There's a desperately sad trope about how some men believe that women are a video-game where, if you put enough friendship in, you eventually get rewarded with sex. This is the tangled and twisted tale of how some people believe that, if you put enough friendship in, you get rewarded with a video-game company.

The book is rich with foreshadowing and brutal in its execution. It is written almost as though it were a documentary - shuffling time for maximum narrative impact, and telling the story from multiple points of view.

None of the characters are entirely sympathetic; but none of them are entirely irredeemable. It is a complex a lovely work of fiction about people who understand fiction but don't understand the complexity of human relationships.

There is very little "game" here. It's barely an interactive movie. Walk forward until you step on a trigger, watch a very slow cut scene, wave your arms until something happens, repeat a few times, roll credits. That's it. There's nothing to explore, there are no choices to make, and no puzzles to solve.

Parts of the game are gorgeous. Up close, the characters have amazing textures and animations. The caves are beautifully rendered. Even the Rancor monster is a treat.

On the Quest 2, it's about PS4 levels of graphics - occasionally jerky animation and dropped frames not withstanding - it is quite spectacular.

And then it all falls apart. It might be hard to tell from this shot, but the background is frequently just a static 2D image. It looks like a cheap green-screen effect from a 90's movie.

The plot is pretty good - Vader wants to use a magic crystal to bring Padmé back to life - but your inclusion in it makes no sense. You have magic blood? And Vader trains you? But then fails to kill you? Fine, whatever. I get to use The Force® and a Light Sabre™ right?

Well, ish. The Force is pretty hard to control - vaguely point at something and squeeze the trigger, then shake your hand. There's no real control, you can't easily move things or throw rocks at enemies. It all feels a bit hollow. The Light Sabre is slightly more fun - but it's pretty much Beat Sabre. Move it where you're told to, wiggle it near an enemy and slice them. That's it. There's zero skill involved. Which is fine, because it's impossible to die in the game.

Which, as a tech demo wouldn't be so bad. But Disney have the audacity to split this into three games at £8 each. You'll be able to complete them in under a couple of hours. Which, coincidentally, is about as long as your battery will last.

I is stunning having Vader loom over you in VR. And it is fun to wave a Light Sabre in his general direction. But this is just a lazy game. The cut scenes drag on as if to convince you that you haven't overpaid for a short and vapid experience. Endless rounds of Storm Troopers© attack and you just fend them off by waving your hands.

Considering the price, I was expecting something more. Games like Red Matter show how you can do interesting puzzles and stories, even within a linear framework. But Vader Immortal is an on-rails experience which fails to satisfy.

If your friend buys a 4K laser projector, you can immediately understand the appeal of the massive screen. Even if you only see the photos of it on Facebook, you get what the experience is like.

Games are different. While having a parasocial relationship with a Twitch gamer may be fun, it isn't a particularly good demonstration of what playing a game is actually like.

Back in the days before Internet connected games consoles, we had to rely on demo games set up in shops. Your local video game emporium would have a console and two hardwired gamepads set up - along with a demo cartridge of whatever the Next Big Game was.

Something like this:

Back in the day, those controllers were smeared with the grease - and worse - of a thousand teenage hands. We played until we were thrown off and then ate Sbarro pizza without washing our hands. Grim. But these were the days before hand sanitiser was de rigueur.

How can you reproduce that visceral excitement with VR?

A few years ago, I got to demo the a prototype VR headset at a conference. I queued up behind a dozen people and patiently waited my turn. I eagerly grabbed the proffered headset with both hands and jammed my face into it.

You know that feeling when you go to a public toilet and the seat is still warm from the last customer...?

As well as having to tighten the headset, adjust the eye separation, and make sure the lenses are clean - you have to make sure the unit is wiped down. No, really wiped down. Like with proper cleaning fluid.

I refer you to this delightful paper - "Bacterial Load of Virtual Reality Headsets" - where researchers swabbed headsets to see what dark germs they contained:

The results of these tests indicated that the Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from the headsets possessed high levels of antibiotic resistance.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3385956.3418958

The whole paper is worth a read - unless you're particularly squeamish.

VR is a lonely, plague-ridden experience.

That seems extortionate. I remember, when I were a lad, video games cost... wait? Do I remember? Or is it just rose tinted glasses?

I remember saving up my pocket-money for weeks on end, and getting an advance on my birthday money, in order to be able to buy Sonic 2 for the Megadrive. Let's check the archives... Sonic 2 cost about £40 when released.

Hmmm... forty quid in '92, plus inflation, takes us to about... £80.

I remember, a few years later, the huge fuss that was caused by Sega releasing Street Fighter II on the Megadrive. The 24Mb cartridge cost SIXTY BLOODY QUID. Oh, and the new six button controller would set you back £15.

