PLACESPOTTING

What makes a  piece of music/art/ a video game genuine? We all have our own views and feel strongly in favour or against ideas that challenge the very notion of what a specific art form is. Is today's jazz "jazz"? Is crust punk better than California punk rock of the 90s? Should vaporwave stay in the realm of plunderphonics? Are superhero movies art?  Are retro games  the real thing and today's titles just a pale reflection of yesteryear's digital fun? Can educational games be art? And most importantly- can a non-game be a game?

PlaceSpotting makes use of Google Maps and the prominent user behaviour of screenshooting a location .and sending  it to friends so that they pinpoint the location by exploring Google Maps. What an interesting way to spend an incredible amount of one's time. Make an online game/application around this concept and voila! Judging by figures, people enjoy finding locations far more than creating "quizzes" (3mil:20k). I guess people love searching for needles in haystacks. You test your inner geography and culture buff and aggravate your friends in the process. Lovely.

Can such applications count as video games? I think so.

placespotting.com

A SLOWER SPEED OF LIGHT

I 've  only recently found this game and I was completely blown away by it! My ESL skills are virtually non-existent when it comes to physics and explaining scientific concepts and how they translate to video game parts . Therefore I strongly recommend  viewing the video below to get the grasp of what the game is all about.

The first time I tried it I figured it would just be a single afternoon's worth of  fun , but it transposed  a series of highly sophisticated concepts and physical phenomena to  your average 3d game mechanics and surroundings  making you somehow experience these so vividly that you almost feel smarter as you progress. Sure, it got mixed reviews , but mixed reviews have been en vogue for the last couple of years, haven't they?

ENVIRO-BEAR 2000: OPERATION: HIBERNATION

Messy games are the best , and this is truly one of the messiest ones out there. Messy as in sketchy  and swiftly built, a far cry from being an eye candy. The navigation is  simple and awkward and done by moving and clicking a single mouse button, the in-game music is obnoxious and made in a matter of minutes. Almost every aspect of this game seems unappealing . Despite this, ENVIRO-BEAR 2000 possesses some je-ne-sais-quoi that keeps you tied to your seat for at least a while. That is, if you're open to a game like this to begin with.

Having awaken a bit too far in the autumn, you now have to prepare for the upcoming winter by eating fish and berries. And what better way to do this  more efficiently and swiftly than to take someone's car and go through the reserve in trying to have enough food stuck to your windshield,  avoiding other cars driven by other bears and dealing with badgers and other animal friends that miraculously end in your car . If you fail to gather enough food and drive your car into your cave before the snow starts to fall the game's over. Sounds a lot dumber than  it's supposed to, but the game is loads of fun. The concept of using clumsiness of movement pays off and makes this a delightful play.

as user i_am_sad once said in a reddit comment : "Enviro-Bear 2000 is more fun than should be allowed for a game as stupid as this."

MR. MOSQUITO

I once let a mosquito live in my bathroom during wintertime without letting it bite me only to see if it would  survive. Needless to say it didn't last long,but I instantly remembered this the first time I played this game.
I'm partial to simulation on this blog,I know. I feel this genre has always been one of the very few to  often come up with original concepts. And MISTER MOSQUITO is no exception to this.You're a mosquito trying to live off the Yamada family during summer so that you may store enough blood to survive the upcoming winter. Targeting different body parts, carefully attacking so that the target(s)  are not annoyed enough to come after you ,carefully tracking their horizontal movements,and using hidden items in rooms and many other things the game tightens its grip on you with.The battle ensues even if any of the Yamadas see you without you attacking them.

The therapeutic value of your battle against Entomophobia is what I treasure above anything else in this game. A friend of mine recently said to me he would be interested in immersing himself in a first-hand virtual experience of being a targeted animal or an entity exploring different sides to their existence.Imagine people being able to cure themeselves of xenophobia, queerphobia or any other such debilitating condition.

The Incredible Machine 2

This game is an epitome of  what puzzle games should be like. It's about our dream of being Tom or Wile E.Coyote coming up with fantastic contraptions in order to catch their respective prey. You're given parts you need to integrate into a contraption that needs to perform a task (usually moving objects in a wanted direction).A cannon shoots a ball, the ball turns on a switch, the switch sets a factory line in motion and the motion spills a bucket with another ball coming out etc. Sounds simple and maybe a bit too retro as an idea for a game now, but it's another highly addictive game that stood the test of time with its unique concept.The navigation is easy, the playability is extremely high, the icons are beautiful. Of course,  Incredible Machine 1 set the foundation for the entire series, with IM 2 introducing new levels , better graphics ,less irritating sounds,new parts for machines etc, All the later versions  failed to introduce something new and take players somewhere else.

Absolutely worth your time.

LITTLE COMPUTER PEOPLE

I value this game over any other "God"-simulation or pet simulation as it blends the two concepts before each of them properly appeared in video games (feel free to correct me if there were previous uses of any of the two in video games or electronic games of any knd) . I absolutely adored being a caretaker for the little people who "lived" inside my computer in a wonderful two-storey dwelling.

