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

There aren’t really enough female game developers around today (Kim Swift and Jade Raymond do not count) Now, Erin Robinson makes freeware 2D adventure games like Spooks, Nanobots and Blackwell: Unbound – which I’m sure none of you guys have ever played. My pick from the three is definitely Blackwell: Unbound, but if you’re not willing to shell out ten dollars for Unbound then give Spooks a try instead. The puzzles are a lot easier than the ones found in Nanobots, but I’ll include links to a couple of walkthroughs for “gamers” who think “escape the room games” belong in the “adventure games” category. I mean seriously — how can it be an ”adventure” if you never even leave your room until the very end? That’s like saying “indie games development” is “work.”

From the guys who made Samorost. Froth away

Machinarium web site

(more…)

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

Welcome to The Pretentious Indie Gamer Scene. When I say “welcome” I really mean it in a selective sort of way. For example, have you heard of Darwinia? You have? Cool, why don’t you take a step through that door. The one labelled Exit. Do you really think Darwinia is “indie” by any stretch of the imagination? Really? Indie games being sold on Steam? Heh, If my nervous system wasn’t too busy trying to figure out whether to vomit or cry, I can assure you I’d probably be laughing at you, or at least quietly judging you in my mind.

This site isn’t about “indie” (note the quotes) games that are being sold on Steam. You can read all about Half-Life 2 and Eternity’s Child and Aquaria at TIGSource, which might as well be called NIGSource on account of anything you read there is Not an Indie Game. Yeah, hold on, let me write about a game everyone already knows about on account of it’s been advertised on XBox Live and the Playstation Network for weeks now. Hey guys, did you know Castle Crashers was out? Well, it is, why don’t you buy it so you can pretend like you care about indie games at all. Note the word “pretend.” Yeah, I went there.

The PIGScene goes beyond the mainstream. We report on real indie games that real indie artists are creating. Note the word “artist” as opposed to “developer.” I’m talking about Jenova Chen before fl0w, or Nifflas before he realized he could make a lot of money making games where you’re basically testing a platform engine.

Don’t dig it? Whatever, we don’t care.