Inflation adjusted, a £15 game controller becomes about £30 today. Which is roughly the same cost as a PlayStation controller.

Why has software become cheaper while hardware peripheral prices have stayed static?

Part of it is that games are now almost purely software. Games used to be delivered on hardware cartridges. These were costly - which led to multiple lawsuits.

Nowadays, most games are delivered over the Internet - the cost of delivering megabytes over the net is miniscule compared to shipping boxes around the world. The remainder are burned onto optical media - which are cheap to purchase and light enough to ship cheaply. Nintendo also sells games on proprietary flash cartridges - just like the olden days - but it is now much cheaper to manufacture physically smaller carts with larger amounts of data.

But lower manufacturing and distributing is offset by the labour it takes to make a game.

Zelda had a staff of 300 hundred people working on it for 4 years

Sonic took 100 people a mere 2 years.

The real reason seems to be the sheer size of the market now. On the day of release - "Sonic 2sday" - Sega sold 750,000 copies of the game in the UK alone. Lifetime sales are estimated to be around 6 million worldwide.

By contrast, two years after launch, Zelda had sold over 12 million copies. As of now, it is close to 30 million copies

And that's it, really. Yes, there are bigger teams working for longer on more complicated games, more amazing graphics, more intricate soundscapes. And I'm sure marketing budgets and executive bonuses have also ballooned. But manufacturing and distributing is now ridiculously cheap. And there are many more people willing to buy games.

That means video game prices have fallen over the years.

But price is not the only metric. We also have to consider value.

The last Zelda game offered about 50 hours of gameplay to the average user..

Sonic 2? A paltry 3 hours - although there's no "save game" functionality, so it is likely to provide entertainment for a lot longer.

Imagine going back to the 1990s and telling your younger self that the future has epic cinematic games, with an orchestral score, which you can play for months, and it costs less than Sonic! Your fragile little mind would explode.

Anyway, I thought I was grumpy with the cost of games. I now realise that I live in a time of embarrassingly cheap entertainment.

Looks like my wife will have a new game to review soon!

I think it is fair to say that it is the best computer game I've ever published. And probably the only time I'll ever be reviewed in The Guardian and Kotaku!

Anyway, a year ago I was contacted by an art student. They wanted to adapt my game into a comic for their art class. How could I refuse?

This beautifully styled, monochrome pages were the result:

They also provided me with a rendering with the text in English:

Isn't it gorgeous!

I'm overjoyed that someone turned my daft little game into a work of art. Now all I need to do is find a way to print it in the quality it deserves.

Huge thanks to "flyingpotato" (yes, that's how they want to be credited!) for creating something so distinctive and delectable.

It feels like the developers lost the courage of their convictions. Cats can see in the dark - but your avatar has to use a torch! Cats can follow scents - yet that's left unexplored. Cats are expert hunters - yet you never once get to pounce on a drone. Cats can manipulate people's emotions by snuggling them - but on the rare occasions when the game lets you rub up against someone's legs, it changes nothing. There are weird bits where your cat can sharpen its claws by scratching furniture - it's cute, but doesn't have any impact on the game.

Instead, you have a robot (!) which hacks computers for you. Right...

Video gaming has yet to move out of its primitive phase. In the early days of text adventures, you would see something like:

You are in a cave.
There is a box and a sword. 
An imp sits in the corner.
Exits are to the North and East.
>_

From there, you know exactly what you can do. Take sword or Open box or Talk to imp or Go North. Modern video games take that exact paradigm and make it so much worse.

Rather than telling you that an item is interactive, you have to guide your character around glancing at every piece of set dressing, just in case it is important. Some point-and-click adventures helpfully make usable items glow. Stray - like so many others - takes the lazy way out and forces the player to spend most of their time pivoting the camera around in the vain hope that an interaction prompt will appear.

I know what you're thinking - "But you can explore this gorgeous 3D world!" - well, you can't. You can jump up on some bits of set dressing, but not all. Why? I made a massive jump earlier in the game, now you're saying I can't scale this fence? It makes no sense. But, of course, that's video-game logic.

In terms of plot, games like this face a tricky challenge. Make things too restricted, so characters only appear in the correct order, and it becomes little more than a interactive movie. Give the player free rein and they'll do things in the wrong order and get confused.

During one of Stray's levels, I found myself in a haberdashery. While wiggling my joystick, I spotted that one of the hats - and only one - was interactive, so I grabbed it. About 10 minutes later, a character told me that he couldn't do the thing I wanted unless I got him a hat... Which makes things narratively complicated. Why let the player pick up something that they cannot possibly know they need? Again, video-game logic.

