This morning I have been enjoying Grab Them By The Eyes [official site] – a game by Terry Cavanagh about the cut-throat business of selling burgers on street corners.
But it’s not about who has the best burgers – that would be ridiculous. It’s about who has the best burger signage and thus you must compete with your rival street corner businessmen to buy messages, colour effects, borders and customised text movement for your neon monstrosity.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
VVVVVV is about you and the challenge in front of you. Are you fast enough with your left-right maneuvering to dodge spikes as you fall upwards into the sky? Are you skilled enough to reverse gravity the second your feet touch the ceiling, to send you tumbling back floorward to dodge spikes in reverse? There are no other controls to consider, no lives to protect and restore, and generous checkpointing means you never need to repeat yourself. The game asks you a question and removes everything else in between: are you good enough?
Moving Stories by Terry Cavanagh (him off Super Hexagon and VVVVVV) and Stephen Lavelle (Puzzlescript, English Country Tune) is a satisfying little snack of a game I’ve been prodding at for about 20 minutes.
The idea is you’re moving house and only have a limited amount of space in your suitcase so you must choose the things you wish to take with you. Once the case is packed and the detritus shoved into the nearby bin you’ll get snippets of the story of why you’re moving out.
The noisE3 is dying down and we’re returning to some semblance of normality. That means I might actually find time to play some games on this here computer rather than watching hundreds of trailers and livestreams about games that I probably won’t dabble with even when they are released in December 2015. It also means I can take a moment out of my day to report some jolly good news from Camp Cavanagh. The designer of fiendish musical masterpiece Super Hexagon has released a free version of his acclaimed spike-dodger VVVVVV and it’s available now for Windows, Mac and Linux.
No, Christ, don’t look to me for an impassioned editorial about Flappy Bird. There’s already an Encyclopaedia Brittania’s worth of analytics-chasing bullshit* about this now-withdrawn mobile game and its overly-scrutinised creator out there already, as SEO-crazed news sites strain to capitalise on interest in a from-nowhere breakout hit. The trafficks! The precious trafficks! Worse, when concrete news ground to a halt, the airwaves filled instead with hasty supposition about how this is a lesson that we all need to be more excellent to each other. We most certainly do, but I hope the sites who have most doggedly pursued this game and its maker aren’t now using a masquerade of concern as a pretext to wring one more drop from this story’s bone-dry washrag.
I have seen only one truly convincing show of support for Flappy Bird itself, and it is telling that it is achieved almost wordlessly. Terry Cavanagh’s ‘fan game’ Maverick Bird uses his familiar abstract-minimalist style (as most famously seen in Super Hexagon), but without uttering even a single syllable demonstrates inarguable admiration and affection for what its understandably popular inspiration actually did.
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Naya’s Quest, the latest from VVVVVV and Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh, is an incredibly stressful game. You know that whole relationship you have with your eyes where they by and large tell you the visual truth of a situation? That thing your entire basis of reality is more or less founded upon? Yeah, well, forget about that. You play as a girl (presumably named Naya, unless even that part is an insidious trap door of a lie) who seeks “the edge” in a world that’s falling to pieces. So you hop between squares and everything is just dandy until – if you’re anything like me – you fall right through the ground. Or so you think. But actually, the isometric viewpoint just made it look like a square was right in front of you. In reality it was above you or on the other side of the level or in outer space. And that is when the (exceedingly nauseating, nerve-wracking) learning begins. It’s occasionally frustrating, but also frequently brilliant.
RPS Feature The (Indie) Stars Align
Terry Cavanagh. Jasper Byrne. Ian Snyder. Jack King-Spooner. Richard Perrin. Zaratustra. Michael Brough. Robert Yang. Alan Hazelden. Benn Powell. Jake Clover. TheBlackMask.
You have probably played games by all of these people. VVVVVV might ring a bell. Maybe Lone Survivor or Kairo. Or, if you’re really, really cool, Blues For Mittavinda. Etc, etc, etc. You get the idea. But now they’ve all congealed into a hivemind and made one giant, multi-stage/setting/genre melting pot of madness. Each developer had three days to make a contribution, and then the next creator picked up where the previous left off. Experiment 12 is insane. Experiment 12 is inconsistent. Experiment 12 is beautiful.
