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.

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.

BOONG-GA BOONG-GA / SPANK 'EM

No, I haven't actually played it. Serbia was unfortunately done with arcades around '98-'99 and it's a real shame we didn't get to play any that came out since.

I don't see anything extreme about this game. Each nation has its own set of stupid rules they go by. Here in Serbia we go about kissing other people's rears just like the Japanese do, and so it was only natural they did something about it without putting their careers and families in jeopardy. There's a universal, unisex rear dressed in jeans sticking out of the arcade you physically hit and inflict some humiliating pain on the characters in the game. Facial expressions of the characters being spanked are ludicrous, and I guess it feels good to let go of the frustration thinking one spanking might inflict some serious damage to those you hate. Con artists, child molesters, gangsters, mother-in-laws, gold diggers of both sexes should all be paying for your sweat equity not rising, though  they could have done without featuring prostitutes and ex-girlfriends (ex-boyfriends  and male prostitutes should have been there as well). Spank 'Em is revolutionary in a sense that it bringsall the insecurities and frustrations and anger (and sick drives) into the open and allows you to vent it, transforming it into  something else. When I was a kid I was advised to picture people I was scared of as babies pooping their nappies. This game performs a similar function, and I applaud the creators of the game for realising how groundbreaking it was .

THE NOVELIST

Never have I found a game that explored family struggles so vehemently as much as THE NOVELIST did , nor a story-based game I bought into more whole-heartedly. A struggling novelist fighting his writer's block that's taken a toll on his family comes to a summer house with them in hopes of getting back in the zone creatively while hoping to become a better dad and husband. You play an ectoplasmic entity monitoring their interactions, entering their thoughts and memories and trying to make them reconnect and solve their problems by inobtrusive interventions.

The minimal settings, the sollid, mellow background music, the repetitive movements and locations all allow the player to focus more on the story and feel its grasp more intimately, as it's honest and relatable (despite the fact that some dialogues and thoughts may seem forced at times)

Each time I played it I experienced a different sequence of events, and I didn't find the rndings as limiting and abruptly stupid in comparison to the subtleness of the story that unfolded as other people seemed to have had. Are we really in control of our own decisions, even with benevolent voyeur ghosts by our side?

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.

PC BUILDING SIMULATOR

A game with an original idea that stays in  0.x early access  only because some features are copyrighted by some greedy corporations. It does what it says on the tin, and  truly delivers, but any feature having to do with software or hardware giants that won't give pemission for their products (ex. Microsoft and running bios or diagnostics on your simulation) is unavailable.

You can either  play in free mode, combining available  components in building a dream machine of your own (using components and software by companies that allowed the use of their designs here) or career mode , juggling services and prices proposed by the clients. This game is doing a tremendous service to all of us with no previous experience in making a PC that works and shines light on the once thriving enthusiast computing culture of the Xers that is now coming into focus again with micro computers and open software. I understand the need of those in charge to keep the majority of the population mere consumers instead of inspiring them to become builders, but sometimes copyright and intellectual property claims are downright ridiculous.

The creator of this game might have made greater use of  for a more interesting background music from a wealth of  CreativeCommons-licenced tracks out there, and putting a $20 price tag on this title is a tad excessive. Still, PC BULDING SIMULATOR remains a true  gaming breakthrough bringing another successful blend of gaming and life.