Exhibition: "Vida Interior" at Intermediae

Handle With Care (or should I say, "Cuidado, Frágil"?) is part of a super-way-cool-gee-whiz "alt games" exhibition (if we start calling ourselves "alt games" instead, will that bypass all the pointless debate about our label? Probably not...) called "Vida Interior" (Inner Life) at Intermediae in Madrid, Spain, alongside cool indie game devs like Dan Pinchbeck, Stephen Lavelle, the people behind Windosill and Osmos... Hurray! We're important and relevant, see? We're in a museum!

So if you happen to be in the area, go there and see it. I think there's gonna be a DJ and free booze too; or is my Spanish really that rusty? Anyway, sounds like a good time to me.

There's also some cool interviews with all the artists in the exhibition program (PDF), so check that out. (Though I'm a little disappointed by how content-less Stephen Lavelle's answers were, but I guess a lady's got to have her secrets.)

GeoComp2: Sparth, by Nunuk

GeoComp2, put on by Nicolas "sparth" Bouvier: the purest manifestation of modernist architecture ever achieved in video games. No shaders, no normal maps, no photorealism. Just color, form and light -- sculpture. You want to understand how FPS levels work? Curious as to how artists achieved beauty without 100's of normal-mapped pipe models to clutter a level? Then look at these. Study them. Love them.

(PlanetQuake, or perhaps Gamespy, in a breathtaking display of stupidity, has deleted all its hosted sites -- including the original GeoComp2 pages. This is my attempt at ensuring these masterpieces aren't forgotten.)

Sparth, by Nunuk / "Sparth", was made before GeoComp2 I believe, but it still shares many similarities with Bengal's "Minima" -- it is an arena floater that eschews Quake 3's space gothic aesthetic in favor of an abstract style with bold colors and shapes.

GeoComp2: Minima, by Bengal

GeoComp2, put on by Nicolas "sparth" Bouvier: the purest manifestation of modernist architecture ever achieved in video games. No shaders, no normal maps, no photorealism. Just color, form and light -- sculpture. You want to understand how FPS levels work? Curious as to how artists achieved beauty without 100's of normal-mapped pipe models to clutter a level? Then look at these. Study them. Love them.

(PlanetQuake, or perhaps Gamespy, in a breathtaking display of stupidity, has deleted all its hosted sites -- including the original GeoComp2 pages. This is my attempt at ensuring these masterpieces aren't forgotten.)

Minima, by Bengal, was the overall winner of the GeoComp2 competition. (EDIT -- 3 May 2015: in the wake of FilePlanet's closure, I'm archiving a downloadable copy of the map .PK3 here / mirror2 ) (EDIT, 9 June 2017, fixed Dropbox link)

A Decision of Wasted Opportunity

Via Play This Thing comes "A Decision of Paramount Importance" by Thomas Lui. (WARNING: Some spoilers await, take 5 minutes to play it first...)

Patrick Dugan at Play This Thing already sums up some of the better features of the game -- it plays on a cool adventure game trope, the timer adds a nice touch of urgency and the art style / choice of middleware was smart. The primary weakness is how much of a binary it is, and how unrealistic the game is -- presumably the real-life situation would be much grayer than "oh my god what are all these beer cans and drugs doing here."

However, where I think this game really goes wrong is the player character.

Interview with Game Developer Magazine

http://gamedeveloper.texterity.com/gamedeveloper/20100607?pg=55#pg55

Where I complain about the Source Engine / defend the Source Engine against its critics / talk about why playing outside is awesome and important for video game designers to do.

The "Family Dinner" game I cite in the interview isn't really fun at all. You can only play it once before everyone gets pretty pissed off about it. The funny thing is that everyone's really excited and happy at first because it sounds fun when you're explaining it. (Also, I wish I could take credit for it, but really it was a stellar final project from the first semester's students.)

I am a frontiersman.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/alt-mod-scene-article

As much as I love / fiendishly crave attention and praise, I still feel weird about being placed in some sort of "movement" or "scene" and having people tell me my work is significant; when I look at my mods, all I see are flaws and weaknesses that I hope people don't notice. I guess that's a good thing?

Part of it is, I think, that I'm afraid people are getting tired of what me and Dan Pinchbeck have to say. (We're almost always paired up in these kinds of features.) Part of me is also afraid that we genuinely don't have much to say, that we're broken records who are already irrelevant and too stupid to see it.

Part of me also doesn't want to put my sexuality on a pedestal -- sometimes I feel like I'm exploiting that as my M.O. or something -- but then it's an important undercurrent in my mods, so I feel compelled to talk about it. As I say in the article, I definitely don't aim to preach, "hey start being nice to gay people" because that's boring and intellectually lazy.

So I've decided that after I finish Radiator Vol. 1... I think Volume 2 will be a hyper-violent trilogy with no mention of sexuality whatsoever. Kill people and then kill more people. Just to show that I can swing with the big boys.

Oh, and start being nice to gay people!!!11

Dear Valve, Please Fix Faceposer.

... Because it still crashes, even after the latest update. See this thread. Or this thread. Or this thread. Thank you.

Magnar Jenssen's "Mission Improbable 2"

The ever-so-lovely Mr. Magnar "insta" Jenssen has (quietly?) released the second episode of his Episode 2 mod, "Mission Improbable."

It's a little disconnected from the previous entry -- you escape from part 1 with a car, only to ditch it a minute into part 2 -- and the whole thing is infected with invisible-wall-itis because he was afraid you could turbo the car over the barricades or stack things to go where you can't (but there are so few physics props that aren't item crates, I'm not sure I see the point)... but I digress. It's otherwise really well-designed and entertaining.

If you're in the mood for some classic arcade-style Half-Life 2 adventures, this won't disappoint -- very focused enemy encounters, lots of cool setpieces, really polished visuals, well-tuned difficulty (though maybe a bit easy for some), and lovely cliffhanger for the next episode in what looks like a trilogy. Download it. (Disclaimer: I beta-tested this.)