Monday, April 30, 2012

Hutch Games Ltd: Smash Cops

Smash Cops by Hutch is a game in which you play RoboCop if RoboCop was a police car instead of a police robot. In the world I live in, the word arrest means to accost a lawbreaker with the minimum necessary force to allow the arresting officer to charge the individual with whatever crime they have committed. In the world of Smash Cops, the word arrest means to render the lawbreaker’s vehicle (and presumably the human contents of said vehicle) to a charred mess. Perhaps in this world, people are cars, and this is just the logical violent extension of the Pixar film Cars’ anthropomorphic four-wheeled characters.

The problems with this otherwise enthusiastic game begin with the fact that you cannot listen to a podcast while playing. The game’s audio overrides any external audio upon startup, even when you have silenced all in-game audio. This seems like a move of arrogance for two reasons: firstly, any application which overrides the primary functionality on what is essentially a glorified MP3 player for nonessential reasons demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the platform; and secondly, the game is not nearly rich enough to warrant a demand of one’s full attention regardless. This kind of override is annoying (and thankfully, is going out of fashion in iOS games), but is almost forgivable on a complex story-driven game, or one which makes use of its sound design in a fundamental way, but in this case, the 70s cop show knockoff theme tunes are--while amusing--not nearly amusing enough to warrant such a hobbling of the user’s device.

Further problems include repetitive level design, not helped by the relatively few ways you can effectively confront situations; properly annoying in-app purchases; and a disappointingly shallow collectible system (more on that later).This is another conceptually interesting game marred by a lack of follow through. That being said, I do believe this could have been something special, and now that my pessimism is out of the way, I can gush over how much fun the concept is, and over the few things it does well. Phew!

The controls are properly innovative. To best understand, a metaphor: imagine your fingers, nay, your whole body has turned into water. There is a droplet of oil in front of you. By putting your finger to one side of the droplet, it goes speeding off in the other direction, because of course, oil and water do not mix. This is how you drive your car in Smash Cops. Make sense? Also, this is how every iOS game should handle driving cars in the future. Please, heed my words, developers.

Most missions consist of trying to “arrest” a number of vehicles participating in gang activity, joyriding, or street racing. Remember of course, that in this game, an arrest is a euphemism for a vehicle which has been rendered a smoking carcass. The easiest way I’ve found to make an arrest is to pass an offending vehicle, pull a hairpin turn, and tap the screen for a “ram” boost ability, propelling your police vehicle headfirst into the front bumper of the criminal. This will execute a “smash” and hopefully an “arrest”. Other missions involve ones where you’re trying to race to a specific destination before pursuing vehicles destroy you, which are generally fairly simple, because your opponents tend to take themselves out in the process of trying bash into you.

My favourite mission has the description “Destroy as many illegally parked cars as possible” and suitably ended in carnage as I slid around a parking lot and the surrounding streets completely destroying vehicles parked in comically poor places, including one parked perpendicular to traffic in the middle of a road.

Sometimes other cops enter the fray, ostensibly in your support, but they mostly get in the way, and you are harshly penalized for destroying them, despite how bloody annoying they are. The mirthful violence and cops vs gangsters theme of this game reminded me pleasantly of Crackdown, and makes me wish that game had had driving missions like this one.

Smash Cops isn’t a bad game, it’s not a particularly good one either. There are much more interesting games available for the asking price, and to be perfectly honest, I feel a bit insulted by the in-app purchases, which consist of Super Cop powerups as well as early unlocks of cars. I really don’t feel those purchasing options were necessary in this game, though I suppose talking about in-app purchases in your design docs makes investors pretty happy, so I don’t really blame them. The controls are really pretty neat though, and this carmageddon has a charmingly RoboCop sense of humour. Your call on this one, Officer.

My rating:
I could...
A. Eat a bunch of donuts right now.
B. Take it.
C. Leave it.


