Ghosty, by Shensetta, is about our fear of the unknown, our fear of death. Instructions of a most cryptic nature, like a riddle told quickly, sprawl upon the screen at a tortoise’s pace:

Your objective is to destroy the ghost and eyes that over populate the world.

Thus sprach Shensetta; and thusly it was received:

Man’s fear of mortality has driven scientific advances since time immemorial. It is a powerful force; we march inexorably towards our end, some at peace, some thrashing wildly, but regardless of our route or our manner during transport, our destination is the same. We all must die some time. We must all become the ghost, excreted from the anus of Mother Gaia, born of darkness, a rancorous disembodied ectoturd.

From the time the divine hand of our creator, John Carmack, plucked us from the primordial birth canal and stoutly slapped us on the buttocks, we have pondered the great philosophical questions: is morality relative or absolute? What is reality? Did Hitler have trouble winning arguments on account of literally being Hitler? What happens to us after death?

Both Eastern and Western mythology are rife with fearful tales of the vengeful undead, fueled by the unpleasant realities of death. In the traditionalist, Confucian West, the ancient folk classic Ghostbusters, whispered from the hills to the people, remains in the collective psyche. In the East, however, popular 80′s comedy movie Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio has put a jovial face on ghosts. Indeed, the Japanese have even subverted a traditional holiday, “Hallowe’en,” as depicted in the Indie Classic Obake, as an excuse for children to dress up in costumes. It is on this day that the Japanese folkmonster, the dreaded Gishase, a rotund (or kabana) man in blackface — the answer to the West’s Grim Reaper — wanders the countryside, excreting a tepid slime to break down the bodies of the living, turning them into cyclops-like piles of black goo.

As is popular in the movie industry, Shensetta has taken a jovial Eastern tale, and dragged it through the punishing labyrinth of Western video games. The once cherubic features giving way to throbbing, normal-mapped veins, an existential rage and an M-for-Mature vocabulary. The playful farm animal has become a minotaur, and the gears of war are turning.

German psychiatrist, Freud Mayweather Jr. once wrote of the distinction between the Eastern and Western views on death. Citing the Gishase, he proposed the so called “eight stages of death”:

1. Shooting ghosts (anger)
2. Bombing ghosts
3. Grinding
4. Exchanging bread for physical strength (bargaining)
5. Resuming hostilities with ghosts
6. Finding out you can hold down the bomb button to make it bigger
7. Walking off of platforms (denial)
8. Walking through ghosts because it takes too long to shoot them (acceptance)

Thus it is clear through both the game mechanics and the very literal use of 8 stages that Ghosty is a memoir of a person of Japanese descent, meticulously chronicled therein are his struggles with a distinctly Japanese death. That Japanese person is you. You are a Japanese. The harsh realities of life compound upon you this day, but you shall soon find sweet release.

You play out your rebellious streak. You strike back at death. You cackle in his bony face and call him names. It is all in vain. We all die. We are always thanked for playing. We all become the world’s fart; our existence fleeting, yet poignant. Putrid, yet distinctly human. The lingering ghost of past experiences escapes up a nostril for a last spiteful dalliance with the living. And then it passes.

Your objective is to destroy the ghost and eyes that over populate the world.

Destroy all eyes, yet ignore the ghost. For when there is nary an eye to see the ghost — we shall no longer fear death. Out of sight, out of mind.

Ghosty (Direct Link) by Shensetta

Mankind occupies a special place on this planet. When first he learned how to create tools, he wrested the Intercontinental Championship from the animal kingdom, but once he evolved and internalized language, the game was up. The King of the Jungle wilted under the double knee drop of art and science, and a World Champion in Perpetuity stood boldly. Each and every challenger has been felled. Some stay boldly standing, juking against the ropes, but even AIDS and cancer know that a late round stoppage awaits them. The apex predator stands alone, yet every dog has his day.

Jump, Copy, Paste, is about that fateful day.

In Hempuli‘s latest work, you are given the ability to copy and paste the environs, to mangle and mutilate creation into a twisted caricature of itself — a terrifying chimera of human endeavor and nature’s providence; at once the ground beneath our feet and the pit that sends us hurling off the mortal plane. Like a cake in Terry Cavanagh’s wake, or a young female pixel artist under Phil Fish’s employ; what once was will soon no longer be, and the chasm created by emptiness will be made twice deep by the space of what could have been.

