Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War. A misleading title at best, a poorly written account that is devoid of any intellectually stimulating thoughts regarding Art — focusing instead on the inanities of War. War, a concept as old as Art itself, yet so disparate that not even a book called The Art of War could bridge the two. War and Art, like two twins, separated at birth, never to learn of their biological link. That is, until two artists penned a figurative The War of Art, a work that seamlessly integrates two concepts, doing in one day what Sun-Tzu could not do in his entire lifetime. I speak, of course of cactus and Terry Cavanagh’s latest gamepiece, Xoldiers.

The game makes Passage look like an autistic child’s crayon scribbles.

Like Passage, Xoldiers metaphorically comments on life through the act of walking right. You play not as a single entity, but as a collective — a 3 x 3 grid of soldiers who are armed with guns, grenades, and the ability to lay down. You must travel rightward towards the palace, facing insurmountable opposition in the form of enemy tanks, jeeps, and buildings, but none more opposing than your own team, for you see, your unit works as a whole — if one soldier gets caught on an obstacle, your entire unit cannot progress further.

“Leave no man behind”.

If Passage comments on love by saying it will prevent you from collecting treasure boxes, Xoldiers comments on love (albiet a different, more homosexual kind of love), by saying “there is no place for love in the battlefield. Love for your brothers will only hinder you from fulfilling your mission.”

Now, I know homosexuality is a bit of a touchy subject (especially with artists), but I am not pulling out this homosexual thing from the ether. The troop’s commander says quite explicity that “War is a man’s game”. And when it comes to man games, two’s company, nine’s a crowd.

Xoldiers (Direct Link) by cactus and Terry Cavanagh, 1.62 MB

If man’s actions are his quill, and the world his papyrus, then the tale he has penned is a sorrowful story of deceit, greed, and callousness. One of the most active members of the Social Commentary Video Game Movement (SCVGM), JW, has released yet another game. This one, Lynchmob HD, a sordid glance over the shoulder at the civil rights movement, as we enter an enlightened age of a hip and happening world leader who can play basketball, and might even be able to dunk. A world with endless possibilities. A world which melts the societal boundaries between black and white; ground and sky; gay and not gay. However, I live not in the glorious empire of the USA, and so I feel no shame in proclaiming that I am white and not gay.

As with all great artists, JW knows his audience, and panders to them almost — but not quite — excessively. Independent gamers are exclusively white, middle class young men who want for nothing. Though such a detailed depiction could come off as snide, the player character depicted so richly with the high definition graphics alluded to in the title feels very real, and very genuine. The game looked stunning in full 1080p high-def — the individual pixels that made up the pixel-like characters of the game were almost indistinguishable.

The premise is simple: avoid being overtaken by the affluent and vulgar green and blue hued corners of society — the stagnant, algae infested waters of no-change as characterized by pre-Obama America. You are a single, white pixel — a pebble that will cause a ripple; which will cause a wave; and eventually, God-willing, a tsunami of change that will engulf all third world countries and drown them in the purifying waters of tolerance of the Afro-American race. But the fatcats will not have it — immutable — they wish only for your untimely end, and it will come at their hands. They form a great mass of bodies, wailing and gnashing their teeth, hungering for your death like some kind of ancient Roman bloodmonger. I literally shed a tear the first several times I played this game, knowing that through my W, A, S, and D keys I had connected with the spirit of so many young African Americans killed in this abhorrent manner prior to the civil rights movement. Fear and uncertainty in my eye, like an abused dog, I knew in those moments of primal instinct, survival driving every twitch of sinew, exactly how it must have been.

Lee Harvey Oswald tried to change the world with a single bullet, but his plight was in vain. Likewise, Lynchmob HD places in your hands, a rifle, and with that rifle, the ability to kill your oppressors by clicking on them. Yet this will not stop their advance — they are too heavy in number. They must be dealt with with Change. With Hope. With a mere nudge, your pebble wills the great stone of Hope into motion, creating a giant wave of destruction. No, not destruction, for such a word carries with it a negative connotation which cannot be associated to the Afro-American freedom fight. No. A giant wave of African American centric-intolerance destruction.

This isn’t so much a role playing game as it is an experience, a portal into the past. As we bring the handmirror to society’s face, we must be prepared to view its ugly wrinkles — and this period of racial intolerance was of the most unsightly variety — and face them unflinchingly. The face of our world is a beautiful face, but it is pockmarked with such unfortunate history.