PS. (on the semantics of collectables)
When I collect donuts in the world, don’t tell me I’m collecting pieces of donuts, when I am clearly collecting whole donuts. Furthermore, if I work hard each level to assemble a full donut out of three donut pieces, the least a game can do is acknowledge that with some sort of reward.

Now that I think about it, maybe the game is implying with the donut synecdoche that my cop is eating two thirds of each donut, leaving only a part, and requiring two more donuts to assemble those parts into a whole. Which is probably an off-hand insult to cops, because any reasonable person would just eat the two whole donuts and save the third to present back at the station, or to whoever it is that is so interested in this one-donut-per-level.

Let’s go easy on the persons in uniform, Hutch Games Ltd.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Amanita Design: Botanicula


I know I call most games cute. That must be annoying. But don't worry, this point-and-click puzzlin' story book from the Czech gaming studio Amanita Design isn't cute—IT'S ADORABLE. AhhhhhhHHHHHH it's just so darned loveable! Everything is little and makes funny little "yeehooooo!" noises (like Baby Mario but better) and your character isn't just ONE character. Oh no. You play as FIVE BEST FRIENDS! Okay, so it doesn't come right out and say they're best friends, but you know what's up. I mean, they're always together: a mushroom, a Mr. Lantern guy, a little flying feather man, a stick and a tall, hatted nut thing. Dawwww.

Anyway, premise: you run around on trees and underground and meet other creatures, like worms and singing bugs and chestnuts and bacteria or something, and they all make cute noises, too. And you're trying to save everyone's home from the big, black spider thing that is sucking the life out of the trees and plants and cute little creatures (think Ferngully, but without Tim Curry). On the way, you collect creature cards (like Pokémon! Except you don't fight them. This is a game about cooperation, guys), mementos of all the little beasties you meet on the way. Like the flea circus! And the bitty micro tree-squirrel! And the scary flying beetle guy!


So your little super-team of best friends runs around and solves puzzles tries to save everyone from the meanie spider. Everyone keeps telling them stories about how the spider ripped their head off or killed their friend or pulled a whole tree RIGHT OUT OF THE GROUND. Super tragic stuff. But the friends know their mission! And apparently so does everyone else. At one point, they all sit down and watch a little puppet-show-creature give them a puppet-performance of how they're going to pull the legs off the spider and murder it with a giant knife and eat it for dinner, or something, and everybody cheers and makes various other happy noises. And it's all very cute. I mean adorable. Very adorable.

Something I learned: you have to have some pretty agile cursor skillz at some points in this game. I played it through on my laptop, but my fingers just weren't fast enough. I had to connect a mouse. I should have probably known that from the start. But look—unlike Theodore, I wasn't given video games instead of a soother. I'm STILL LEARNING GUYS, so shhhh. But hey, if you're still learning, too, just remember to connect a mouse!

Back to how adorable the game is: there are lots of puffy floaty things to play with, and lots of musical things to click on. The whole landscape is super whimsical and beautifully designed and sort of vascular and explicitly alive. I don't really know how else to describe it. It reminded me of studying cell structures in biology class:

But it's also kind of cosmic and spacey. And usually pretty sensitive to the cursor: you can brush through the glowy wormy grassy stuff, and pop bubbles, and blow fuzz around. And that's before you start clicking on stuff! So much stuff to click on. If you like clicking on stuff you will like this game.

My rating:
I could...
A. Ummm
B. Take it.
C. Leave it.

PS:
The soundtrack is really great! You can listen to/buy it here. And it comes on vinyl, you know, if you're hip like that. Neat!

And remember: when all your little friends die (in the game) don't panic. It will be O.K. The power of friendship will prevail! Or something! I mean, as long as you actually keep playing.

Anna Anthropy: Dys•4•ia


A very sincere little game we have here from Anna Anthropy (a.k.a. Auntie Pixelante). It's like an interactive storybook! What's the story, you ask? Well, it's about hormone therapy. It's an autobiographical interactive video-story about hormone therapy. And it's super cute and colourful and engaging.