Indeed, man’s awesome power is at once his savior and his undoing. The life of frivolity he has afforded himself is at odds with his primitive beginnings, yet his aching coccyx lays upon him an existential pain: the collective memory of a vestigial savagery. The 8-bit arpeggio sings its alluring siren song: leave behind your life of plenty and live the primitive way, you’ll be bereft of comfort but your race shall last forever and a day.

But he heeds not the call. Instead he continues to manipulate and manufacture the “perfect” environment, all the while the world’s hospitals, his shrines to immortality, breed the impassive, impenetrable, invisible, immutable opponent that shall one day wrest the title from his hands. Man has found safety in uniformity; replication. The structures of society allow it to thrive — and those societies’ fathers have laid down the code to copy and paste themselves into each successing generation. Yet Mother Nature, working on a scale of time incomprehensible to man, will find a way. She who made the very caves that would one day be filled with the songs of Mimigas. She who gave man disease, and allowed mankind to subvert it. It will be man’s cocksure unwillingness to do more than copy and paste from Mother Nature that will be his undoing, and thus, so too shall fall the independent gaming world.

Those practiced in the art criticism  will surely by now have noticed the parallel that I have drawn, but for those who have yet to ‘get it’: Arthur Lee, your days are numbered.

Jump, Copy, Paste (Direct Link) by Hempuli

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”!

This game requires Flash to play:

Controls:

Arrow keys: Movement
Z, C, or Space: Action

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.

No one on this island is your friend. Caves mean safety.

An island. A large landmass beset on all sides by deadly blue water — like Japan under Sakoku — a terrifying isolation remedied slightly by the provenance of Akira Toriyama and the invention of the Anime. It is a constantly shifting landscape — a procedurally generated labyrinth from which there are no absolutes. What is Art? What is Fun? Only the random number generator in the sky knows.

The player represents the plight of the everyman. He, who must appeal to “the prettiest girl’s name you know” — Derek Yu — by collecting purple flowers; the decaying remnants of the red flowers that first appeared in Cave Story, a gesture that can be seen both as a perversion of beauty, but more importantly, a comment on temporality. The same rotten flowers; flowers that time forgot. This is all Derek Yu desires.

Surely, it should be no alarm, therefore, that he suggest you find safety in the Caves — after all, many of independent gaming’s greatest successes (including his own) have taken place in those sordid caverns.

But within these caves lie the result of years of inbreeding, the Edmund McMillens and Terry Cavanaughs of the Island of the Indie, the retarded Super Meat Babies, who, having lived within Plato’s Cave for so long, have ironically lost the very thing that once set them apart — their Ind(i)ependence. They move the same. They act the same. When confronted with light opposition — a wall, for instance — they disappear in a cloud of embarrassment and farts. In fact they don’t even attempt to hurt you — rather, they merely steal your rotten flowers in the hope of collecting 100 of them and getting a Life, or at the very least, the acceptance of Lord Yu. “No one on this island is your friend.”

So what should we do? Should we wander this island, collecting these rotting flowers, living amongst the mindless zombies? Surely there is another way.

The whirlwind. Looming and ominous, it chases you around the level with a ferocity unseen even in this islands living inhabitants. Loud and obnoxious — almost Podunkian in nature. Its call is a constant drone, like the ramblings of a Super Joe. What terrible fate lies at its epicenter — what horrible truth does it reveal?

You were found.

It finds you. Unlike Derek Yu, hiding in the house that Saddam built (a cave), waiting for the storm to pass by, hoping to manipulate you into doing his bidding by leaving you ineffectual notes about XBox Live, the whirlwind finds you.

If this is Where We Remain, then let us escape this island of shit.

Let us be found, my indie brothers.

Where We Remain, by Twofold Secret, Browser

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.

The Rundown:

Gimmick-Based: The mechanic of flipping gravity in a platformer is so common one might argue it’s not a gimmick at all and instead a viable control method along with jumping and waggling.

