When I came in to work today John was bright red with an incommunicable rage. It can only mean one thing: a new game about programming is coming out. This one is called State Machine [official site] and it’s from Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV and Ruari O’Sullivan, aka randomnine, of Fear Is Vigilance and Beacon. Luckily, I quite like programmey games, so I calmly slipped the press release out of John’s furious, frozen grip and that is how you are learning about it.
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RPS Feature The best free games of the week!
Oh look, you’re back. Last year was interesting, wasn’t it? Hopefully 2017 has good things in store, both in terms of free games and the continuation of human history. We’re off to a strong start on the games side, anyway. Come into our digital den of dastardly downloads as we explore some of the finer details of your personality, including but not limited to:
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.
RPS Feature Hexa-Gone, Baby, Gone
Ever looking forward, I’ve finally found the time to explore my thoughts about one of last year’s finest. I played Super Hexagon and I loved Super Hexagon, but it wasn’t until I saw it removed from my screen and occurring in a drinking establishment that I found the words I needed.
After a fair deal of ugliness concerning its sort-of-evil clone, Super Hexagon is finally, definitely, mark-it-in-your-calendar-ably twisting and turning its way onto PC. Which is great, because the, um, third-person hexagoner – a diabolical product of the evilest brain trapped inside a very nice person – is a masochistically compulsive good time. But creator Terry Cavanagh declared it as little as two weeks out from launch back in September. So what exactly took so long? Well, have you ever re-coded an entire game before?
Update 1 – there’s been some kind of breakdown in communications here, as it transpires that Terry Cavanagh isn’t as cool with this game as we first thought. While the Open Hexagon dev was given a blessing to make a game ‘inspired’ by Super Hexagon, he was explicitly told that it couldn’t be a clone. And yet… So, if you like Open Hexagon please be sure to give your support to the creator of the game it so liberally borrows from once Super Hexagon itself arrives on PC.
Update 2 – the creator of Open Hexagon has apologised profusely for releasing his clone game before the PC/Mac version of Super Hexagon, and attempted to explain why he got the wrong end of the stick.
With his new iOS game, Super Hexagon, I’ve just realised that Terry “VVVVVV” Cavanagh has a plan, and it’s to achieve immortality through drinking the tears of broken souls, bent over electronic torture devices screaming his name in fear and fury. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. Super Hexagon will be coming out on PC. You will hate him too. Hate. There’s a trailer after the jump. Hate.
How’s your Monday morning going?
The Lonely Wizard, a browser-based collaboration between Alan Hazelden and Terry Cavanagh, will take you all of thirty seconds to play. So off you go and play it now – no excuses. I’ll leave the site off the air until you get back, so you won’t miss anything.
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RPS Feature Terry Cavanagh does the chat
Terry ‘VVVVVV’ Cavanagh’s ultra-minimalist, abstract first-person co-op puzzler At A Distance is nominated for the Nuovo award at this year’s Independent Games Festival. As part of our seemingly infinite series in which we chat to (almost) all the finalists, Terry talks about the concept behind the game, what he’d like to see win at the IGF this year, his disappointment that the Pirate Kart didn’t get a nod, and his answer to the most important question of all.
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Instructions: “be a cat.” This is all you need to know about VVVVVV creator Terry Cavanagh’s free and cannily-named mini-MMO, ChatChat. Go on, be a cat. Do what cats do (bum-licking not included, mercifully). Hang around with other cats in the way that cats do, i.e. doing your best to ignore them with barely-concealed hostility. Catch mice. Leave dead mice as gruesome offerings to your owner. Be completely unmoved by the discovery of treasure, because if treasure doesn’t run away, scream and bleed, what possible use is it to you?
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Terry Cavanagh’s extraordinary first-person co-op puzzle game, At A Distance, is now available to download for free. You’ll need two networked PCs side by side to play it with a friend or helpful acquaintance. I played it with an Alec, as you can read here. We found it to be something quite special, demanding both considered co-operation, spatial thinking, lateral thinking, inside-out thinking, and boiled thinking, fresh from the pot. It’s remarkably atmospheric, too, and goes a long to way towards showing how minimal first-person visuals can be, while still telling you everything you need to know.
RPS Feature Together alone
Him: silent, stoic, patient. “OK.”
Me: jabbering, confused, hectoring. “Go there, what about that, does that look like that?”
A right pair, Jim and I. Entirely inappropriate, surely, to tackle a co-operative puzzle and exploration game together. We did it, though. We conquered At A Distance‘s abstract shape-worlds, and we did it together. And creator Terry Cavanagh (VVVVVV) only had to give us big, fat hints around half a dozen times. Perhaps he was inwardly thinking “these feckless jokers run a website about videogames?”, but outwardly he was patient and understanding, so I’ll presume we weren’t quite the most pathetic pair he saw tackle his brain-teasing wonder.
Right: here’s the main problem with writing about At A Distance. You say how it works, you spoil it. I’m going to take a cowardly middle-ground and obliquely reference key elements without actually shining a direct light on them (and certainly not on how to solve the game), but if you want to go in totally blind to this 30 minute-long co-op indie game that requires two adjacent PCs to play it, stop reading now.
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We all loved Terry Cavanagh’s wonderful VVVVVV last year, didn’t we? Well I certainly did, that Kieron bloke did, and a straw poll of my hands unanimously voted in favour it. Universal approval if ever I saw it. Fantastic news: Terry has joined up with programmer Simon Roth to push out a major update to VVVVVV. Here’s the what’s new in VVVVVVersion 2.0: Read the rest of this entry »
American Dream is a collaborative browser game from Increpare, VVVVVV’s Terry Cavanagh, Jasper Byrne and Tom Morgan-Jones that’s made me laugh more than enough to warrant a post. It’s a bit like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street directed by a wet pocket calculator. Set in the 80s, it tasks you with fulfilling the American dream by making a million dollars, though according to Terry it started its life as a game called Killing Spree about “an assassin who spent all his money on designer furniture”. Go play! It’s exactly the kind of oddball thing that I play then can’t help but wonder how it would have turned out with an actual budget.