Although there's a spoiler right at the very beginning (something along the lines of "this is an autobiographical story about my experience with hormone replacement therapy), you don't really know what you're in for. It's no puzzle-solving, code-breaking, shoot-em-up thriller—it's really very intuitive and easy to play. It's the ideas that are challenging.

Maybe play the game through once before reading the next stuff. (It doesn't take very long, I swear!):


Anna Anthropy is a transgendered activist game designer, and this is a game about the 6 months she spent on estrogen-replacement therapy. She started designing the game mid-therapy, and didn't know what direction her game—or her life—was going to take. Luckily, it's a happy ending!

But the first time I played the game, I honestly didn't have a clue who Anna Anthropy was. I didn't know she was transgendered. It made me sad to think people feel the need to go through hormone-replacement therapy in order to look like one of the two polar sexes society has deemed acceptable.

Learning that Auntie Pixelantie is trans changed my reaction to the game, but it still had my brain churning. Yes, it does make sense that if you are a woman you would want to look like a woman. But that just got me thinking: why do we all (think we) know what it means to "look like a woman?" I mean, what does that mean? That you don't have hair on your face? That you have big tits and a small waist? That you have narrow shoulders and wide hips? That your hair and your fingernails are long? I want to be careful here: I'm not saying that it's wrong to have any of these traits. I'm just saying that it's not concretely right! There are TONS of women who don't look like any of that, and that's not wrong either.

So even though it was a happy ending for Auntie P., it was difficult going to get there. The game shows that it's pretty darned taboo to be obviously in between the gender poles (and let's face it, to be on one of those poles is like hitting a bull’s-eye). And that made me rather sad and troubled. I mean, it's one thing to want to look a certain way for personal reasons, and another thing to feel socially stigmatized until you look that certain way.

Cool game. The graphics are really cute. The little people are funny are lovely and wonky. The sounds are great! Like womp and zoop and tick and waaaa. And it makes you think! Or it makes me think. And think and think and think and think and think and think and...

I could..
A. Have played that game about jumping elephants, but instead I learned something.
B. Take it.
C. Leave it.



Sunday, April 22, 2012

The Good Sister

Firstly, I have no interest in rating this game. I don’t think it’s necessary.



In The Good Sister, you read a tragic tale about a family birthed from abuse.



The player’s role is to provide the Poe-ish incessant tapping which serves as the soundtrack.



For turning guitar hero’s rhythm timeline into a cringe-making horror, this game is good.


The author of this The Good Sister is Stephen Lavelle and it can be found here.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Boats vs Space Boats vs Pirates

I’ve always had an embarrassing thing for games about boats. It has a connection to the books I read when I was a kid. I read a number of the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, while sitting by the ocean at my grandparents’ house. That’s a good experience. My stepfather also read the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian and recanted all the stories of the horror of grapeshot and mealworms in the biscuits. I’m not sure which I find more frightening.



I remember playing a lot of Sid Meier’s Pirates as a kid, and a whole lot of KOEI's Uncharted Waters series (the two first games--that is, being the only ones translated into english). I even fell into the trap of trying to play some free-to-play Korean online game about being a naval person (it wasn’t very good). Furthermore, the one and only week I played World of Warcraft was spent almost entirely in the water as I skirted the continents and saw just how far I could get with my character through the world using the night elf powers of invisibility (the answer is pretty far). But even that fun wore thin pretty quickly after the novelty wore off of being the only trial-levelled night elf in the human starting zone on the other side of the world from my own.

For some reason the myriad space exploration, trading, and combat games based on Elite fail to sustain my interest, despite having virtually identical mechanics to the Uncharted Waters games of my adoration. I will still play them, but feel that guilty grime afterward of time wasted pretending to be in a spaceship, instead of the satisfied thrill I have upon buying a whole lot of silk in Istanbul and then sailing down the Nile because I can, before starving to death in Ethiopia, reloading my save, trying to sail around Greenland and to Newfoundland, before starving to death again, and then turning it off, all warm and fuzzy and tired, and responsible for a good number of crew deaths. Space sims commonly deprive the player of crew management, maybe this is their downfall? Or maybe it is the lack of that feeling of being at mercy of the winds, rounding the cape of africa?



