3) Golf?

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When describing Golf? to someone, you always run the risk of sounding like a pretentious idiot. “Well,” you’ll say. “It’s like golf has been transported into a world of artistic freeform expression.” Eventually, you just have to make them play it. What actually happens when you play Golf? There’s the game of golf, of course. But in the LAN-only multiplayer, you all play at the same time, so you’ll mostly drive around in your caddy cars, on a landscape littered with architectural follies. The golf is just a vague reason to be there. There’s a lot of humor in the physics, and the developers have wisely restricted it to po-faced absurdity, rather than in-your-face craziness. The feeling of directionless is liberating - and exploring the playground of design is a pleasure.

2) Facade

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A genuine insight into the interactive future of gaming, Facade is a first-person drinks party simulation - in which you, as a guest, enter a New York apartment and attempt to either placate an arguing couple called Trip and Grace, or drive them further apart. Depending on the way you tap conversation into the parser by the end of the 10 minute game one might have broken down and admitted an affair, or they may have temporarily reconciled. Or, more likely, they may have thrown you out for calling Grace a slut or picking up an object from the mantelpiece and slowly walking in circles chanting obscenities. The amount of phrases recognised, or at least the illusion of it, is remarkable, while the human emotion that seeps from the game remains unheard of in commercial games. Facade’s two developers are working on a game called The Party - where you host a party of seducable neighbours, angry bosses and bitter exs and can misbehave Desperate Housewife-style - which could be a milestone in gaming.

1) Cave Story

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Moore’s Law said two things. Firstly, that computers will get smaller and cleverer until we’re inhaling whole clouds of super-intelligent nanobots. Secondly, that 2D platformers will fall out of fashion in such a dramatic way as to almost wipe them from the face of commercial gaming forever. Who’d have thought that the final resting place of the platformer would be on our least powerful platforms (handhelds) and our most powerful platforms (our beloved PCs)? Not only that, but who’d have foreseen that one of the best 2D platform adventures ever made would be a PC exclusive? And that it’d be stark raving free?

Consider how finely in tune Cave Story is with the greats of the genre - your Metroids and your Marios - and you realise that this could easily have been a forgotten classic of the 8-bit era. A cast of characters ranging from the cutesy rabbit-like Mimiga tribe to the entertainingly nefarious antagonists, a chip music soundtrack that infuses the entire game experience with unique retro flavour: you can analyse any component of Cave Story and find intelligent game design down to its very core. The quality doesn’t relent either, taking you through hours of adventures and rewarding you every step of the way, be that through weapon upgrades and story progression, or simply by introducing you to a sassy malfunctioning factory robot. The whole game’s been meticulously translated from the original Japanese too, so the story arrives unscathed and, as far as we can tell, just as beautifully written as the original. Cave Story isn’t just our favourite freeware game; it rates highly compared to any full-price release. This is where classic platforming has been hiding for the past four years, right here on the PC. The phrase ‘you get what you pay for’ couldn’t be more untrue.

Jun 6, 2008