The civil rights movement may have ultimately delivered the accutane, but the scars remain, and we must bravely face them if we are to survive in this new era, this great, bold era, where the world’s imaginary black friend can dunk.

Lynchmob HD (Direct Link) by JW, 1.01 MB

Imagine two overlapping circles. In the center of one circle, the word “Games”; in the center of the other, “Sexuality.” In the intersecting portion — the lemon-slice that exists between the realm of “Games” and “Sexuality”, the word “Art.”

The concept of sexuality is one rarely dealt with in the indie games community — a mysterious function which accepts an argument of type Effort and return void. To attempt to tackle such a broad and imposing concept would require not only a firm grasp on “Art,” and the ability to talk to a girl (one day, I swear it) but balls quite literally made of steel.

I have admired my distorted reflection in the cold, convex surface of Matias Kallio’s loins, a veritable hall of mirrors held within the groin of one man, and have looked a gay in the eyes — yet I have never seen such a brutal depiction of homosexuality as I’ve seen from this member of the NIGSource community. Yet the head upon which sits the Crown of Gay is not the head of Derek Yu — nay, the King of All Gays — the man who presides upon a throne made of another man’s naked flesh — is none other than Matias Kallio — he who possesses balls of steel and fists to match.

Yet his punches are not akin to the barbarism of our civilisation’s great fighters — Cassius Clay, Jack Johnson, Peter McNeeley — oh no, in fact they show little grandeur or fluidity, only an overly rehearsed combo, a powerful one-two, clearly drilled ad nauseum, a lifetime of work behind these two shots. The opening salvo? A threatening jab, not of bone and sinew coordinated in one glorious effort to dominate another being, but of art. Chased swiftly by the crushing animal force of a left cross (southpaw is the indie of pugilism) of intellect.

Matias Kallio’s ’seminal’ (heh) work — Queer Village, is equal parts Mondrian and Borat.

You play a nameless character, a tabula rasa upon which to project your own identity. You are you, and you are leaving the comfort of Queer Village with your brother in search of mehrehem. You lose your brother. You must find him.

You glide with ease past sexual boundaries, unconstrained by the Puritanical views on sexuality. The metropolitan lifestyle enveloping you during your childhood in Queer Village stripping away any modicum of decency and self awareness your pitious soul may have once held. Your insatiable sexual appetite — and primal lust for mehrehem — your sole inspiration in life. Your deadful queer existence more a sad inevitability than a series of choices. Your quest not an unfolding book, but one long written, and covered in the dust of prejudice.

You are a gay, and no more than you can blame a dog for its actions can you be blamed for yours. Mattias Kallio has spoken the words on the Guantamo of our tongues, that which haunted our minds yet we thought destined to captivity forever, now given voice, given soul. What words has he chosen to impress upon the carbon paper of society for all eternity?

Gays are people too, no different to you or I. Not.

Queer Village by Mattias Kallio, 2.4 MB

“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”

- Confuscius

Free will. Choice. The if-else statements that control the program flow that is the human existence — a program that ultimately ends with “return 0;” — a return to naught. To distill the sayings of a character in Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 4 — to boil it and extract the pure meaning of the dangerous poison of the Kojima Frog — one can become ten. Ten can become one hundred. But zero? A zero cannot become a one.

Bernie’s Treasure Hunter Man is a wonderful gamepiece in the Octacamo-ian guise of a petty game about treasure hunter. The main character, Marvin, or shall I say, MArviN (Note the capitalized letters for they reveal my gambit), must embark on a journey of a thousand miles — or at least, a couple thousand kilobytes — a journey full of peril, adventure, and above all, treasures. The role of treasure in this game plays the same role as it does in Passage (an oft cited game in academic gamepiece circles) — mere distractions from our inevitable returning of 0.

Treasure Hunter Man starts with the birth of MArviN — his descent from the heavens and crash landing on an alien world — Port Kruz. Here he is given a binary choice, two roads diverging in a yellow wood; the leftward path — a path off a cliff; and a rightward path; the path of progress.

I’ll not beat around the bush; I am a thinker; an iconoclast; I oppose the flow of the mainstream and choose to swim upriver to its source — the origin of meaning — the spring of the free thought. As such, I made a choice that reflected my attitudes — a destructive choice, to be sure — one that lead me off the ledge of reason and into the chasm of the unknown.