Or more likely, it’s for the same reason that playing the original version of the board game Risk, set on our very own earth, is infinitely more compelling than playing one of the versions set in space, or on Middle-Earth; and the same reason that Civilization continues to include an ever popular map to play on, which is an approximation of, again, our own earth.

I haven’t a connection to the journey to Alpha Centauri, because we haven’t gone there yet. It’s a part of the narrative of human culture as a hypothetical, not as a collective memory, as for instance, sailing across an ocean is. When I watch my little boat sailing across a screen, I remember the salty air, and the wind in my ears. I taste stale hardtack. I smell sweat of a hundred crewmates.

...I remember why I’d rather play a game made from this experience, and why I haven’t signed up for the navy.



Every year that goes by I legitimately mourn that there aren’t more games about boats released. Why weren’t the later games in KOEI’s Uncharted Waters series of naval rpgs ever released? Why does every re-release of Sid Meier’s Pirates have to be exactly the same game? Why aren’t more developers trying to push the naval genre forward? The answer must be that not enough people care. But I do. And I must find relief that the ones that do exist, no matter how imperfect, at least do scratch that junkie’s itch.

Anyway, go play Sid Meier’s Pirates (just released for iPhone at 3.99) and cry with me. It’s not fantastic; but it’s kind of the best we’ve got.

My rating
I could:
A. Crush this game with the back of a spoon and snort it.
B. Take it.
C. Leave it.


PS. (in Uncharted Waters news)

In research for this entry, I’ve come to be aware that they DID finally localize Uncharted Waters Online for English players. This is a dangerous realization. Tortuga, here I come!

Playdead: Limbo


Limbo is scary. I'm not talking the west-Indian dance in which the dancer bends backwards in order to pass under a wooden pole, which is progressively lowered, although that can be scary, too. Do you watch Futurama? You know Hermes Conrad? He used to be a professional limboer, but quit after a young boy died trying to limbo like Hermes. Poor kid!

Speaking of dead children, let me get back to my original topic: Limbo, realm of unbaptized souls. I hear you asking, "Someone made a game about dead, unbaptized children?" Yeah. Yep. Someone did. It was the Danes. Mmmhm.

But gee, I sure am glad I didn't stuck there forever, like poor Limbo Boy. Poor Limbo Boy! He's too damned cute! But he just keeps getting impaled by spiders and poison-darted by meany other limbo boys and squashed and drowned and crushed and sawed in half and exploded and spiked and brainwormed (just think about what a brainworm entails for a moment) and otherwise violently exterminated. All exterminations come with all the yucky sound effects of breaking bones, and squoochy bloody messes, free of charge! 
look out for the brainworm...

That said, this game is FUCKING RAD.

Maybe, if you're squirmy like me, you should play it with a friend because I certainly had to turn it off a couple times, around 2AM, on account of all the creepy, gorey, violent surprises. Sometimes it is dark and foggy and you can't really see, so you run around because if you walk it gets boring, and even though the eery silence tells you something AWFUL is about to happen, you just keep running until right into an electrified post and sizzle, or someone throws a spear at you, or you fall into a tiny pool of water and drown (I guess Limbo boy died before he learned how to swim). On the plus side, you can die as much as you want/have to. You just keep coming back. Maybe this is just another cruel form of torture imposed upon the poor, child inhabitants of Limbo. But it's also helpful, because I die a lot in every game I play, and I appreciate when the game doesn't tell me I suck. I already know that, guys. I don't need it written in some wittily sarcastic phrase below a big, menacing skull accompanied by some doomy-dooms day music, okay? Okay. So, thank you Playdead.


