Let’s feature every game that tells you what to do or what you have done! No sane-minded individual would name their games that way. Messhof’s You Found the Grappling Hook is an example of the finest masterpiece the world has ever seen. I mean, who the hell would think of using “pee yellow” for the color of their caves? You’re not fooling anyone by calling it gold, buddy!

So here’s the setup: you’re out on an adventure to steal gold, but the denizens of the cavern you’re looting from aren’t too happy to hear about your little activity under their noses. Still, gold is what you’re after and you won’t leave without amassing a small fortune of it, or that’s what the fairy godmother told me in my sleep after the six bottles of beer I had yesterday.

I’ve got to puke now, but yeah play this “thing”. *bleurgh***

You Found the Grappling Hook by messhof, 12 MB

Ropes are in vogue and Forgotten Sky has them in spades. Made by a team of Cornell students, Forgotten Sky is basically Bionic Commando if Bionic Commando’s Bionic Commando’s Bionic Arm was made of rope and not of metal. Basically you swing around on a rope a lot, and the rope is limp, and that in and of itself is a pretty big deal. You can also use your limp rope to pull things like crates, or to fling yourself off of deadly sawblades, or into them if you are self-loathing (and which indie game developer isn’t?).

The story involves a guy named Caelum, who has a rope gun and a “katana-hoe.” I’d like to tell you more about the story, but doing so would marginalize the fact that there is a “katana-hoe” in the game, which is exactly what it sounds like.

This game is so indie not even IndieGames.com has written about it. Indie as hell.

Forgotten Sky by The Dynamite Bananas, 14 MB

As far as artgames go, Blueberry’s Advanced Set The Rope on Fire Cartridge not only takes the cake, but it is the cake. This is art games. This is the single pixel period in the “yes.” that answers the silly “are video games art?” debate (note, the answer is “yes.”).

A play on Mazapán’s seminal work, You Have To Burn The Rope, ASTROFC hits all the right notes. The gamepiece (yes, “gamepiece”) has pixels big enough to offend all but the niche retrocore crowd. Have a fancy HD set? Don’t play this game unless you want to remember that feeling you had when you first got it and realized that things weren’t nearly as crisp as you thought they’d be. This is the kind of aesthetic that reminds us of the superficiality of HD, plasma, LCD, CRT, et al.

The gameplay. How do I describe it? The phrase reductoironic comes to mind. If you have yet to play this game, I suggest you get off your highhorse and do so immediately before reading onwards, as the rest of this post may contains spoilers that could potentially ruin your experience of it. Here you are, given a simple task, to defeat the GRINNING COLOSSUS (a stand-in for the mainstream gaming industry? You decide). You are given hammers, but they are powerless against the grinning giant. Brilliant, a biting commentary on traditional gaming conventions. Your actions seem futile. Turns out the only way to defeat the beast is to take a different approach — to burn a rope, as it were.

Or. That is what we are lead to believe.

In fact, burning the rope only exacerbates (worsens) the situation. Maybe I’m reading too much into this (or perhaps, and more plausibly, others aren’t reading hard enough), but if we are to read the GRINNING COLOSSUS as the mainstreaming gaming industry, if our conventional means of attack — that is, conventional games — are powerless to stop it, we must resort to means that are more, dare I say, unconventional. We must create games that take our understanding of video games and turns them on their heads.

We must burn the rope.

But it is after burning the rope that we realize the follies of playing with fire. Our attempt to undermine “the industry” has only resulted in the creation of another tier of it — the “indie games” tier, a BURNING FIRE SNAKE – which industry giants (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc.) use to hegemonize and encroach on our works. XBox Live Arcade, WiiWare. We are fighting an impossible battle — a battle that cannot be won — and this is a point that is punctuated poginantly and concisely in ASTROFC. All in merely 708 kilobytes. Demake? Hardly.

Advanced Set The Rope On Fire Cartridge by Blueberry, 0.55 MB

Hello! I’m the high score whore that Mr. Podunkian had been warning you about. Now Pug Fugly (real name Chris Roper, but don’t tell anyone) has a new game out, titled The Hordes. If you’re as old as he is, then you’d probably remember credit-guzzling games like Galaxians and Space Invaders. You’d also recognize that the same ship from Namco’s arcade shooter makes an appearance here, but with a new lick of paint and maneuverability that wasn’t found in the original.

Here’s how the game works: you shoot aliens for points, and blow up larger aliens for power-ups. Grab the collectibles to upgrade your weapon and increase the difficulty level of the next enemy wave. Repeat this for massive points. But, hey! Don’t let upgrades go uncollected, or your weapon will “power-down” automatically. If you last three minutes out there in space then you might make it into the top ten. If not, stick to WoW instead.

The Hordes by Pug Fugly, 1.51 MB