Blind Drive

I always thought it would be interesting for gaming to put on some sort of physical limitation to the gaming experience so that it might herald in new forms /gaming genres. Like, eliminating one sense from the equation and letting the player's hightened experience and anxiety do the rest. In Blind Drive you get to drive a car along a main road just by using the sense of hearing. As you progress and get accustomed to the fact that you don't see the road ahead , in comes music and other distractions. Strangely enough , the experience doesn't come off as fake- despite simple graphics and limited commands available you feel genuinely entertained. Plus you can always remove the statistics from the screen and make it even more life-like and immersive. Highly recommended!

THE ARTIST IS PRESENT

Recreating a part of a MOMA  conceptual performance experience in the form of a short computer game is certainly something I haven't seen before.The pixelated graphics, the painfully slow motion of the protagonist and the aggravating period of waiting only to be awarded by a silent encounter with an unflattering image if Marina Abramovic represent a highly personal take on this exhibition. Although this game might be a dart at MOMA, Marina Abramovic or contemporary art (no viewer pays attention to a famous Matisse painting to their left) , and though the game maker clearly and effectively showed what he thought about the show and the pricing, it is still significant that it was made. It makes people think  of the significance of high art and its misinterpretation in our lives and inspires some to get acquainted with Marina's extensive opus. I wish there were more games challenging people this way.  

you can play this game here:

http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/theartistispresent/TheArtistIsPresent.html

GRIS

This is the most visually astounding and satisfying game I've ever played. Although less expansive than its 3d counterpart Journey which is a personal all-time favourite, GRIS leaves you completely in awe of what the game designers achieved. When you play a game and its visual component beats everything else you've ever seen in a game the gameplay comes second.It's as if the designers in this game had over 500 years of art and design experience collectively - it's daunting how immersive  admiring someone's artistic achievement can be, as it completely affects the gaming experience itself. You seem to foget you're actually playing a cleverly designed platform game.This is what Dali\s Dysney movie should have looked like.

CARMAGEDDON

A relatively open world you can explore and demolish while driving in your car, racing against others or disregarding the track was a huge revelation for us back then. Sure , its elements were already present or implied in other racing and non-racing games, but it is the sum of these ideas and the presentation that made CARMAGEDDON a legendary game. It is gory, funny, replete with out-of-this-world characters and pimped vehicles with crazy add-ons that help you score destruction bonuses, Carmaggedon was a bold mainstream venture into the unknown that defied the racing genre and its narrow confines where  racing track was god. Finishing the race meant either clean racing , or destroying cars and property or killing all people in the streets.Sure, its outdated graphics might belittle its importance, but its pioneering  concept inspired hundreds of games in and outside racing genres, most important being the original GTA. Loads of fun , even today
Oh, and featuring Fear Factory's music in the game was the most natural thing to do at that time :) 

FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S

You're a night watch monitoring the animatronics via surveillance cameras and trying to keep them from running  out of Freddy's.The animatronics get homicidal at night and your job is solely to look at cameras and avoid contact with them while occasionally securing the doors and putting on  the lights in the halls (not covered by cameras) to your left and right.And all this for a meagre $120 a day.The phone calls from the previous watch include all kinds of scary details and events involving animatronics and it builds beautifully into the scenery your experiencing with cameras buzzing, poor lightning, ominous illbient sounds, radio sounds and your own scatting sounds aimed at mustering courage. Your job is to get through all seven days until you're fired for not doing your job properly.

This game was probably the most played title among my 7-9-year olds pupils. When I asked them what it was about the game they liked so much that still played it after 3 years or so they said things like this: " Pizza places scare me...old music playing is scary, but camera sounds make me calm...you can hear yourself think...it's scary and funny...it's cute and scary...there are lots of stories about me...you get to look trough cameras...it's easy to play and bears are real". So everything that a good survival horror has minus the need to cater to older audiences, aiming at the very essence of what was scary about our childhood- loneliness and darkness. Very few games went there and did it the right way.

GRIM FANDANGO

Legendary games need no introduction. Especially when a point-and-click adventure's mythic status gets cemented by the fact that it can't be played on new machines. Whatever impression the new generations are left with after playing the remastered version, they will recognise the unique look and feel to this game.GRIM FANDANGO is one of those games that  managed to concoct the wacky narrative with folk traditions, modern life, visual art, 50s movies satire, film noir cliches, observations on the absurdities of both life and death and cultural diversity. It gets artistic, but not obtrusively so, and only after you've stopped playing and gone daydreaming about it do you realise how visually impressive it is. You'll praise the game for its characters, screenplay, exceptional dialogues (even when some of their elements border on cliched). A seller of travel arrangements for the passing over of his clients into the netherworld tries to deliver with a client after having performed poorly with his previous clients. The story unravels into one of the best ones ever seen in a video game.

