Humor

Frayed Knights is an indie CRPG set in a fantasy world in which you control a party of four pre-set characters: Arianna, a fighter; Dirk, a thief; Chloe, a magic-user; and Benjamin, a cleric. The game is 3D, but in a rather crude way; NPCs are static models without animation, poly counts are low, and the combat animations of the enemies you encounter are simple slashes or other attacks.

The characters themselves are never seen in the world; you play from a first-person view, and the characters are represented by 2D portraits around the screen.

Where the game excels is in the dialog. The characters each have strong, and different, personalities, and often banter with each other, comic-book style, with word balloons emitting from their portraits. The game's humor is carried by the dialog, and comes across strongly; I actually chuckled at times, as when one character remarked "not another go into the basement and kill rats quest." The humor often plays off the conventional tropes of digital RPGs, as that quote indicates.

Liberal Crime Squad is a game that makes us nostalgic for a period in American history when hippies were looking for new direction in their lives, and were ripe to be snatched up by any cult or extremist group that needed the manpower. It simulates the answers to some interesting questions: What if someone could succeed today where the Symbionese Liberation Army failed? What if instead of causing a media storm with the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, they had simply “enlightened” her and returned her to her normal life as a newspaper heiress? What if they had managed to use their crimes to sway public opinion to the Liberal end of the spectrum instead of alienating everyone? Of course, reasonable discourse never enters the equation. The future of the nation is far too important for one to even bother with such naïve measures.

A business simulation of a sex harem for comic book characters? This game cannot not be reviewed here. However -- refrain from any lewd remarks here -- I couldn't last more than fifteen minutes with it. Blame an early childhood rife with the Dark Knight, my (sorta) aversion to games without a jump button, or plain old apathy, but I just couldn't get into it. From what I gathered there was some Macguffin that required Professor Xavier to pimp out his mutants, or something. The game threw Horniness, Stamina, and Kinkiness meters at me and I got a chuckle from that, but my kid sister walked into the room and asked what I was playing. I didn't experience any Puritanical shame or anything like that, but I didn't really want to crack open that proverbial can of worms at that specific moment -- and especially in that context. I exited the game, told her "nothing", and we played some Mario Kart 64. She's devastating with those damn green shells.

Ideally this game would be played on a lazy Saturday morning: slightly after you gorge yourself on delicious, nutritiously-void cereal, but right before you properly wake up. Unlike the multicolored breakfasts of your youth there isn't a trinket at the bottom -- it's cheesy as hell to say this, but the prize is the game itself. The game evokes memories of simpler times without being condescending or awkwardly nostalgic. It's just fun; lighthearted, kinda messy, delightfully juvenile, fun.

My interest in RPG's waned just around the onset of puberty. It doesn't help that this happened around '03 -- long after all the classics were chiseled in stone -- but it's been years since I've been able to enjoy an honest to Allah number-cruncher. Lord knows I've tried. I'm replaying Mother 2 right now, and I'm obviously loving it, but the combat is such a goddamn *chore.* It brings me great pleasure to say then, kind reader, that this game is not only my favorite RPG of the millennium (hey, a little premature but it still counts) but one of my favorite indie games to come out this year. Fuck it, outside of a superhero ninja game that made me love again (*review forthcoming*) this is my favorite title since VVVVVV.

Console dweebs frequently say things like "PC games suck because you can't be sure they'll run," and its true that sometimes there are configuration issues. Of course, we PC gamers sneer at console gamers for this kind of thing, because it's rarely a problem post-DirectX, and anyway, we know what a goddamn DOS prompt looks like and know how to use a Linux shell when we need to, and suspect that console gamers' coffee pots are all blinking "12:00". But Jesper makes me think maybe they have a point.

If you like Game and Adventure, SUPER BIG GUN ADVENTURE for you! Shoot enemy! Shoot down to move over lava! Shoot more enemy! Are you gentleman enough to save yourself from other gentleman with smaller gun!!??? ...I'll stop now. This game is my choice pick from the Game Jolt Minimalist compo, and reminded me why I dig indie games so much. One interesting mechanic as its crux, chunky graphics, and thinly veiled innuendo via intentional Engrish. Nice time waster, and the chiptune soundtrack is catchy too.

No, you aren't going crazy. Yes, that picture is accurate. That is Mario, and he is indeed fighting an MS Paint shit monster. I should add that a MIDI rendition of The Phantom Menace battle music is played throughout this scenario. I should also add that this boss fight is broken and obtuse, and so far I can't figure out how to pass it. I think this segment encapsulates the experience of Mario's Adventure for me, and is pretty fucking hilarious. Super Marco (Mario's autistic cousin) is also entertaining in the same MST3K kind of way, and is tantamount to playing a platformer made by Andy Warhol circa 1986. Today is an exploration of amateur design, a meditation on the earnest and unintended Shit Games out there.

The usual rigamarole of jumping, grabbing keys and reaching point Bs is ripped up and partially erased in GENERIC, yet another platform game that tries to turn a mirror on the underlying logics of gameplay and genre, but this one does it better than the usual. Many platform games have come out featuring excessive difficulty, Braid and a host of retainer breatheren have played with the interval-driven reload cycle and temporal causality. GENERIC goes even further, this game lets your tear the levels apart. It´s like Little Big Planet with a big bottle of white out.

Flashbang is back with a flash and a bang, the staple physics-based viscerality, and the staple removing dialectic of destruction vs. capitulation. Instead of being Taurus trying your hand at entreprenuership, you´re a lazy entitlement-jockey trying to do the bare minimum to get through the day while collecting guaranteed pay. Your job is to man a crane, though man-handling it is more accurate. The controls, like those of Minotaur In A China Shop, are intentionally difficult. There´s an inherent delta in where you move the mouse and how the crane follows, and they tuned the gamma up real high, it makes running in the original Super Mario Bros. feel like walking in The Legend of Zelda, by comparison. This sloppiness is amplified by the inability to directly control the height of the crane hook. There´s something in the noise.