I went left.

The screen did not scroll — there was no hidden room at the foot of that pit, just the absense of level data — NULL, personified.

But the Game was not Over.

I continued to fall. Surely such an obvious folly could not have simply been an oversight on Bernie’s part. No. This was purposeful. There was intent behind this action. I sat in wait, staring at the screen, for a minute, then for ten minutes (I did not have the patience, nor stamina, to wait 100 minutes, sadly), waiting for a glint of change, but there was none. Two roads diverged in the a yellow wood (the wood flooring of the first level, is in fact, brown) — and I chose the one less travelled. And contrary to Frost’s depiction of this scenario, it did not make a difference in the world — the world continued — unchanged — unmoved. It did not even bat its metaphorical eye.

Now you are probably clamoring “How dare you write dismiss an entire game on behalf of a single bug?”

Bug? There are no “Bugs”, in life. The “Bugs” that inhabit your garden, for example, are not some oversight by our Holy Programmer — they are intentional and integral to the program of Life (not to be mistaken with the famous Game of Life, which is a shoddy portrayal at best). This gamepiece is a statement on choice, the permanence of human folly. There is no Game Over; no Continue. You cannot Save nor Load. The journey of life starts with a single step, but know this — the wrong first step will cut your journey quite short indeed!

Treasure Hunter Man (Direct Link) by Bernie, 4 MB

“Let’s do this.” - Super Joe

Super Joe:

“Let’s do this.” - Super Joe

Phil Fish:

Who am I talking to?

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December 16th. The unsung hero of the Gregorian calendar.

• 1653 - Oliver Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of the English Commonwealth.
• 1689 - The bill of rights is embodied in the English parliament.
• 1773 - The Boston Tea Party, ungrateful Americans waste a lot of tea, in defiance of their cultured masters and creators of civilisation.
• 2007 - Anonymous internet man BenW gives birth to a video game, to little fanfare.

Lamentable is the fate of the pauper. Languishing in obscurity, a fate pre-ordained and hand-picked from inception. As inseparable and integral to his being as the very genes which define him. It is through art we find a voice, and through our voice that we are heard. On December 16th, 2007, BenW requested an audience.

On this day, it is my pleasure to say: request accepted.

In Chain Reaction, you either are, or you control (according to your religious beliefs) a coloured square, occupying space on a tapestry of other coloured squares that endlessly scroll left. The squares that meet with the edge of the screen are detonated, and any squares touching them are also detonated. Hence the name. To complicate this task of “moving right”, occasionally a red square will scroll from the right. Needless to say, contact with the red squares, or contact with detonating squares, ceases your existence.

Ostensibly, you may say “I’ve walked right before. Passage is a bad game”. You’d be right, of course, but unlike Passage, this is art, not some child’s colouring book masquerading as a work of great profundity.

Our fate chases us, an unwelcome spectre haunting our every waking moment, our every sleeping dream. An invisible force pushing us onwards until we shamble from our realm of the living, into whichever nebulous afterlife you do or do not believe in. To fate, this is a mere playground activity, joyfully toying with our very existence, playing tag with all that we are, and moving inexorably towards the next victim.

A haunting melody backs your tango with the end, both the structured, internal ambience, and the unpredictable, external cacaphony, the sagas of life. Neither the most powerful man, nor the most pitiable wretch exert any sway over the omnipresent inevitability. Your time has been predetermined. Your fate carved in stone long before you existed, and shall exist long after you have departed. Not as a touching monument, but as a meaningless etching, a craggy edge amongst a sea of rough, igneous features.

For all your presence of self, your belief in your own free will, you are going to die. You know this. You know not when it is, but some great and mysterious force does. BenW has seen the face of death. He’s studied each remarkable feature of the iris, and lived to make a game about it.

Chain Reaction (Direct Link) by BenW, 8.52 MB

Hatman is, put simply, a great game. Unlike other titles, riding an endless wave of nostalgia fuelled by idiotic man children with no desire to grow up, Hatman feels like your first love, but it doesn’t make you feel awkward because it’s not 13 years old. Though clearly inspired by several other games, Hatman’s secret recipe has just enough proprietary noxious chemicals to differentiate it from the stampeding herd of NES games made in the Space Year 200X.

