Here we are, at the last segment of my Indiecade mini-series. Looking back, it seems like forever ago that I was enthusiastically traipsing around the super-heated parking lots that played host to that wonderful little convention while doing my best to maintain something resembling a professional facade in order to hide the inner child going excitedly mad with every new game and friend introduced into my life. In actuality… yeah, it was still forever ago, as it took me forever to write these. I do hope you’ve enjoyed reading them, and that this wasn’t an incredible failure in my endeavors to be interesting. If you’d like to backtrack, check out parts one, two, and three!
Note: I am not a game critic. I play games, and I get excited about games. Prepare for gushing, not invested inspection and critique.
The summary on this game’s website reads: “Ether One™ is a first person adventure that deals with the fragility of the human mind”. As you can imagine, that makes the game a little abstract and difficult to describe, especially when I got an unfortunately small amount of time with it. From what I remember, its an adventure game that as far as gameplay mechanics go, feels similar to many adventure games; but the puzzles you’re solving and the tangled web of a story that you’re working your way through is one born of your character’s own mind. If it goes the way I believe it does, the puzzles you solve and the information that it deliberately leaves you without are supposed to give you something resembling an idea of what it might be like to be a person with a particular mental illness. Since I don’t remember which mental illness it’s specifically exploring (perhaps it’s exploring them in general), I’m not going to say which for fear of being mistaken. I’m all at once excited and afraid of playing this game; I consider myself an intelligent person, and all of my passions in life (including my career choice) deal directly with my cognitive abilities. I am, however, dreadfully forgetful. I can lose something I was holding moments ago, and I misremember events with alarming frequency. Its a terrifying experience being told something happened one way but KNOWING that it happened another, or trying to think back to just moments before in an attempt to find where you put something and not being able to. The degradation of my brain is probably my biggest fear, and I suspect this game will trigger some pretty significant emotions. Of course, if it does, I’ll consider the game a success.
Oh, Oculus Rift; how I wanted to love you so much. I happily waited in a super long line at PAX (and since the line was capped I had to stalk it for a while before I even got to wait in it) just to play Hawken using the Oculus. Finally, I sat down, put on the headset and the headphones, and looked around the cockpit of my GIANT ASS MECH. It was amazeballs. I then naturally proceeded to climb up as high as I could and jump off something. This might not have been the best move for someone who KNOWS she gets seasick, but that little childlike wonder in me that insists I climb on stuff (a habit that comes out in force when I’ve had too much to drink) overrode my rational thinking, and I set forth to jump off the top of the world. I didn’t actually throw up on anything, but I felt like I wasn’t too far away from it. The rest of the demo time was spent crouched in a corner shooting at anything that was dumb enough to wander into my line of sight, because I wasn’t about to go afraid to moving around anymore. Since then, every time someone offers me an Oculus experience (no, that’s not a euphemism. Yet.) I’ve felt the overwhelming need to decline with no small amount of vehemence. So it was that when I approached the Classroom Aquatic booth, I almost instantly nope-d my way onto the next display. However, having both heard more than one insistence that I give it a go as well as the assurance of the developers that there is very little movement, I gathered my courage and gave the vomit rocket one more go. For those of you who suffer similarly, you’ll be please to know that I didn’t get sick! In this game, you’re in a classroom full of sea creatures (mostly Cetaceans I believe), and you’re about ready to take a test. You have no idea what the teacher (or anyone for that matter) is saying, cause you (or at least, I) don’t speak whale. So, once the test starts, you’re left with no choice but to cheat off your neighbors. You have to be sneaky though, you get in trouble if the teacher catches you cheating. I’m not sure what happens if you’re caught, cause I took the game very seriously and wasn’t ever caught. I was told afterward that there was a certain amount of wiggle room, and that the detection cone was probably smaller than I thought it was, but what can I say? I’m super good at cheating. I never got to try it in school (seriously, I’m so lawful good it hurts) so the game held more thrill than it probably should have for me. If you ever own or have access to an Oculus, give it a go!
