SUPERLIMINAL

Superliminal

This is a game about perspective and our perception of it that uses a lucid dream as a concept as much as it is a mockery of modern attempts to solve individual problems by exploring the depths of the subconscious. Yes, there’s a good bit of the Stanley Parable and Portal in it, but it’s to be expected since all three explore the hopelessness of the human condition. There’s so much that makes Superliminal a unique gaming experience. You manipulate perspective and objects by placing objects above or below you to make them bigger or smaller in order to solve spatial puzzles in each room. The game designers experiment with game’s mechanics and other physical aspects of its world as you progress making you confused and disoriented, and this is also part of Superliminal’s charm. No amount of stale dialogues or seemingly awkward treatment of subjects and philosophies can change the fact that you’re partaking in a unique gaming experiment treating gaming, happiness and life.

KATAMARI DAMACY

You're on a mission from your father, the mighty King of All Cosmos, to rebuilt the stars that he accidentally destroyed for no known reason., and you do so by using adhesive balls called katamaris, sticking many objects trolling the katamari over them until there's enough material for a  new star amassed. Naturally one has to make sure the overall shape of your "creation" stays  as "rollable" as possible in order to complete the task more successfully. Sometimes it's about a time limitation to do a task and other times it's about about specific materials used for particular stars.

With engaging soundtrack of various styles, odd and funny cutscenes, easy-to-master controls, blocky graphics that allow you to appreciate the concept and attention to details even more, its high replay value , and its absolutely magical  child-like quality, Katamari Damacy quickly proves to be a fun and unique experience for anyone who tries it. With  characters like  Kings and Princes of the Cosmos one would think a  fantasy world  would be the only obvious choice as a setting of choice, but making the Princes whereabouts mundane and common only makes the contrast suit the story even better. The fact that the game is about "mass consumption" (Takahashi) might make you look at events in the game with a new set of eyes, but this information does not tae away from your play sessions.

HOCUS

A 3d puzzle game based on impossible perspective and objects? Yes, please! Although Monument Valley  pioneered the concept of using impossible perspective in a game, it also sugar-coated it  and made it more about construction and the combination of pieces, the lovely designs and the music phrases that accompany movements across moving platforms, while Hocus focuses on the undilluted experience of enjoying the unsettleing and alluring  objects/drawings in the style of Duchamp, Escher, Penrose and McDonald. It's about consciously observing the geometry of each object while trying to find a way out for your red cube. The design is simple and effective , the controls are basic and levels progress with grace, each offering you the same exhilaration you felt when observing Escher's staircase drawing for the first time.

HOMO MACHINA

Not realising this was a game tribute to the work of a certain Fritz Kahn, I played Homo Machina and thought "Wow, somebody made Osmosis Jones into a game with an early 20th century industrial feel, how come nobody thought of that?". The entire game is based on Kahn's illustrations that appeared in his "Das Leben Des Menchen" book series almost a hundred years ago. The series and the game transport us to technical and societal advancements of the Weimar Republic. By depicting the processes of a human body as  machines, his intention was to introduce the inside of a  human body in a way that would be more appealing and easy to grasp to a common man. Aided by a group of graphic designers and architects , he would depict ears as cars, sight and speech as a mental movie projector, the human body as an industrial company with a number of departments and facilities with a firm power structure, the internal organs as landscapes where scientist shrunk to microscopic proportios study blood and glandular cells (sounds familiar?). The game is organised around these clunky designs and bygone industries , and  patience and precision with puzzles gets you through Chapters, each dealing with a different bodily function.
Now, people can say the game is too short and lacking more features, and that the original designs were wrong , but I applaud the effort of the game designers in trying to essentially make a gaming tribute to some man's work. I hope this catches on and that somebody made a game tribute to Alan Turing.

