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I tried this thread in games and those nerds didn't give a hoot but I bet you cool cats know what's hip So a while back, indie game creator Anna Antrhopy wrote a book called Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. I love this book! It's about the increased accessibility of game-making tools, and the resulting wave of tiny little expressive games made by individuals. Since they oftentimes don't stand a chance on Steam Greenlight, I think we should have a thread dedicated to celebrating and discussing these games! God knows there's so many more of them worth playing than I can track down on my own. "Idiosyncratic" is probably the first word I'd choose to describe games like these. There's little to unify them - sometimes they're challenging pixel platformers, sometimes they're first-person games with nothing to do but explore. Sometimes they're mostly narrative, sometimes they're based on tight and renewable gameplay. Sometimes they're polished, but more often, they're messy - and in the best of times, that mess is part of the charm. Here are a whole bunch of games you can play for free, you are sure to like at least one of these so don't be a dork! Triad Triad is a very small game, consisting of just one puzzle. It was made by Anna Anthropy, who I mentioned above, and in my opinion it perfectly encapsulates her philosophy: this game is expressive. It's about three people in a polyamorous relationship struggling to find a comfortable way to share a single bed. Cleverly delivers a cute point about bodies and relationships through the use of game mechanics. Corrypt (Also available on iOS!) Michael Brough has earned a bit of a reputation for being some kind of mastermind, a reputation he's largely earned for his meticulous iOS roguelike 868-HACK. Corrypt is somewhat less assuming but no less ingenious - what starts as a very clever sokoban-style puzzle game, with distinctive visuals and procedural music, gives way to the best twist in a puzzle game since Portal. I won't spoil it. Absolutely worth a look even if you usually hate block sliding. The Terrible Whiteness Of Appalachian Nights Steven Lavelle, AKA Increpare, makes a lot of weird little sketches. He specializes in puzzles which seem impossible, but I've already linked to two puzzle games so this one's one of his mostly-narrative games. Featuring a seriously creepy atmosphere, this game lets you experience a modern housewife's mental breakdown! Ramble Planet This game's a recent discovery of mine, and a good example of the kind of gem you can find by digging around - fuckin' no one is playing this thing. It seems to be by a guy who calls himself Willy Elektrix. It's kind of a big scavenger hunt. It might take some serious dedication to actually finish, but it's super colorful, is really pleasing to look at, and has groovy music and witty + surreal writing. You can play it on your OUYA if you want to dust that thing off!? Experiment 12 Spearheaded by Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV and Super Hexagon fame, Experiment 12 is an "exquisite corpse" - essentially 12 different game segments by 12 different game makers, each featuring their own gameplay, graphics, and sound, unified by a fraying thread of a plot and nightmare logic. More than the sum of its parts. Mibibli's Quest This is a pretty tough action platformer with a neat punky twist on the Megaman "Nintendo hard" style. Sweet music! Crazy mechanical mixups! Pay what you want! Ilamentia Atmospheric first-person-puzzler set in some kind of celestial plane. Are you some kind of angel or some kind of demon? Very mysterious! Lots of different kinds of puzzles! hosed-up mouse controls! Not free, but there's a generous free demo. Most of these people have more games you should check out! Let's talk about that, let's talk about these, let's talk about other game creators, let's talk about game jams and gamejolt and itch.io and Twine and Puzzlescript how cool all this stuff is.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 04:11 |
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# ? May 8, 2024 03:54 |
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Anna Anthropy's games are poo poo and she should have her arms removed so she can no longer type. I don't know about the rest of those games but they sound decent to bad.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 04:18 |
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Zoq-Fot-Pik posted:Anna Anthropy's games are poo poo and she should have her arms removed so she can no longer type. I don't know about the rest of those games but they sound decent to bad. i said DONT be a dork
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 04:19 |
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 04:19 |
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there are way too many mixed up arrows and text boxes for me to read this, but Guacamelee was good.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 04:21 |
