61 Frames Per Second : pixeljunk eden

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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4bidden Fruit - The Methadone For Your Eden Addiction

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Pixeljunk Eden was the first game to make me happy I'd "invested" in a Playstation 3. Unfortunately, I wound up investing a lot back into it. First there was the HDMI cable so the game –specifically designed for HDTVs – wouldn't be blurry and vague. Then there was the lack of sleep as Eden hypnotically pulled me through its lush gardens full of vibrant lights and sounds. Finally, there was the lost sense of reality, as I started to imagine myself as a grimp and looked up at the towering buildings in Manhattan, estimating how far I could fling myself from the top of each one in fruitless efforts to collect pollen.

Dear reader, if you're like me, you need a gardening experience to wean you off of Eden safely and comfortably before you find yourself on a fire escape eyeing the opposite rooftop. Might I recommend 4bidden Fruit.

4bidden Fruit emulates all the fun of Eden from the comfort of your own web browser, only without all the pressures of traditional Grimp platforming. There is no thread to swing from, no synchronization meter to give you any sense of urgency and no fancy colors or music to force you into a world you know you have problems walking away from. With only the computer mouse to guide you, leap around the one-and-only garden in 4bidden Fruit collecting the twenty gold crescents. Or don't, no pressure.

Most impressively of all, 4bidden Fruit was designed as an entry in the Java4K competition, meaning the entire game is coded in Java (no Flash required) and clocks in at under 4 kilobytes, meaning you can play this game on even the lousiest of internet-enabled office computers when you're hurting for an Eden fix real bad. Together, we can all get through this...at least until PixelJunk Dungeons breaks loose.

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Derrick's Top 13 Games of 2008 - Part 3

Derrick Sanskrit — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Catching up? Read part 1 and part 2.

5 - The World Ends With You (DS):
The insanely ambitious action-JRPG probably makes the most use of all the DS hardware has to offer of all DS software with the possible exception of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and even then The World Ends With You does it with so much more style and flair that the comparison seems woefully unfair. It's clear that Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts team put years of thought and research into what the DS could and could not do and the result is a game that breaks all expectations like so many angsty teenage hearts. It takes a truly great game to affect me outside of my gaming time, and much like Wii Fit got me thinking about jogging to the train every morning, The World Ends With You got me wearing pins on my bag for the first time since college, picking out just the right ones that may, someday, save my life in heated battle. Oh lord, did I love that dual-screened battle system...

4 - PixelJunk Eden (PS3):
2008 will go down in the history books as the year that downloadable games finally caught on. Okay, maybe not, but it sure feels like they finally delivered on the promise we'd heard for so long: fantastic independent games delivered straight to your home console, no retail environment required, at competitive prices. I loved echochrome and Cubello, and there is no denying the charm and brilliance of Braid and World of Goo, but the one that completely stole my heart and my thumbs was PixelJunk Eden. Not since Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol have I so enjoyed making flowers bloom. Not since Circus Atari have I so enjoyed soaring upwards into monochromatic point markers. Not since spring break have I so enjoyed atmospheric techno and pulsing colors.

3 - Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii):
The biggest-selling game of the year was easily one of the most anticipated, and while it may not be as fondly remembered as its Gamecube predecessor, Super Smash Bros Brawl delivered everything expected of it and then some. The frenetic multiplayer brawling was back, as always, with more characters than ever, including unlikely new faves like Lucas and Diddy Kong and first-time-ever non-Nintendo characters Snake and Sonic. Adventure mode came with an epic, if somewhat vague, storyline complete with luscious CGI cutscenes and gameplay and level design in no way dissimilar to the SNES classic Kirby Super Star (one of my all-time favorites). Classic, All-Star, Multi-Man, Events, Target Smash, pretty much every feature of Super Smash Bros Melee came back bigger and more beefed-up. Of course, the big feature of Brawl was access to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, being able to fight people from around the world, either total strangers or your own friend lists, sending your friends video replays of your greatest battles, receiving new stages that your friends built in the surprisingly engaging stage builder, even betting on the brawls of total strangers in Spectator mode. What was my favorite feature? Taking snapshots, of course:

2 - LittleBigPlanet (PS3):
It is hard not to fall in love with LittleBigPlanet. The art direction, the music, the narrative and general use-your-imagination, make-whatever-you-want gestalt is sometimes intoxicating. I've already written at length about the charming adventures of Sackboy, so I won't reiterate the points of my review found here and here. I will say this: LittleBigPlanet so far is the only disc-based game that has made me happy I own a PS3 rather than an XBox or PS2. The endless potential of user-generated content guarantees that LittleBigPlanet will always be exactly as fun and exciting as you want it to be, if not moreso.

