Hacking

Digital Eel, one of the most creative developers on the indie scene (creators of Brainpipe and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space among others) has recently released their next major title, Data Jammers: Fast Forward.

There's some hugger-mugger about how you're a hacker infiltrating the secret data systems of the Military-Industrial Complex to crash them, but the gameplay makes Data Jammers a kind of arcade track game in which you slide along a trippy highway curved and splitting in 3D space, avoiding enemy data objects while trying to pick up rings for score, along with the occasional powerup. New enemies and features are introduced over time, and what's an easy game to play at early levels gradually becomes more complex and difficult, with use of bombs needed to destroy or evade enemies and reach the track end without dying -- and certainly to achieve a high score. In other words, the gameplay is not as original as we usually expect from Digital Eel, but the enemies and effects are imaginative, and the controls very smooth.

Sp.A.I is a visually stunning 3D game built using the Unreal SDK by five students at Queensland University. The installer installs SDK support, so you do not need a copy of Unreal itself to play.

The world is a Tron-like framework of glowing graphics, which avoids the necessity of creating textures and makes any polygonal artifacts explainable as part of the 'cyber world.' The back story is that you are a sort of cyber agent named Aiva (whom you see in the inevitable ass-cam) penetrating a computer system; apparently "hacking" means navigating through a 3D space, solving block puzzles, and platforming.

The puzzles themselves are nothing novel, although many of them do involve a timing element -- e.g., once you destroy one block, you must quickly destroy another, or a moving laser sweep will trigger an alarm. Thus, even though the gameplay is mainly puzzle-based, there's a skill-and-action aspect to it as well. Similarly, once you obtain a 'file' enemies will attack you, and apparently you cannot both carry a file and shoot back at the same time, so you must move quickly (and can use the file is a sort of shield). You do have hit points (which regrow once out of immediate danger), so it's not a "one hit kills" kind of game.

Platforming controls are, alas, kind of muddy, which combined with the fact that Aiva sort of floats along over the cyberspace often makes it hard to time your movement just so, and you may wind up over- or under-shooting targets at times. The platforming challenges are far from masocore, though, so the muddiness is tolerable, if still frustrating.

Nice tutorial, nice music; only a couple of levels, but pretty polished for a small student team.

In general, I am not a big fan of rail shooters, the genre of game in which you move along a fixed path and try to shoot as many of the things you pass as possible. In general, they take the least interesting aspect of shooters -- actually shooting -- and make it the focus of gameplay. Procedure did suck me in, however.

The game's conceit is that you are 'debugging' code by moving through a sort of cyberspace and shooting at things that look like actual bugs. Insects are, of course, fairly easy to recreate in 3D, since their exoskeletons can be represented by rigid polygons. But this also allows the rest of the game to appear somewhat Tron-like, with glowing polygonal structures, floating textures like the billboards in Bladerunner and so on; together with a curiously relaxed electronic score, the effect is pleasantly trippy in a cyberpunk kind of way.

Weapons, armor, and such can be upgraded between levels; and there's a boss bug at the end of each.

Digital: A Love Story is an extraordinarily charming game -- a sort of text adventure in which you use your new pre-VGA computer to dial up all sorts of interesting BBSes, just like we did in the Old Days. There, you make virtual friends, uncover a mystery, and have the opportunity to fall in love.

Gregory Weir swerves from the psychology of being trapped in a room or the body of a tentacled monster to give us a casualized take on the hacking type of game we could probably use more of. In fact, now that it´s been thematized to a more blantant puzzle, I think we can go ahead and level these things up to "sub-genre" status, in the same way that a Squire in FF Tactics levels up to become a Thief. The game itself doesn´t have a whole lot to do with actual hacking; it´s an abstract logic tracing game with time sensitivity on a turn-based cycle. That´s my one sentence analysis. You just click on these little packet launchers and try to clear a packet to the pyramid (why is the cliched hacking goal always a pyramid? Is there some Amon Ra/Illuminati current to the cyberpunk genre?). In order to clear it you have to shoot switches and things, which means you have to figure out the right order of packets to fire with the right timing.

Hacker Evolution is, ahem, an evolution of Exosyphen's previous hacking games, of which they've developed several over the years. This is a good thing, as the current game is intelligently thought through and polished, and the puzzles cleverly designed (if at times frustratingly hard). That is, of course, a big advantage of reworking the same theme: you improve each time.

Many will compare Hacker Evolution to Introversion's Uplink, also an excellent game in this--well, there aren't enough hacker games to call it a genre, but "of this type" will do. Hacker Evolution =feels= more like you're actually hacking because of a design decision that in almost any other type of game would be obviously incorrect: The game is largely played on the command line.