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Wednesday 30 May 2012

Getting to Grips With the Games of Dr. Foddy



I first heard of Bennett Foddy's game QWOP via a 'demotivational' poster posted on one of the many meme sites I incessantly stared at while writing my dissertation last summer. The image displayed a picture of Modor with a strangely primitive rendition of a man falling backwards in a running position; the lower text read 'One does not simply QWOP into Modor'. After chuckling in a confused and self-conscious way I quickly typed the word 'QWOP' into Google, hoping for a simple answer to my apparent internet illiteracy. I then spent the rest of the day struggling to play QWOP, a game in which the player has the apparently difficult task of making a man run 100 metres.

In many ways QWOP is simply a funny game in which the basic faculty of running - possibly the most popular and simple modes of transport either in life or represented in computer games - becomes a task of immense difficulty. The ridiculousness of the actions on the part of the game's runner as the player tries to negotiate the utterly different controls generally results in either fits of hilarity or bewildered frustration, or both. Whereas pressing a directional arrow had sufficed throughout gaming's history, QWOP forces the player to reacquaint themselves with the human body as a means of propulsion. The Q and W keys are assigned to the character's thighs while O and P are the calf muscles. Pressing these keys causes the character to move each muscle and, hopefully, the body forwards. Whether this occurs in stiff spasmodic jolts or smooth strides is really down to the player's familiarity with the control scheme and seeing as it's a scheme which belies all our collective knowledge of 'how games work'  it generally requires a great deal of practice.

Friday 18 May 2012

Game of the Week: Time Gentlemen, Please!



The history of comical pastiche is one of varying success. Family Guy's parody of Star Wars succeed only in being the most turgidly boring thing ever created by human minds while films such as The Princess Bride and Chinatown showed that, done properly and with some intelligence, pastiche  can be as good as those which they lampoon and pay tribute. Spaceballs fits somewhere in the middle I guess.
                            
This week's game, Time Gentlemen, Please!, developed by Size Five (formally Zombie Cow) Games, who were responsible for Time Gentlemen's freeware predecessor Ben There, Dan That, possibly sits a bit higher than Spaceballs on the scale of Family Guy (-20) to Chinatown (+ 2,000). Despite what I just wrote please don't be put off by my comparison to Spaceballs (the scale means nothing!), Time Gentlemen is a genuinely funny game which pays great homage to the classics of the point-and-click genre while also being a clever and deserving example of it.

Wednesday 16 May 2012

Freeware Love: PMQs


For some strange reason I've always enjoyed watching Prime Minister's Questions. There's something alluring about watching the leaders of your country act like the unadulterated school ground toffs that they are. It's almost like watching a parody of itself. So what better way to celebrate this strangely addictive spectator's sport than having a go yourself? PMQs, a game developed by Mark Richards alongside his blog Pixel Politics, allows for just that.

Sunday 13 May 2012

Game of the Week: Bioshock 2



Finding myself working far more than I'd ever reasonably want to I thought that a good way to make sure that I continued to write regularly was to make an easy and accessible way to discuss videogames (for myself that is). So I hope to suggest a 'game of the week'. This might be a game I'm currently playing or a game which I think is worth talking about - whether its surprisingly good or remarkably bad. Ultimately it allows me to indulge in a bit of creative bankruptcy and also lets me chat about games I like - win, win. 

Kicking off this week I want to look at a relatively recent, big budget game which kind of deserves a bit more credit than it received. It's Bioshock 2 of course! woop! Now the first game, Bioshock 1, is certainly more worthy of 'classic' status, despite the fact that its plays like a crayon drawing of System Shock 2, but I personally think that it's the sequel which has the better gameplay. It might lack the impact of setting which the first game had, and misses out on having truly insane characters such as Sander Cohen or Steinmen, but I think Bioshock 2 provided a much more convincing and exciting experience overall.