FunEffect.com

Super Search 60 is a fast paced searching game for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The game contains a bunch of different objects splattered all over the screen and players must find a certain item. The game is a different take on hidden object games. Instead of searching for a list of objects set in a background [...] Continue reading

Apple is targeting 5000 - not 5, not 50, not 500: five fucking thousand - applications for removal from the iPhone's App Store due to "overtly sexual content". This is the developer equivalent of a pogrom set in the town from Footloose. The obvious, knee-jerk response you might be expecting from me is "censorship sucks my @#$%!" as I chimed back in the day, when I was developing for consoles, looked at Braid as my commercial/artistic model of success, and was losing money trading. Now I have a somewhat more nuanced perspective.

You're a developer, you love games, you love figuring out the best way to splice a data-structure in real-time, but you're also an economic entity, so any app/game you develop is in a way a bet, best a calculated bet, on some kind of continued or shifting behavior in the entertainment marketplace. Let's say you want to bet that people will continue to be undisciminating horndogs, not an unreasonable one, and you have a variety of instruments to choose from in placing this bet. These instruments break down to the sorts of mechanics you design into the delivery of your data which, on visual parsing, resembles boods or whatever. Now imagine you're taking this risk on and spilling yourself on the vargaries of market chaos, hoping for Win, playing the game-game, and all of the sudden the platform holder politely informs you that your bet is being canceled regardless of performance, and they aren't even going to reimburse you for the dev costs.

If I were the adventuresome, venturing sort, which I am, this kind of precedent makes me think that said platform has no credibility as a marketplace. Sure, Apple has credible reasons for defending their cut of the pie, they want their platform to seem more credible to consumers, and that's fine. But what splits my hairs on this one isn't so much the censorship of the data as the fiat discrimination between instruments.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to make a reference to finance to nail this one home. Prepare yourselves.

Designing a game or some other product around a tactic of draping it in sex is sort of like short-selling, where you bet that things will get worse. You're assuming, hey, eventually people will get more horny than they are interested in new stuff. Similar psychology. What Apple is doing here may seem like the Government banning short-selling altogether, but in fact it's more capricious and inconsistent, and is similar to some bullshit that brokers have pulled in 2009. See, if you want to bet on a market decline, you have a lot of instruments to do that, you can borrow shares of individual stocks and sell them, you can buy Put options, you can buy ETFs that short the market for you, and you can buy ETFs that short the market for you with leverage. Some brokers decided those leveraged instruments were too risky for their genteel, retiree customers, and unilaterally banned them from their services. Very similar motivation, similar scope (Apple is more like a broker than the entire market, albiet exclusively for one segment of the market) and similar ball busting, smug attitude that belies a lack of true customer service, which I believe supports broad choice in the customer.

The platforms that are truly going to win are not going to moralize pre-emptively on your behalf, they aren't going to have high barriers to entry, they aren't going to siphon off more than 40% of the revenues (20-30% is a range where mathematically the balance of power encourages growth an innovation rather than near-term enrichment of the platform operator) and most of all they are going to let the market sort itself out. So while I'm ruling the AppStore out of my candidate list of potential winners, let's backtrack and go ahead and scratch XBLA, WiiWare (lot check is way too inefficient, distribution sucks), and any kind of closed web-portal, such as, hey, Big Fish for example.

Most likely platforms themselves will be de-emphasized as things get more Cloud-y, but as for now I'd say Facebook et al. have profound edge.

Titan Studios’ Fat Princess certainly has a hysterical premise. It’s a team-deathmatch game that features cartoonish visuals, tons of gore, multiple classes and upgrades. Did I mention the whole feeding the princess cake makes her enormous and hard to move? The game’s concept, visuals, and overall feel are instantly appealing, but Fat [...] Continue reading

Though serious arcade rats (what's left of them) typically scoff at casual-targeted machines like Golden Tee, it's surprising to see just how far ahead of the game the golf series is, at least in terms of technology.

Golden Tee LIVE 2010, for example, doesn't just offer "grip it and spank it" gameplay; it allows virtual golfers to link their player card to an online account, where they can view personal stats and dress their avatar. They can even upload videos of hole-in-ones directly from a Golden Tee machine to Youtube for free.

The latest new feature Incredible Technologies has added to the trackball game, Golden Tee Connect, enables players to attach their account to Facebook. Once a player has set it up, the next time he or she plays Golden Tee LIVE 2010, the machine will automatically send a Facebook status update that you're playing the game at a specific location.

So, if you're on the lam, make sure not to turn on this functionality, as the police are likely following your Facebook updates and will interrupt your game once they see you're hanging out at a local bar.

[Via Arcade Heroes]

Which is a short horror adventure game about escaping from a house that you are trapped in. A 3D mode is included if you have the right glasses to view the images with.

