The article is Butchering Pathologic, by Quintin Smith, over on the excellent Rock Paper Shotgun. It starts with:

I’m going to explain, right now, why a Russian FPS/RPG called Pathologic is the single best and most important game that you’ve never played.

Intrigued yet? Go read the article. It’s in three parts, so it may take a while.

So why am I getting so excited about a Russian game from 2004? Because somewhere, in an obscure little notebook, I keep a list of Things I Want To Do In Videogames. And Pathologic happens to contain an astounding number of those things.

Things such as ‘unfun’: tragedy, horror, despair, negative consequences, ruin. We’re not using the full spectrum of emotions in games, and there’s no good reason for it.

Or playing with the medium. I looooove playing with the medium. A lot of my designs use it.

Or a living world that changes significantly during the game and reacts to the player’s actions. John Walker, in his review of Pathologic over at Eurogamer, correctly points out how shallow most so-called “living cities” in games are. Pedestrians walk around, but nothing ever changes. Pathologic apparently goes a lot further. And why not? I think people don’t do this for wrong reasons.

Or what I call ‘plastic reality’. In Pathologic, even the buildings become sick.

Or plain old weirdness, of course. I am a David Lynch fan after all. Things don’t have to make sense. Or at least, not in an ordinary way.

And finally, Ice-Pick Lodge, the developers of Pathologic, seem to take storytelling very seriously. And that is also something to be applauded.

Ironically, all of this happens in a game that is apparently very hard to play – in other words, the kind of game I would normally delete within 5 minutes, and then spend 30 minutes ranting about. Will I ever play it? Who knows. I’ve seen it online for 10-15 Euros, well within impulse-buy range.

I think what is most inspiring about reading about Pathologic is the fact that a group of people managed to cram this many non-mainstream elements into one game. That someone managed to make a game, to quote Quintin Smith:

[...] as daring and unique as one of those 15 minute indie games that everyone raves about (and rightly so!), only blown up into a 40 hour epic.

That warms the cockles of my heart. And it makes me wonder, once again, if I am not making games like this because of the constraints of “The System”, or because I don’t have the courage to do it. I console myself by the thought that I don’t know enough crazy people to make something like this with. Well, crazy and available people.

Contemplating why wildly ambitious games like these often seem to come from non-core games industry countries is worth a blog post of it’s own.

I realize, of course, that the game I am imagining based on the articles I have read is likely quite different from the real thing. But the excitement is real.

Update: Corrected the developer’s name.

Here are some observations on Lego Star Wars now that I’m playing through again in coop mode:

The inherent absurdity of a film license done in Lego allows TT to circumvent the restrictions of the license (especially this license: They can do things with Star Wars I can imagine few official Star Wars products being allowed to do). While you could do a funny game without Lego and you could probably even do a non-humorous Lego game, the humor and the Lego nicely reinforce each other.

Lego also means you can get away with simpler graphics and lower production values, which means lower costs as well as more platforms and thus more potential customers.

Lego Star Wars is made for replayability. It is easy to finish all of the levels, but advancing in the pretty deep metagame takes more time and skill. It also requires the player to completely break the rules of the Star Wars universe and replay levels with groups consisting of, say, Darth Vader, Han Solo, R2-D2, Jar-Jar Binks and young Anakin Skywalker, in order to reach each level’s nooks and crannies. So this replayability is possible because of the light tone and irreverence regarding the license. Lego Star Wars’ replayability would not fit in a Half-Life 2 or a Gears of War (although in the latter the replayability is in the multiplayer mode).

On a side note: This kind of replayability is an excellent way of generating more hours of fun per development dollar. A Lego Star Wars level might cost more than a similar level that is designed to be played only once, but it provides disproportionally more entertainment.

Lego Star Wars has strong casual game values: it’s very easy to get into, restarts after failure are very quick, and the rewards are constant.

However, the game also proves again and again that being extremely forgiving and extremely charming can make up for a lot of mistakes, bugs and sources of frustration. And there really are a lot: fiddly vehicle sections, a camera implementation that means one player can push the other one off a cliff despite being on the other side of the screen, and very uneven level design. I actually find the game more frustrating during the second coop playthrough than during my first solo playthrough.

Despite that slowly increasing frustration, we’re still having fun, and I can see us playing the game for a bit longer. At least, until my Wii works again and we can dive into Lego Batman.

(Thanks Andy.)

From the Joystiq article:

The in-game add-on began as a homebrew Bejeweled clone from Michael Fromwiller, cleverly titled Besharded.
Fromwiller developed the add-on as a method of killing time during long
raids and farming sessions, but it wasn’t too long before PopCap caught
wind of the MMO mini-game. Instead of issuing a timely cease and
desist, the casual gaming colossus hired Fromwiller to create a more polished version of the application.

Great move by Popcap.

(Via Wonderland.)

