Worth Playing: 05/16/2014

Boom baby!

Glad to see some stuff about Circuits, it looks cool, especially for the price. Also, while I like Blendo's spy stuff, I love his zombie RTS "Atom Zombie Smasher", and I'm especially looking forward to quadrilateral cowboy.

I didn't think TFOL or Gravity Bone were bad games, but they didn't really do that much for me. At least TFOL doesn't have the same horrible platforming as Gravity Bone.

I really like TFOL. Sure the actual "substance" of the game is quite small, but it has a lot of soul.

Thirty Flights of Loving and Gravity Bone is great. Pretty hype for Quadrilateral Cowboy.

I've never played TFOL of loving normally. Only played it with the Jeff Goldblum mode turned on. Who would want to play it any other way?

30 Flights of Lovin'

50 Shades of Klepek

@patrickklepek The audio level between the two parts seems a bit off. The Circuits part is much louder.

Thirty Flights of Loving is not what I'd call an "amazing" game. It's neat, but ultimately disappointing given the hype surrounding it. Game Journos always seem to overreact when something different comes along.

Is there a soundtrack for that circuits game? I love the music.

@getz: It straddles a fine line. I think if I had had any sort of expectations going into it, I would have been underwhelmed.

I usually don't watch these, but Thirty Flights? Oh yeah, baby. You had my curiosity, Patrick; now you have my attention.

@getz: I think the stuff it does with foregoing the temptation to have a continuous, non-breaking timeline and instead just skips to the relevant bits (like every other form of narrative), the style, the way it non-verbally communicates its vague story (that includes everything you need), and the boldness of creating a game THAT short all add up to make an "amazing" game. I like Gravity Bone more, but regardless, I think both are fantastic and other games should learn a lot from them. Obviously, it's not gonna click for everyone, but I really, really like both.

@patrickklepek I fully endorse the idea of playing older games here. Gives you more to work with and gives more longevity to games in general, which is still kind of a problem for this medium. A game two weeks old already feels like ancient history, and that's a problem.

Great video this week.

I bought it after hearing it was David Jaffe's game of the year.

I HATED it.

Maybe if I had no expectations, I would think it was neat, but...damn. Just damn. I stand on the "fuck that game" side of things. I feel like Jazzpunk was 30 Flights done right.

Thirty Flights of Loving & Gravity Bone

Circuits by Digital Tentacle

Missile Come Back To Me by ABA Games

Always love the feature, duder. I don't think you should be tied down by what's current, but I do enjoy seeing the new games that I don't necessarily get to see otherwise.

Also, where the hell is Quadrilateral Cowboy? I thought it would've been out by now. It looked great!

Good damn, I love Blendo Games. So hyped for Quadrilateral Cowboy!

I'm getting a bit of a Jazzpunk vibe of the first game. I'm trying to remember but I can't think of a game effectively using the jump cut technique before, so that's really cool.

I'm not really digging the other two games but that's the beauty of this feature, I guess. Can't remember the last "episode" where I didn't like at least one game, or saw a game that I thought didn't deserve to be featured.

If you like Blendo's games and haven't played Flotilla, you owe it to yourself to correct that mistake.

TFOL... I dunno man. I played it a while back and I just don't understand the appeal. I have no issue with its length, or the way it looks, or even the fact that there's no actual "game" in there. I just feel like the story it tells isn't interesting enough. it's an interesting concept, but it lacks an "OH SHIIT" moment that could have made it great.

I agree with Patrick on TFOL that the use of jump cuts, camera techniques, and nonlinear plotting make it interesting, and other devs should definitely think about adopting ideas like that in pacing through a game. But I wasn't blown away by TFOL itself, even if it was worth it to go through.

Hey a video on GB that doesn't have out of sync audio... That's refreshing.

Personally, I think an even mix of old and new, polished and... "less so" is a good way to go with this feature. It functions as a window into the whole wide world of games! A sense of the aggregated potential of the entire medium, all in one show! Games that are horribly broken! I want it all.

I think using worth playing to highlight older stuff that's, you know, worth playing, that people might of missed, is a good idea, especially if you're going to show some iOS stuff. So many games come out on there that it's hard to know what's worth searching for. I'd heard alot about 30 Flights, but never actually seen much of it, so this was great :D

Thanks for this Patrick! I might finally get around to buying Thirty Floors! Heard it was good, but never got it because I thought it was just a Minecraft clone or something.

This is great, Patrick! Hope you do plenty more videos like this! :)

Okay, am going to check out 30 flights of Loving.

Same here! Shame it took this long to get around to it.

Awesome sound production in that first game! I might have to check it out.

Alright, I think I'm sold on 30 Flights. Had to stop halfway through to not spoil it for myself.

I enjoyed Thirty Flights of Loving, but it was too expensive for what it offered. If you're making five minute games, they should be priced accordingly.

The trouble with 30 Flights of Loving is that there's very little to get out of playing it that you can't experience just as well from watching a video. You basically push W for 10 minutes and experience all the content.

I thought 30 Flights of Loving was an okay Quake mod demo. It had some style, but that's it really. It should have been free. I think it's okay to make games that mostly appeal to people within the gaming industry, and having once been in it, I can appreciate it. But I didn't find much interesting in the game.

