“Nuclear Baby” is a browser game by Andrew Brophy playable HERE.  It’s a simple sort of shooter, press Z to shoot left, X to shoot right as hordes of mutants try to kill you.  Nothing in the way of depth, but some good fun while it lasts.

I’ve been exceptionally busy as of late, so you’ll notice that nothing’s been posted on the site for about four days.  There are at least 3 more People’s Games coming this weekend, so keep an eye out, and there has been some news recent worth mentioning when I get to it.  I’ll probably do that in the monthly summary we do now.

Anyway, “Vatn Squid” is a pretty fun shmup for your PC by Ted Lauterbach, consisting of nothing but boss fights where your little crab ship takes on an extremely dangerous underwater creature.  There are 8 bosses in all and veterans of the genre should breeze through.  I’m not exactly great at shooters, but I still managed to win after about four or five tries, so the difficulty isn’t too brutal and patterns are easily visible.  Not too hard, but plenty of fun.  Give it a try at this LINK.

“Balloon in a Wasteland” is a defense browser game by Armor Games, where you play a tiny man with a gun who crash lands his hot air balloon in a dark and stormy wasteland (hence the title) and has to repair while hordes of flesh rending monsters try to kill him.  It’s a fairly simple concept, and not very hard to beat, but it’s a lot of fun.  The goal is not to outlast the waves of creatures; it’s to repair your balloon as quickly as possible.  The creatures come in numbered waves like in most defense games and you can buy new weapons, traps, or fortifications to help defend yourself.

The core problem I had with the game was that I always would get the balloon up and go before getting any of the coolest items.  That’s not a bad problem to have.  So I just wasted time instead of fixing the balloon.  Each run felt pretty fun, and it’s just a good waste of time.

Give the game a try.  It has a unique art style and some fun gameplay.  You can play it: HERE.

“Starfeld” (by Stephen Lavelle) is a strange sidescrolling shooter.  You play by just controlling your ship through an asteroid field with the directional pad and the lasers autofire.  The games extremely short and gameplay can waver between dull and annoying, but the interesting part of the game are the dialogue sections between missions.  If you’re nice to characters they will be creepily nice to you, to an uncomfortable degree.  If you’re mean to them, they’re uncomfortably creepy, but in a bad way.  It reminds me of something Bethesda would have made if all their writers were rapists or something.  There are multiple endings, and I could say that there’s at least one “good” ending… technically… I guess…

So give it a try: LINK!!!

“Cosmosa” is a 3D shooter by Andrew Brohpy.  I’ll be perfectly honest, I barely knew this genre of gaming existed until “Cosmosa,” (which you can quite clearly tell from our latest podcast) but now I do…so that makes it hard to judge from my standpoint.  However, I did enjoy this game, and if there’s definitely no better introduction to 3D shooters then a freeware game.  So give “Cosmosa” a try, and I hope you enjoy it.

“depict1″ is a freeware title made by Alec Holowka and Kyle Pulver for the Global Game Jam, and it does pretty much what every game does (keep reading).  It’s a platformer which starts you off by having a(n essentially) disembodied voice instructing you by simply telling you the basic mechanics of the game (arrow keys are for movement, hit space to jump, etc).  Which sounds very standard until you actually play the game.  The game is best described as a “total mindfuck.”  And I’m trying really hard not to give it away, but it is brilliant.  Aside from the “total mindfuck” the massive depth of the game’s abstract story will made me replay it, five seconds afterwords in order to re-experience everything it did right, which was EVERYTHING!  I’m having a very hard time describing the game without giving away any amazing, so I’ll just finish by saying that only a moron wouldn’t love “depict1,” and you should all play it. Go-!
LINK HERE

I’ve never recommended an iPhone App for The People’s Games before… but I hadn’t seen a free iPhone App worth playing before.  But now I can say there’s a good one for everybody out there!  “Trundle.”  Go, download it off of the iTunes shop.  In the game you play a black ball against beautiful sunset-like backgrounds.  Each screen is it’s own little puzzle, sometimes frustratingly hard (or just too vague), but the gameplay is solid.  The controls are tilt to move and tap to jump, that simple.  It has a really neat style, and if you have the ability (i.e. an iPod Touch or iPhone) there’s no reason not to grab it.

