creators not only got their start posting games on the site; Tom Fulp himself actually started the site! The site is the original home of Alien Hominid which eventually became a modestly successful console game on multiple platforms including the latest version on XBLA. The success of that game paved the way for the insanely fun XBLA title Castle Crashers. The site hosts all types of Flash content, but a major chunk of its content is in the games section.
Mod DB- If you own any of the popular PC games released in the past 10 years, there are probably at least one or two mods you could download and install for free to give you a fresh gaming experience. Mod DB currently indexes almost 5,000 PC game mods which can be searched and sorted by the game they modify, the release status, the genre, the theme, and whether they are single or multi-player.
If you find yourself bored with a seemingly endless cavalcade of cookie-cutter AAA titles, dig a little deeper into the indie games scene. You’ll find greater variety and incredible innovation in almost every aspect of the games from story to visuals to gameplay. There are also indie developers working hard to refine more mainstream gaming tropes to levels not pursued in the mainstream. The indie scene can truly provide something for every gamer.
City Rain: Awesome twist on city building
February 6th, 2009 •
Tags: city building, City Rain, falling blocks, Game, games, Indie Games, indie games, SimCity, Tetris
IndieGames.com spills the beans on City Rain—a cross between a city-building sim and a falling block game. It sounds to me like just the twist to bring new life into this sub-genre that has remained virtually unchanged since the release of the original SimCity. A Flash demo is available now, and the full game is set for release soon on Direct2Drive. I must say the music is wonderfully relaxing.