I've been reading this thread for a little while now, but Doug.zip gave me the final push needed to actually contribute. I'd played the compilation shortly after it came out, at what I'd thought was a reasonably leisurely pace, but after playing doug.zip again I was struck at how differently it came across to me when I played it by itself, not as a part of a much larger whole. The smudged and unsteady "thanks for P" at the end shocked me a little bit with how stark and sincere it was (right down to the way the image is placed off-centre on a plain black background), which given that my previous reaction was that it was a simple joke, I was not prepared to feel. I guess what I'm trying to say is that playing these marker games one after the other is a completely different experience compared to each as an individual work.
I like that because of the starting setup, you can rapidly enter and exit the house by pressing down and jiggling left/right when necessary. I also like the gradient background of the house, and although I would hesitate to analyse this in ways other than simple contrast with the outside world, there seems to be many possibilities to what this represents. To me at least it is giving the game that weird mix of sterile computer art and organic paper art that is present in a lot of things that thecatamites does.
I dunno, Doug.zip felt strange in that it didn't have a simulated kitsch feel to it (which would of gone unnoticed amidst the overwhelming majority of other games in this compilation that did), the audience reaction wasn't fed back into the experience so it came out being much more honest, although that could be just because it was so short. I'm looking forward to discovering new outlooks on these games now.
