61 Frames Per Second : flower

Whatcha Playing: Earth Day Edition

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

April 22nd, the day we all take off from work and gather at our local mosques and synagogues to solemnly pay respects to our mother Earth on the anniversary of her creation... or something. So do your part and take your game time today away from blasting zombies and chainsawing aliens in half, instead playing games all about helping mother Earth. Here are the four games that I'm playing for Earth Day:

Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol for Nintendo DS

Rather than cleaning up a house and helping with domestic troubles, this Chibi-Robo has been tasked with turning a barren field of sand into a lush flourishing public park. Like SimCity, you get to design your own world, laying paths and streams, rocks and hills, even benches, fountains, clock towers, statues, and mini-games to your liking. The nicer your park, the more visitors it gets each day. You also have to befriend local toys (including Molly Mapletree, seen above) to help you build up your park and battle smoglings who aim to pollute all the beautiful nature you've brought to the park, but the majority of gameplay is planting flowers. It's actually a lot more fun than it sounds, thanks to the charm and playfulness found in all Skip-developed Nintendo games.

Flower for Playstation 3

Nature is so relaxing for those first few levels, but the final stage really flaunts the nature vs. man-made-atrocities vibe. It's vindicating to smash your trail of flower petals straight through scaffolding and watch a child's swing-set color itself and start swinging in the wind. My only problem with this for Earth Day is that it romanticizes the wind more than the flowers. Playing Flower makes me want to go ride a bike, not water a tree. Still, at least it's prompting me to go outside.

Bonsai Barber for Nintendo Wii

This WiiWare title asks you to be kind to nature in a very different way, by playing the neighborhood barber in a village of anthropomorphic plants. Yes, it's a cute and quirky little topiary simulation. The adorable factor in this game is fairly high without ever becoming sugary sweet, and seeing your shrubbery clientele bristle with joy when you've completed their new 'dos might just make you want to go outside and trim those hedges.

Pixeljunk Eden for Sony Playstation 3

If the above games are a bit too casual and cutesy for you, though, here's a true hardcore platformer. While a bit more abstract, the main focus of the game is pollinating flowers. You essentially play as a spider who thinks it's a bee who has done some psychadelic drugs in the garden. Through the techno and bright colors, the message is clear: more flowers = more awesome.

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The Hardcore Gothic Romance of Judith

John Constantine — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

It was probably rash of me to accuse the new gaming romantics of pulling a beauty-for-beauty’s-sake routine. Jenova Chen, Jon Blow, and their contemporaries are the stars of the indie movement after all. Not everyone can get their game distributed on Xbox Live and Playstation Network. There are creators out there making romantic games that aren’t just pretty flowers and lost love. A perfect example is Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn’s The Path, a game that uses gorgeous color and freeform play to inform its frightening exploration of growing up.

Stephen Lavelle, aka increpare, and Terry Cavanagh of distractionware have also made their names on exploring the darker side of romanticism in games. Their latest collaboration, Judith, doesn’t fall within a classically romantic literary mode, but more to the side. Look past the game’s blocky Wolfenstein 3D-ish impressionism, and you’ll find that this ain’t romantic. It’s Gothic!

Stop rolling your eyes, I’m not talking about those kids in the black tights reading Twilight. I’m talking old school Daphne Du Maurier style business right here, a tale of forbidden love reflected in the secrets and murder of the past! Judith starts you off as a man meeting his mistress at a long abandoned castle, far from their mutual spouses. The game’s minimalist presentation is almost comical at first, but by the time you enter the castle, it’s too sinister to laugh at. After your lady love Emily disappears, the game shifts your perspective to that of the castle’s ancient resident Judith, a trophy wife who dreams of these adulterers and uncovers her husband’s dark side in the bowels of the castle. Cavanagh and Lavelle’s design sense, beyond the simplistic visuals, shares much of the tone in Chen and Blow’s most recent games. At its core, Judith is about the perils of infidelity, how secrets between lovers will ultimately destroy them. It isn’t subtle – Gothic media rarely is – but it’s impressively affecting for a game that’s barely twenty minutes long. Its most powerful moments come when it wrests control away from you; pick up an item, like a shovel to bury a dead body, and the game takes over. You’re in control of your decisions, but you can’t control their results.

Expect great things from these fellas. You can play Judith right here, fo’ free.