Silhouette/Monochrome: The most shocking twist in V-six’s narrative is at the very end splash-screen when you find out the main character being a deformed silhouette isn’t a technical restraint but his actual design.

Abstract Graphics: The background might as well be flat vectors, but enemies shapes like the world “LIE” shooting repeatedly out of a bullhorn show a true mastery of the art of metaphorical imagery.

Silly Title: A title so silly it cannot be uttered aloud without risk of sounding like a helicopter. I remember my days as a child when names were used to accurately describe their product, but thankfully we’re more enlightened now.

Artificial Difficulty: I think a valid question to ask Terry is whether or not this game was meant to delay players rather than challenge them. It can be beaten in under 2 hours, but will still manage to kill you an average of one thousand times. You won’t be frustrated, just… delayed.

“Metroidvania:” More accurate than Metroid, the game seems to transform into Knytt between missions, with many screens of vast emptiness to explore and stand around in.

“Lo-Fi:” The difference between lo-fi and neo-retro is a relatively fine distinction in the realm of trendy game classification. Neo-retro is a game with modern technology infused into retro aesthetics, like “Fathom” or “Braid.” Lo-fi, on the other hand is a low-quality sound recording.

Neon Vectors: In a field dominated by “Geometry Wars” clones, it’s nice to see some neon-vector innovation in the form of Jet Set Willy clones as well.

VVVVVV (direct link) by Terry Cavanagh

Ain’t no Joe Danger like the danger of a Super Joe,
Super Meat Boy (HURR) like Super Mario

The IGF once again repping the PIGScene,
Independent Games (Wait, what does that mean?)

Don’t shit your pants, yet.
You could win the prize,
A Hoshi Saga Ringold Starr
Could be yours if you try!

Pay the fee,
and bend over slow!

While the judges stick it to you up your Seumas Hole.

Give you head Trauma make you babble VVVVVV for days,
Like Jason Rohrer, making games nobody likes to play,
Nobody wants to play another indie game like Braid,
Remember shitty retro games we played when we were eight?
Let’s do em over, pretend we don’t make minimum wage,
And Derek Yu, can you put us on the frontpage?
FUCK INDIE GAMES AAAAAAA
(A reckless disregard for innovation.)

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.

The value of art. When I say value, I mean not the monetary value of art, for what value can we assign to quiet hours after one’s first Passage. No, I refer to that immeasurable thing — that which turns the pixel into an expression; a softly buzzing saw tone into a gesture; a game about mermaids and underwater holocaust into Aquaria. Art is objective, universal, and simple to understand, so long as you’ve an understanding of its history. For what appears to the common prole to be an piss bucket, is, to the intellectual, an exciting re-thinking of Art itself — an object to be engaged not with the cock, but with the brain.

Yet, “here’s the thing – the IGF isn’t judged by [people who know what they're doing]. It’s judged by a [bunch of morons].” I am, of course, paraphrasing the inimitable Michael Rose, the editor of IndieGames.com, the inheritor to our Lord, TimW‘s throne, a magnificant throne which leaves Michael appearing rather dwarfed. He continues, “If a [judge] doesn’t play many indie games, then they aren’t going to be familiar with the ‘style’ and may not get as much enjoyment.“  To sum up:

“If a judge doesn’t ‘get’ the game, then it’s likely others who play the game won’t fucking get it either. So who’s fault is that?“

Indeed, whose fault is it? Surely not the game developers, who, despite the absolute confundity of their works, managed to drum up interest amongst fellow enthusiasts and gamers alike, utilizing PayPal and Kickstarter to cover the costs of throwing money at the IGF.

It’s surely not the indie games community, a dedicated legion of nerds who’ll read into anything with ambiguous lowercase text, so long as any displayed pixels are left unshaded. Here’s 13 pages about a five letter word.

Here’s one sentence about a game that consists of many letters worth of code:

“There are just too many pixel games (esp platformers) coming out of the tigsource crowd these days, it’s kind of lost its charm.“

Here’s another:

“most of these ideas are straight up derivations of the Mario Bros. series: the platforming, the stomping on enemies via jump, changing of blocks when you activate a power“

Believe it or not, this last one isn’t a reference to Super Meat Boy (IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize Nominee).