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Zoq-Fot-Pik posted:Anna Anthropy's games are poo poo and she should have her arms removed so she can no longer type. I don't know about the rest of those games but they sound decent to bad. at least you used the correct pronouns, that's all that really matters the best free indie game is crime zone and i will have no dissent in this: it's cool to be every cop.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 04:23 |
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Space Hamlet posted:i said DONT be a dork I'm sure one of those (besides the first one) is at least fun to play, I don't know how that makes me a dork.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 04:23 |
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i like increpare's games, especially his only commercial game, english country tune.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 04:29 |
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But Rocks Hurt Head posted:at least you used the correct pronouns, that's all that really matters i will play this now and provide a trip report, the undorky thing to do
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 06:36 |
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Journey is kind of hipsterish but I kinda enjoyed it while hosed up one night
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 06:43 |
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Space Hamlet posted:i will play this now and provide a trip report, the undorky thing to do I already did, and here's my trip report: The puddle of piss is the game. Uninstalled.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 06:46 |
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Widestancer posted:Journey is kind of hipsterish but I kinda enjoyed it while hosed up one night not indie enough for me, nerd! Crime zone was pretty cool for a game which was clearly made in the space of a few hours! The repetition in the writing and the totally rushed impressionistic art style both at first seem like they're just jokes but they actually come together to create a pretty convincing dreamy hazy atmosphere. This game is a lot like when you try to describe a dream you had to a friend and you realize that the story is a lot dumber and less coherent than you thought when you first woke up. My favorite mechanic is that there's never any way to turn around, so you'll keep walking around in circles until you hit the brick wall.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 06:49 |
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Here's a cool "artsy indie game" (IF, really). http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Aisle.z5
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 06:58 |
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Zoq-Fot-Pik posted:Here's a cool "artsy indie game" (IF, really). http://iplayif.com/?story=http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Aisle.z5 This is kinda interesting I guess! Neat to completely explore one moment like that, but even as a guy who's pretty interested in IF and fiction in general I don't think this game really earns its contemplative tone. Not for me, anyhow. Did you find it thought provoking, as it seems to regard itself, or just kinda cute?
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 08:41 |
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Zoq-Fot-Pik posted:Anna Anthropy's games are poo poo and she should have her arms removed so she can no longer type. I don't know about the rest of those games but they sound decent to bad.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 08:51 |
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dork
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 08:51 |
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Space Hamlet posted:dork bad games are really good if made by certain people with certain aesthetics yase
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 08:54 |
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Super columbine rpg
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 15:23 |
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Space Hamlet posted:So a while back, indie game creator Anna Antrhopy wrote a book called Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. lol
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 15:34 |
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i think this could be a good thread if we dont get caught up in whether or not we like anna anthropy, imo. to facilitate this, i wont say my opinion of her
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 15:38 |
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IMO the thread is off to a poor start when the second sentence is "hey let's celebrate pretentious indie hacks!" e: And the first line was how even Games didn't want this thread when it had a Gone Home thread.