Elegy for a Dead World is one of those games that many people would argue isn’t really a game so much as an “interactive experience”. Since such distinctions aren’t incredibly important to me, I’m going to continue referring to it as a game. I can see where they’re coming from though, as there isn’t a whole lot of gameplay involved. The core of the game is basically crowd-sourced stories. You’re handed a system of long-dead planets depicted with absolutely gorgeous art, and as you explore you’re encouraged write stories about what you’ve found. You can spin up a fiction of the long-dead species that used to live there, or be a twat and comment about how the architecture reminds you of a penis. While you’re poking around, you’re free to read what other explorers have written about the planet. I’m not sure if there is any sort of approval process for works, or if perhaps the plan is to have different servers geared toward different desired experiences, but I sincerely hope there is some form of regulation or method allowing me to hide stories from trolls and asshats who are just there to derp around instead of respecting the experience. Yes, I still hope they have the freedom to asshat about all they want, I just hope I have the choice to not read it. In any case, its a gorgeous framework that I think could result in something amazing, or end up being another cesspool where humanity can once again prove that we can’t have nice things.
Recently, I invested a lot of time into Super Time Force by Capy. It captured the art style that I love, as well as being thematically quirky in the way I can’t get enough of. I only got a few moments with Broforce, but I’m hoping it’ll key off some similar happy notes when it comes time to really sit down and play it. Unfortunately, with the videogame culture going through its growing pains, seeing games that are obviously targeting male demographic sets off that exhausted feeling of ‘great, another game not designed for me’. Broforce… I don’t know. I need more time with it to be sure. It seems like a game that would be aimed right at dudes (what with there being no female playable characters) but… I don’t know; I didn’t really feel excluded from it. I felt like it was aimed at anyone who enjoyed ’80s and ’90s action movies, regardless of their gender. Since those movies were almost exclusively based around male leads, it’s kind of by extension that all the playable characters would be male. It’s definitely one big ‘MURICA FUCK YEAH guns-a-blazing big tough men with big tough beards coming in to save the day montage. Anyway, the game is a shoot-em-up sidescroller whose playable characters are a mishmash of pop culture’s incredibly masculine action hero bros. Grizzled gentlemen such as Indiana Brones, Bro Dredd, Brade, and MacBrover crop up as you fight your way through the game, rescuing all your buddies. The language and absurd over-the-topness of the game really sell it for me, and I’m really looking forward to another ridiculous sidescrolling pixel adventure.
SPORTSBALL. All weekend, I kept hearing about sportsball. Being a pretty sports-retarted individual that travels in pretty sports-retarded circles, I’m pretty used to the term ‘sportsball’ being thrown around as a generic declaration of facetious glee whenever people in the vicinity are excited about sports. This resulted in an incorrect assumption that there was a sports game over in the nintendo booth that everyone was being a prat about, so no real interest was peaked. However, when night games came about, my cohorts were all worked up about playing in the sportsball tournament. Since as far as I knew, at least one of these individuals was a fellow sport unenthusiast (not counting wrestling, of course) my curiosity started poking about. Of course, I was going to watch them play the tournament anyway, but now I was starting to wonder if it was something I might enjoy. Turns out sportsball is pretty much just Joust meets basketball, and is a pretty amazing party game. I never got to play it myself, but watching it was an incredible experience. Of course, its not often you get to watch a game under such conditions: a plethora of videogame fans jammed into a tent watching an incredibly competitive party game while jazzed up about the mere act of BEING at night games, and having that enthusiasm shaped and molded by a pair of tenacious announcers who were surprisingly amazing at announcing. Each of the colored teams that you can chose from have their own unique set of birds to ride, and the announcers knew the name of every single one. Not only that, but they knew them well enough that you’d think they were watching old friends play a game from the way they were able to fire off and describe who was doing what. Their excitement and quick wit helped to whip up a frenzy in the crowd, and the entire tournament was an experience in what (I imagine) it’s like to be a sports fan. I’ve been to a couple Sounders games, and it wasn’t too different a feeling, except the Sounders game had the advantage of a LOT more people pumping everything up. Anyway, it was awesome, even though my buddies didn’t take the cup. Oh, and you should watch this live action trailer for the game, it’s seriously epic.