Circuits seems like the toddler toy where you put the shaped blocks through the shaped holes, except for sounds/music...

No one cares about Flotilla but me.

I was like #13 in the world a few weeks after release. Maybe overall too slow of a game, but I enjoyed my time with it.

idk how I never heard of thirty flights of loving but I'm glad I saw it here, Thanks Patrick!

bought Thirty Flights of Loving cuz i saw this, it really looks interesting and different

I keep forgetting to play Thirty Flights of Loving. I was told it's pretty short, so well worth a quick play through. Ahh, I'll get around to it eventually...

^This.

I think it's a clear misnomer to talk about it as a game when it's lacking any degree of system or consequence. Same deal with Dear Esther. Certainly they're virtual experiences made using game engine technology, but they could both just as easily be short films and nothing would really be lost in translation given the very paucity of player agency, and interactivity in both (the very thing that makes gaming as a medium unique ).

I'm all for experimentation, but in truth I think there's a lot more legroom and creativity at work with a title such as Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard computer, where in they're not only challenging the spatial nature of games and taking their leads from Theatrical design Vs Film, but also really pushing the user relationship with narrative in some quite unique and unexpected directions and genuinely leveraging the richness of interactivity.

Thirty Flights is a bizarre and wonderful time.

I love almost every game concept and half-decent game. But when it was over i thought their was a error and i must have skipped a huge chunk or something. Nope. If it was a chapter, and bundled with more chapters i could see it's potential. But to me this was a big let down. But i'm glad others enjoyed it, and i didn't pay too much for it.

Patrick sure is enthusiastic about Thirty Flights

I think it has some things that are neat about it, but at the end of the day, it's hard for me to ignore that it's so rough around the edges. I mean, yes, it does communicate things without the characters speaking... but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have been more interesting with some actual dialogue.

@kadayi: I'll give you that you can experience most of what these games are by watching someone else play them, but there is something to participating in driving things forward. In TFOL's case, the jump cuts bring a specific sensation with them that doesn't translate if you're just watching a video of it. Not saying it's the most revelatory thing, but not grounds to deny it status as a game either.

Where I think we can agree is that Kentucky Route Zero is pretty incredible though, and fleshes out some of these ideas in a more robust, longform way.

Just as telephone directory may be considered a book, I think it's fair to say we can discount it from being considered a novel. Sometimes a degree of specificity isn't a bad thing, and I just don't find TFOL passes muster in that regard.

@kadayi: I hear you, but I think we have a very limited taxonomy for games, where something is either a game or it's not, and if it's not a game, then what is it? This is often a difficult question to answer and the denial of "game" status is used as a means to exclusion, sentencing so-deemed not-games to fend for themselves outside the walled garden. I'd rather just include things in "games" as they claim to be so.

I think there's room for differing opinions on whether something is a game or not (much like the myriad opinions on something's status as "art"), so long as these games on the fringes are still invited to the table to allow players to decide for themselves.

Computer games is a subset of interactive media. I can recognise TFOL and Dear Esther as the latter, it's just the former category where I think they fall foul due to lack of challenge/fail states or meaningful uniqueness of player experience. For me personally one of the defining aspects of a game as interactive media is the water cooler talk of 'this is how I approached things' Vs others who have also played it and with both TFOL & Dear Esther that gets replaced with 'this is what I think it was about'. It goes from being experiential to interpretative. Now that's not to say that games can't have elements of the latter (Kentucky Route Zero again) but I think it's essential for the experience to contain the former as well (and preferably in abundance), and I'm not sure there's a strong enough argument for that with either of those titles when all is said and done. As to what they are if not games? Virtual fiction springs to mind.

To quote Douglas Adams: -

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

It's a fanciful idea that opinions are a democracy.

@kadayi: If designers want to start calling what they make "virtual fiction" then I'm all for it, but I feel like that's their decision to make. As is, there's a semantic powerplay at work that places the makers of "virtual fiction" at a distinct disadvantage to things that are called games when it comes to audience recognition and cultural status. It's hard to ignore the out-of-sight-out-of-mind sentiment embedded in the denial of something like TFOL to be called a game.

Maybe we're not going to come to a consensus on this, but I've been thinking a lot about these classifications after seeing Charles Pratt's lecture on Formalism in games (not just video games). He makes the claim that goals don't come out of games, but that they're an expression of player motivation within a structure that sometimes aligns with the prescribed goals a game directs players towards. In essence, games are acts of play (my interpretation).

Not sure where I'm going with this, except that I want these weird not-games around and to be part of the cultural conversation about games, and that calling them "games" is an important part of that.

That the descriptive wheel is presently broken is a poor excuse for not fixing it.

Also how about presenting a cogent argument for why TFOL or Dear Esther should be considered games? I laid out my thoughts on the matter where as you've so far presented nothing substantive with regards to the case (your uncomfortableness is beside the point). Also this the idea that the definition belongs to the author is an amusing one. Tracy Emin could shit in a notebook and submit it to Harper Collins as her first novel, but I doubt they or anyone else would view it as such. It's all very well to posit a rule, but it needs to hold up to universal scrutiny.