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TEN MORE GAMES THAT WILL MAKE YOU THINK ABOUT LIFE
Life, eh? It's all a bit mad really, isn't it? Here we are, the products of millions of years of chance chemical and biological reactions, wandering around on a dying rock as it spins through the vast, indifferent universe with nought but the knowledge of our own inevitable oblivion for company.
A sobering thought. And sobering thoughts will sure as sugar turn you to drink. But you don't want to do that - apparently it can be quite good for you. So spare your liver and sacrifice your eyesight and wrist tendons instead by digging in to our latest top ten games that make you think about life.
1ONE CHANCE
Here's something to think about - every decision we ever make, no matter how seemingly inconsequential it may be at the time, has the potential to fundamentally change our lives forever. A simple 'Should I go down the boozer?' on an idle Tuesday evening could set off a chain of events that leads to you meeting your partner, getting married, having kids, the whole shebang. Or you could end up with liver disease.
Of course, the thing about decisions is you normally only get one chance to make them and, once they're made, you can't go back. This frankly rather depressing little segue brings us toOne Chance.
You are the super-smart scientist whose discovery appears to have conquered one of the most devastating diseases known to humankind. Unfortunately - oh hubris, thy name is scientist guy! - your discovery has also gone ape and will kill every living cell on Earth within the week. What you might call a mixed day at the office. Over the next few days, the decisions you make will determine the fate of, well, everything, everywhere. A good time, perhaps, to invest in a bigger executive stress ball.
Even with the cartoony retro graphics, developerAwkwardSilenceGames has delivered a game that, like a good thriller, builds a creeping sense of unease into its early stages that gradually accelerates to blind panic as the clock ticks down to doomsday. Will you find a cure? Will you top yourself? Will you retire to the boozer and hope for the best from the bottom of a bottle? The clever thing is, you really will only get One Chance to find out. Play One Chance here.
2A MOTHER IN FESTERWOOD
Kids, eh? It seems like one minute, they're little pixels wandering around your woodland home, the next they're on their way into the big, wide world, where they must find their own treasure and kill their own trolls. At least, that's how life is like in Festerwood.
As a mother, it's your job to keep your little tyke in the safety of the homestead until they have enough experience to survive the monster-infested woods. Don't expect any gratitude, though. The brat will continually try to give you the slip and escape into the wild. After a while, like many a parent, you may well be tempted to say sod it and let the know-it-alls find out the hard way what the world's really like. Let them just see!
Oh, they'll be back when they want feeding. Well, they better bring some treasure. We aren't made of money, you know. And will there be a word of thanks? And look at the state of your room? This isn't a hotel. And another thing... Ahem. Play A Mother in Festerwood here.
3AMERICAN DREAM
Crude, materialistic, morally bankrupt, downright filthy...you've got to love the wonderful world of the free market. And it's captured in all it's terrible, rapacious glory in American Dream, a frankly bizarre celebration of consumerism and greed that pitches itself somewhere in between American Psycho andFight Club.
The aim of the game is to make a million buckaroos by trading the "stock" of a eclectic collection of long-forgotten celebs (Max Headroom, Rick Astley...er...Madonna) and Blondie (everyone loves Blondie, right?). Yes, really.
Buy low, sell high and kit out your pad with all the latest furniture and gadgets to hide the emptiness inside. Once you have, of course, it'll all be out of fashion and you must start all over again. Oh and then there's the parties...which you can find out about yourself. Perhaps best not to play this one with your gran. Play American Dream here.
4AS I LAY DYING
Of course, a big part of life is sharing it with another person. Unless you subscribe to the view that hell is other people, I suppose. But anyway, let's say you don't. You like at least one person enough to share your life with them. Right.
As I Lay Dying makes you think about how far you'd go to get that person back home - even if they're dead. The dialogue might sound like it's been recorded in a phone box, but this retro-style platform adventure offers plenty of little puzzles and pesky enemies to test your initiative and throwing arm. Leave no man behind. Play As I Lay Dying here.
5PRIOR
Another thing about life is that you can sometimes wake up in a strange place without a clue about what's going on. This isn't always a bad thing; there was that time in San Francisco when I came to and there was this girl...erm...I digress. In the case ofPrior, however, waking up in a strange place without a clue about what's going on is most definitely not a good thing. It's up to you to find out just what the flippin' 'eck is going on and where your family have gone.
