Deirdra Kiai is an adventure game developer, mostly working in the Wintermute engine, who has created a series of games that explore the functional space of the game in interesting ways. I'm not at all sure that's her intention, actually; my impression
Ulillillia is now an honorary video reviewer. This guy has a beautiful, thorough mind. This is just a part of a complete, and I mean complete exploration of Ultima III. Pay close attention to his use of syntax, it will shed insight into the very
If you took a trading card game (TCG) like Magic: The Gathering, added some board wargame mechanics, and threw in an online player-matching server, you'd have something very much like SpiritWars. As in Magic, you have a 'hand' of spells you can cast,
My Life With Master is as seminal a work in the history of tabletop role-playing games as Frankenstein was for literature. It's a game designed around not a narrative, but a dramatic scenario that you act out, producing your own unique narrative. From a
Tempo is a third-person adventure game where you play a psychic in a wheelchair. Coming fresh out of España, the work of Cristian Pastor, who collaborated with Pat and Jesus and Alex, Tempo is one of the most technically furbished freeware
Realizing I'm actually going to blog this, my immediate thought is: "I am such a geek." I've recently been reading Harry Turtledove's Timeline 191 series -- a set of alternate history novels that posit that the Union did not capture a copy of
Reiner Knizia is a boardgame god. While the German-born designer has lived in England for many years, he comes from a culture that reveres the form far more than we do in this country; in Germany, as in much of Europe, playing tabletop games remains a
Hacker Evolution is, ahem, an evolution of Exosyphen's previous hacking games, of which they've developed several over the years. This is a good thing, as the current game is intelligently thought through and polished, and the puzzles cleverly designed
Student Showcase Winner, 2007 Independent Games Festival In Opera Slinger, you sing opera--into a microphone. It's a quasi-beat matching game, but your score depends on hitting the right notes as well as singing them at the right times; before you play,
Eternal Daughter is the game I would have made when I was 18 if I were Derek Yu. It's Metroidvania with poetry - much like Know, a student project of mine that did not come to fruition because, basically, the programmers wanted to code the whole thing
2003 Independent Games Festival Finalist Here's how a typical game works: You spend 20 hours or more pounding through a series of pre-planned linear obstacles, very often hurling your controller across the room or banging on your desk in frustration as
Empyreal Nocture is a surrealistic blend of a 3D Gradius and Shadow Of The Collosus. It's the student project of just two guys, up in the IGF Student Showcase, and shows both considerably unique aesthetic as well as keen innovation. You control an arrow
Cost Of Life is one of the best political web games released in 2006, right up there with The McGame and the comic genuis of Airport Security. Unlike most games with a political message, like September 12th, or 3rd World Farmer, CoL has a strategy that
5 Days a Stranger is the first in a series of freeware, horror adventure games created by Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw. If that name sounds familiar to you, it probably is; he recently achieved internet-stardom via his wildly popular series of Zero Punctuation
Lost in the Static is visually striking game, quite unlike anything you've seen before. As you can immediately understand from the screenshot. Right? Well, no, you can't. Let's try again. Lost in the Static is a conventional, short, enjoyable platformer
Rabbi Stone has a crisis of faith. When was the last time you heard a game described in remotely similar terms? Shivah is the Jewish mourning ritual. For a week after a family member's death, the family stays at home, receiving visitors, and mourning the
Largely a remake of the much-loved Amiga game Defender of the Crown (later released for just about every platform available in the late 80s, including the NES), Heroes Live Forever updates the game with better graphics, fully digitized music, and a new
In Against All Odds, you play a citizen of a repressive country who is (in the first of twelve acts) detained by the police and forced to flee. The first four deal with escaping from your country, the next four with trying to establish refugee status in
When you see the timer come on at thirty seconds, instead of the square minute the original gave to escape the doomed space colony, you know you aren't in fucking Kansas anymore. Then you touch down on Zebes, and you're not even in Oz. You're in a crazy,
It is 1928, the kulaks are starving by the millions, and the collectivization of agriculture is proving to be a disaster. Careworn by his awesome responsibilities, our beloved leader, Comrade Stalin, wishes to have a pleasant evening with the other
I'm back from Game Focus Germany, the second such event, held in Hanover on Thursday and Friday of last week. Approximately half the events were auf Deutsch and half in English; since, as a board wargamer, my German is pretty much limited to