And that’s what real art is.  It is a creation of emotions, a meaningful experience.  Each one of these games gave a unique emotional moment.  No two were alike, and they were all brilliant, from Tom Sennett’s lighthearted humor, to Molleindustria’s bleak view of reality, to Daniel Benmergui intense and thoughtfully poetic storytelling.  These people brought to me something more than money, or time, or big teams of people could provide.  All of them are artists.  All of them have created something wonderful, and if you haven’t played even one of these games I hope you choose to.  I think there is something for everyone here, whether you are looking for fun, challenge, or thought.

10. “Canabalt” by Semi Secret Software
“Canabalt” is a 2D platforming game from the mind of Adam Atomic (also creating the noteworthy game “Paper Moon” this year), and it manages to create an experience without plot or ending that is addictive in every way.  The core mechanics are hit button to jump and make sure not to crash into walls or fall, and with that simple gameplay element “Canabalt” became the browser game version of heroin.  The atmosphere and all together style built around the game helps to create questions in the mind of the player, “Why am I running?” being the prime thought to enter one’s head, but that never stops the player from running.  No matter what the circumstances, whether you’re the good guy or bad guy, whatever you’re running from, it’s always important to keep running.  Each new failure is just as heart breaking as the last.  It’s an exciting experience that is only trumped by its own iPhone port.

9. “Fig. 8″ by Intuition Games
“Fig. 8″ has a very strange premise, ride a bike through a maze built out of an instruction manual while trying not to crash into the pictures or text, all while not lagging behind the quick-scrolling camera – essentially this is a new way to become frustrated by instruction manuals.  However, the game is always “charming.”  As you play your ears are accompanied by playful accordion music or folk guitar which stabilizes the mood and smoothness of gameplay.  This keeps the player from becoming overly tired of failure or too panicked when things get tough.  “Fig. 8″ has a beautiful look, where the player leaves trails of color behind himself as he rides through a purely black and white backdrop.  The end result is one of the most intriguing experiences one can have in any medium.

8. “Ergos/Logos” by Molleindustria
Mood can be very important, and it’s not exactly something easy to master, or even explain.  A good game can be ruined by a lack of proper atmosphere, and a bad game can feel a little bit better when it gets the mood just right.  “Ergos/Logos” can barely be called a game, but whatever you want to call it, it’s good! and the mood is perfect.  Guiding through hastily moving text at unreasonable speed, trying to take a literary right turn, leaves one panicking in alarm without even realizing that there are no avatars or environments.  “Ergos/Logos” is as energetic and scary as any action or horror game.

7. “RunMan: Race Around the World” by Tom Sennett/Matt Thorson
Easy to play, hard to master, and simply adorable, “RunMan: Race Around the World” is a wonderful game.  You play as the titular RunMan who enters a competition to “race around the world.”  Even with all the other competitors dropping out upon his arrival he decides that it’s still best to go ahead and run, which leads to one of the most entertaining adventures of the year.  Every level is done in with cute and cartoony look that leds itself to the fun racing formula of early Sonic the Hedgehog games without the frustrating lack of saves.  Quite simply it’s a blast to play.

6. “Tower of Heaven” by Askiisoft
“Tower of Heaven” is about traveling up a tower, and with progress comes the more and more restrictions upon the player, limiting his actions – from going left to touch the flora and fauna and eventually not being able to look at the book to see what rules you have been set up, this is a challenging game, and whereas most games reward progress with new items for easier movement, “Tower of Heaven” is punishing the player for daring to defy the odds and scale the tower.  With a beautiful art style  found nowhere else, eyes may bleed when cast onto such a wonderful looking game.  It uses it’s simple 2D graphics to create a dark and gorgeous setting better than most any other game can try to do.

5. “Every Day the Same Dream” by Molleindustria
Reminiscent of stories like “An Occurrence at Owl Creek,” “Every Dray the Same Dream” leads the player through the world in a dream like state, even if it is perhaps a more mundane world than any of us are used to.  The dull events and daily routines which the player instinctively follows must be shucked away to investigate the greater world, a more beautiful and perhaps reflectively dismal world.  With a wonderfully scary ending “Every Day the Same Dream” is a hard game to forget.