In the end, it's a fairly bog-standard 3D puzzler. Person A wants a thing, go get it from Person B. But B will only let you have it in exchange for item C. So you run off and get that. Rinse and repeat. There are a couple of simple logic puzzles, and a few side-quests. But, again, very little is unique to playing as a cat.

Despite the somewhat sedentary puzzling, there are a few bits where your cat gets eaten (!) or killed with lasers (!!). It is tonally very jarring to suddenly shift from puzzling to shooting slug-monsters or running away from killer drones. And, of course, every death leads to a boring wait for the level to re-load. Why is that still a thing in 2022?

Finally, it's a pretty short game. I'm rubbish at console games and I completed it in about 9 hours.

It isn't that I didn't enjoy Stray, it's just that I don't think I enjoy video games.

Stray is a basically fine way to spend a weekend. It isn't too taxing, there's not too much getting lost, and it is occasionally extremely cute.

One of the constraints is the limited number of resources on some levels. You need silicon to make alloy. But to get silicon, you need sand and coal. But what if you don't have sand and coal? Similarly, you need oil and titanium to make plastanium. But you might not always have titanium to mine.

But lots of levels have scrap metal. Scrap can be melted down to slag. Then that slag can be processed to base minerals. Those base minerals can be recombined to produces other materials. And those can be recombined further.

In fact, using only scrap - it is possible to make everything. So, I present to you, The Scrap To Everything Machine!

It uses a little bit of logic to stop it getting clogged up, and to bleed off any unproductive machines. There are several vaults to buffer resources if you can't deliver them to your base quickly enough. I've tried to make it as compact as possible.

It is a bit silly, obviously, but it works. Build one, feed it with as much scrap as you can, and it will generate all 15 resources. Fed with a moderate amount of scrap - here 6 water-cooled and overdriven airblast drills - and that's sufficient to kick in the Overdrive Dome and start producing massive quantities of stuff:

When fed with a full complement of scrap, this is how many resource it can produce in 60 seconds:

• Copper 382/min
• Lead 34/min
• Metaglass 33/min
• Graphite 393/min
• Sand 28/min
• Coal 302/min
• Titanium 231/min
• Thoruim 65/min
• Silicon 90/min
• Plastanium 65/min
• Phase Fabric 20/min
• Surge Alloy 30/min
• Spore 61/min
• Blast 13/min
• Pyrite 13/min

Ok, scrap can't produce coal directly. But you can use electricity to make water, which can then mine spores. Those spores can be pressed to oil, and the oil can be centrifuged to coal. Simple!

If you're on a level with scrap and don't feel like building loads of factories, this will keep chugging away producing everything.

Now, I wonder if I can make it self-powered…

Anyway, Free Guy is a fun, uncomplicated movie about the perils of cross-licencing GPL code within a proprietary codebase.

If you're a gamer - or Extremely-Online™ - you'll probably get a lot out of the cameos and background action. If not, it's still a funny and silly movie. There are lots of humorous little touches in the set decoration and amusing throwaway lines. The plot is never really brave enough to commit to discuss the ethical questions it brings up, nor does it tackle the toxic environment that some gamers create.

It's a bit too tropey for my tastes (Friendly Black Sidekick, will-they won't-they friendships, and utterly failing the Bechdel test). But, hey, you can't have everything.

There are a couple of weird sequences where it's obvious that they couldn't quite get the IP rights for some video games - so some generic characters are used instead. But that's redeemed by the final fight which is pure fan-service.

In about 10 years this'll look as dated one of those 1960s movies exploring the Hippy subculture. But, for now, it is a delightfully daft way to spend an evening.

Upfront Cost

There's nothing on the main Stadia page which says that you need to pay £9/month to get the 4K version of games. Go on, take a look at https://store.google.com/gb/product/stadia?hl=en-GB.

It says "features (including 4K, HDR, 60 fps and 5.1 surround sound) are service-, network-, device- and game-dependent" but it doesn't say anything about the cost! Only if you closely read the small print on a completely separate page do you find out that this requires a subscription.

Honestly, if you're going to start off by deceiving me, this isn't going to be a great relationship.

Games Cost

OK, so how much do the individual games cost? It's impossible to find out. The Stadia page lists their (small) selection of titles. But there are no prices.

So... what? I'm supposed to fork out for the console and hope that the game prices are reasonable? Nah!

I know I could go to one of the dozens of sites which claim to scape the prices from Stadia. But that's a little fragile, isn't it? Why are Google so afraid of showing me the true prices? The only conclusion I can come to is that the prices are unreasonable and Google are hoping to trap me in their platform.

