EG Expo 2009: Indie Games Arcade

VVVVVV

Terry Cavanagh's cheerfully sadistic VVVVVV is a much more straightforward low-fi nightmare: a platformer which messes with your fingers rather than your mind. The simple story of a crashed spaceship has three buttons: left, right and reverse gravity instead of jump. It's basic, frenetic and difficult - this YouTube video should give you a clear idea.

Super Yum Yum: Baby Rescue

Super Yum Yum has a different point of origin to most Indie Arcade entrants, being the first PC and console work of mobile developers AirPlay, and actually a 3D reworking of its popular mobile series, most recently seen on iPhone. It's essentially a maze puzzle, in which your plump chameleon needs to eat fruit the same colour as its skin to clear paths to stranded baby chameleons and the exit. The tricks is that he changes colour to the match the fruit's leaves. There are satisfying knots to untie here, but some will find the presentation and relentless, cheery music grating.

Is art games?

And finally, a roundup within a roundup: there were four games at the Indie Arcade that used computer game design as a starting point for experiences that were, really, more like interactive art installations than any conventional notions of gaming. Eat these, David Cage. (With apologies to rllmukforum's K.)

My notes on Fig. 8 say simply: "Penny farthing navigating architectural drawings to accordion music." It's beautiful, and actually has an interesting scoring mechanic relating to steering, so this art probably is games. Not sure you can say the same for Starcade, which creator Anna Anthropy describes, quite accurately, as "six glorious trainwrecks". Each one, from Gay Sniper to the capital punishment simulation of The Sentence and two-player role reversal of Space Escapers, has a fairly blunt political point to make via gaming idiom - although the hilarious inverse Pong of Dodge Ball is a great gaming one-liner for its own sake.

Pixel-Lab describes Ergon Logos as "Mario retold through beat poetry, with the final level an existential crisis, possibly faced at the point of death". It is actually a playable poem - you choose the "route" through it by mousing over the branching lines - composed of the stream of consciousness of a platform game hero. Clever, but I preferred Happening Game. This challenged Expo visitors to "find somebody else to play with", "shake hands" and "come back in an hour", and caused much hilarity among the few groups who attempted it seriously. It was a gentle reminder of how silly the goals games set us are - and, more happily, why we all got together in the first place. See you next year!