Art Style: ORBIENT / ORBITAL

I found out about this game only well after I played Everything for the first time, and though it has a much narrower focus  it must have been a huge influence on it. Orbient / Orbital is a brilliant puzzle /life simulation /God simulation  that sucks you into its world straightaway. Controlling (or being) a white star with its solar system consuming or making other stars and planets into their satellites for the sake of self-preservation while orbiting red stars to be able to travel  and using your gravitational and anti-gravitational pull to attract or repel celestial bodies etc is made super entertaining and playable here. The visual identity of the game is excellent - you can easily appreciate its  minimalist, elegant design and it doesn't stand in the way of your playing sessions. The controls are easy to master and the music progresses and becomes more complex as your sustem enlarges.

Misdirection or not, this game and the entire Art Style series is another great example of how big gaming companies can still  introduce novelties in gaming. A true work of art, period.

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.

PAPERS, PLEASE

Being brought up in a country that was neither truly communist nor capitalist, a country that would let everybody in and then keep track of their activities, had goulags and rock'n roll festivals, aimed high and died in a conflict between its petty tribes, I just had to fall in love with this game.In fact I have a love-hate relationship with this title, same as with Bully and GTA, and  especially after years of living under sanctions in the 90s and the 00s.

Being a third-rate god stamping passports and deciding on people's fates, you're spotting smugglers, bombers, idlers and regular people  as they try to cross the Kolecha border and enter the  the promised land of Arstotzka. You are not just checking names, dates, passes, visa details, but are also dealing with bribes, moral issues, personal and family histories and tragedies, and your own humanity in the process. You are a good peson doing reproachable things, even though you appear to have been given an illusion of choice, and you do everything in your power to allow your country to thrive.

Up until 19th century there were no borders as such and our predecessors had greater freedom of movement than we do now. It would be wild if somebody made a game about a 19th century person crossing imaginary borders, doing so in a wold where national states were still just a vague concept.

PARADROID

Though it was later ported to several systems and its life was prolonged well into the early naughties, this gaming phenomenon is largely associated with the good-ole c64. It is still regarded by many as the greatest c64 exclusive ever  to have graced the screens of our TV sets.

Hostile service robots have "gone mad" and taken over a spaceship killing its entire human crew. Your robot is beamed aboard  with a mission to sweep the ship clean deck by deck, removing the unruly robots and investigating everything before pressing the ship's self-destruct button. Unlike many c64 multidirectional shooters, Paradroid doesn't overdo it on desperately trying to make  the best possible shooting experience for a player ,and  makes up for graphic limitations with suspense and nervous anticipation instead, as other units become visible only after you've entered a room. The in-game puzzle of invading other robots CPUs and busting their circuits is a great complement to the shooter and makes this one of the most intriguing gaming experiences of old. Body snatching and destruction  never had a level of sophisticated presentation that high in a game up to that point. The beeping sounds adding to the nervous anticipation and the cold hollowness of an abandoned ship  and the conscious decision to not include in-game music  further highlight  the masterful presentation and enrich the gaming experience.

Paradroid remains a ground-breaking classic and it's easy to realise its value once you've tried it.

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.

ANOTHER LOST PHONE : LAURA'S STORY

Feeling ill at ease with passages of deeply personal reminiscences found in  artists' autobiographies?Feeling as if you're encroaching upon their privacy while catering to their self-gratification? Then this game is not for you.

We've all grown into wonderful underachievers turning to other people's woes and failures for comfort and we can't help it. If you found somebody's phone in the street, would you explore it  before returning it? Would you bother looking for wifi passwords, data, e-mail and social media content, calenders and business communication to find out what happened to the owner of the phone? By exploring and testing Laura's phone to pick up the pieces  you test yourself on how far you can go.

Looking at another person's smartphone through your own phone adds to the creepy Big Brother feel to the game and the concept itself is original, simple and elegant. marinating in juices of an intriguing story that unravels in a surprising way.

BOOKWORM

This must be the single useful piece of software I've ever used in my ESL classes, and the only one kids really reacted to and perceived of as a video game interesting enough to be given repeated plays. Every  9-to-11-year old that tried Bookworm was absolutely amazed by how addictive it is - "Can I play this one  on my phone, is it available? No - why not? It doesn't look like an old game". Later on I found out it was available online and on iPhone. Needless to say, I installed the game on all those defunct machines that were still being  used in classrooms I taught in.

Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian language is a language where spelling is 100% phonetic, so imagine the travails of having to persuade kids to learn the spelling of individual words of a language they're only beginning to understand. Bookworm, a simple game of stringing letters to get to real words while accompanied by a bespectacled worm,  succeeded where I failed so many times as a teacher.

CALCULATOR : THE GAME

Ever thought there was more to your personal calculator than doing calculus, ever wished there was some secret mechanism that could unlock its hidden features and turn it into a game console of sorts? Even if it be a Tabletop game? As a kid I would turn it upside down trying to write words and would often try to play with the look of operations on screen so that I could get hints at imagined landscapes -little did I know about ascii then.
This game  is not about existential  glitches and the meaning of life as some other similarly Spartan designs and titles would suggest.This one's a genuine game, and a cute one at that. And cute and charming sells. Puzzles start with regular operations at each level only to become more of an infatuating interaction with your cute calculator that add to the feeling of excitement and excellence with each new level.Levels change, buttons change, your calculator gives you uplfting comments. You almost wish you chose a career in science instead of humanities,

One of a kind game.

World of Guns Gun Disassembly

Not all unique game ideas are brilliant. Some are both stupid and unique at the same time. And if they happen to target a particular audience all the better. The title -World of Guns-Gun Dissassembly- speaks for itself and it appeals to lovers of weapons and mobile upbringing  of the military worldwide. As somebody living in the Balkan I fail to see the grace behind this manual-slash-game and the possible educational value to this game, though I do understand the weapon craze and fascination of someone who hasn't seen what a weapon can do to human flesh. The gameplay is simple, you get to learn about the basics and you can chose among a number of different guns, rifles etc.I assume the etheral substance of clouds underneath the weapon you're disassembling is put there as a stark contrast to a sight of a gun or maybe as a means to make guns look more heavenly. Whatever it may be , I fail to see the reason behind it. The retro-modern elevator music fits the manual feel to the game perfectly well,
In a world where guns and nations and countries and other shite is all supposed to be long gone and obsolete but isn't, we still feed on the mass hysteria that feeds our fears and short-sightedness. So whoever came up with  this game is a genius and deserves every penny they earn.

LEMMINGS

Ported to a number of different systems, Lemmings proved to be one of the biggest video games success stories of the 90s. A simple, unique and addictive concept of successfully guiding a number of lemmings to the level's exit by assigning 8 different tasks to 8 of them while paying attention to all the others in order to get as many of them to the exit gate by navigating and changing the levels' landscape became an instant iconic title in the  Amiga universe and one of the games most readily associated with Amiga. It inspired clever games across different gaming eras, from The Lost Vikings to Max and the Magic Marker and beyond.
120 beautifully designed and well-structured levels (or 20 in a 2-player mode) with ascending difficulty level throughout are still an eye-candy and still bring genuine joy to the player.
The music could have been given greater care with arrangements and sounds, but again it was the era of the unfortunate 16bit OGTs.However, this is insignificant compared to how great this game was and still is.

TETRIS

TETRIS  was a title that  made such an impact on the gaming world and such a revolution in gaming that every console or personal computer since had to have at least  one version of it available. The game that shook the world came to Alexey Pajitnov in a dream and stood out as an  inherently unique tile-matching puzzle game.The concept was simple and unique- you rotate dropping pieces to form solid lines at the bottom of the screen so that they could disappear. It's still equally addictive and attractive. It was a triumph of brains and imagination over graphics, state and corporate greed.To think that a single game could mess things up  on a grand scale only to  end up being what it was - a game of the people for the people- is amazing . Long live Alexey Pajitnov !

SHADOWMATIC

Another great game the greatness of which lies in its simplicity. You solve puzzles by manipulating shadows to get a recognizable shape.. Spatially manipulating  oddly-shaped object (or a group of objects) rotating at the centre of the screen being  lit by a sigle light source  proves to be much more of a challenge hat one would initially think.The game appeals to our childhood fascination with shadows and playing shadow masters and puppeteers and is highly recommended to both kids and adults. Loads of fun for your ios/android!