But damn. This game is pretty sick. Sick like cool and sick like gross. And graphics get an A+. And gameplay is glitch-free and challenging. And the puzzles are always interesting enough to make you want to solve them without a walkthrough. And Limbo boy is super cute. I just liked it bunches and bunches.

My rating
I could:
A. What?
B. Take it.
C. Leave it.

Nekogames: Parameter



Parameter by Nekogames is essentially an interactive design document. It could be for an RPG, or for a fighting game, or for some kind of simulation. Whatever the missing skin, it matters not. After this game, I want to play all the design documents.
I am presented with an off-kilter spreadsheet with wonky swaths of yellow in the drunken black and grey grid. I can click on boxes. Only a few at first. Only the few which aren’t marked with the grey padlock. The boxes fill up like the status bar in a loading window. Percentages tick up. Other numbers fly out! Pink ones! Green ones! With a swipe of the cursor they are collected, even though I haven’t figured out what I’m collecting them for. How is this sea of numbers and garish yellow over abyssal black so compelling?

The top of the screen is a maze of different statistics, all described by abbreviations not always clear. An ACT. meter governs how many times you can click in a row before the message “Run>Attempted:Lack of ACT.” is displayed. A stat I can put points into called RCV. puzzled me for about twenty minutes of play until I figured out it corresponded to life recovery rate. I diagnose this not as an intentional attempt at obscurity, but rather as the inevitable result of a Japanese flash game translated without a translation budget.


I fight yellow enemies by clicking frenetically until “You win!” is displayed across the top and the enemy box is converted into a lifeless grey, spewing out its numberly innards. There is no blood, there is no death rattle, there is no acknowledgement at all of what the entity I have defeated is, but it is gone. With my new money and EXP. I make my parameters grow stronger. The help menu lets me know that “Effects of RCV. is LIFE, ACT,ATK, DEF speed of recovery will be faster.” Thank you Nekogames. Mysterious telephone boxes explained only by a question mark are taunting me with additional unexplained mechanics. Maybe if I find the secrets of the telephones I will grow stronger... (the answer is yes. Telephones are good)

The funny thing about this playable design document is that it’s totally broken. There are serious balance issues no matter how you go about optimizing your character, resulting in a long and tedious grind (click) towards the end so as to be powerful enough to beat the final boss (represented solely as the fraction “752/752”). This is followed by a series of “greater challenges”--which are really just more excuses to make a clickclickclickclickclick noise with your mouse--ending with the kind of gleeful goodbye message of a company which is incredibly proud to have offered an experience for a player to have enjoyed. I like their attitude. That made it fun. The simplicity made it fun. And that there is no skin to this spreadsheet allowed me to assign details entirely according to my imagination. I saw it as a hacking simulator, because my imagination is dull--but it could have easily been seen as a sports management simulator, a knight simulator, even a reductionist recreation of a Counter-Strike match.

I think Parameter is more than just a broken spreadsheet rpg; it is raw enthusiasm minus the flavour text. It can be found here, and is worth experiencing--if not to the bitter end--just to get to know the numbers behind a video game a little bit better.

My rating:

I could...
A. Can not combat with the enemy to recover LIFE and becomes zero
B. Take it.
C. Leave it.



PS. (why didn’t I write about the sound in this game?)

They forgot to put sound in this game. I would really like to know what kind of music Nekogames would assign to this game. That being said, it’s probably so versatile as a reductionist piece of design because there are no textures. A score might imply an atmosphere, and an atmosphere would destroy its whole aesthetic as skeleton. I listened to the Blade Runner soundtrack when I was playing. I would imagine I would have had a very different experience listening to renaissance lute music while playing. Perhaps that’s worth another try.