Prior is a classic platform that, like 1980s classics likeTreasure Island Dizzy, put the emphasis on you picking up clues and solving little puzzles to crack the maze and save the day. Cool music, too. Play Prior here.
6THE END OF US
Life can, of course, bring very sad moments. People come and go. Friends drift away. Sometimes they crash into planets. Erm, well in this case they do. This strangely touching little game sets you up as a purple comet whizzing through the cosmos, who is joined by a spirited orange comet. You spin and swirl through the vastness of space, chasing stars for no particular reason and slowly fading as you grow older.
All things must pass, though, and you eventually come upon a asteroid belt that knocks the wind out of you. In the end, all that's left is to decide who's going to take the big fall and who's going to carry on alone? Although this game is set to a music track, I'd suggest playing it while listening to Do You Realize??by The Flaming Lips. Pass the hanky. Sniff. You can play The End of Us here.
7PIPEDREAMZ
Meat can change your life, apparently. I honestly couldn't tell you. I also honestly couldn't tell you what you could learn about life from Pipedreamz, but then perhaps it's a bit too intellectual for me. It's a series of weird mini-games in which you have to flip burgers, surf and trough meat without others seeing. I just don't know. I really don't. Maybe you can work it out. Let me know if you crack it. Play Pipedreamz here.
8FLIGHT
The beautifully animated Flight is all about hope. The hope of a little girl to see her mum at Christmas. Aww. Little Sandy has written down her only wish on a paper aeroplane and it's up to you to make sure that the message gets all the way to London, 1,000 miles away.
This highly addictive little physics game is all about picking up and chucking said plane as far as you possibly can. Getting altitude and distance will help you pick up money to buy some pretty nifty extras - I wish my paper planes at school had an afterburner. Ooh and you can personalise your plane too! And what kind of monster wouldn't want to help a little girl at Christmas? Even when it's April? Play Flight here.
9DISTANCE
If you've ever been in a long-distance relationship, Distance is likely to tug at your heart strings. If you're just a soppy old romantic, it'll hit the spot too. If, like me, you're a sneering misanthrope with a piece of flint where your heart should be, you'll still appreciate the storytelling.
Austin Breed, who clearly likes pondering life as he was also the developer behind A Mother in Festerwood, has created a split-screen tale of a couple separated by, well, distance. You follow their separate, daily routines and at night get to pose one of two questions while they chat on the phone. But will their eyes start to wander? What would you do? Find out! Play Distance here.
10SPENT
Spent is more of a personal challenge than a game. Putting you in the extremely sobering position of being one of America's 14 million unemployed. You have no savings and no home. Can you survive the month? Course you can, right? Just find a job! Land of opportunity and all that. So you view the ads and try to land a post. I failed the typing test to become a temp (rather upsetting, I must say) so took the warehouse route.
Of course, all that lifting puts a strain on the body, so do you cough up for health insurance or opt out and just hope you don't get hurt? Then you need somewhere to live. Do you pay a higher rent to be closer to your job or live further out but spent cash on commuting? Then, of course, there's the bills. Do you pay the arrears on your car or go without? Do you pay your student debt? What about the lighting? Heating? Water?
Oh and not forgetting feeding your kids, paying to send them on field trips, shelling out for birthday parties, covering your mother's medical bills...and feeding yourself. It soon becomes a stressful grind that illustrates, even if it's just a little game and you only have to survive one month, some of the truly awful choices that people face every day. It's like an interactive version of Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days on Minimum Wage.
The game was put together by Urban Ministries of Durham in North Carolina, which works to help those needing food, shelter, clothing and support without asking why they need it or who is to blame. Play Spent here.
Here are the Pax 2012 highlights http://asia.gamespot.com/events/pax-east-2012/?highlights_page=0
In the 90’s, it seemed like virtual reality headsets were inevitably the computer display of the future. Despite the limitations of 3D graphics at the time, the idea of being fully immersed in a virtual world, each physical movement being translated 1-for-1, was incredibly powerful. But as time went on, the dream of VR headsets seemed to fizzle. Consumer units were expensive and didn’t deliver the sort of experience we all imagined, and even sci-fi movies that were based in virtual worlds, like The Matrix and Inception, explained them with more direct neurological interfaces.