Related links:

Rite of Spring: Flower and What’s Lacking in the Romantic Games Movement
The Path is Real, Not A Fever Dream
Indie Dev Moment: i made this. you play this. we are enemies.
Breaking Out of Your Gaming Comfort Zone

Bringing Sexy Back: Rebecca Mayes's Musical Game Reviews

Derrick Sanskrit — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Game People is a blog that has been amusing me for a little while now, playing to the idea that there are many different types of gamers out there (there are) and that they deserve to have their opinions on games heard (they do) because they're interesting and insightful (they are!). They've got a sports gamer and a teen gamer and a family gamer and even a haiku gamer who reviews games with haikus and origami. It seems the contributor drawing the most attention, though, is Rebecca Mayes, Game People's "audio gamer".

Like so many people we know and love, Rebecca is new to the world of video games. She does not have a pedigree in Metroid, Rebecca is just diving into a mysterious pool of beautifully uncertain water and hoping she'll float. She does this by doing what comes naturally to her, writing and recording quaint little pop songs about whatever she's playing. If ever a genre was formed of "twee gaming," I think Rebecca and I would be right there in the same boat of uneasy wonder, she plucking her guitar strings and me thumbing my kalimba. What? Sorry, I seem to have drifted off there for a moment... As is, they're rather delightful jaunts. Check out her newest one for Flower (sorry, the embeded player doesn't seem to work on our blog). The sound is somewhere between Imogen Heap and a hushed Neko Case, for anyone to whom that sort of thing matters.

She's also got some rather amusing ones for Hello Kitty, Okami and Wii Sports, but easily her best ballad to date is this ode to Kyle Hyde, the shifty hero of Hotel Dusk: Room 215:

Rebecca makes me long for the days of adorning my beret as a patron of our local open mic night eight years ago, writing stream of concious songs during the day and performing them at night...except her's are all charming and about video games. Keep an eye out, she seems to do these on a roughly monthly basis.

Previously on Bringing Sexy Back:
The Nintendo DS Spa
Toshihiro Nagoshi
Retro Controllers of the Future
John Carmack
Street Fighter Dress-Up Party!
Susan O'Conner
Yoji Shinkawa

Also:
Soulja Boy on Braid: "BWOOOOOOOP!"

Relaxing Games

Cole Stryker — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I came across an article on Slate regaling thatgamecompany's Flower, calling it "the only video game I've ever played that made me feel relaxed, peaceful, and happy."

Several years ago my college buddies and I would unwind after classes with a few F-Zero GX races. There was something about the game's blinding speed that encouraged this state of zen, during which the day's stresses would melt off of our bodies.

One of my friends refused to take part. He was a long-time gamer who had given them up for college, saying that they just added stress to his day. He'd often walk in on me cursing the screen during heated Ikaruga playthroughs and ask, "How can you justify this. You're an adult. Look at what you're doing to yourself. You're not relaxed, you're furious!" And yet even though these games provided an amount of frustration, I often found them to be relaxing in an indirect way. It may look like these play experiences were only winding me up tighter, but I always felt more ready to face the day after a half hour of SSX 3.

I guess my point is that I never felt that games had to be aesthetically relaxing in order to provide me with relaxation. Sure, blowing up dudes in TF2 is frenetic and requires a great deal of brainpower, but expending that adrenaline is what brings on deep relaxation.

Am I alone, or are there others out there who find solace in bullet hell shooters and the like?

Flower - A Zen de Blob?

Indie Dev Moment: Dyson

Rite of Spring: Flower and What’s Lacking in the Romantic Games Movement

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:00:00 GMT

Last week was full of everything you want out of a vacation: a change of setting from urban sprawl to glorious mountain range, rancid air exchanged for clean winter wind, great food, better scotch, and the best company. Of course, there was also a smorgasbord of great portable games. Retro Game Challenge, Atlus’ under-the-radar curiosity My World, My Way, and Kirby Super Star Ultra made for marvelous palette cleansers, washing away the last traces of Epic Holiday Gaming morsels still stuck between my gaming teeth. It was restful, brief, and rejuvenating. When I returned, I knew that it was going to be time for 2009 hardcore gaming to go into high gear what with Street Fighter IV and a Killzone 2 demo waiting, but the first thing I had to spend some time with was Flower. As soon as it had finished installing, well, it felt like my vacation had just gotten an extension.

The game is exhilarating. Having grown up in rural upstate New York, the contrast of Flower’s city-bound preludes and its soaring bucolic playgrounds pulls at very specific heartstrings in me. The game is brief but I’m no less taken with it. Jenova Chen and ThatGameCompany are damn good at eliciting just this sort of emotional response with their games. Their debut Cloud was rich with the same bittersweet catharsis that characterizes Flower. Both are something like the game equivalent of a symphonic poem, their fluid flight-based gameplay replacing music as the visceral informant of a visual/audio narrative. They’re games unified in subject too; Cloud and Flower chronicle escapes to a pure, natural world from metropolitan confinement. They are concerned with beauty and simplicity.