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 15:40 |
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I think that if we can find indie games based on spree killings we can salvage it
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 15:42 |
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Hotline Miami
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 15:44 |
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ah what a buncha dorks
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# ? Jul 2, 2014 19:15 |
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Today’s sex and/or relationship game is Increpare‘s puzzle game Striptease. I’d like to point out that this game, though it might seem from its title to be lighthearted titillation, contains depictions of violence against women and addresses issues of sexual assault. If this might trigger or distress you in any way, I’d recommend to take care in reading this, and consider whether playing this game might distress you before playing it. Stephen ‘Increpare‘ Lavelle is probably one of the most important game makers of our time. I do not say this lightly. Increpare is prolific, distributes most of his games for free via his website, and constantly plays with form, structure, message, theme, mechanics, and music in a way that no other person does, in a way that large scale games development would never dare. He is ridiculously well read and his work displays a constant and empathetic awareness of social struggle, of political issues, and of complex interpersonal issues. He is my favourite game maker. I discovered him two years ago whilst I was an emotionally broken wreck living in my friend’s attic. I sent this Wot I Think, my first ever, to Alec from that attic, and it was on Increpare’s Slave of God, which had the same sort of effect on my heart as a defibrillator. I’d been a zombie for months. I’d been trailing around the winter streets of Brighton and London half a frozen human being. I felt like I’d been shot and was slowly bleeding out until all of a sudden that game made my fingers type. I wrote words; at a weird juncture in my life, Increpare’s game all of a sudden made me a writer. That was when I knew that I would be okay. Slave of God articulates feelings of isolation, overstimulation, alienation, or abandonment through images, flashing lights, the environment of a club. Striptease manages to take a fairly simple tile-moving mechanic and make the player understand the sexual objectification of women and how it depersonalises and demeans them. On the right, there is a barely clothed woman, dressed up sexy. A yellow box designates the part of the woman you are concentrating on. This is the part of the clothing that she will next ‘take off’. On the left is a set of puzzle tiles with her body parts on that you have to swap around to put together the item the stripper, named ‘Candy’, will remove. The game begins with text: the crude dialogue between Candy’s boss and Candy. The ‘go show ‘em what you’ve got’ seems simple enough, a kind of caricature. You then begin sliding tiles around to have Candy take her clothes off. Mechanically speaking the ‘focus’ on one aspect of her body at one time has you depersonalize her, until you begin to think of her as a collection of tiles that comprise that one important part, the part you want to see. The hair. The feet. The tits. The crotch. She’s not really a person but a set of things. Things that are goals. Things that you can win. You can bargain for them. Who cares about her face? Stop looking at her face. Interestingly, you are penalised for putting together other parts of her body, the parts not designated in the yellow box. Put together her shoulders or some other ‘irrelevant’ part and the game awards you negative points. You think her neck is sexy? Guess again. It ain’t. That isn’t the point of this game. You look at crotch or nothing buddy. It’s like being reprimanded in the stripclub for trying to touch a woman, or for asking for too much without paying enough. The second level, there’s another exchange of text at the beginning, this time Candy and another stripper talk about their last shift. Candy ups the ante this time: she’s wearing red. The end of the second level is where it graduates from merely having you feel sleazy or gross to having you feel distinctly uncomfortable. Candy is waiting for a ride from her friend, and a guy from the bar begins hassling her. Level three, Candy is entirely naked, and her body is covered in bruises. The focus now is on piecing together the puzzle so that she can put clothes on instead of take them off. First, her trousers. Then her t-shirt. The mechanical message here works two-fold, I think: as you work to have her cover up, you take both Candy’s role and a voyeur’s role, whereas before I only considered the voyeur role. The difficulty in having her put clothes on now seems somehow Candy’s difficulty in putting her clothes on; a long, sad, contemplative process. Perhaps even painful, along with the disturbing music perhaps dissociative of her body parts. But as onlookers, we also do not want to see the bruises on her body. She is no longer ‘attractive’ in a societally acceptable manner. She has become a symbol of everything we do not want to see. Her body is a symbol of where society fails women. We want her to hide it for us. If women are silent about it, it does not happen. The game ends as Candy’s friend finds her and asks her questions about her attacker, to which Candy replies only a stuttered answer. Striptease is a sensitively complex way to explain how women’s bodies are treated as commodities, and how value is measured and placed upon them at a purely cosmetic level. Usually games are very quick to offer up both men and women as objects that can be beaten up, but rarely if ever is the woman’s point of view represented on this violence, which is the crucial way in which the gender treatment differs. Women are never afforded the reins to their pathos. Male characters get revenge or important dialogue, some sort of narrative bluster. Male characters might get angry about the way that women are treated on their behalf, but rarely are women allowed to have their own anger. The moral consequences of violence may be shown in terms of a police rating in GTA for example, but you won’t see a prostitute pick up a gun, assume some badass chit-chat, and embark on teaching the aggressor a lesson, or witness a playable woman gangster talking to her best friend through her stitches, because there’s no woman protagonist for the player character to lead that narrative. Women’s bodies are often the ornaments of story-led videogames. We decorate them with naked breasts or scars as if they were statues. They look nice or are punched. Only rarely are they allowed to undertake the violence, such as in Bayonetta and fighting games, and they still have to look like ornaments on a mantelpiece with very little of consequence to say. Most of the time, women are relegated to bodies that LA Noire maps crimes on, like bruises on Candy’s body. You don’t usually hear Candy’s voice, because it wasn’t written. Perhaps what she really has to say is more gritty than twenty Call of Duties put together.