When a new little person  is generated by the computer  they go about their daily routines and you can initiate contact or they might do it. They won't be coerced into talking to you. They decide whether to talk or play poker or play a piano tune for you or to themselves or otherwise. Using cuss words or hurling sarcasm at them will only get you further from them complying to your requests. A "pretty please" won't help either.This is exactly what makes this game so intriguing- at times I felt as if I was bullying them or encroaching on their privacy. I felt bad. And giving them gifts in forms of records, books. computer games didn't help. Sometimes I would go for days without playing the game, that's how uneasy I was about the whole thing.The only thing I had to do was to leave them food and see to their drinking water  to keep them alive. And so the pretense of little people living inside computers worked - I thought about  my characters starving to death or dying of thirst while I went about my own daily routines.

My late father finally said the disc had to go.

CLUSTERTRUCK

With so many dear people leaving my country and going elsewhere to work as truckers, I take sinful pride in seeing so many trucks bumped and destroyed in this game. An (ex-)trucker must have been stuck so many time in convoys and terrible traffic jams and have expressed his frustrations to an eager programmer truthfully enough to have these unpleasant experiences turned into a game. It is very common to have people walking atop your truck trying to rob you of your gasoline, tyres or your truck itself while you're trying to get some sleep during nights.

So in this game you may easily be a thug who tries to rob a truck in a convoy when the convoy starts moving. CLUSTERTRUCK is a platform indie game  where the aim is to stay atop moving trucks (moving platforms) long enough to meet the finish line. If you touch the ground, get burnt, or hit by rocks, trees, contraptions etc you die. The pun in the title is thoroughly appropriate, as the game becomes harder with each level making you realise the first few levels were just training ground for the onslaughts to come. You decide whether you run or sprint before jumping, and you can slightly correct your movement while in air.Takes some getting used to, As the levels become wackier and more addictive, you get style points and acquire skills. You can only unlock two skills total at any given time , but once you've amassed all 14 of them you will have a whole lot of features to choose from : slow-falling , taking a double jump,  beaming yourself elsewhere, using climbing hooks, jet packs etc.

Fresh ideas that become unique gaming experiences are not hard to come by at all.

LSD DREAM EMULATOR

When I was a kid I greatly enjoyed game intros and scene demos displaying the graphic capabilities of the C64. They were done with utmost attention to  detail and they were messy and loud at the same time and you would often leave the demo amazed at what was achieved there. The hunger for Amiga and C64 demos never stopped  and it became a noble tradition to this very day. The C64 demos we've seen in the competitions and displays in the last four years far exceeded anything we've seen on these defunct machines so far.

Playing this title back in the 90s I had the feeling that the creators of the game absolutely enjoyed the demos we all did. Based on a dream journal, LSD  is an first-person exploration game where the player navigates a surrealist world. If you bump into a wall, you're transported to another surrounding, and bumping into creatures, people, animals and anything in between will get you introduced to a unique surrealist surrounding. After a 10-minute dream you will "wake up" and be presented with a graph  of your progress and states induced, and when you get back to the game, a new dream may easily be influenced by the previous one. After  experiencing a certain number of dreams you earn the right to "flashbacks" that transport you back to previous dreams you could relive in a number of ways. The experience is  further intensified by IDM contemporaries such as Warp Records' mu-Ziq.

I think this concept should be taken further and be reintroduced into the gaming world with only slight alterations. A player might  enter key words and phrases of a dream they dreamt and provide other sensory data remembered so that the algorithm could generate a chance world the player could traverse.A sort of  No Man's Sky  for the exploration of synapses, sold for the price of your average indie title.

LED STORM (C64)/ MAD GEAR

You'd probably say I should have posted some other 8bit racer here. Well, no. This gem, and particularly its c64 version has it all. A jumping car vertically scrolling from level to level, jumping on/over cars or overtaking  them , the frog-like creatures that slow you down when they get stuck to your car if you don't shake them off, driving  damaged roads or open fields, taking boosters, enjoying  beautiful structures and sprites, jumping off ramps over missing bridge parts etc- it was the first time I saw any of that in a racing video game . I admit it, all the other versions of the game have everything I stated and some (the Amiga and the Atari ones) even finer graphics. What makes the commodore 64 version stand out is Tim Follin's masterful adaptation of themes from the arcade version, making them into something completely different on the C64. His greatness as a music composer really shines here. He introduces racing beats that skillfully combine techno and his ever-present prog-tinged melodies. Tim is/was one of the very few composers who managed to  push the  natural lushness of the SID chip way above its capabilities and trick you into thinking that your c64 had an additional sound chip installed. 16bit computers came nowhere near Commodore 64 when it came to the quality of sound. As you drive , it's the combined efort of excellent graphics and powerful music that keeps you glued to your seat  all throughout the game.

I loved Led Storm  and I played it so much that I ended up thinking  Deep Purple stole the riff from Tim Folin's opening theme. I never liked Deep Purple , and I still think Follin  is one od the greatest rebels in the history of original game soundtracks. The melody always comes first and I wish more game music composers realized this.