Category Archives: Games

Zen Bound

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Zen Bound is an almost unbelievably innovative and interesting game.

Basically, you wrap a cord around a wooden object, which paints the object. Sessions feel half like a game and half like some kind of soothing knot-to-untie.

This game has vision; all the elements feel unified in a monastic, gothic way. But the game is not just cohesive aesthetically…the entire thing feels polished in a way that you rarely encounter. That alone adds some pleasurable quality to interacting with the game.

Part game, part toy, part puzzle, part relaxation fetish. I love this Zen Bound.

(Note: Jordan, this game is for you.)

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Subway Shuffle (iPhone)

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I have a love/hate relationship with puzzle games. (I’d rather engage with something that allows me to play expressively.) But I love strategy games and a few puzzle games.

Subway gameplay involves moving pieces around to open a path to the goal. Each level (01-91) gets increasingly difficult.

The part I find fascinating is my approach to solving the puzzles. There’s an interesting mental shift, where I “let go” of trying to solve the puzzle overall, focus on which moves I *can* currently make, take into account what has to happen (in the final move) to solve the puzzle, and *try to solve faster*. I find that I’m far more successful when I make this series of mental shifts than when I try to approach the puzzle as a whole, or in a systemic way. Hard to articulate.

Subway also has a super clean art style and implementation that I love.

This game has made it onto my list of iPhone favorites, along with Galcon and Drop7.

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Glasvegas

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After hearing about them for a while, I finally started listening to Glasvegas this week. One part melodrama, one part grit, I love their music entirely.

I’m playtesting my iPhone game a lot right now, near the end of the project. (This is, more or less, a regenerative side project I’m doing with a handful of other people, while working on longer-term first-person RPG-style stuff with Arkane Studios.) Out of many, many great qualities, one of the best things about the iPhone/iPod is that you can general pop on headphones, turn off the game’s music, and play to your own soundtrack. Not completely novel, but better supported than on any prior platform.

My favorite music while playing my iPhone game: Dan Deacon, Cut Copy and–more specifically–the Teenagers’ remake of a song by Vampire Weekend. Glasvegas works well too, it turns out.

I [bloody] [heart] Left4Dead

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I’ve been playing Left4Dead and I’m totally in love with it.

It’s a ‘game’ in a purer sense than many shooters…it’s a sports-like experience in terms of dynamics and phases of play. The game feels very smart in terms of dramatic pacing via mechanics: Each enemy class represents a different tactical experience, rising and falling in intensity as players move through a solid structure, from safe zone to labyrinth to arena to labyrinth to climax to safe zone. And each mix of enemy classes represents a different tactical experience. The variability in enemy spawning and items feels almost perfect.

It’s a great example of excellent mechanical differentiation. This is best seen with regard to enemy classes (witch, boomer, etc), but it’s all over the place (zombie-attracting pipe-bombs vs wall-of-fire molotov cocktail; zombies can’t open doors but have to batter them down; etc). I’m constantly seeing small, well differentiated mechanics that enhance the game in some way…that can be used tactically by players in different contexts. Enforced co-op mechanics are some of the game’s most interesting features and really matter a lot when a team is trying to survive a big finale battle. The game constantly gives the player clear feedback, with minimal noise. You get messages for goals, for bragging-rights, dynamic events, etc. Some of this is conveyed through character voice lines (even your own), which works great.

But it’s not enough to describe it as a sports-like shooter, because the setting, character archetypes and situations make it more than that too. Rather than feeling abstract (Team 01 vs Team 02), the player cannot help but surf along the edges of the zombie fiction. There’s a kind of media transference that happens because the player has seen so many nihilistic, desperate zombie movies set in the modern world. The game fiction leverages this very well, allowing the story to unfold dynamically as the player simultaneously drives and interprets the situation. That story is generally constrained to something between a zombie movie and a game of sandlot football, but it’s seamless (and brilliant for being so).

I love L4D. Kudos to the team for making one of the best games of the year.

Bonus Xmas Score

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I just found out that Puzzle Quest and Passage are available on the App Store. I first played PQ via XBLA and found it addictive and interesting. For me, Passage was the hit of the Gamma256 event in Montreal (in 2007?). Having both of these games on my iPod is great, for different reasons. PQ will allow me to level up on planes and trains, something I love, and the iPod version of Passage will allow me to show the game to people who normally might not encounter it.