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Console dweebs frequently say things like "PC games suck because you can't be sure they'll run," and its true that sometimes there are configuration issues. Of course, we PC gamers sneer at console gamers for this kind of thing, because it's rarely a problem post-DirectX, and anyway, we know what a goddamn DOS prompt looks like and know how to use a Linux shell when we need to, and suspect that console gamers' coffee pots are all blinking "12:00". But Jesper makes me think maybe they have a point.

4:32 is inspired by John Cage's famous musical composition, "4:33". "4:33" is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. The question Jesper poses is: What is the gaming equivalent?

The results are funny. Give it a -- well, "play" in the sense of playing a video more than in the sense of playing a game, perhaps, but amusing. I'll note however that I have not gotten to the end, because beyond a certain point I can't be bothered, and anyway it's taken me more than four minutes and thirty-two seconds to get as far as I did.

If you like Game and Adventure, SUPER BIG GUN ADVENTURE for you! Shoot enemy! Shoot down to move over lava! Shoot more enemy! Are you gentleman enough to save yourself from other gentleman with smaller gun!!??? ...I'll stop now. This game is my choice pick from the Game Jolt Minimalist compo, and reminded me why I dig indie games so much. One interesting mechanic as its crux, chunky graphics, and thinly veiled innuendo via intentional Engrish. Nice time waster, and the chiptune soundtrack is catchy too.

No, you aren't going crazy. Yes, that picture is accurate. That is Mario, and he is indeed fighting an MS Paint shit monster. I should add that a MIDI rendition of The Phantom Menace battle music is played throughout this scenario. I should also add that this boss fight is broken and obtuse, and so far I can't figure out how to pass it. I think this segment encapsulates the experience of Mario's Adventure for me, and is pretty fucking hilarious. Super Marco (Mario's autistic cousin) is also entertaining in the same MST3K kind of way, and is tantamount to playing a platformer made by Andy Warhol circa 1986. Today is an exploration of amateur design, a meditation on the earnest and unintended Shit Games out there.

Mario's Adventure is a parody game made by Noyb when he was twelve, and his age shows. Graphics are either ripped from Mario games or drawn in MS Paint, and the music is Super Mario 64 tunes mixed with weird MIDI compositions. Noyb does the voiceovers himself and they're hilarious, in an ear-raping absurdist sort of way. I can only reach the sixth level, but within this half dozen I've played every bad design choice conceivable. Vague objectives? Check. Unresponsive and unintuitive controls? Check. Requisite shitty underwater and forced-scroll levels? Check and check. In one level you even have to replay two boring and easy sections indefinitely (asinine dialogue and all) since you die to a poorly designed boss immediately afterward. And then you face the shit monster. It's games as seen through the lens of a pre-adolescent, an unflinching reflection of substandard gameplay cliches that 'actual' developers cling to. There's a surreal and banal story interspersed between the levels, with all of the wit of a middle-schooler who thinks South Park and fart jokes epitomize comedy. The sum of all this is the game equivalent of Manos: The Hands of Fate, and in order to enjoy the game you should approach it in this campy manner.

Virtanen Games is best known for its unorthodox, Cactus-inspired Seven Minutes. Before they created that indie gem they developed some generic platformers, of which Super Marco is one. It's less esoteric than Mario's Adventure, but just as mediocre. Like countless other homebrew games it's a pastiche of the Super Mario franchise, and is highly derivative and kind of buggy. The graphics are half quirk, half placeholder art; the music is repetitive and doesn't even loop properly, resulting in stilted transitions that make the game 'skip' like a fucked up record. The controls are floaty, but that's all right because the game is pretty easy (outside of the occasional poorly placed spike pit). Like all of the consumeristic platformers out there you collect gold trinkets -- which are useless. The culmination of all of these elements result in a decidedly B-game; the equivalent of a movie with Vincent Price or Bruce Campbell attached. It's all of the tropes and cliches of the platformer genre mashed together without any charm or smart design driving the experience. It feels like an autistic post-modern take on an ancient genre, while in truth it's just a crappy game. How punk.

Some games, like Edmund McMillen's, are punk due to their content and attitude. These games are punk through execution; sloppy and ersatz copies of the mainstream made by aspiring young 'uns. To this I say rock on, but get to your No Wave era already.