Compare and Contrast

PlayStaytion offers a similar streaming service. It is completely transparent about its pricing. Half the price of Stadia! It also has a large list of games.

If I didn't want the streaming service, I can buy games directly from PlayStation - just like Stadia. Only Sony tell me the price up front: That's not even including the fact that I can go on eBay and buy any AAA title second hand for a tenner.

A second-hand PS4 Pro + PS Now is about £220. A Stadia + Subscription is £200.

PS is transparent with its pricing, Stadia isn't.

PS can play 2nd hand discs, Stadia will cut off your purchased games when Google shut it down.

I get that with Stadia I can play anywhere (if I have sufficient bandwidth) - but PS also offers a mobile version and a (hacked together) Linux version.

But, when push comes to shove, Google deliberately made it hard for me to see the price of what I was buying. So I walked.

I'm pretty sure that I had the shareware version of the original Monkey Island. At any rate, I remember the amazing graphics... But I don't remember getting further than the first few screens. I do remember a few years later, my brother and I completing the CD-ROM version of "Day Of The Tentacle" - by which time computer games had advanced so far that there was no compelling reason to go back to Monkey Island.

Thanks to PS Now - the game streaming service from PlayStation - you can play a REMASTERED Monkey Island on your console. For £40 a year, you get access to a vast library of older games. Nifty!

All the Monkey Island graphics have been lusciously updated and the voice acting is pretty decent.

It mostly works. The PS Now version has a few bugs. Audio drops out from time to time and there's the occasional stutter. The controls aren't overly suited to a game controller. And, weirdly, a few of the puzzles seem to require you to drop back into the "old school" graphics.

Some of my criticisms are also applicable to the original game. Running your mouse around to try and find the tiny cluster of interactive pixel is tedious. Some of the "lateral thinking" puzzles involve trying every single permutation of your inventory in the hope it will trigger an action.

Is the script as funny as it was when I was a tween? No - but it's still better than most games. It's fun challenge and a great way to spend a couple of lockdown evenings.

Final verdict? Never spend more than twenty bucks on a video game.

You can also read my wife's review.

I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews.

I have mixed feelings about this. It isn't really a game - and admits as much - more of a low-stakes exploration simulator.

It is gorgeous. I couldn't believe my laptop was capable of rendering some of the scenes that it did. It worked perfectly on Linux running Wayland.

Overly moody and atmospheric with - thankfully - no jump scares.

But it starts really badly. About 10 minutes of non-skippable demo effects. I genuinely thought the game was broken. When it starts, there's no instructions. Luckily, it's just arrow keys and the mouse, nothing more complicated than that.

The whole experience takes about 45 minutes. Some of the rooms fade out just as they get interesting, other seem to drag on.

It's worth playing - and shows great promise as the basis for a future game. It is interesting without being entertaining.

I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews.

This starts as a fun little logic puzzle, but quickly descends into frustration.

Like Portal, you have limited array of actions and have to manipulate your environment in order to get move on to the next level.

But it has a bit of a problem. It is so easy to get lost. There are a bunch of rooms which all look similar, and I found myself quickly running out of puzzles and mostly trying to find my way around.

The logic puzzles are neatly done and it's pretty clever mechanic. But I got bored trying to find the next room to go to. It is designed to be short game, but I found it a little too tedious to finish.

Linux

It runs under Linux using WINE, but you will need to run winetricks d3dcompiler_47 first. That gets Direct 3D installed. Even so, after a while, it seemed to crash out.

This is the delightful indie game A Short Hike. I don't play many video games, because I find them arbitrary and confusing. They also go on far too long. But "Hike" is the perfect length. I completed it within 2 hours (I think - more on that later). Which, considering I paid $10 for a hundred games as part of the bundle, feels like good value for money!

It's an open-world adventure, which basically consists of a couple of dozen Zelda-style side-quests. Get the mission, pick up a thing, take it over there, climb this, use that, sell this, buy that. Nothing stunningly original, but a great way to spend an afternoon.

I absolutely hated Untitled Goose Game because it was all hype and no substance. This is different. It's a charming little adventure. Zero stress, zero consequences.

There are three minor things I found annoying. And I'm prepared to believe that they're just me not being used to this style of game.

Crappy graphics.

Apparently the blocky graphics are part of the game's aesthetic. I can appreciate that - but it made my eyes hurt and made certain quests really hard.

Annoyingly, after I completed the game, I found there was an option to have smooth graphics.

I've no idea why that isn't the default.

Where am I? What do I have to do?

There's no map, so I found myself wandering around lost. That's not a feeling I enjoy in life, so I don't enjoy it in a game. Similarly, there's no quest log. I've no idea what quests I have, which have been completed, how many MacGuffins I need to pick up. It was quite frustrating.