Note that Which has a bit of violence that might be seen as disturbing, and if you're worried about jump scares then you should probably avoid playing the game as well. (Windows, 20.9MB)

The artform we acknowledge as being best at getting inside the heads of characters and saying something meaningful about life is the novel, largely because if its ability to portray interior monolog. Film is a distant second best, since it portrays the outward appearance of things, and is far less able to portray a character's interior life.

Games don't normally ever qualify, since they are best at showing process and action. But what if you did a game that was fundamentally about the interior lives of characters?

Lives Births Deaths is in a sense the antithesis of a typical tabletop RPG adventure: rather than providing a story, with characters as blanks the players are expected to flesh out, it provides a diverse and unique slate of characters, with pre-established relationships to one another, with the story generated partly via system but mainly through improvisational roleplay.

Sixteen characters are provided, each represented by a card with a photo on the front and a discussion of the character's attitudes, a "macro" concern, and their relationship to the other characters on the back. Each player takes one as their "base" character -- only they roleplay the character during play -- but the others are available for use in any scene (and any of the players may roleplay them when necessary).

At the beginning of the game, each player free-associates with the word "life," writing down what occurs to them on a piece of paper; each then chooses two words, and writes them on an index card. The gamemaster also writes three words down, along with "birth" and "death." Semirandomly, these cards are arranged in a 3x5 grid.

The rows of the grid correspond to "work," "family," and "vacation." Each column corresponds to a "story." Each card corresponds to a scene. "Birth" and "death" must be somewhere in the grid.

In addition to his or her "macro" concern (printed on the card), "micro" concerns are allocated to the characters, differently in each playing -- the game provides some suggested micros, but GMs may improvise others. In addition, the players (not characters) may be given "goals," which are overarching themes to bring out during play (e.g., "life is grim and earnest," or "life is joyous," or "life sucks and then you die").

A story is selected, and the players decide which characters are primarily involved. They roleplay out the scene, with other characters coming into play as seems appropriate. Brodén & Wrigstad do not go into the techniques of the jeepform in their rules, but expect the gamemaster to be familiar with them, and to adopt particular techniques during play as necessary (see the jeepform dictionary).

Between each scene, the gamemaster performs a "narration," merely recapping what transpired and transitioning to the next. This is in the voice of one of the characters, who is portrayed as something of a Lebowski-like loner.

Part of the brilliance of the game is the diversity of the characters -- ranging in age from pre-adolescent to aged, of a diversity of sexual orientations and attitudes -- along with the relationships among them -- many belonging to one of two families, and many employed by the same tech company. There's enough meat here, hooks on which to hang a story, to produce emotionally impactful play. And while the gamemaster has to guide the players to produce something that questions the nature of life and human motivation, the system and the setting are well conceived to point improvisation in that direction.

Lives Births Deaths was designed for play at roleplaying conventions in Scandinavia, and as a consequence it may be harder for players from other areas to get into; the characters as portrayed will be sympathetic and understandable to Swedish players, but might need some modification for use by Texans, say. All characters live and work on a small Swedish island; prejudice against immigrants is a subtheme, and while this certainly exists in America, its nature is different here; and the tolerant nature of Scandinavian religion might translate to, say, American Episcopalianism, but not to what we normally expect from Americans who wear their religion on their sleeve.

Still, it's another example of the impressive and innovative work appearing out of the jeepform community.

The best part of an arcade title is that moment when everything clicks, when your brain fully grasps the game's mechanics and you begin to play at an intuitive and almost instinctual level. People who yearn for spiritual enlightenment liken it to 'zen', but I've always thought it was more akin to locking into a musical groove than a form of passive meditation. If jamming out on fundamental mechanics older than this reviewer sounds fun, then dive in daddy-o. It would seem contradictory to say that a game grounded in old-school tendencies is progressive, but it toys with the traditional structure of those coin-op machines as well. Oh, this is a game about a wizard that was turned into a worm and eats through planets, by the way.

I'll get my one gripe out of the way first, but thankfully it's an aesthetic one. The cheery pixel art is certainly some form of anti-depressant but the color palette is muddled; it's initially hard to distinguish desirable orbs from regular blocks. Other than that this is tightly crafted. Any attempt of explaining the game's mechanics wouldn't be as telling as playing the game a couple times, the readme consisting of "move with the arrow keys" is about all you initially need to know. You guide your worm through various planets in a vertical forced-scroll setting, devouring things all the while. What makes this compelling from a design standpoint is its structure, Auntie Pixelante notes that "this is a game based on the bonus round" and that holds true. It seamlessly segues between four seperate microgames that you have to master; it's like a focused WarioWare title or a better implementation of this obscure arcade game. Because it rapidly cycles through these microgames it keeps you more involved than you would be if you were repeating a single mechanic ad nauseum -- which usually is the case with this sort of game. It also makes it a tad harder to lock into a groove, but when you do it's glorious.

I own a small flash drive which has on it all the indie titles you'd expect me to have, and this is my latest addition. Give it a little time and you won't be disappointed. For maximum awesome change the background music to "Dumb Toms", it fits the game perfectly.