thecatamites

Yo I posted a little here but IDK the collective stance on self-promo! mods delete if necessary.. But I have a new thing and figured I'd mention here too. Magic Wand By: thecatamites Available: PC, Mac, Linux Synopsis: A kind of fussy little capsule RPG?

Congrat to everyone involved in this perversely monumental piece of critique!!!! How have you all been finding the HTML versions? I was never sure how smoothly they ran / weird tech problems. I don't know abt putting them into the loader, especially now that chrome has discontinued unity webplayer support, but if they all work ok i can update the glorioustrainwrecks links at least. .............. well...................................... until next time.............................................

"Whoever wins, we lose." A few of my games use music that I never got copyright for, I think it's pretty innocuous when it comes to dopey freeware hobbyist games that get released to audience of like 0-1000 people and then blow over, and I haven't gotten into trouble from it, but it has meant I have to be more circumscribed with their release afterlife than I'd maybe like. E.G. there are other games I can turn into zines and sell at local events, or bundle up into compilations and multicarts, or decide to charge for, or submit to festivals, but I wouldn't do any of those with games that have pilfered content, at least without stripping the illegal stuff out and probably substantially changing them in the process. Is not a big problem & I'm not complaining but I try to be more rigorous these days about usage rights just so I don't have to worry about being alienated from own games by hypothetical future legal complications. Having more control over the ability to distribute my own shit trumps, for me right now, having less control over what that shit can consist of (including perfect-yet-illegal-bgm-songs, stuff that's creative commons but only for noncommercial projects, etc).

':p sorry

IDK, kind of cursory in this weirdly aggressive way, in service of an overall thesis which is also kind of cursory in a weirdly aggressive way, I think summed up for me by decision (in Khandaker-Kokoris paragraph, and throughout) to wave away everything that blurs line between his chosen two poles as basically product of a wishy-washy pluralism rather than inescapable dialectic. If Sim City turns into mush upon merest challenge or reframing of its olympian framing viewport then all that suggests to me is that nothing about it was ever worth saving in the first place. And an account of how systemic Video game representations actually work and are "read" that seems to me extremely selective and dubious. Wasn't he one of the people pointing out that MolleIndustria's "McDonald's Video game" could just be played as a regular ass sim game about optimising system where the satirical subtext gets glossed over and lost (like the "satire" in The Sims)? As if even high-level systems are still produced, disseminated, marketed and consumed as part of even higher-order systems in which, yes, individual affect and identity are inextricably involved among other factors throughout, and that all this also plays into how these constructions feed back into consciousness and act? I am not gonna touch on the stuff abt identity other than to say it's, again, cursory and I think wrongheaded in a lot of the assumptions it makes abt the underlying end goals of that movement. So... IDK. It's a call for video games to do something that does not seem either particularly interested in or thoughtful about what video games actually are right now, other than as a tetherball to be bonked back and forth in service of vague straining rhetoric about sublimity and action and photography etc. I do not really have a preference between the two poles he describes, and pretty much everything I enjoy about video games doesn't fit into either model as portrayed here!! So, I really don't know what to take from it other than confirming that I don't like much Video game criticism and think it's generally a bad idea to deliberately coarsen your own thoughts for purposes of goading on an argument/.

I like it so far. The middling-to-bad reviews for it are weirdly the ones that best explain why - one compared it to a giant quake map pack, another to DLC. It sorta reminds me of like The Sims Go Medieval or whatever. There's a sense of something being replicated over and over until it loses all focus and becomes distortion with maybe an occasional glimpsed recognition of contour underneath, which is something that I think meshes a lot with the actual feeling of playing these games. I suspect is direct inverse link between how much anyone cared about plot of the first one and how much anybody will like the second. For me first one was a really tight, direct package and was fun but I didn't get much conceptual mileage out of it or whatever. This one feels like it's constantly playing with and grinding against the "iconic" (awful word) aspects of the first one, like that's the hidden pole everything orbits around and is unintelligible without. Like all the varying ideas of what the first one was gradually got bootlegged into own conflicting franchises, horror movie, mob slice of life, seedy reportage, action, vigilante, etc. And the kind of swampy tone that comes with holding together all these varying perspectives. Apparently it actually did start as DLC which would explain a lot. I like it and can't think of any better fate for the original than to disintegrate structurally into the weird blurred queasy paranoid mangle that makes up the actual play experience. All the tricksiness of plot and commentary sort of collapses leaving world of perpetual decentralized vague dread and dance music as more and more people put on the animal masks for reasons none of them really understand. Like all those sequels to Death Wish where they had to keep giving Charles Bronson new family members to be killed off so that he could go back to having a Death Wish, extended to infinity. They killed my..... cousin!! I don't like the rape scene, and it feels like the developers don't really like it either, and that's why it's so awkwardly handled on top of everything else. For better or worse I think if exact same scene was buried somewhere later in the game alongside all these other little segments it'd maybe read as actual commentary of a pretty damning kind - as a distorted chinesewhisper of the role of women in original, taking something faintly gross that got more or less glossed over in how that game was covered and moving it horribly into the foreground to stand as the most important aspect. And I think the eventual resurfacing of this plot thread actually does hit this note of selfcannibalising loathing and ended up being weirdly effective to me, but again it works as standalone rather than followup to the scene. As it is it's just this awful bit you have to grind through before the, pretty unrelated, rest of the game happens. The action segments sort of feel antsier and more pedantic but again to me that feels like just building on how the first one ended up being. I like all the extra glass, less so the guys who can kill you from outside line of sight. The way windows turned from being this really minor element of the first into big structural role sorta reminds me of the Mario Lost Levels. I think I'm more or less just glad to see specter of weirdly technical-exercise-y shareware murk get raised and played with again, think it's a much cooler and more interesting direction to go in than another breakout action game. Hotline Miami 2: The Tribes Oh No! More Hotline Miami Christmas Hotline Miami

Good moth song. I think a way you could have different authors without things feeling too miscellaneous would be to pick a certain time period and grouping criteria, like from all games posted to indiegames.com in 2004 or by using the random page function for freeindiegam.es (which was recent but i think still holds up as a distinct period / grouping lens for freeware, that i'd love to see written about and discussed as things maybe start to change up again). In terms of short games from a specific author then increpare remains the undiscovered country http://www.increpare.com/

ah, they were all just aimless squiggles but that one (also the player character in Happy Astronaut City and probably some other robot-looking guys) were kind of based on how Gary Panter draws robots as like... squat boxes with crude eyes and teeth. here is closest example that comes to mind (the robot in bg, a recurring character in Jimbo In Hell/Purgatory)

The shot of the shark keeps making me think of some Video game cutscene segment (far cry?) that got thrown in somehow. I liked the setting of first JP and mix of really tacky actionfigure-looking park elements (those jeeps!! the logos plastered on everything) with swampy vivid jungle island. I like this setting too, water emphasis and how all the crowd shots look like brochure pictures for some kind of gated development community. Is shame about plot and seeming lack of animatronic stunt dinos.

Hello my friends, It's me, thecatamites. I haven't posted bc I figure it'd be offputting but I read + enjoy thread a lot :^) Thank you for writing about my tiny, dubious video games. I post bc I've finally been able to work thru some tech problems re. porting of the marker games to HTML5 and am running through that. I plan to update the glorioustrainwreck posts en masse when I'm finished with them all but rather than force people here to download zip files unnecessarily I figure I post whatever the current week's game is ahead of time. Hopefully all be over soon. Here is YardDoggz http://harmonyzone.org/Dev/MagPlan/YardDoggz/Yarddoggz.html Good luck / I'm sorry - Stephen