There, now I’ve written about the sound in this game. Mission complete.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Pedro Pavia: Anestesia



This morning, I woke up to find myself in a cold sweat, realizing I’d been thoroughly outdone by Kay and her Vidiot Game review. While she had managed to describe a nonsense-sober-drug- trip-in-a-game for her first post on this site, the best I’d managed was to blather on about ASCII and shmups, two moderately obscure acronyms. If it was acronymsdaily.com we were working on, perhaps that would have been appropriate, but as it is, we’re trying to run a dueling video game blog, and as such, I had fallen behind. No matter! What follows is a cure to all of my anxieties:

Anestesia by Pedro Paiva is a bit like someone who’d only ever played the original Zelda for the NES decided to ruminate on the impact of alcohol on the working class. The result is a carnival of transactions (charmingly illustrated by all manner of pictorial equations) involving the exchanges of life for money, money for booze, booze for “happiness”, booze for broken hearts, broken hearts for booze, and so on and so forth.





ANESTHETIZED YOU DON’T FEEL.

ANESTHETIZED YOU ACCEPT.

I think this work is a fantastic example of a personal reflection in the medium, as well as a political statement. It is almost an animated film in its simplicity of interactions, except that as a metaphor for the all-consumingness of alcohol abuse, I think it’s entirely appropriate to make the progression inescapable. The frenetic pace with which the game responds to the small inputs it demands of the player amplifies the sense of being lost down a path. Furthermore, like a magician, the game presents flickering lights and abstract movements, redirecting the player’s eye from the actions they are committing to. All this is effective dispute the actual narrative being so simple it can be completely recognized on the first playthrough.

The sound design deserves a special note for being that particular combination of off-kilter and funky that I am so dearly in love with. This music is the James Chance of chiptune. (more on potential applications below.

If not obvious from the few paragraphs above, I love this game, and recommend it highly. Go down this two minute rabbithole for a charming bit of working class Anestesia.



My rating:

I could...
A. You don’t have money enough.
B. Take it.
C. Leave it.


ps. on blending musics

One of my favourite pasttimes is listening to different pieces of music at the same time and seeing if they play nice together. Today the combination was of the Fez soundtrack’s gorgeous adventurescapes (found here) and of course the whinging, exhausted pleasuredome of Anestesia.



Thursday, April 19, 2012

Revelo: Battle For ASCIION



Battle for ASCIION is a side scrolling shoot-em-up displayed all in ascii art. As a result, any screenshots make it seem like a minimalist roguelike. Now that I think about it, a minimalist roguelike sounds delicious (more below). More delicious than Battle for ASCIION, I’m afraid.

The main problem with Battle for ASCIION is that it’s not very good. The weapons are poorly balanced, the enemies are dull, the controls are fiddly, and my real joy at the visual stylings was squashed as soon as I realized how confusing it made actually playing the damned thing. The production style is what drew me to the game, and I find myself coming back to it just to watch it do its dance, despite the crummy playing. If this had been a video-mockup, it would have been amazing, but the gameplay design just isn’t there.

Having to move one character’s distance at a time makes the game unable to achieve anything like the sort of precise grace that makes a shmup good. If a foodstuff has an awkward texture, it’s difficult to appreciate the taste. The same goes for a shmup.

I like shmups a lot, but I’m not good at them. To me, the mark of a good shmup is that I can see where I could improve, and build skill if I were to invest it. That I don’t end up choosing to invest that time is my choice of priorities, and not the game’s fault. If I play a shmup and don’t fantasize about being really skilled and graceful in it, then it’s probably a waste of time.

Despite my gripes, it does win a few points for having reversed the toggle for sound. If you want to hear sounds you click on “NO” and if you want them off you click “YES”. For this detail I offer developer Revelo Videogames a mighty applause. Also of praise is the ability to download the soundtrack offered to all players, and the TEXTSHOTTM feature which allows you take a screenshot of the game outputted as fully copyable ascii image. For instance, following is a screenshot I took of the most frequently encountered scenario in the game:


