Fast Play

I'll say right off the bat that this game is awesome, and if you don't download and love it I'll think less of you as a person. But I digress. Ahem, every nerd's gotta grow up someday. In time superhero comics transmute to Alan Moore graphic novels, and after a while DBZ VHSs metamorph into Evangelion DVDs. Today I'm going to ask you to take the next leap, the next step in your nerd evolution: play a Rogue-like. It sounds daunting, I know, I've been there. I tried playing Nethack when I was a lad of 15 and I just got baffled. There weren't any graphics to speak of, I died roughly every minute, and there were ten different ways to drop your items. Shit got confusing. I felt there was something amazing lurking underneath though, so ever since Derek Yu popped my procedurally-generated cherry with his little cave game I've been wanting a Rogue-like fix. DoomRL admirably fills this role, and is a perfect introduction to the genre. Instead of twiddling your thumbs and waiting to pay your Activision-Blizzard overlords for a re-skinned Diablo II, play this thing.

James Ernest games (like, say, Lord of the Fries) tend to be fast, funny, and fun, but often too luck dependent for serious tabletop gamers. Falling is instead fast, funny, fun, and with surprising strategic depth.

The set-up is simple: most of the cards are shuffled, except for the "Ground" cards, which are placed at the bottom of the deck. One person acts as dealer, Blackjack-like, but there's no betting and he's an impartial referee as well. The object of the game is to be the last person who hits the ground. (As the rules say, "It's not much of a goal, but it's all you could think of on the way down.")

The popular first-generation arcade game meets the next generation of fluid physics in this awesome abstract game. The basic rules of Pong still apply (move the paddle to reflect the bouncing ball), but in addition, you can project (by pressing the left mouse button) or absorb (with the right) a jet of a color-changing, plasma-like fluid from your paddle, which fills your screen, making it look trippy, and in which the ball will move according to the fluid dynamics.

A Student Showcase nominee at the '08 Independent Games Festival, Mayhem Intergalatic is a fast-playing space conquest game. My first thought was "Risk clone," but it isn't actually; although combat seems to be per the Risk combat algorithm, there's no concept of adjacency (any ship can move anywhere on the map, though trips to distant stars can take multiple turns), there are no cards, and a fleet can only make one attack per turn.

What it really is, is "4X lite"; your only real actions are dispatching ships to target systems, and upgrading your shipyards. Basically, upgrading a system's shipyards increases the number of ships it produces each turn, but doing so forgoes one turn of production.

Chivalry is Not Dead is a short indie graphic adventure with fairly entertaining dialog and cartoony graphics; you play Phlegmwad, the assassin of Lord Horrible, sent to kill the Queen of Everything. When I say "short," there are only about 8 scenes, and if you do the absolute obvious thing (go kill the Queen), you can finish it in about 5 minutes.

From a design perspective, what's interesting is that it leans in the direction of bushiness.

Cactus! Cactus! You wicked alchemist, you mercurial son of a bitch! You're too fucking good!

This is a shmup made in 12 hours that can be played in a minute. It's the latest in a long series of shmups made by this prickly, lone genius that takes a tired genre and deconstructs it with the delicate care of a surgeon back by generous morphine. Have you ever tried morphine? I worked at a hospital one summer... that first minute, its like this game.

Lost in the Static is visually striking game, quite unlike anything you've seen before. As you can immediately understand from the screenshot. Right?

Well, no, you can't. Let's try again. Lost in the Static is a conventional, short, enjoyable platformer with nothing particularly innovative about the gameplay. But the mechanism by which it produces its images is highly unusual, with effective music that (purposefully, one assumes) carries a sense of the static you might get by playing music on an old AM radio or a 45 turntable, providing an interesting and artistic emotional frame for the game itself.

Passage is a special kind of game made by an unusual kind of game developer. Jason Rohrer lives with his wife and child in a cabin in upstate New York. This cabin is specially insulated to maintain heat during the winter; it has means of collecting rainwater and a fully implemented garden in the back yard. As a result, Jason and his family live on around $800 a month. He has an MS in Computer Science and experience doing network applications, but he doesn't play the Corporate America game. Instead, he's free, and he's free to make beautiful art games that, like his house, are technically and experientially tight to the point of self-sufficiency.

Passage is about the literal passage through a maze, but it is also about the passage of time. You begin as a young man; you have a wall fore-grounded directly to your north, and can move to the right or explore the maze to the south. Early on you encounter a woman; if you bump into her you will fall in love and become her companion. Together you walk through life, illustrated as a variation in wallpaper; you age together, you explore together.

FastCrawl is what the name suggests: a quick-playing dungeon crawler, perfect for a way to kill your lunch hour. One of the parameters you set at game-start, in fact, is whether you want a short, medium, or long game; short ones last about 30 minutes, while long ones last perhaps an hour.