1 - de Blob (Wii):
Yes, my absolute favorite game of the year is on the Wii. No, that game was not made by Nintendo. No, I'm not messing with you. de Blob is, without a doubt, the happiest a game has made me since I first played Yoshi's Island on the Super Nintendo and relished in its blatant disregard for flashy CGI and polygons in favor of engrossing gameplay and a unique and heartwarming aesthetic. As a young progressive, I rally behind its anti-corporate, pro-independent artist storyline. As an audiophile, I bliss out to the interactively escalating soundtrack, as I've mentioned before, twice. As a solo gamer, I delight in the variety of challenges. As a social gamer, the multi-player paint-fests get my teeth gritting in a ferocious grin. If you have a Wii and enjoy playing any games that do not involve simulating sports/exercise/music playing, get de Blob. There, that's my review, just flippin' play de Blob because it's the best damn game that came out all year, and 2008 was an amazing year for games.

Part 1
Part 2

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Whatcha Playing: Cleaning House, Finding Roots

John Constantine — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It has been well over a month since my last Whatcha Playing here at 61 Frames Per Second. The vicious truth of the matter is that I haven’t been playing that much since the beginning of July. The summer will do that to you. When the weather is as nice as its been here in the northeastern United States (mild, sunny as hell, great thunderstorms), its hard to devote eight hours of a Saturday to grinding RPG characters, engaging in manic shoot-outs, or even just taking in some classics (especially if your apartment isn’t air conditioned.) Last Thursday, though, I finally downloaded Bionic Commando Rearmed, a game I may have mentioned anticipating. Those first delicious minutes I spent grappling around the vibrant world GRIN created signaled one undeniable fact: come the weekend, it was time to play some freaking videogames.

But first I had to clean house. Twice a year, I take a look at my game library and growing collection of consoles and peripherals to take stock of what needs to stay, what can be tossed, and what needs to be reorganized. The process is cathartic. Old games in dire need of revisiting reclaim your attention, it’s determined what unbeaten titles need finishing, and old consoles end up reconnected to the TV for the first time in ages.

Cleaning house also reveals just what your predilections are. By the time I’d finished, the library was a bit lighter, and I had a nice smorgasbord put together for Saturday and Sunday. The Playstation 3 was going to get put through its paces with Bionic Commando, PixelJunk Eden, and Lair, the 360 would get love from Too Human and Braid, and the freshly reconnected Gamecube would play host to Metroid Fusion and a little Ninja Five-O.

What did I find out? Well, clearly, I have some kind of grappling hook obsession I need to work out. It also looks like my absence from playing games subconsciously drove me to get back to my platforming roots. I never did fire up Lair and played only a smattering of Too Human (more on those beasts later this week.) The craving for two-dimensions and precision jumps was undeniable. But it occurred to me that the games I was playing, Braid, Eden, and Bionic Commando, aren’t just relics of yesteryear but brand new games, full on fresh ideas. Seems developers broadly are cleaning house themselves these days and rediscovering just what works again.

Summer is in the home stretch now and fall’s bringing cool weather and games to match; the cutting edge of current technology and design will be our hands. A few months back, I felt rabid for the future and the evolution of three-dimensional, narrative driven design. But now that I’m finally playing on the regular again, I’m wondering just what it is I’ll be craving when the fall’s blockbusters arrive. Will I want the meaty story, the deep 3D space? Or will I just want to run and jump?

More Whatcha Playing:

Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS
Whatcha Playing: Fallout (Metaphorically Speaking)
Whatcha' (Wish You Were) Playing: How Does Your Garden Grow?
Watcha Playing: Loving/Hating Mario Kart Wii
Whatcha Playing: How Many Buttons Do I Gotta Push?
Whatcha Playing: Fire Emblem is Pretty Hard
Whatcha Playing: Keeping the Beat, Drum Master Style
Whatcha Playing: A Little Singin’, a Little Dancin’
Whatcha Playing: Another Slice of Cake
Whatcha Playing: BS Zelda
Whatcha Playing: With a Little Help From My Friends