Remastered version is as great, looks a tad more polished and has its phenopmenal jazzy OST re-recorded for the occasion.

HUMAN RESOURCE MACHINE

Finally - a game dealing with the most hated and the most excruciatingly painful  position in the global workforce! Not only did they do a splendid job at making you feel like a puppet master toying with destinies of the employees at the company, but you also get to do it total-surveillance style and program people by means of basic algorithmic thinking. So not only do you get to control everything and everyone making a system that would automate things. but you also  get to boost your own self-esteem in the process.Even a complete ignoramus like myself won't get scared of the algorithmic nature of a limited number of commands at your disposal. Run your programmes and revel in success.

MINI METRO

The other day I watched an episode of The Orville  which dealt with discovering a 2-dimensional civilization and thought the colourful lines of movements of its beings and objects  were remindful of old metro scheme designs and vehicle pathways of Tron and that it would great if such designs were used more frequently in gaming. Minutes into my on-line quasi-research and I come upon Mini Metro.What a great example of an exciting real-life job simulation carved into a slick game! Subway and train outlines have been part of gaming since its infancy, but this title gives you an actual opportunity to see the results of your construction engineering efforts seconds after you've built, reinvented, upgraded or altered the lines. The city (one in 10 actual cities you can pick) and its population gets bigger and so does the number of stations  you need to connect with subway lines and thus keep make things run as smoothly as possible,

Mini Metro is visually pleasing and fun and easy to play and has a decent replay value and cute music. It also has that Je ne sais quoi  quality about it that makes it both charming and ground-breaking at the same time. Could it be the compelling nature of fighting entropy on any scale and within any given system the thing that makes Mini Metro a great game? Or is it simply the combination of casual gameplay and deep tactics? Try this instant classic, you won't be disappointed.

EVERYTHING

When I was 9 I thought it would be great if someone made a game in which you could be a platform, a sprite, a boulder,a trap, a contraption, the hero's arch enemy or anything else but the hero. Someone beat me to it (Tim Winsky http://indianastone.twinskygames.com/ ) and the result is wonderful. I recently realised , though, that there are people who went way further than what I thought leaving the confines of your average video game concept could mean. What if you could play everything within a game and be a microorganism, a plant, an animal, a boulder, an island, a natural phenomenon, a celestial body, a galaxy and so forth, all within a single game? Add some metaphysical humour and unease ,beautiful music and passages of recorded narration by the inimitable Alan Watts and you got EVERYTHING the game. It rewards reflection and patience, and as you ascend or descend by experiencing the interconnectedness of forms in the pool of  universal consciousness you realise you can listen to its thoughts, receive and sing its vibrations, and become a vibrating sequence yourself. Entering and leaving forms (even those such as oil rigs, boots and snowmen) as you gain knowledge through experience of being leaves you asking "What am I supposed to want here?" (Alan Watts again). Playing it over and over again, I suppose.

This is the best game I've ever played. Period. Nothing comes even close.

CUPHEAD

There's been a lot of nitpicking about this game. It's nothing more than a collection of bosses, the Cuphead character lacks character, we've all waited too long for this and it doesn't live up to the hype etc.Forget that.

From an era of animation that produced hundreds of cartoons that are now banned for their social,racial,chauvinist undertones  comes a game celebrating the years of uncertainty and fear dressed in cuteness and duelling with the devil.The distorted world Cuphead's living in is a map, a menu for the voracious and lost,  depicted with faded colours. Characters are monomaniacal and blind to anything around them.The authors have they even toned down  the racial  and chauvinist stereotyping of  some of  Max Fleischer and Tex Avery's cartoons  (Mexicans, East-Europeans, Italians).They softened it down but still retained the characteristic physical features for characters and bosses. The fact that the devil is also entitled to the souls of the bosses you fight with to free your soul of smelling your own flesh roast till there's no tomorrow only goes to show you how thorough the game makers were in outlining the story. Why go there? Why not?An era that had dance marathons  deserves to be presented in the form of a game as it is eerily similar to contemporary experience.There's almost an educational value to this game.

But there is so much more to this than making a threnody for the Roaring 20s and the frightening 30s - it's a fun and highly addictive game  requiring skill and alertness acquired through trial and error, just like the favourties from the 80s and 90s we loved as kids. If nothing else , Cuphead should be praised for all the love, painstaking exploration and creativity put into it.