SCORE 000000007700    |    |    LOCAL TOP|000000010000           |  |LIVES|x00
           |  |______/ \__/ \______|  |  |  |____________________|  |  |  |____
           |__________________________|  |__________________________|  |_______
           ·              |  |       |    |       |  |  |  |       |    |      
    ·                     |  |______/ \__/ \______|  |  |  |______/ \__/ \_____
 ·                        |__________________________|  |______________________
·                                        |  /_\     /_\  |  /_\  |  |           
                                        |  \_/____/\\/_/ \_\_/__|  |           
      _____    ____    __    _  _______\|__________________________|_____      
     / |  \\  /  /\\  |  \  /| |  |  \ /  /  / \\ |  |  || |  |    |  | \\     
    |  | __  |  |__|| |  |\/|| |  |___   |  |   |||  |  || |  |___ |  |_//     
    |  | | | |  |  || |  |  || |  |/     |  |   |||  |  || |  |    |  | \\     
     \_|_|_| |__|  || |__|  || |__|___    \__\_//  \__\//  |__|___ |__|  \\    
                                                                             ·
                  - Y O U R   M I S S I O N   F A I L E D -                    
                                   ·                                           
                                         ·                                     
                                                                          /  ·
                                                     ·                  =o)    
·                                                                               
            --------------------------    --------------------------    -------
           |   ______   __   ______   |  |   ______   __   ______   |  |   ____
·          |  |      \ /  \ /      |  |  |  |      \ /  \ /      |  |  |  |    
[X] Select Weapon type:    SHOT x1 |  | LASERx1     |WIDE|x1     |  | STAGE 01



Battle for ASCIION is a flash game and can be found here. I do recommend playing it, if at least to encourage one’s fantasies about more interesting combinations of roguelike and spaceship.



My rating:

I could...

A. does not compute.

B. Take it.
C. Leave it.


PS. (more on the minimalist roguelike)

Picture a lone wanderer (the ‘@’) wandering through a desert (or maybe a void, or maybe a gymnasium). There are a few rocks here and there (represented by ‘,’), and some plants (represented by ‘r’). There is a hunger meter at the top (represented a growing string of ‘!!!!!’) and when it fills the top of the screen, you die. There are other letters distributed about the landscape and they either do, or do not mean something. This game is perfectly suited to iOS. A mockup screenshot (I promise I’m not infringing on your TEXTSHOTTM copyright, Revelo).


__________________________________________________

H!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!               
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                   r                                                     
                                                                         
                                                                         
             ,                                                           
                                               r, r                      
                                                                         
                                       W                                 
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                             r           
                                                                         
                                                                         
          @                                                              
                                      ,                                  
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                  ,                      
                   ,                                                     
                                                                         
                    r                                                    
___________________________________________________________________                                                                          
                                                                      
   
                                        

Vidiot Game


So I bought this cheap, Russian indie game last night. I read online that it will give you brain damage. Naturally, I couldn't resist. It was wild! I sat down for a good pre-bedtime virtual romp, and this game delivered. The pacing was absolutely perfect for my late-night attention span (and by late-night, I mean 11 o'clock. Give me a break. It's been a stressful week). I died like 8 times in the first 5 minutes! At first, I was disappointed that I was so bad at this game. But then I decided that such epic failure was pretty amusing. And later decided that if this game has any point at all, it's probably to die a lot. And then I was really happy, because that meant I was a goddamn master at this game, and could probably kick everybody's ass.

I really liked being named Dog Bench and Alonzo Spud (or whatever). It made me think deeply about what my favourite food is (trash food), and how many apples are present in 4 bunches of bananas. I became a mushroom-bee and fucking destroyed a mean, rabid dog after it bit me to pieces several (dozen) times. Sasquatch gave me a real hard time, though. He's a toughy. He doesn't wanna be friends, he beats you up if you try to catch him, and if you kill him, you know, in self defense, the PIPA people (I can only assume it's them) lock you up. Harsh! But don't worry, because all of these things just make you die, and that means you're doing well like me.

My rating:
I could...
A. does not compute
B. Take it.
C. Leave it.