WEB DIMENSION

WEB DIMENSION is one of those hidden gems of yore that  simply beg for a re-release. It was one of the first titles you got to play a Demiurge in, dabble in creation and construct paths to help evolution run its course.
A grey web that greets you at the beginning is your playfield. With a stretch of imagination you'd be perceiving it as anything but the actual spiderweb in no time. Each level  requires you to freeze the coloured organism into energy clusters  waiting for them by a web node (the grey web phase), stabilize these energy clusters (the blue web phase)  and make preparations for the transition to occur (the light-colour-changing-music phase) . The accompanying music  is stripped down to its bare tasty melody/rhythmic nuggets that get more flavoured  as you progress, thus letting you, the Demiurge, know you're closer to the Universal Music that resounds your glory  :)

 "To experience, enjoy, create. There is no beginning, no end, no rules, no lives to be lost, no score to be gained. Watch. Listen. Learn". (WEB DIMENSION manual: http://c64-games.blogspot.rs/2011/08/web-dimension-manual.html )

THE TALOS PRINCIPLE

The best game ever made in any of the countries that were once collectively known as Yugoslavia!

The game can easily be enjoyed without getting philosophical about androids and volition and laws of robotics and demiurges and the meaning of life and intelligence and communication and the Tower of Babel and be played for the appeal of its puzzles that get increasingly more difficult as the game progresses.The game looks wonderful, plays well and the accompanying music algorithms are spot on.Utmost care is given to all the sets , objects and artefacts. But neglecting the original intention of the creators to perceive of this title as of a philosophical game simply results in dumbing it down. This is one of the most powerful , if not the most powerful philosophical statement in gaming I have seen so far (alongside the unparalleled The Stanley Parable, of course). Making people think about their life and how free in their actions and thoughts they really are as they play the game is the greatest gift  a player can be given.

A game worth every penny.

BEJEWELED 2

This is one of those legendary gems that come back to haunt you like ghosts in your gaming recollections. A guilty pleasure, yes. If you turn on a defunct pc machine lying around an old administrative or school office you are more than likely to find this title on it, Unlike Tetris,Sentris, Pang and other such shapes-bashing, tile-matching games,  Bejeweled 2 never gets anything but relaxing. Perfect casual cool for gamers and non-gamers alike. And player's view on whether this title is truly a game or not has absolutely nothing to do with it. The music is average but never gets unnerving, the graphics are beautiful and the backgrounds never get in the way; the puzzles are intricate while never getting too demanding; the playability is amazing; there are several different modes to keep you interested.
When you come home from work and want to blow off steam you will find yourself successfully doing so with this non-shooter game. Tried it today after a lousy day at work and it worked like a charm. College midterms all over again.  

you can play it online here:  
http://zone.msn.com/gameplayer/gameplayer.aspx?game=bejeweled2
or here:
http://www.popcap.com/sites/www.popcap.com/prettypkg/games/bejeweled2/flash/1033/bejeweled2.html

BAD MOJO

BAD MOJO is a Kafkian tale of an insect expert embezzling grant money to find himself  turned into a cockroach  by his mother's magic locket the minute he's about to flee his rented apartment and his current life.The locket-mother becomes an oracle guiding the roach through an astonishing world of  tubes, holes, fuses, appliances, furniture, carcasses of other roaches and small animals,oozes and leaks of various kinds and other wonderful features of a nasty old landlord's building and the bar beneath it.
The roach-you solves puzzle after puzzle  and is addressed by the oracle after unlocking each part of your quest until finally presented with a choice -to save the landlord or yourself or both (in which  a family reunion is in order).

Interactive movie games became one of my favourite genres the minute I found out about them in the 90s and I enjoyed playing each and every one of them (The Klingon Academy, The Ripper, Burn: Cycle etc). The reason I value this title more than others is that it took the bizarre elements and used them consciously moving away from the prevalent cyberpunk and  movie franchise tendencies of the day, thus creating a singular outing in the world of interactive movies. Highly recommended!