In response to “A Comedy of Errors” from the Escapist Forum: Bugs are sort of a lost art to games, as well as game breaking mechanics. Yesterday my friends and I had a bit of a laugh during a game of Rainbow Six Vegas when I walked up to a wall and promptly died. I didn’t even fall through, I died. It’s not just what happens, but the reaction as well.
Overall, humor from glitches is sort of becoming a lost art. I’d love to see a game that is intended to be a sort of self-aware parody in the manner of SpaceBalls or other Mel Brooks films. I know there are some out there, but they are typically sophomoric in style and appeal to an unsophisticated “I’m in College and drink BEER!” mentality. They’re basically video game versions of all these “Not another shit movie” coming out. I want a game where the big bad evil emperor is actually living in his mom’s castle, and the heroes escape the dungeon by exploiting the glitch that drops them through the level and respawns them back at their base.
The closest to that I can recall playing is Gex: Enter the Gecko, a platformer I’d love to see revived properly. Overall it was more a big joke on television than video games (but tell me you wouldn’t love to see a game spoofing Left 4 Dead, Super Mario, Halo and God of War all in one level).
In response to “Katamari Absurdity” from the Escapist Forum: First of all, you’ve written the best in-depth analysis of Katamari Damacy I’ve ever read, so well done, and for the love of all that is good and insane, keep writing for The Escapist.
What I really liked about this article is that it reveals the surprising amount of depth the Katamari games have kept hidden from us for so long. While most gamers dismiss it as another of “Japan’s Trippy Games,” I never realized that this game had so many sides (no pun intended.)
In response to “Where the Funny Things Are” from the Escapist Forum: Yeah, I think it was a poor choice. The Adult Swim’s games section is very high quality, and it does a good job at playing with gamer’s expectations and gaming clichés – like how HRmageddon is your basic RTS, except the fantastical magical creatures or the tough hardened soldiers are replaced by office drones, and gameplay remains the same, or how the highly awesome (most of the time) Amateur Surgeon can take a famous game, replace the names in the buttons you press, and turn it into something identical yet completely opposite. But most of the games just try to hard to be darker and edgier for no reason other than being darker and edgier. Like Bible Fight. It obviously didn’t emerge from a discussion about what would be a nice place to get characters for a fighting game, it emerged from a discussion about how to make a game be very offensive without being objectively offensive.
That said, I agree in jist with the article, since the poster above me as I posted mentioned Ben There Dan That, in which the main character accidentally goes on a murder rampage through several alternate dimensions, and how to pick up urinal cakes without touching other men’s pee poses a serious problem. Yeah, games that try to push the envelope will not be found in the realm of AAA games with their massive investiments and boards of directors, but in a couple of guys writing Actionscript in their basement. But didn’t we already know that?…
After playing a number of the games linked in the article (namely HRmageddon and Meowcenaries) I can safely say that the level of quality in these free-to-play-on-demand games is nothing short of inspiring. You can easily see that some TLC has been taken by someone somewhere to make an idea a reality – and to make that reality work correctly as well.
The freedom of being able to put nigh on anything in these games is refreshing too. Some of the humour (HRmageddon’s “sexual harrasment” attack comes to mind) is crude, garish and often entirely inappropriate, but if the humour offends the audience then simply switching the game off is always an option. Censorship is somewhat tiring in this day and age and to have a source which is free and able to present whatever it may choose is a welcome addition to the Tubes. Granted, there will always be the downright pathetic attempts at “videogames” which took a bored 30 year old two days and a folder of porn pictures to create, but Adult Swim goes to prove that the quality is out there, and is worth playing.
Who knows, maybe the developers of some of the best games will be recognised and be hired. You never know.