Which leads me to the last complaint...

Have I completed the game?

I don't know. I climbed the mountain. Took the phone call. Got most objects back to their owners (I think). And found a load of feathers.

Is that it?

It's fine if it is. But I ended up getting a bit bored wandering around lost - so the game fizzled out.

I don't have time to play many games. My gaming experience is mostly sitting and watching my wife play endless quests on Skyrim and Dragon Age. So this was an entertaining - if slightly frustrating - diversion.

These rules were thrashed out at the Oxford January Games Jam. I think it is original - but there are literally thousands of card games, so it is hard to tell!

As I've mentioned before, I love collaborative games. I'd much rather help my friends than beat them.

This game is deliberately designed to be simple. I get confused with some card games where everyone has a different role, and there are dozens of actions in each turn.

This card game has difficulty settings! You can add or remove certain rules depending on the cognitive ability of your group.

Quick Game

Each player lays a card down in a 5x5 grid. Once a winning poker hand is placed down, that player may discard those cards.

Aim

To work as a team and remove all the cards from play.

Players

The game scales from 1 to 52 players.

Equipment

A standard deck of playing cards.

Rules (Co-operative)

Divide the cards equally between all players.

Cards are laid face down in front of the players. They draw cards unseen from the top of their hand.

Player 1 is the player who wishes to go first.

Player 1 places a card face up on the table. For example:

The next Player places a card face up on the table, either to the left, right, above or below the existing card.

Play continues with players placing cards face up in a grid.

When a player places a card which completes a sequence, they may remove all those cards from the grid and place them in the discard pile.

The game ends when players have no cards in their hands.

Sequences

A reminder, it is the player who places the card down who decides whether or not to remove the cards from the grid.

Sequences must involve cards which are touching each other.

Valid sequences are similar to those of poker. With two exceptions - straights and flushes can be more than 5 cards long.

The order of this list is not important. Removing cards from play is all that counts.

• Two of a kind (A pair with the same value. Example Q♦ Q♠)
• Two Pair (Example A♦ A♠ 7♠ 7♦)
• Three of a kind (Three cards of the same value. Example 9♦ 9♣ 9♥)
• Full house (A pair and a three. Example A♦ A♠ 7♠ 7♣ 7♦)
• Four of a kind (Four cards of the same value. Example 8♦ 8♠ 8♣ 8♥)
• Flush (All of the same suit. Example A♦ 3♦ 9♦ 6♦ J♦)
• Straight (All consecutive values. Example A♦ 2♠ 3♠ 4♣ 5♦)

Flushes and Straights

As in traditional poker, a Flush or a Straight has a minimum of 5 cards.

Unlike traditional poker, there is no maximum of the number of cards in your sequence.

Straights may start or end with an Ace. They may not have an Ace in the middle.

For example, this is an invalid sequence: J♥ Q♣ K♥ A♣ 2♥

Proximity

A sequence is a set of cards which a next to each other.

That is, an unbroken chain in a horizontal or vertical direction.

This is one of the areas where you set the difficulty.

Difficulty Settings

You will need to agree on these optional rules before game play starts. Or after, if you like arguments.

Cards aren't laid in a grid - but only horizontally.

For an extra challenge, cards can only be laid in one direction - for example always to the left of the existing cards.

Sequence can be diagonal.

Sequences can be multi-directional.

For example, this Straight has vertical and horizontal components.

Competitive Play

Play proceeds as above.

When a player completes a sequence, they place the cards onto their personal discard pile.

Once no more sequences can be removed, the remaining cards are added to the discard pile of the player with the smallest pile.

The winner is the person with the largest discard pile.

This encourages players to engage in tactics!

Gameplay report

It's pretty good! Playing the horizontal variant is a good introduction to the sorts of tactics which can be used.

The one thing lacking is the idea of a common enemy for the team to fight. There's a nice element of "The Weakest Link" - whereby players can choose to "bank" the score by removing cards from the table.

So, have a play - and let me know how you get on.

I attended the Oxford Games Jam with one very specific aim in mind - help create a game where people had to work together as a team. It's a hard mindset to get into - almost all games are competitive. But with the help of an amazing team, and the frank feedback of several play-testers, I think we created something fun and original(ish).

This game is Open Source! We released the code and rules under the MIT licence, any additional artwork will be Creative Commons.

Get started at https://github.com/OxfordHackspace/CaveTeam - and please let us know what you think!

Here's one of our hand-made prototypes of our Roguelike game - CAVE TEAM:

As a team, you have to move from the "Start" tile, to the "Exit" tile. Teamwork is important, some tiles will require more than one player to successfully pass. It is impossible to win the game by yourself - but you may have to sacrifice some of the players in order to escape.