“So what is the answer? Make sure the whole judging panel is full of indie gamers? That sounds like the opposite of what it wants to achieve.“

Ah, yes Michael Rose. Let me illustrate you a little something about the INDEPENDENT GAMES FESTIVAL.

Breakdown of IGF Judges

Breakdown of IGF Entries

*Raises thick rimmed glasses*

There are 151 Pokemon in the original Pokemon series. You can easily complete the game with about 6. The reason for this is because for every one good Pokemon, there are a thousand worthless nerds. Sure little fish-mon might turn into giant dragon-mon, but that’s only after you deal with about 12 hours of lugging around a worthless flaccid cock, pathetically taking it out for a few seconds before putting it back in your pants to let the big boys continue fighting.

There were around that many judges in the 2010 IGF Judging panel.

But fear not, the judging was left to  capable hands. Captains of industry. In fact the IGF press release mentions:

“To ensure the highest-quality judging for the IGF, more than 150 leading indie and mainstream game industry figures — from 2D Boy’s Ron Carmel through Spore’s–”

– ah… wait. Oh no. What? Wasn’t that…?

There is a phrase that involves soup, chefs, and chinamen that immediately springs to mind. However, in the interest of good taste (a pun), I’ll avoid that bigoted saying, and instead say this: one chinaman (Derek Yu) and a couple of chefs (I’m going out on a limb here and assuming Phil Fish and Terry Cavanaugh did not achieve critical body mass without a predeliction to food) could’ve shat out a soup better than this.

When you assign random games to random people, you run into this widely studied phenomenon called “sometimes people don’t like certain things.” This is made worse by this condition called “people who don’t know a thing about something won’t really know how to appreciate them.” Sometimes you also run into this thing called “Being given a random selection of games, you tend to rate your games relativistically against one another, which makes your scores based on what you’ve been assigned more than how they really stack up against the other entries.” Judging a book by its cover is stupid, but judging a book by assigning each of its pages randomly to people is >>fucking<< (language alert) dumb.

It’s a little telling when there are press releases attempting to “demystify” the judging process. And judges having to use their journalistic muscle to post entries justifying their decisions. And the Nuovo Award — a category in the Independent Games Festival, a festival, for independent games, used to distinguish, in this festival of independent games, the best independent game, which is not, contrary to popular belief, the best game that is submitted to this festival, this festival of independent games.

But enough negativity! Congratulations to all who got nominated. I look forward to playing your games on Wiiware!

“Frankly, what it looks like is that the judges have no idea what measure to use. Some went by their personal likes and dislikes, some reviewed the games like a fucking Kongregate player with an attention span of six seconds, and some just didn’t like a game and latched onto whatever failure they first saw in order to explain their hate. That’s why the IGF renamed ‘Innovation in Graphics’ to ‘Excellence in Graphics’ (and will soon rename it to ‘Good Graphics’) and Nuovo will become Jason Rohrer’s Sadlet Award.”

- Zaratustra

“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.

As Adam the Space Addict, you claw your way through the perpetual dark, in search of the next big score. But in space, man is like a fish out of water, his very life reliant on his tools, at the mercy of his own engineering, his own fallibility. Weak of conviction and jittery of hand, you clasp down on the tractor beam button, syphoning up junk with a childlike glee, and attempting to pawn it off to the faceless God of Space-Capitalism. He is a cruel and unloving God, and yet you shall return to kneel at his altar uncountable times, the ghosts of a life you once lived quivering in your grasp, ready to be sacrificed for Credits. He relieves you of your bounty and offers nought in return. Dejected, disbelieving, you return to the infinite ink, your search growing in scope. You recognise the ashes of your former life. The space-frivolity you once knew is dead. A tear forms in your nasolacrimal duct. It flies, a perfect sphere, towards the viewing screen, free of the laws of the lesser men who stayed behind on the surface.

The old languages seem a distant memory, cold and unfamiliar. The only thing that is certain is the necessity of the space sale, the one that immediately preceeded it, and the one that shall follow.

I am ouroboros. Listen to my tale. Tell of my space deeds. Warn the others before the same fate befalls them. The rest is silence.

Scavenger (direct link) by Fiona

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

IGF: Rewarding innovation in independent games.