The usual rigamarole of jumping, grabbing keys and reaching point Bs is ripped up and partially erased in GENERIC, yet another platform game that tries to turn a mirror on the underlying logics of gameplay and genre, but this one does it better than the usual. Many platform games have come out featuring excessive difficulty, Braid and a host of retainer breatheren have played with the interval-driven reload cycle and temporal causality. GENERIC goes even further, this game lets your tear the levels apart. It´s like Little Big Planet with a big bottle of white out.

The game has one constraint in each level, you must attain a certain score before passing to the next gate. This involves the usual collecting of coins, diamonds, bags of cash ect. The catch is, many of these goods are beyond reach, hidden behind walls or under floors. The twist is that you´ve got a big ass raygun that at a button press will annihilate everyonething along a radian. Walls, enemies, goodies, the exit flag, all of these can be partially erased, rendering them solid, stagnant, and canceling their special properties. In this manner you can use fragments of coins as stepping stones, new passages can be carved, moving things can be frozen, ect. Instead of a deductive process of figuring out what the designer intended, the game plays like paper mache rampage. The emergent humor is amplified by nostagia, so if you´ve got enough of that, its worth your time.

Flashbang is back with a flash and a bang, the staple physics-based viscerality, and the staple removing dialectic of destruction vs. capitulation. Instead of being Taurus trying your hand at entreprenuership, you´re a lazy entitlement-jockey trying to do the bare minimum to get through the day while collecting guaranteed pay. Your job is to man a crane, though man-handling it is more accurate. The controls, like those of Minotaur In A China Shop, are intentionally difficult. There´s an inherent delta in where you move the mouse and how the crane follows, and they tuned the gamma up real high, it makes running in the original Super Mario Bros. feel like walking in The Legend of Zelda, by comparison. This sloppiness is amplified by the inability to directly control the height of the crane hook. There´s something in the noise.

The gameplay has two sides, stacking chuncks of building on top of each other and throwing those chuncks at the buildings of your rival. This is all relatively simple, the chaos in the controls gives it some spunk, but otherwise, pretty simple. The brilliance of Flashbang´s work is how they take a viscerally sticky prototype and then concieve of a holistic soul. The theme of the game is building stuff in a city, specifically as a Union worker in competition with a "Scab" who is competing based on market rates. Appropriately, the capitalism-tuned competitor is a machine, literally, controlled by the AI and not the least bit clumsy in his construction efforts. You, on the other hand, are all too human, you don´t calculate inertia in real-time, subtle ergonomic shifts in your upper arm will move the mouse ever so slightly compounding the shift, little flaws in drop timing compound further as things tip and momentum takes over. Frankly, you´re shite at this job and you shouldn´t be doing it. But its cool, you´re entitled, just as entitled as a web user when they click "Play Now". The clock is represented by your budget, ticking down like the S&P. The accompanying text is charming, gruff, and steeply political, Flashbang pulls no punches in loading their games with subtext just because they can.

The dynamic that results, psychologically and in game-theoric outcome maximization, is more similar to China Shop than any of their other titles. You have a point early on where playing the game, following the rules, doing something "productive" gives you more points. However due to the inefficiency at this productive task, based into the controls cake, you pretty quickly come to the point where you say "fuck it, lets smash it all". Once the scabs start getting some buildings up, but before they finish them, its time to start throwing trucks over there, try to cause them some property damage. After all, its zero-sum, if they lose you win. This game bears the theme of a bloated and inefficient faux-capitalism, manifested mechanically with sticky controls, manifested dynamically with the shifting pay-off matrix, manifested aesthetically in scheming construction workers duking it out in unhealthy competition, is perhaps the most efficient use of metaphor in gameplay in their entire portfolio.

Have you ever seen those little stars that appear next to a product on a product review site?, or those percentages or points that indicate how good a product is?, well, they are Evil!, ratings systems used for games and any other products don't do much good to the end user or business, they only hurt both, here I explain why. At first sight, ratings may appear like a good way for customers to quickly differentiate the best products from the bad products, but in fact, they only do either one this 2 things:

1. They express the personal opinion of a reviewer.
2. The

Have you ever heard of the Monorail cat? Do you like lol cats?. Then you are going to like this one. This is a fun video of my little kitty cat climbing a wall, she likes to do that from time to time :) Enjoy!… Continue reading