In a shocking turn of events, Terry Cavanagh has announced that the upcoming sequel to VVVVVV will not be called VVVVVVV as originally thought.

Rather, ever the ironist, Cavanagh has decided to go with a more literal name, XV, perhaps as a way of quieting those who felt the original game was not worth the 15 clams it was asking for.

The new game is not an RPG about upgrading your arms or legs independently, as was originally suggested, but rather a game about upgrading your head indie-pendently — to level up your mental abilities from that of a baby to one that is able to synthesize meanings from bouncing, abstract objects, and to find the clever links between the level titles and the levels themselves.

PIGscene spies have, through dubious means, obtained a private build of the game, which we’ve decided to upload. So without further ado, the exclusive PIGScene demo of XV after the “jump”!
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You are the player. The island is indie games. You must escape the island.

“If you were to be stuck on a desert island, what items would you take with you?”

It is a question that has festered in the minds of fools for ages; a parlor game of sorts — but one that holds a mirror to reality, and reveals the jagged edges of the human condition.

Where We Remain, is Twofold Secret’s retelling of that story, though twice removed from the realm of the real via the lens of both Video Games, and Art. It is a story of a young lad stuck on a desert island, searching for “the prettiest girl’s name you know,” as the game puts it. Presented with a text entry field for you to type such a name into, and with well practiced accuracy, you type in “Derek Yu,” as you have done so many times into Facebook’s search bar. And then the mirror is turned — the game is afoot — and reality’s pixellated edges come into focus.

Nearly 30 years after John Carmack invented the independent games scene with his seminal, but largely overlooked indie game, Doom, we, the new blood, the tenants of the Yu-coined “New Wave” of independent gaming, are able to look into the rear view mirror that is Indie Games and see progress that is much smaller than it appears.

For the mainstream, it has been a decade of growth, with many game developers casting away the training wheels of their Game Makers and Multimedia Fusions, and adopting a platform that appeals to a much wider audience of babies, the Nintendo Wii. Mainstream gaming took its first steps as a more adult form of storytelling with the heart-rending death of the the protagonist’s love interest, and one of video game culture’s most endearing female characters, halfway through Japan’s influential game, Cave Story. But what of indie games?

The gameplay of Where We Remain is simple — move your character around a procedurally generated island, avoiding a malevolent whirlwind whose sole purpose is to find you. Sanctuary can be found within the many caves that pockmark the island’s face, though safety from the storm, you soon learn, may be the lesser of two evils.

On this island of independent games, we are trapped.

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Philosopher George Santayana once wrote “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” The indie gaming scene proves, however, that those who remember history can repeat it most often and quite faithfully as well. Indie games in the past few years have grown at such a magnitude that the only way to accurately and fairly collect data on current trends is as such: a randomized 5×5 board, each with a common aspect of indie gaming.

While such a system has existed in the past, with many insights into the very cogs of that war machine we call indie gaming, I felt it would take a truly notable piece of software to awaken the bingo from its slumber. I didn’t have to wait long as Terry Cavanagh stepped up to the plate with the phonetically challenged VVVVVV. One look at it and you might get the impression that you’ve traveled back to the golden age of 1985, but VVVVVV quickly sets itself apart from games of yesteryear through its employment of chiptune music, constrained screen scrolling, brutal difficulty and a lack of any form of depth or ingenuity. VVVVVV is not so dissimilar to finding your old photo book, glancing through the pictures and reminiscing, then burying it for another 20 years. It’s a nostalgic experience, but sometimes you have to look at the same photo around 300 times before continuing to the next one, which has been flipped upside down and is rapidly changing colors. Then someone charges you fifteen dollars.

Overwrought metaphors aside, there’s almost something despicable about this game; the way it carefully emulates retro classics while inserting a gimmick presenting itself as new and innovative. The method in which it employs the most unnecessary and shallow “metroid-like” free-roaming environment in recent memory, seemingly just because it wasn’t indie enough already. Every screen, room title and spike pit reeks of indie, and yet at its heart it is merely a foul construct; an imitation. When historians look back to pinpoint the death of the independent spirit, coldly calculating machinations like VVVVVV will be the ones fingered.

