Browsing around Gamasutra this morning and stumbled across this great Brandon Sheffield piece on game preservation and once again found myself wondering whether in ten years time, there’ll be a big black hole where this generation of games lies^[1].

I’ll freely admit to enjoying the benefits that this uber connected-always-on world brings us and brings to our gaming. It’s an incredible time to have our hobby with so many things going on right now but more than ever, I find myself thinking that with the race to push the game player further and further towards service based, we’re kinda fucking it up a bit for future generations.

We’re already fairly reliant on piracy for preservation because the software industry is especially volatile, studios open, studios close, studios get sold on, people move on, time and hardware move on at a rapid rate. Companies buy IP but care little about heritage and why should they? They exist to make money not to preserve culture as icky as that is to me. Sure, there’s some money to be made from it in reissues but the amount of games that would be deemed worth reissuing? Not many, methinks.

The measures the industry is taking currently to combat their personal devil slims the chances of these things being easily preserved even further. Of course, it’s not just anti-piracy measures as egregious as those can be, there’s the move towards multiplayer and removing dedicated servers from the equation, there’s reliance on online scoreboards, social networks, all sorts of integrated things where each and every layer makes preserving the experience of a game even more difficult. Every service games get tied to is one more point of failure, one more chance of a server shutdown or service closing taking the game with it. Imagine for a second if we’d tied our games to Friends Reunited or to MySpace…

It wouldn’t surprise me to be looking back in ten years time definitely thinking “man, there’s just a black hole where some of the things we created were”, y’know? “Remember all those games we used to play but now can’t?”

John Anderson talked about a fair few of the issues surrounding the matter in his Where Games Go To Sleep series and the follow up Selecting Save On The Games That We Make, The National Videogame Archive is a thing that exists and that’s a good thing although of course, there always remains the questions of not just how to preserve things but what also. I’m in favour of The Museum Of Computing’s attitude of “all of it” and obviously, if it doesn’t include Williams’ Blaster then it’s all for naught anyway but that’s by the by.

There’s another aspect of preservation though that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while and it’s something that everyone can help in.

As a clue, here’s RR regular @ToreSupra damning himself for all eternity^[2] for Save The Videogame. We can all lynch him later, ok.

Over here in the UK, I’ve always found the way we talk about our heritage as a bit, well, fucking embarrassing mainly. This was brought home a few weeks back on the lovely Speccy’s 30th Birthday and rather than stand up and be truly proud of what we had, once again, we drift into the same pathetic arguments over which format was best, the C64 or the Speccy with the obligatory CPC owners looking on a little bit befuddled^[3].

I know, I know some of it is mild entertainment and it’s hard not to resist a breadbin dig and they can still be rather funny but I bring this up to make the point that the one thing we’re tremendously good at in the UK is letting our games history become footnotes rather than achievements and milestones.

We’d sooner squabble than celebrate and that’s kind of a shame.

We don’t champion our quirky stuff nearly enough, we don’t champion the stuff that’s distinct, unique or y’know, just bloody fun anywhere near enough. Because we don’t talk loudly enough about our games. And we don’t really discuss them with a critical voice either. How else could we still have people walk the Earth believing that Rick Dangerous was a good thing to happen?

3d Monster Maze becomes a footnote in first person shooters, Ultimate are those guys that went on to make SNES games and Xbox avatars and we’ll talk of Jet Set Willy and Elite and Minter and Chaos but little else. Obviously Retro Gamer magazine puts in fine service on behalf of most formats and most games but it’s an outlier, we don’t talk about our gaming heritage, our gaming history nearly enough and when we do, we talk about the same things.

We’re the ones who grew up with these games, we grew up playing them, we’re the ones who’ll be first to hit up an emulator to play Obscure-o-game X and yet, we do so little to pass this knowledge on. We just don’t talk outside of our little forums and communities, we don’t give these games a chance to be heard or replayed by those who will never otherwise know about them. And that, also, is something that contributes to games disappearing into the mists of time. Because there’s no-one to tell their tale.

Who then, of the next generation of kids, will know about Technician Ted or Rapscallion or Tir Na Nog? How could they know? What are the chances of them stumbling upon any of them when the history of videogames consists of Space Invaders, Elite, Mario and something something something NINTENDO something something PLAYSTATION something something GEN3 APPLE?

You’d never know we had such a rich and diverse history in this country when it comes to videogames because it’s always Elite, it’s always Jet Set Willy and it’s always bloody Chaos or something.

So your task, for today and for the future, is to go out there and talk about the videogames you played and loved. Tell people what you found great about that pocket money game from Mastertronic with no shame^[4] because it’s one step closer to keeping these games and our history alive.