The map of the caves is a hexagonal grid - in homage to many classic games. Boards are procedurally generated - team member Thomas Kiley wrote a Python script to create valid boards

Here's a typical cave board:

All players start, unsurprisingly, on the "start" tile. In order to move to a new tile, the player tells the team which tile they're attempting to clear, and then rolls a single 🎲.

If they defeat the tile (that is, roll higher than the number on the tile) the tile is flipped over and the path is clear.

If they fail to clear the tile, there is a cave-in. The tile is removed from the board and the way is blocked.

Some tiles are impossible for a single player to clear - they will need the help of other players. A player can ask for assistance from any player adjacent to the tile they wish to clear.

In the demo version, we used white counters to represent a clear path - and red tiles to represent a cave in. But what are those mysterious green tiles, I hear you ask?

SLIME!

Lurking in the cave is luminous green slime. A deadly, mindless mould creeping though the board.

Every few turns (more on that later!) the slime gets a chance to roll the dice. If the slime is next to a tile with the same number as the dice, that tile is consumed. Any player on that tile is eaten alive, and removed from the game. Slime cannot get through a cave in - you will notice in the above board, players have managed to create a small defensive wall in the hope of protecting themselves.

The slime's advance is both relentless and random. In some games it won't bother you, in others it will consume you and the exit before you're partway across the board.

Once the slime hits the clear path, it will always advance, regardless of the score on the dice.

Nick Brett

@nickdbrett

Early prototyping at #janjam17 pic.x.com/DsnvOHUaHg

---

Thresholds

This is where things get a little complicated. In order to make the game exciting, we need to have the slime move rapidly - but it also needs to be balanced with the number of players.

Every time the dice is rolled, we add its score to the Slime Counter. Once the counter reaches a score of (Number of players * 3) it is time to roll the dice for the Slime's move.

We want the slime to happen fairly regularly, but not predictably. If players are lucky enough to roll low numbers, the Slime will not advance - but the players may not be able to get through the tiles that they need.

This adds an element of risk to the game. You might want three of your team to help you defeat a particularly hard tile - but that brings with it a greater risk of the Slime advancing.

Escape

In order to escape, a player has to be adjacent to the Exit tile and roll a score of the threshold or above. This will require help from your team. Each player adjacent to the exit tile can help, and they all escape if the roll is successful.

But what if all the players aren't by the exit? You have a choice - do you wait for your team and risk Death By Slime? Do some of you escape and leave the others to perish? Can you split your team?

Team Play

Your team might decide to send scouting parties in different directions - hoping to clear paths before the slime gets there. Or, you can stick together and blast through tiles all the while risking the slime speeding up to get you.

Perhaps you'll deliberately sacrifice players, or die heroically together.

One of the features of Roguelike games is rapid death. It is entirely possible that a cave becomes impenetrable after just a few turns. The majority of your team may die shortly before the end. You might be unlucky with your rolls and block yourself in.

No matter! Sweep the board clear and start again! The game is fairly rapid, generally taking around 20 minutes for a team of four to escape.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

#JanJam17 pic.x.com/NnV0nccGCM

---

Variations and Rule Tuning

We played through the game half-a-dozen times - sometimes radically altering the rules to see if it improved the game.

How characters move has a massive impact on the game. Originally we had players roll for every move - even if they were going along a clear path. That makes the game too hard.

Then we said that players could move anywhere along a clear path for free - and only roll if they wanted to clear a tile. That makes it too easy.

We settled on being able to move one tile along the path for free. The next move - whether to a clear tile or a numbered tile - must be rolled for.

In some variants, the slime moves to all consecutive tiles of the same number.

Let's take this board as an example.

If the Slime rolled a five, the 5 tile next to the Slime would be consumed - as would the 5 tile adjacent to the consumed tile. The other 5 remains unaffected.

If a two were rolled... Youch!

Players which have escaped - should they be able to help rescue players stuck inside the cave?

Pieces

Because the event was taking place in the Oxford Hackspace, we were able to 3D print some playing pieces.

We used David Hagemann's incredible "Low Poly Fantasy Tabletop" pieces.

Pieces had to be reasonably small so that that several players can fit on one tile.

Play it!

This game is Open Source! We released the code and rules under the MIT licence, any additional artwork will be Creative Commons.

Get started at https://github.com/OxfordHackspace/CaveTeam - and please let us know what you think!

Credits

This game was built with with ❤ and 😘 by (in alphabetical order)

• Jamie Bayne
• Nick Brett
• Terence Eden
• Thomas Kiley
• Jamie Lokier
• And all the play testers at the January Games Jam.
• Special thanks to Simon Roth for organising the event.