You gotta pledge to Messhof, the man drops games like they're blog posts. You Found The Grappling Hook is so retro, yet so crisp, a re-imagining of the old grapple-hook mechanic done with post-modern irony. You're a little horned dude running around a
Irish designer Gareth Hanrahan has written many roleplaying game supplements, including a few for Mongoose Publishing's licensed Conan RPG. Doubtless that had nothing to do with his short free RPG Poking the Emperor, subtitled "A Game of Courtly
I haven't played Rendition to the end, and I don't plan to. I suspect most people reading this won't want to either. Rendition is a short interactive fiction about torturing a terror suspect for information. It is both banal and distasteful. The piece
First published in 1959 by Games Research, and continuously in print since then--now in a handsome edition from the Avalon Hill division of the Wizards of the Coast division of Hasbro--Diplomacy is both a superb game worth experiencing today, and a
Chronic Logic has developed a reputation as one of the best "indie" developers in the field--among other things, they created Bridge Construction Set and Gish. In Kingdom Elemental, they return with a very different game: a tense, nicely
Dwarf Fortress is an amazing game. I mean "amazing" at the level of Sim City and Civilization, as amazing to encounter today as they were when first released. I'm not sure I can offer higher praise. And yet--it is also frustratingly difficult
Jadan says: Howdy! This is a little self-serving, but as a long-time gamer who thinks that Euphrat & Tigris (or Tigris & Euphrates in its English form) is one of the best games ever made I figured that I would be remiss in not pointing
What's the best way to express one's angsty, teenage feelings these days? Many would pick up a guitar and write a pop song. Others might set about writing a self-indulgent autobiographical novel. This Singaporean lad bared his soul to the world by making
I'm of two minds about posting this game -- because in some ways it's utterly brilliant, and in some ways it utterly sucks. The site is supposed to be pointing you to "the good stuff," and it's hard to characterize this game as that, exactly;
The Chinese Room is a little like Norman Juster's Phantom Tollbooth in interactive form. Taking place entirely in the realm of philosophical thought experiment, The Chinese Room tackles questions about the nature of perception, the foundations of ethical
Well, I wanted to review Ian Bogost's new game Fatworld today, as it was just launched, but as it happens it runs like molasses on my 1.5GHz machine, so this will have to be more of a "first impressions" post, perhaps with a more in-depth
The Zork games are seminal influences on many games to follow, and are the examplars par excellence of the heydey of the text adventure. Purely text in nature, they cast doubt on the very term "video game" -- nothing "video" about
The proximate cause for this rant is one of the few sessions I attended at GDC, run by N'gai Croal, about game journalism. I won't discuss the session (which was moderately interesting), but instead the conflation by the panelists, from sources as
2004 IGF Independent Game of the Year Winner 2004 IGF Winner, Innovation in Game Design Game Tunnel's 2005 Independent Game of the Year Oasis is, at its core, a highly original casual game--but with strong crossover appeal to strategy gamers. In some
Passage is a special kind of game made by an unusual kind of game developer. Jason Rohrer lives with his wife and child in a cabin in upstate New York. This cabin is specially insulated to maintain heat during the winter; it has means of collecting
You can download the demo of Defcon, for Mac, Linux or Windows, and play a limited version of the game for free. You should do that now. What you'll get is a deep strategy experience coupled with a harrowing example of the artistic power of games: the
Like Toribash and Rag Doll Kung Fu, Triachnid is based on ragdoll physics -- that is, the character you control is a jointed model that behaves according to the rules of physics. In Triachnid, you move your three-legged character by picking up its feet
A long time ago, a great war was fought between a few units composed of three to five individuals. Some of these individuals were dragons, liches, vampires, Dragoons, and level 23 Paladins. If the rebel soldiers fought enemies weaker than them, they
Chivalry is Not Dead is a short indie graphic adventure with fairly entertaining dialog and cartoony graphics; you play Phlegmwad, the assassin of Lord Horrible, sent to kill the Queen of Everything. When I say "short," there are only about 8
An Act of Murder is a classic country-house mystery: an isolated estate, a small group of suspects, a limited amount of time to solve the crime. The country-house mystery premise has been done numerous times in interactive fiction: consider Infocom's
Audiosurf is nominated in three categories for this year's Independent Game Festival Awards; grand prize, audio, and technology. It's an interesting combination of a music visualizer and a match-three game, with elements of a racer. When you start a
Some years ago, at Fastaval in Århus, Denmark, I had one of the most splendid, if brief, roleplaying experiences in my life, in a mixed company of Danes, Swedes, and Finns, who partially in my honor and partially because English was the only