Tag Archives: indie games

Good reads

It’s been a loooong time since I posted some good reading.

5 Things I Learned as the Internet’s Most Hated Person | Cracked.com
"I watched every avenue of social media suddenly blow up with messages of abject hatred from thousands of strangers. For the first five days, I couldn't sleep. Every time I would start to doze off, I'd be shocked awake from half-asleep nightmares about everyone I love buying into the mob's bullshit and abandoning me. The ceaseless barrage of random people sending you disgusting shit is initially impossible to drown out — it was constant, loud, and it became my life."
They Are Not Trolls. They Are Men. | Make Me a Sammich
"By calling these people “trolls,” we are basically letting them off the hook. It’s a lot like the “boys will be boys” mentality that helps to keep rape culture thriving, but it’s also different, because boys are expected to be human. By calling these people “trolls,” we relegate them to non-human status, and we make it clear that we don’t expect them to live up to the same behavioral standards as human beings." Continue reading Good reads

Forever and a Year Ago Linkage

Don’t ask where I’ve been. It’s been dark and full of things like strangely proud “humble views”, polka dots and stripes, mock objects, skiing, the IRS, gradients, and a strange dampness.

Still not sure where the dampness is from.

Getting back into the swing of things, have some links!

Uplink: Soothing Routine, or Monotonous Punch in the Face?

I picked up Steam’s Indie Future Pack this weekend–great buy, by the by–which includes Uplink, a game about hacking. And more hacking. …And getting caught.

The premise and mechanics are pretty simple: you’re an agent of Uplink with a handle, a plaintext password, and a bank account. You connect to the web through your gateway (think: managed, dedicated server), and hack companies and government databases to earn money, increased rating through Uplink, and status amongst your fellow hackers. There’s also some sort of “hack the planet” or “save the cheerleader” plot in there, but we’ll get to that.

Or not, actually.

I played this game a few years ago and loved it. I don’t remember why I stopped, except that maybe I graduated college and became exhausted.

Picking it up this weekend, though, I found that I have a much more analytical eye towards it. I blame the Weir(d) One. The game suffers from a narrowly-defined path to success, which gives the feeling that there’s only one (or two, or three) ways to succeed at the game. When a game opens by giving me a crap-ton of missions, no plot, and various ways to upgrade and optimize, I expect more of a sandbox than Uplink provides.

SlashNBurn was my first hacker. (Hey, at least it wasn’t “ZeroCool”.) Continue reading Uplink: Soothing Routine, or Monotonous Punch in the Face?

Jack move, fool!

Courtesy of G, I bring you “Pondering Indie Spirit: Derek Yu Speaks“.

Skip the article and go to the comments. (That’s mean, I know, but I leave the indie game drooling to G. I’m sure Yu is at least a moderately cool guy.)

Read the first comment. No, really. Go read it now. Note that “Flytrap” is that man’s game… apparently. This is the beginning of one of the more hilariously-executed jack moves I’ve seen on a comment thread. I’ve seen smoother, certainly, but rarely funnier.

I can pretty much promise that reading that thread is worth the 30 minutes of your life that it’ll take. It takes a few comments to warm up, but by the time the following exchange happens, the giggles only get louder:

Raigen Burns: I understand your frustration concerning Flytrap, however there are almost 700 games on XBLIG! […]

The crazy man (Adam Coate): Correction, there are almost 700 games on XBLIG that aren’t Flytrap.

I wish I’d recorded myself as I read this, because my screams had to be funny as shit. Later in the thread, the crazy man brings in some “evolutionary psychology” to justify the idea that “What do women, on average, like to do the most? Shop and eat; aka consume.” That’s later followed with “Sorry; shop, talk, and eat.”

Yeah.

Yup.

There’s a special treat near the end where Coate is asked to return a game he borrowed… Comedic gold, folks.

I usually don’t want to feed the trolls, and I discouraged G from doing anything (him being a professional and all), but that is some “what in all the hell?!” shit right there. I’d feel really bad for Yu the interviewee if he didn’t already seem to be a famous, well-liked guy, because that mess got jacked by someone who thinks that all publicity is good publicity… which I’m not sure holds in indie game development.