Kyle Orland’s Workblog

You’ve probably played Nanostray already.

This might be hard to believe, expecially if you’ve never heard of Nanostray, but I’m telling you,chances are you have already played it in another form. If you’ve ever played any one of the dozens of games in which a spaceship shoots enemies as it automatically scrolls through the sky, you already know what this game is like. And the version you played was probably more exciting than the bare bones, bland action offered in Nanostray.

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A field of blocks three rows deep sits against a colorful background. You casually shift the blocks around, sliding them up and down their columns as additional blocks occasionally drizzle down from the top of the screen. Lining up groups of three or more like-colored blocks launches whole columns skyward, where some blocks disappear into the heavens and the remaining drift slowly back down to Earth. Pleasant music and sound effects fill the air to accompany your every action.

This is the dreamworld of Meteos as it exists at the start of a session - calm, peaceful, all-in-all a generally agreeable diversion. This version of the world lasts… oh… about a minute before you begin to notice the drizzle of blocks turn into a light shower, then a steady downpour, until finally a torrential flood of blocks begins to fill the screen almost faster than you can handle them. Far from a lackadaisical diversion, Meteos quickly transforms itself into a frantic test of visual acuity and reflexes.

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Thus far, developers making games for the Nintendo DS have been pretty desperate to show off just how useful the system’s distinctive features are. Unfortunately, these developers seem to have focused so much on using these features that they forgot to create a substantial game to apply them in. Nintendo DS owners have had to suffer through a string of games that generally get repetitive after a few sessions and waste the DS’ potential.

Now along comes Kirby Canvas Curse, a surprisingly meaty platform game that just happens to be perfectly designed for the DS. Suddenly all those wasted features are put into what could pass for a decent platforming game on any system, and the DS’ unique functionality begins to make a lot of sense.

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Ever since Konami scored a major worldwide hit with the Dance Dance Revolution series, it seems everyone wants in on the act with games that feature either (1) licensed music, (2) some sort of wacky controller or, preferably, both. Nintendo’s Donkey Konga series manages to include both of the above but, in true Nintendo fashion, also squeezes in (1) lots of Nintendo’s franchise characters and (2) a totally unique controller that looks weird but works well.

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Serious Role Playing Game fans may be quick to dismiss the Pokemon franchise as too simplistic or too child-oriented for any further consideration. Critics sneer that the games have no gripping story, there’s little to none of the character development that characterizes other RPGs, and that the type-A-beats-type-B battles don’t provide enough of a challenge for an experienced RPG player.

These critics are right, to an extent, but they also miss the entire point of the Pokemon universe and what makes it so endearing to millions, young and old alike. Collecting and battling Pokemon can be fun and interesting… if you let it.

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Chris is right in theory. The EyeToy and EyeToy: Play have the potential to be "the killer app that can draw people who have never played a videogame in their life before towards the PlayStation 2." But in practice, there are still some problems preventing both the peripheral and the game from becoming a revolution in the way we play games.

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Today we take a look at the web-based work of Gonzalo Frasca, a game researcher and developer based in Uruguay. Frasca’s issue-based simulations are somewhat unique in that they are not necessarily intended entertain the player, but rather to engage them in the social and political issues of the day. "If you are… interested in designing videogames with social or political content, you simply can’t rely on gameplay," Frasca says in a post on his site, Ludology.org. "Gameplay, if good, becomes addictive and makes everything else invisible."

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Soon, she has literally traded in her microphone for a ray gun and proceeds to blast Morolian and human alike, the former to stop their attack and the latter to free them from the alien invaders. But one has to question whether the civilians are really better off after being rescued. Both before and after the rescue the civilians are mere pawns, forced to dance for a cause by powerful forces outside their control. With the Morolians the means of control is a rather direct ray gun; with Ulala, it’s the much subtler influence of a strong media image.

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I came into not really knowing what to expect. After playing it, I don’t really know what I was expecting, but I sure didn’t get it.

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While most hardcore gamers eschew these sometimes simple games for the deeper pleasures of console and standard PC games, millions of people play these free web-based games every day. This alone makes them worthy of discussion. And while many of the games that populate the internet are crude, badly produced and horribly unplayable, there are some high-quality gems to be found among the muck. This feature exists to point the reader toward some of those gems.

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