I wouldn’t say that Chen and TGC started it, but they’re certainly poster children for what appears to be a burgeoning romantic movement in game design. As much as Jon Blow’s Braid was a commentary on play conventions, it was also a deliberately lyrical game. Trading in pastoral visuals and acoustics to inform its tale of romantic loss and redemption, it shares more than a little with Flower and Cloud. I’m wondering, though, why these new romantics have yet to explore more emotionally troubling and challenging themes. Gamers and critics are constantly citing “dark” themes as a mark of credibility in mainstream game design, but the darkness they refer to is usually tied up in angst driven narrative and violence. Where are the games that are legitimately dark, games that don’t just gain their emotional thrust from beauty or human ugliness? Braid’s ambiguous conclusion and TGC’s exploration of predatory natural selection, Flow, flirt with ugliness and dissonance but never make them their focus. (Flow’s poetic prescript “…life could be simple…” limits the game’s reach from the start.) But why can’t the lyrical style and play of these games be applied to subject matter like Procedural Arts’ Façade, a game that places you directly into a married couple’s complete relationship breakdown?

I’m excited by these creator’s efforts and, yes, moved by them. I was caught up in Flower from the start. But I am anxious and thirsty for the romantic games’ movement to find its Stravinsky, that artist who asks me to look at and hear and play something I’d rather not to make their work that much more powerful.

Related links:

Flower - A Zen de Blob?
Indie Dev Moment: Dyson
Far Out, Man
Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

Indie Dev Moment: Dyson

Cole Stryker — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

There is a growing strain of game imagery. Not a genre, but a play style or an aesthetic. Soothing ambient music, minimalist design, simple play schemes with unintimidating adversaries, clear goals and pleasant locales. I put Flower, Flow, and Dyson in this category. Dyson is a new indie game, made in under a month for the TIGSource Procedural Generation Competition.

I'll let the developers explain it:

Dyson is an ambient real-time strategy game with abstract visuals. Remotely command semi-autonomous self-replicating mining machines to take over an entire asteroid belt.

You start off with a planet. The planet grows trees. The trees grow seeds, which are used to colonize other planets, grow more trees, and expand across the game's universe. It's a bit more complicated than that, but this is one of those zen-like games that's perfect for unwinding after work. It's minimialism is what makes it so enjoyable. Call it an apertif between Supreme Commander sessions

Download Dyson for free.

Indie Dev Moment: Gravity Bone

Indie Dev Moment: Hunted Forever

Flower - A Zen de Blob?

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:59:00 GMT

thatgamecompany's long-awaited "Zen game" Flower is finally being released on the Playstation Network next week, having been originally teased way back at the Tokyo Game Show in 2007. So far the game has caused all who've witnessed it to find themselves unable to accurately describe what the "game" is, only that it is captivating.

VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi was recently treated to a demonstration by Creative Director Jenova Chen. While it is still nowhere near as telling as an actual hands-on experience with the game, it is most definitely insightful.

Controlling the wind via Sixaxis motion control, carry colorful flower petals through the dreary grey flowers and grass to energize the world with color, panning out for cutscenes of landmark colorings. This looks decidedly similar to the story mode of de Blob (my #1 favorite game of 2008) with the notable exception of being incredibly relaxed. There don't appear to be any enemies or noteworthy obstacles, just the garden around you. We've heard that the "levels" of Flower are each the dreams of potted flowers on a window sill and that other dreams include bringing wind to a valley and bringing light to a darkened city. It appears from this demonstration that the little success cutscenes will feel very liberating and joyous for the player, an excellent way to form an emotional connection in such a "casual" game. (You may notice I'm using quotation marks a good deal here. That's because the jury is still out regarding Flower feeling like a "game") Very interesting here is Jenova's explanation that the player will still be in control even during the cutscenes so that they never lose that sense of immersion, even when the camera pulls away, similar to how the player could still control the camera during cutscenes in Shadow of the Colossus.

Flower looks to be the game of the season that shows the most of what the Playstation 3 can do. Tens of thousands of blades of grass moving independently, pushed and pulled by the player in lush high-definition. If you have a Playstation 3 and ten dollars, you should probably get Flower when it hits the PSN Store next week. I know I will.

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