Three Noteworthy Video Games

[Matthew]

I don't play video games anymore. But sometimes I like to watch them played, it's like watching a movie and reading a comic at the same time.

Here are some that caught my attention over the last few years:

Inside
produced by Playdead 2016

This is an eery game, cryptic and moody. Yet the game is made in a primitive format, a 'side-scroller', which harks back to the video games of the 1980's. This means the character you control can only move left and right, with a bit of up and down. Yet despite this choice it is atmospheric and more rich in story than other fully immersive games. This is mostly because the back story or any information about the world is never shared. Instead you discover clues as you flee them, or try to walk across the terrain. All you see is a boy escaping something, running for his life. You don't know what, why, who, or when.

It's a puzzle game ultimately, but the story that's never told is compelling while puzzles more or less make sense in the world and environment the boy escapes through.

It follows on from a very similar but very different game by the same producers, Playdead, called Limbo. Limbo is more primitive but it's easy to see how one inspired the other.

Inside by Playdead, full video gameplay:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sFziI3Hf2n8

Limbo screenshot: very similar to Inside but also very different:


That's one game; Limbo gets a passing mention but isn't the star. It's good but Inside has more crazy crypticness.


Project Zomboid

A 'realistic' zombie survival game. It's designed to be hard, and you've already died as you start. Well, no, but all hope is sucked from you. There is no victory, just a cold, wet, and hungry survival. You'll die of thirst or hunger if the zombies don't kill first.

This video below is of a single player game with NPC modifications added. There's also a multiplayer version where you have to contend with other players, also short of resources, or sometimes psychopathic killers. But here is the single player version, and you can see multiplayer gameplay c/o HarvestZ on youtube here.

Project Zombiod by The Indie Stone, full gameplay:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=eYvzr0OTQ1U

Squirrel With A Gun

There's no nuance here. It does what it says on the tin.

Squirrel With A Gun by Dee Dee Creations, full gameplay:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YhZ8IKy5pe0

[Sunny-side-up]

This is a very good Survival crafting game.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qjLDbxB-Xt4

Far more than a simple shooter

[thirtythree]

I enjoyed playing the game, INSIDE. Really well made. It's basically puzzles, my only criticism is that it wasn't long enough.

One game that i'd recommed to everyone is SUZERAIN.

It's a role-play/strategy/decision-based game. You get to be a president or a monarch of a country and lead it through all kinds turmoil.

Price was a bit steep for a mobile game but it's well worth it since there are 20 different endings so can replay and make different desicions.

https://www.suzeraingame.com/

[Matthew]

Thanks Sunny-side-up, and thirtythree. Both VEIN and SUZERAIN look like games that are simple on the surface but have depth... on the face of it simple but turns out to be more.

After your post thirtythree I looked up SUZERAIN and tried to get the gist. For the benefit of everyone else: the gameplay is mostly controlled by choosing dialogue options in conversations with NPCs. Watching this gameplay is like reading a book made almost entirely from interpersonal political dialogue. It's incremental, with the next dialogue being influenced by prior conversations and choices.

It's hard to dive in the middle of a video playthrough and follow what's going on. One thing that is easy to follow is the beautiful music. I came for a video of the gameplay and stayed for the music. Wow video game music is so underrated, this is a great example:

Full SUZERAIN playthrough: youtube playlist link

An example of gameplay and the music:

You gotta check out the music it's awesome

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cE5nn0DMWJA

[thirtythree]

Yes, Suzerain is one of those games you have to play yourself to enjoy it. It's really deep.

I agree, the soundtrack is really good. It adds to the atmosphere and never gets monotonous.

[Matthew]

The Isle, a dinosaur simulator. Survival of the fittest in a dog-eat-dog world exchanging 'dog' for deinosuchus, stegosaurus, carnotaurus, and many others.

In this video we follow the journey of a juvenile deinosuchus on its quest to become the dominant monster on the island.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QkVgc0p9tSE

[Matthew]

Ok this post is a bit more serious and less frivolous:

We, the human race, are building computers using neurons. This is lateral, where silicon/resisters are traditional, quantum is sideways, and neurons is crazy mad-scientist left field. Building a computer with neurons makes a biological computer. It's not AI, because AI is an imitation of biology using complex logic gates, databases, and training.

No, a biological computer has bits of what we would call life in them, although the semantics is disputed and suddenly we trip over semantics and it gets weird.

Doom is a classic first person shooter game, where you run round as a guy with guns shooting demons. It came along in the early 1990's to a world-wide chorus of "wow the graphics are amazing, it's so smooth". It changed games as a huge leap forward.

Since then Doom has been ported to other computers and there's this little challenge in the ever evolving field of computing: what can you make Doom run on? Someone has kept a list on a website: Can It Run Doom?

It was originally written for 1990's personal computers, the same ones you'd run Microsoft Word on at work, but since then people have enjoyed making the game Doom run on farm equipment, satellite systems in space, and anything that has a CPU, a screen, and buttons.

This time some mad scientists have got the game Doom running on a biological computer, although it's not so much running on a biological computer as much as the biological computer is running AND playing Doom. It kind of lives Doom. At this point the name of the game "Doom" sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.. pour biological computer.

At first they successfully got a biological computer to run and play Pong, the bat and ball game. Interestingly Pong was arguably the first game written, when a bored physicist called William Higinbotham developed a game called "Tennis for two" on an oscilloscope in 1958. But forget Pong, it's a boring game and it has rubbish graphics.

Humans create biological computers and condemn it to live Doom:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kJDfqynsE2k

[petra]

I watch a lot of video games too but don't play much

Hearthstone is pretty fun. It's a card game by Blizzard