FunEffect.com

As a reviewer, it's my job to push you in the direction of cool things in the hopes you just might check them out. I wouldn't be living up to my duty if I didn't direct you towards more of Stephen Lavelle's work, and you would be doing yourself a disservice as well if you aren't keeping up with his explorations of the medium. His motto is "let's try something out there" and he holds to it. He cranks out quirky little games that can make you feel empathetic or maybe slightly uneasy; he crafts experimental pieces that toy with game mechanics in a novel way. That is, when he isn't making games about female masturbation or a nerdy math joke. These are short experiences, so overlong explanations would ruin the fun. For the uninitiated here's a few tidbits about each.

Therapy Game is an exploration of conversation as a gameplay mechanic; your physical actions are the same for every playthrough, but the way you handle your therapist is under your control. The dialogue made me smile sardonically a couple times.

The relationship between the game and player is something Lavelle has explored a few times in his work -- Home had you playing the role of a caregiver, and you're a stage director this time around in Theatrics. You meta-game age-old plots to work your way through each puzzle. Think of it as Storytron-lite. Stephen made this in a weekend -- God bless Mr. Crawford.

All quests are a search for knowledge at their core. When you wander around a town in an RPG and talk to NPCs, it's implied that one of them will provide you with the knowledge you're searching for. Not in Missing. I felt a pang of empathy for the little guy.

Grave is a minuscule and claustrophobic tone poem. If you want more horror, I'd recommend Brain Damage. That game fucked with my head.

Increpare is hands-down one of my favorite developers, ever. On a tangential note my favorite band ever is the Velvet Underground. (FYI, they kickstarted the whole "punk" thing.) There's a widely circulated (yet untrue) anecdote that the handful of people who bought the Velvet's albums at their release were all inspired to create their own bands. I don't know about you, but nothing makes me want to make games more than seeing this man in action. Stephen's criminally unknown now, but I'd bet money that given a couple decades he'll get retconned into the annals of ludography as an elder statesman of game design. Or he won't, which would be all right with me. I'm just happy to be one of the lucky few who get to enjoy his work.

['Battle Klaxon' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This week, we examine two different versions of panicked, squeaky-clean PSP title Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!]

There's been an odd glut of tongue-in-cheek Japanese games based on 16bit RPGs recently, games like Half Minute Hero and 3D Dot Heroes. I've already picked my favourite. I like it because it's about PANIC.

I love panic in games. That icy pang of realisation, the blitz of thoughts that follows, the test of keeping your cool. In panic you can find such easy access to that magical realm where the only things in existence are you and the game. And it's such a useful design tool!

Resident Evil 4 was full of boring bits like rooms where nothing happens or having to retrace your steps to stick a stone donkey tail on a carving of a donkey, but nobody noticed because those moments were respite from panic. Inaction became soothing, and a masterful action game became a game of the year.

My favourite of the comedy 16bit reimaginings, then: Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is a PSP series which gives you the task of digging out a dungeon with the aim of killing the heroes that habitually raid it. The original game isn't great, but the sequel is, and that's getting released in America in Spring 2010 with the majestic title of Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! Time to Tighten Up Security.

The first game (out now in America as Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?) is so impoverished in terms of content it resembles a prototype, which probably explains why it didn't get a boxed English language release and can currently be found in the shiny blue limbo of the Playstation Store.

And yeah, Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! does panic very, very well. Here's how it works:

You play the overlord of a 16bit RPG dungeon, which you view from a side-on perspective like you would an ant farm. The game is in digging out earth to create the tunnels and chambers of your dungeon while keeping it populated with monsters.

Every so often a bunch of nosy jerks known as 'Heroes' will come crashing through your front door, and the game asks where in your existing excavations you want to hide. The game is lost if the heroes find your squealing avatar and manage to drag him, trussed up like a common criminal, back to the surface.

Midnight Soil

What's alarming about this? Well, the way you enlist monsters, for one. Certain tiles of dirt contain nutrients, or, after a hero has cast a spell near them, magic. The more nutrients or magic in a square, the higher level the monster that comes staggering out when you dig out that tile. Fine. Except all but the lowest level slimes and sprites need to eat lower level monsters to survive and reproduce. You're not just filling your dungeon with employees, you're managing a fragile ecosystem, and nature runs its course so fast you're always returning to view parts of your dungeon to find they've changed.

Your lizardmen might have eaten all the dogs in their area and are starving as a result, or your faeries have reproduced like bunnies and set up shop where you were planning to lure a dragon. The exception to this rule is when you want the inevitable to happen for the purposes of something like evolution, whereupon you'll watch predator and pray avoid one another like opposing genders at a school prom. And that's not even the bad news.

Because your only real means of interacting with the world is permanently digging out these tiles, Badman's quirk is that, like a Go board, you only have a limited number of moves to choose from. While most defence games have you building, Badman gets you subtracting.

The irony is that the ultimate protection, 1000 feet of packed dirt, is there from the start, but you need to hide. So you dig down, dig deeper, always chipping away at your options and always panicking because of the acute awareness that you're backing yourself into a corner and sooner or later those heroes are gonna come for you.

Graveyard Humour

Did I mention you need to dig fast? The time frame on each party of heroes arriving is agonisingly tight, so you're often slicing out serpentine tunnels by holding down the dig button and sliding your pickaxe over the screen, praying you don't screw up that delicate ecosystem. You do, of course, and worse besides.

Whether you're extending your dungeon or cutting out delicious nutrient-rich tiles for the monsters within, you'll end up turning blind corners into smooth curves, putting safe spots in killzones and (most embarrassingly of all) knocking down walls and creating shortcuts that let heroes bypass whole areas of your dungeon.

And so you panic. You panic because there's no save, and your dungeon is in ruins, and you don't want to start the level again, and-- oh, mercy! Oh, mother! Here they come!

I'm a big fan of games which invisibly force you into role-playing your character through mechanics alone, so it makes me pretty happy when you end up every bit the bumbling villain in Badman. As a player you'll brood, you'll giggle, you'll hatch plots (the game's too fast-paced for any grand strategy, so hatch you must) and you'll panic when your schemes don't work out, most likely because you ruined them yourself. I love it.

Click here for a trailer and a little more info on Time To Tighten Up Security. And remember, don't bother with the first game! It's not being All It Can Be. Save yourself for this.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Every Game Ever. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]