This is a brief guide to getting the game working on Linux - including multiplayer and widescreen.

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 - but the steps should be broadly similar on any distro.

Install the latest version of WINE.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.7

Install the game as normal, the installer will probably crash at the end, ignore it. You can now run the basic version of SWGB without any fuss.

I found that on quitting the game, my desktop wouldn't always revert back to to the correct resolution. To solve this, run SWGB in a Virtual Desktop :

wine explorer /desktop=name,1024x768 swgbg.exe

The virtual desktop will expand and shrink depending on the resolution of the game.

I did find that running the virtual desktop at a lower resolution occasionally gave graphical glitches like this : A quick restart fixed it.

Multiplayer

To get multiplayer working, I followed this advice and installed DirectPlay from Microsoft (you can ignore the stuff about disabling your network adapter).

winetricks directplay

On restarting the game, you should now be able to play across a LAN. Our two laptops communicated quite happily over WiFi.

Remember, Microsoft Zone doesn't exist any more - so you'll either have to play with people on a LAN, or ask for their external IP address. I've no idea which ports need forwarding.

Widescreen Patch

This game was originally designed for a 4:3 screen. If you've got a laptop or modern monitor, you'll probably want to make use of all that extra space.

There is a Wide Screen Patch available. Follow the instructions in the .zip file to apply the patch. Tell the game options that you want to play at 1280*1024 - this will switch it to widescreen.

I didn't notice any graphical glitches - but this game is over a decade old, so the graphics are quite low resolution.

One thing to note, if you're using the Virtual Desktop, you may find the game doesn't take over the whole screen - leaving you unable to access the lower portions.

In which case, I recommend running without the Virtual Desktop.

Gameplay

It's still just as good as I remembered! The music is epic, the voice acting is adequate, and the game mechanics are perfectly tuned.

Everything works well on Linux - even if it does take just a little bit of fiddling to get it right.

Totally worth a go for four quid. Buy it on GOG.com.

This particular review has been doing the rounds on Twitter.

Yes, it's hyperbolic and ranty - but it is the absolute truth. Monument Valley is overpriced.

Now, don't get me wrong, it is a gorgeous game. Sure, it's a bit derivative of the Xbox hit Fez. There's no story to follow except for some cod-philosophy which tries its best to be deep, but ends up sounding like a teenage girl writing inspiration quotes over a picture of a dolphin. The sound design is subtle and compelling, the animations flawless, and the game mechanics are excellent.

It looks amazing. For an hour.

Seriously, I don't play many video games, but I sailed through in sixty minutes. At level 10 I found the first real challenge and then... poof! The game was over.

That does not represent good value for money. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it was pretty dreadful.

You user doesn't care how many people worked on the game. They don't care that proper sound design is expensive. They don't care that your landlord put up the rent on your swanky London studio.

Chris Ross

@darkrock

Replying to @edent@edent Cheaper, longer lasting and more satisfying than a cup of coffee.

---

We live in times of desperate austerity. When you say "well, it's only the price of a cup of coffee!" you utterly fail to realise that for many people Starbucks represents an unobtainable level of decadent spending.

People have hard lives. After working two jobs, slumped on an endless night bus home, they want relief from the pain and tedium of the working day. Pulling out an old phone - perhaps a hand-me-down, or one bought in happier times - they want to spend what little disposable income they have wisely. Something that gives them bang for their buck.

Renting a movie, like Transformers, works out at £1.30 per hour of enjoyment. Twice as cheap as Monument Valley.

Reading a book, knitting, chatting on the phone with a friend - all cheaper.

As the reviewer said - there are many games which are just as good looking as Monument Valley, with far longer play times. Often for free.

Earlier this year, I asked people what they thought of Monument Valley.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Those who've played "Monument Valley" - is it worth £2.50?
play.google.com/store/apps/det…

---

Ian Dow-Wright

@iandowwright

Replying to @edent@edent Yes for the design aesthetic but the game is pretty short.

---

𝚔𝚊𝚒 🤖+🧠 kai.pcc.eth 🤗

@kaigani

Replying to @edent@edent Yes. And you can help to raise the baseline app pricing model above the unsustainable free-99p level that is hurting the industry.

---

The last post, from my friend Kai is the one that interests me most. It speaks to a sense of entitlement that I think is prevalent within the creative industries (I include myself in that group). What we're doing is special - and deserves a special price. To most people, what we produce is fairly worthless, quickly consumed, and just as quickly forgotten.

It's like paying for a cocktail in a swanky bar - you're not really paying for the booze, the buzz, or the mixologist's time - you're paying for the entire experience. That's fine if you literally have money to waste - but for most people, it's just not worth it.