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 01:12 |
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closeted republican posted:Today’s sex and/or relationship game is Increpare‘s puzzle game Striptease. I’d like to point out that this game, though it might seem from its title to be lighthearted titillation, contains depictions of violence against women and addresses issues of sexual assault. If this might trigger or distress you in any way, I’d recommend to take care in reading this, and consider whether playing this game might distress you before playing it. Holy poo poo
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 01:13 |
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jkf reloaded was High Art. also i could tell longpost that was rps before i even googled it. obvious.
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 01:14 |
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oh it's rps. Thought supermechagodzilla was posting about video games now
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 01:17 |
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closeted republican posted:Today’s sex and/or relationship game is Increpare‘s puzzle game Striptease. I’d like to point out that this game, though it might seem from its title to be lighthearted titillation, contains depictions of violence against women and addresses issues of sexual assault. If this might trigger or distress you in any way, I’d recommend to take care in reading this, and consider whether playing this game might distress you before playing it. Burn RPS To The Ground
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 01:27 |
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i kinda want to start an rps mock thread because GOD drat but even here it won't be protected from terrible GAMES JOURNALISM discussion
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 01:32 |
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LaTex Fetish posted:oh it's rps. Thought supermechagodzilla was posting about video games now thing about that guy is he defends straightforwardly sexist titty shots as being artistically important and challenging to patriarchy that RPS article is simply hyperbolic, not way off base
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:25 |
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But Rocks Hurt Head posted:but even here it won't be protected from terrible GAMES JOURNALISM discussion Whta does this mean
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:34 |
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Zoq-Fot-Pik posted:Whta does this mean youve been reading gamers.txt, you know exactly what that means thanks for that by the way
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:39 |
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Zoq-Fot-Pik posted:Whta does this mean Space Hamlet posted:thing about that guy is he defends straightforwardly sexist titty shots as being artistically important and challenging to patriarchy
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:41 |
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CARRIERHASARRIVED posted:youve been reading gamers.txt, you know exactly what that means Oh. Thanks for what Also there have been multiple games journalism threads in this forum and everyone who tried to do serious discussion posts in them got called a homo
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:46 |
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it's a reading of a game, sheesh. he's pretty accurate about what the game is trying to mean, the article is silly not because it's wrong about that but because it goes "this is like the single most amazing thing"
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:47 |
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i am submitting this thread to the next humble bundle to be included as a meta commentary on the way cool people piss on bad games. thanks
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:49 |
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i like how gamers.txt seems to alternate between meaning "people who say stupid bigoted poo poo" and "nerds who care too much about that"
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:51 |
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Yeah it's terrible and I made it go on a 3 page tangent because I mentioned chiropractors and the posters there started arguing with each other (yeah I know the first guy was baiting for replies and boy he got some).
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 02:53 |
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# ? May 8, 2024 03:54 |
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Zoq-Fot-Pik posted:Oh. Thanks for what For trying to get people to stop taking it so seriously is the best way to describe it I guess Alternatively making fun of people.that thread is painful to read
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# ? Jul 3, 2014 05:16 |