4. “Little Wheel” by OneClickDog
“Little Wheel” is a very simple game, that probably won’t take long to finish, but within that short amount of time is an absolutely beautiful adventure game.  Based in a world without human life, where there are only robots, but the power ran dry and they all stopped, one robot awakes and (you, that robot) goes off to restore life.  It’s very rare to see a game that manages to provide the feeling of isolation so well, but with no dialog and an essentially lifeless world even more barren by inactivity it comes off strong.  Yet there are moments of cuteness, beautiful scenery, and a little puzzles that make the game feel like a lot more than just another game without NPCs.  “Little Wheel” is gorgeous and charming in every way.

3. “When the Bomb Goes Off” by Tom Sennett
Black comedy is a tough act.  If it isn’t done properly then you’ll have a tasteless joke with nobody laughing.  Luckily, Tom Sennett is able to show his prowess in the art through “When the Bomb Goes Off” a collection of microgames with a simple stick-figure art style where the player only has five seconds to accomplish his goals before a bomb goes off, presumably killing every one.  It’s ridiculously humorous when one thinks about just how mundane these tasks may be.  Tom Sennett definitely works hard to establish himself this year as a great game maker, and we to see more wonderful and fun pieces from him in the 2010.

2. “Time Fcuk” by Edmund McMillen/William Good
“Time Fcuk” uses a background shifting mechanic to solve each levels puzzle, pushing the character through to the next room.  With a neon and black environment, oppressive atmosphere, questions about time and space, a tumor growing out of you into you, you in the next room talking to you in the current room, an impressive length, and all of this taking place inside a box Time Fcuk is an amazingly well-done, challenging, and mind-bending game.  There is simply nothing that feels quite like it, and everyone should give it a go.

1. “Today I Die” by Daniel Benmergui
“Today I Die” more than any other game this year has convinced me that there is a way to combine gameplay and story into one body.  There is no story here without the gameplay, and there is no gameplay without the story.  Many times we compare video gaming to novels or film, often wrongfully so.  Though I’ve heard “Today I Die” compared to short poetry, which it does show similarities towards, it is the perfect example of how a video game can its own art without peers.  Short in length, but enthralling, “Today I Die” is able to raise emotions from the player with ease as you change the words of a short poem through interacting with the limited environment around you.  In the end it is not the titular depression one might think it is.  It is a beautiful romance and declaration of life.  “Today I Die” is a rebuilding of hoping, a reconstruction and reevaluation of life.  Spread thickly with symbolism and meaning, a wonderful yet simplistic art style set in 2D, successfully getting across the moods it wishes to convey, one of the greatest successes in art I have seen from 2009, this is a game impossible to forget.

There have been a few occasions where I had planned to move to Atlanta…and HERE‘s another big, fat middle finger to me from the city with the nicest airport.  The Art History of Games is “a three-day public symposium in which members of the fields of game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies gather to investigate games as an art form.”  Which would be really interesting for anyone living in Atlanta (who are not me).

They have commissioned art by Jason Rohrer (“Passage”/”Between”), Tale of Tales (“The Path”), and Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman for the event.  So it’ll be probably the most interesting thing in the world if you are like me and enjoy video games and museums.  Since I can’t go, I might as well spread the word.

Also, this may be worth noting: Tale of Tales has created an iPhone app as their commissioned piece, which should be released in time for the event.

So ya like “World of Goo,” do ya?  Then you’ll probably love “Sunshine,” the latest game by Kyle Gabler (one of the creators of World of Goo), released as freeware for the Experimental Gameplay Project.  The premise is simple but unique, if not lovably strange: grow your plant upwards while wrapping up humans who are raining from the sky to get energy (and flowers!) while avoiding falling rocks.  A good plan is to entangle more than one human at once to gain more energy.  It’s really kind of horrifying if you think about it…

“Sunshine” uses the same signature art style as “World of Goo,” which prompts the thought that we haven’t seen the last of these kind of games.  So life seems a bit less hopeless now that we have a bit of Sunshine!  eh, eh!  Sorry…

It’s a great game, and pretty addicting.  Download it HERE.