Can I trust DRM vendors or companies that make use of DRM? No. Maybe this version of Securom for this product on this computer won’t cause problems others have had in the past. But why would I even want to spend time thinking about that?

So, still no Spore for me.

The last ‘PC’ game I played that wasn’t a downloadable casual game was World of Warcraft, in 2005. And before that, not counting games I got for free (and didn’t play because they were PC only)… hmm… I think it was the original Deus Ex. Bioshock? I’ll get it for the Xbox when the price drops and I have time. But just as I was considering getting some games for my Mac, I now realize I would have to do research on what kind of DRM is on there before buying.

Spore is now apparently the most pirated game ever. The Washington Post has a nice article explaining the issue. Loyd Case gives his personal view, based on his long experience with PC gaming, here. (Thanks Mark for both articles.)

Spore is joining a group of games that I’d like to play, but won’t. You know, like Rock Band. I hear there’s a sequel.

(Ah, a friend of mine bought it online on Sunday and finished installing it on Tuesday…)

Two of the projects they have been working on have recently been announced: Cursed Mountain, a survival horror game for the Wii set in Tibet, and Ride To Hell, a free-roaming action game for next-gen consoles and PC, set on the US West Coast in the 60s.

As Deep Silver Vienna uses a development model that’s heavily based on outsourcing, they are much smaller than in the Rockstar Vienna days. It will be interesting to see how well these projects do: there are very few console games being made in German-speaking countries, let alone in Austria.

Is this a Zelda-style game where I get new abilities as the game progresses, allowing me to access inaccessible areas in earlier levels? Or does this game consist of really hard puzzles?

Because I hate puzzles. Hate hate hate! Maybe I should peek at the official walkthrough.

Update: … the walkthrough doesn’t contain any spoilers… Damn.

Update: Right, ‘traversed’ worlds 2 to 6. I am not feeling cool and smart, I am feeling angry and frustrated. I don’t think this is the game for me. Ah well, only 10 euros gone.

Braid has filled my head with so many ideas, so many opinions, so many emotions that wrestling them all into a coherent critique is like trying to strangle a swan made of jelly.

And then also:

Braid is beautiful, entertaining and inspiring. It stretches both intellect and emotion, and these elements dovetail beautifully rather than chafing against each other. Still wondering if games can be art? Here’s your answer.

Impressive. Not the only review like that. It’s live on XBLA now, allegedly.

(Copied verbatim except for that last line from Braid.)

A simple and naive way to provide… variety, for want of a better word, is to simply keep cranking up the difficulty. It’s a time-honored technique: people have been doing this for decades. It has also caused many players to stop playing a given game with a bitter taste in their mouths.

Player behavior being what it is, not that many people get far enough into games to notice that the ending sucks. There is no evolutionary pressure to improve games beyond a certain point, just as in human biology there is no evolutionary pressure to avoid degradation and breakdown beyond a certain age (guess who turned 37 not long ago).

This is of course not the case with games designed for high replayability, such as games with a strong multi-player component. And you can list AAA games with great endings – say, Half-Life 2. But in games with a consistently high quality, I claim that few people will single out the ending as the factor that makes them buy the next game. How many games have really been designed for a great ending? It is a major blind spot.

(I am fully aware that all those games I ranted about earlier might all have had great endings. That is what made me rant.)

The problem with Fairway Solitaire is that it remains, at its core, a luck-based game. You cannot use any strategies, only short-term heuristics based on the current face-up cards and the next one in your deck (which you can see). The only longer-term decision that you can make is when to use your ‘joker’ clubs. Money-making is not tuned well, as I said before, and so there are no interesting decisions to be made there. There is a special event that takes away one of the items you bought (a pretty bad idea in my opinion), but I was always able to buy it back without even looking at how much money I had.

As you progress through the courses, the difficulty is slowly ratcheted up. The goals for each course become slightly more difficult, the courses become slightly more complex, the shuffling becomes slightly less advantageous (or so I infer from the fact that it is easier to make long runs in the early courses). Inevitably, at some point the luck factor starts to play a big role, and I had to redo courses several times, or even go back to early courses to farm joker clubs. I think that was about the point where the game stopped being fun, but I kept playing out of stubbornness.

The second to last course, Mystery Madness, uses a very non-intuitive card layout, where you cannot tell which card will be revealed when you remove a face-up card. Or, rather, you cannot tell which card you have to remove to reveal more cards. So you can easily find yourself riffling through half a deck, trying to get rid of one face-up card while twenty or more cards stay stubbornly unrevealed. I gave that a couple of tries with a full set of joker clubs, and finally gave up in disgust.

In my opinion, Fairway Solitaire would have been a much better game with about 10 fewer courses. It could have been positively awesome if it had allowed for interesting longer-term decisions. Still, I played it over 36 hours. I can’t complain about the value for money compared to full-price games.

But I don’t know if I would buy a sequel.