But enough talk, let’s play Indie Gaming Bingo.

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The democratic process. The very process that crowned George Bush Jr. the lord of the apes, perched high atop a throne of mis-punched butterfly ballots, gently scratching his simian buttocks with the very finger he used to march a million babies to war. It is said that an infinite number of apes could inevitably type out the entirety of Macbeth. The IGF Judging Committee came up with something just as inane with just 150.

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The Festival is particularly keen to give constructive, written feedback to Main Competition entrants — even if they did not place as a finalist. As a result, over 1500 written, anonymized judge comments will be passed along to entrants in the next few days, an important part of deriving value and takeaway from entering the IGF.

“Sadly I think this game suffers from being just another puzzle platformer, which basically hurts every game that isn’t Braid.”

- IGF judge feedback regarding Verge.

2010, the year that our newborns slide from birth canal to snug monogrammed jumpsuit. The crushing emptiness of space has been hugged into submission by the interstellar arms of man. Your own private mindgarden IGF champions won the prize with the stupid name, and technology has rendered sex obsolete.

However, artistic revolutionary Fiona, if indeed this non-cyrillic pseudonym can be considered valid, has a drastically different vision of the utopian future of the 80’s that we find ourselves in. The entire game is based on a maddening and infuriating falsehood. In Scavenger, the universe has been torn apart by Space-Capitalism. It was the innate nature of man to subvert the laws of Space Eden. Slowly, over the years, a once lush field filled with the endless majesty of the universe gave way to the detritus of the Space Man, which he now wallows in, filthy, the smell of stale recycled Space Urine on his breath, unable to break the cycle. Addicted. Addicted to that which is inherent. Addicted to his own greed.

Politically motivated lies, though they make for a great gamepiece.

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Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

• Excite Bike
• Metal Gear Solid
• Codename: Gordon
• N+
• Myst

IGF: Rewarding innovation in independent games.

The evil that lurks in the hearts of men is exposed via the looking glass of Art Gaming

Theatre.

Before the turn of the century, it stood alone as the only artistically credible medium — its playwrights the Jason Rohrers of that dark, pre-digital age — its players the carriers of a great weight of prestige, rather than merely a great weight.

Yet decades later, the creation of the automobile, the invention of AIDs, and a bevy of man’s other great achievements and modern conveniences have strangled theatre. Times change, and so shifteth the topography of the artscape. What could once only be appreciated by the critic has come to be appreciated only by the pimple faced high school drama student — a pitiful creature whose social nakedness is covered only by a beaten, gray Les Misérables sweater; whose first and only kiss came at the end of Act 2 of Batboy, a play in which he played the titular role.

Where Shakespearean wit and subtle sexual puns once filled modern high school auditoriums with awkward silence, the mechanics of Increpare’s Theatrics achieve the same for the auditorium of the mind.

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Love — oft cited, never attained. A theoretical phenomenon, never directly observed by a single indie game designer — though often scrutinized and conjectured towards. Love — the quantum physics of the art world — that which will never be understood by the very obese chimps who are most vocal about it.

It is that which drives man to commit unspeakable acts — to forgo the metaphorical treasure chests of life for the the base, animalistic pleasures of a girl’s tender touch.

Yet never has the theme been so misrepresented in Art as in Andrew Brophy and Andy Wolff’s latest gamepiece, SEWERS, a game that, in keeping with its namesake, conveys little more than human excrement, travelling endlessly through the tired pipelines of the minimalistic 2D platformer, eventually dumping its ineffectual payload into a sea of shit, where it will continue to fester until it is consumed by the primitive, single celled ghouls that lurk a million fathoms beneath the intellectual stratosphere inhabited by pondscum.

In a word, it’s shit.
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