Until the Oculus Rift Kickstarter caught fire, smashing its $250,000 goal by more than $2,000,000, you would have thought that the whole concept was mostly dead.
All that Kickstarter money was a clear sign that gamers, at least, were still interested in the possibilities of a VR headset. And then a number of hands-on reports raved about the performance of the Rift and the immersive gaming experience it created. So when I found out that Rift would make an appearance at PAX 2012, I was eager to see for myself if their display stood up to the hype.
The best word to describe my first few minutes using the Rift to play Doom 3: BFG is “spooky.” The head tracking is remarkably accurate, and being able to look up and see the ceiling, or turn in my chair to see what was behind me, quickly tricked my brain into thinking I was standing in the virtual room. One of the most startling things from my playtest was when the Oculus rep handed me the controller, and I instinctively looked down expecting to see it in the game world — like I said, spooky.
The immersive quality of the Oculus Rift can’t be denied, and with a good set of headphones the simulation would be even more convincing. But as part of the game controls, I found that the VR headset has some limitations. While the display is fully aware of which way your head is facing, it doesn’t know which way your body is facing. So if you turn your head to the left, for instance, pushing forward on the left control stick would then move you in that direction, even though your body hasn’t turned. As a result, I found myself continually using the right stick to get things lined up again, so that “forward” in the game was also “forward” for my body. That problem is specific to first-person games, however. In a game where the player was in a car, plane, or mech (likeHawken, which recently announced support for the Rift) the headset could simply control your view out of the cockpit, and looking forward would always show what was in front of the vehicle.
The head-body disconnect isn’t a deal breaker for the Oculus Rift, but it does say something about the kind of games it’s best suited for. In a twitch reflex FPS, making those right stick adjustments would be a constant hassle. But in a slower paced first-person game, likeMinecraft or Skyrim, the ability to look around the world in any direction would be entirely worth an occasional realignment. Considering how convincing Doom 3’s projectiles looked when flying at me during the demo, I might even be willing to use it with something like Left4Dead, simply to see what a horde of charging zombies looks like with the Rift’s added sense of depth.
I tried to stand up during the demo, but sat down again almost immediately; the headset is so convincing that I found myself leaning forward to start walking, even though I consciously knew I was standing still. It’s possible that over time I would have adjusted for the difference, and other playtesters have been able to remain standing throughout the demo, but developer Palmer Luckey said he believes it’s an issue that can be addressed. Just as with the facing adjustments, the problem is that the Rift currently doesn’t track your body. It knows when you’re looking down, but it doesn’t know when you’re leaning forward or shifting your stance. If that sort of body awareness can be added later, Luckey believes that using the Rift while standing up won’t cause the sense of unbalance that I felt. Body tracking would also open up some new gameplay possibilities, like leaning to peek around a corner.
The Oculus reps couldn’t say much about the future of the Rift that we don’t already know. Pricing and availability of the final product are still to-be-determined, and the company is keeping quiet about which games, aside from Doom 3: BFG Edition and Hawken, will support the display. But it was encouraging to hear that they’re working on an API that will make the Rift easy to incorporate into existing games.
Ultimately I’m very impressed with what Oculus has developed, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it improves. I don’t expect to be putting on a headset for every game I play one day, but for certain experiences the Rift will be an incredible addition.
The Last of Us - Extended Demo
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Check out the behind-closed-doors demo that blew our minds at E3, featuring 15 minutes of gameplay.
New Borderlands 2 Trailer Offers a Tour of Pandora
By now you’ve no doubt discovered how overpowered the two-way rail gun is in the 16-bit version of Borderlands and, as a consequence, found that the game doesn’t seem to ever end. If you are tired of that marketing game, but still in the mood for more Borderlands goodness, Gearbox has, once again, got you covered.
The latest trailer for Borderlands 2 features Sir Hammerlock narrating some of the finer points of the world and characters found in the game. The various regions of Pandora are shown, which all seem quite different and imaginative. The player characters and their play styles are demonstrated, with a few new powers displayed as well. There is also some talk about the huge variety of guns in the game, but that’s a topic that has already been thoroughly covered in earlier trailers.
Check it out below, and know that it probably won’t be the last we’ll hear from Gearbox before the Borderlands 2 release, which is only two weeks away on September 18.
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