Using the ever popular Z and X keys, you guide Hatman through - as of now - 3 levels, each culminating in a boss fight. This is of course standard fare, and barely worth writing about. Hatman’s meat and potatoes comes from its central play mechanic, you attack enemies (crudely drawn, though they be) by throwing your hat at them, which you can control mid-flight. Hatman is, without question, no triumph of art. However, it is engineered with a calculated efficiency, a core beauty that is solely the result of programming.

You’ll not be moved to tears by its message, you’ll not be awed by its visage, and you’ll certainly not lose yourself in its rich sound. You will, however, be impressed by “it”. Its inner workings on display, a wondrous mechanical feat amongst the art on display in Indie Gaming’s Great Hall, clashing with its surroundings, mayhaps even ruining the aesthetic. Yet still deserving of its pedestal.

There’s no grand scheme in sight, not the slightest ethereal whiff of meaning, nor microscopic clue of message. Hatman stands bare in front of all who witness it, intellectually barren, yet intriguing and respectable on another level. Hatman attempts only to be engaging, fun, and solidly built, forsaking all other tenets of great culture, and yet, is that not a bold artistic statement in and of itself?

Hatman is a study in contradictions. The noble savage. The great intellectual slaving away at menial tasks, sweat pouring profusely from his forehead, tremendous effort exerted, not in the name of something he loves, but for the sake of remembering that feeling. What it is to be human.

Hatman (Direct Link) by Bibin, 2.66 MB
(Be sure to install the font that’s included in the zip!)

Ah yes — finally! A game whose play mechanics revolve around time. Time, that which heals all wounds, yet corrodes the cardboard of the brightly colored rectangular coffins that line up the Best Buy aisles — turning them into dust. Sony, Microsoft take note: Indie games aren’t sold in “boxes.” You cannot corrode an idea.

Hempuli’s Timerocketxby stars a character armed with a bazooka who must reach the goal in each level while avoiding contact with various men in suits. To do this, you must manipulate time, shoot rockets, and kill the men in suits. Now without imbuing my own meaning into the game, here’s a decoder ring by which to untangle the ideological knots that are presented in the game:

Men in Suits: Commercialization/Globalization/Microsoft
Protagonist: You (As in the royal “You”, as in all of you)
Bazooka: Game Maker 7.0 Pro.

You might say this game feels a bit like the indie game “Braid,” to which I might begin to retort but then simply stop, only to ask “Indie?”, pointing you towards Braid’s $180,000 budget, and then towards a small door. A green “Exit” sign overhead — flickering on and off – beckoning you to enter. You open the door and step through. You are greeted by Mario and Sonic on the other side.

Yes, whereas Braid presented time as a means to solve all problems, Timerocketxby presents a starkly non-apologetic view of time manipulation:

“Wouldn’t it be great?” says the old man, “If I could turn back time and feel young again?”
“Wouldn’t it be great?” says the newlywed, “If I could stay in this moment forever?”
“Wouldn’t it be great?” says the criminal, “If I could forgo my prison sentence?”

“No”, says Hempuli, “Time is useful for one thing, and for one thing only — to make platforms of us all.”

You see, time manipulation in Timerocketxby has one purpose — to turn everything in the game world into something upon which you can stand. Society was built on the shoulders of others — what if it had been built on the shoulders of other things like bullets, rain, and explosions? There would be no such thing as slavery. What a beautiful world that would be.

Timerocketxby (Direct Link) by Hempuli, 1.28 MB

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard the news that is shaking the independent community at its core. Our holy scripture; our veritable Indie Manifesto as it were, as writ by one of the greatest (if not the greatest) gamesmiths of our time. I speak, of course, of Daisuke Amaya (real name: Studio Pixel). His masterwork, Doukutsu Monogatari (Which when untangled from the shackles of the Nihongo tongue, translates roughly as Cave Story), is the single document that liberated our lost souls from the tyranny of consumerist culture. Cave Story is, for all intents and purposes, our Declaration of Indiependence; the inciting force behind our rejection of ’British East India Gameplay’ for statements of ‘Haughty Artistic Merit.’ Amaya, the benevolent host of our Nintendo Tea Party.

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Skip the first two minutes unless you a sucker. Lyrics and links after “the jump”.

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