Write a blog post, make a youtube video, make a tweet, tell your kids. Shout about it. Talk about these things outside of retro circles, outside of retro meets and outside. Let’s talk about our games, the videogames that are special to us because if we don’t no-one else will.

Let’s talk about videogames. For the future and for the past.

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Chain Champ is a mouse-controlled grappling hook platformer where you master capricious swinging physics that sneeze at conservation of energy over a safety net of frequent checkpoints and infinite lives.

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We’ve mentioned Meteor Storm before and it’s still on my “things I’m looking forward to” list so I’m more than happy to throw up a few pictures and stuff for you to gander your eyes over.

Still no release date but isn’t it pretty? Click to massiveate the pictures.

And a vid!

EXCITED. Dev blog here.

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Something something something something Fleetwood Mac.

Quite possibly winning awards for the worst shoe in plot of all time which I won’t repeat as it’s that terrible, Dynamite Jack is a fairly alright take on the stealth larks. You’re trapped in a maze and armed with some explosives. There are guards ready to fry your face off on first sight. The explosives will help you carve your way through the maze. Don’t get your face fried off. Get to the exit alive.

As you progress, the maps add a few extra layers of complication, walls you can’t asplode your bomb through, coloured keycards, different types of guards… you know the drill. Making more of less in the best way kinda things.

Lots of levels, a level editor to level harder with a vengeance and community map integration to level hardest as well as how fast can you clear the level speedrunny stuffs for those that way inclined. It’s a fairly solid old package all told.

Awkward “most of the game is set in the dark” trailer follows:

It’s £4 or thereabouts on Steam right now. You should get your moneys worth out of that fairly easy, I’d wager.

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I’ve had this sitting round a few days but not had time to sit down and dig into it yet but worth a post because it’s super intriguing stuff.

And oh so very pretty.

Here’s the concept:

POP is an experimental game in the most literal sense. The game was purposefully built in way that explores a different approach to the typical game development pipelines. It was developed by first approaching the music and running with the first game concept that happened to emerge during that creative process.

Here’s the video:

It’s like the Mel Croucher future that never was and that’s good enough for me.

It’s pay what you want and available here. Go to it.

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1. Ok, as promised…

Oh man, I’ve got a soft spot for the stuff that the webhostless-so-no-links StevieG tries to put together, so it cheered me no end when Charlie dropped me a line to say he was hosting the demo of Stevie’s latest thing.

It’s a one switch Scalextric in the style of Super Sprint but prettier. Like Pixel Junk Racers before it, the bigger the screen, the better the view.

Anyway, shamelessly stolen from Charlie’s HARD SELL CORNER…

* Play with up to 8 mates for some old-school multiplayer mayhem
* Balance your car to suit each track, with adjustable wing settings and pit strategy
* Race in the dry, wet or worse
* Nail the bends to get a well earned boost.
* Race at alarming speeds on 20 unlockable themed tracks with new packs planned
* 6 party games and ghost attack mode to hon your driving skills and earn bragging rights
* Accessibility options for one switch menu control

Onwards! Now, about that Polymaniacs…

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From forumite Kryters comes a short little puzzle game of pipes and victoriana.

The aim of the game is to align all the pipes in the grid correctly, so that the gas flows to each outlet point (gaslamp) , providing light.

Features include:
20 levels, ranging from a 3 x 3 grid to a massive 22 x 10 grid.
Unlockable freeplay mode
Level progress automatically saved

I could do with some light. Get to it.

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via Gnome comes news of a partial conversion of Stunt Car Racer.

Note that the conversion is only partial, so some features from the original are missing (e.g. some graphics and the league table) but the game is fully playable. Also it includes some new features like the animated track preview and the ability to change the landscape and also to drive around the tracks in the opposite direction (try doing this on the Ski Ramp or Draw Bridge though!)

Here there be download.

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Best headline I could do at short notice, sorry. I’m rubbish.

Anyway! Voxeliens is sort of Space Invaders in pretty voxel style. It snuck out whilst I was under the weather but better late than never. In heather. Wearing leather.

It’s £2.99 and there’s a playable demo available if you want to give it a bit of a test run first. More info at the end of the yellow brick link.

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Decidedly not safe for work, probably not safe for brains, Live Forever is a game about being born, living then dying and doing some stuff inbetween. Stuff like eating burgers, reading jazz mags and things like that. And listening to sounds. Obv.

Depending on the gender and sexuality you’re born with, different objects will benefit you and you’re scored for just about everything you do in game.

Shame about the long loading times mind but it’s worth the wait if you like things a bit on the mental side. Play it online here.

(via Indiegames.com)

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