Monument Valley is a shallow game, priced at those people who value a delightful transitory experience rather than those who have a reasonable expectation of longevity.

The review on the left comes from the North American version of Plants vs. Zombies™ 2 whereas the one on the right is from the Worldwide version of Plants vs. Zombies™ 2.

The above screenshot was taken shortly after the release of the North American version. The scores as of today have harmonised (4.2/5 vs 4.4/5) but there is still a disproportionate number of 1 star reviews on the American version.

Both have the same version number (1.8.265164), release date, "what's new" changelog, screenshots and are identical in filesize.

This leads me to two questions,

1. Are these really the same app?
2. If so, why the different scores?

I downloaded the APKs and decompiled them. Essentially, the only difference is that one says it's for North America. Given the size of the resources that both download are identical, it's hard to believe that there's any significant difference other than, perhaps, language packs.

It is the same game, where has the score disparity come from? Is it merely that the North American version has fewer downloads and - for some reason - early versions got poor reviews? Is it that Americans just don't like Plants vs. Zombies™ 2?

Finally - why bother having two separate versions of the app? In some cases, it could make sense (if you have to have different legal agreements) but surely most of that could be handled in the app itself.

Curiouser and curiouser.

That's it. Read a letter, type in which words have been redacted. If you get it right, you're rewarded with the next letter.

I can't understand why this game hasn't been made before. There's literally nothing to have stopped this game being developed on early 8-bit microcomputers. It is interactive fiction - but unlike any I've played before. Rather than changing the plot with your decisions, you merely have to decipher the censored letters you have received to move the story along.

Because you learn about the characters while reading their intimate letters to one and other - and you pick up clues based on their personalities - it's easy to get drawn in to their world. While there is an element of crossword puzzle about it (what 5 letter word for sadness fits here?) there is a huge amount of satisfaction to be gained by trying to think like the letter-writers. In many ways, it's the perfect replacement for CAPTCHA - can you prove you have the contextual understanding and emotional depth of a human?

As the game progresses, the tension creeps in. The pain and suffering expressed in the letters leads to a heartbreaking conclusion.

The game itself is short. I completed it in a few evenings of sporadic play. But it certainly represents value for money. Currently £1.22 - it is a short story, full of twists and turns, which forces you to think about what you're reading in a way I simply haven't encountered before.

Buy Blackbar for Android. Buy Blackbar for iOS.

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"
>Go East
"You have been eaten by a Grue. A dwarf starts singing about gold"

Smashing! Just like the pictures are better on the radio, so the graphics are immeasurably superior when they're in your head. Don't get me wrong, I love the 5.1 surround sound snarl of a rabid beast rendered in 1080p - but nothing is quite as good as using your imagination.

Text Adventures - or, more properly, Interactive Fiction - is enjoying a mini-renaissance at the moment. There are emulators for smart phones, computers, and consoles.

But for SMS? None that I could find. Think about it; SMS is close to the perfect medium for Interactive Fiction. Your commands are concise enough to fit into a single message, you don't have to worry about the speed of your response, everything is text based.

So, I present to you, Zork via SMS (with a little help from Twilio).

Brilliant!

HOWTO

Although superficially a simple project, there are a few gotchas along the way. This documentation is mostly for me - but may be of use to you :-)

Let's start at the end.... Using Twilio you can send an SMS to a phone number, that is then POSTed to a webserver of your choice.

Twilio will send an SMS back if it receives a response such as

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
  <sms>You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded
front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
</sms>
</response>

Easy enough. (NB the free account prepends your messages with a trial message. Once you pay, that goes away.)

So, how do we get a text adventure like Zork running server side? There are plenty of client side emulators out there - but I only found one which was purely server side.

THCnet have a PHP interpreter for Zork. It's slightly cludgy - but it works. I'm checking to see if I can distribute it on GitHub.

The game library "dtextc.dat" must be installed in "/usr/games/lib/". The source code is available if you want to recompile it and place it somewhere more accessible.

A MySQL database needs to be created to keep track of users and sessions.

A temporary directory (which must be readable and writeable) will also be needed to store the state of play for each session. I've used "tmp/404/" but you can alter config.php to point wherever is convenient. You will also need to adjust index.php and functions.php with the new location.

Finally, the executable "zork" must be runable.

That's pretty much it.

When a user (or, in this case, Twilio) first makes a request to the URL, we check to see if they already have a session cookie. If they don't, create one, and start the game by returning the opening text.

For every subsequent connection, we check the state of the game based on their cookie, then apply the body of their SMS to the game engine. Whatever Zork spits out, we return as an SMS.

By default, Twilio kills unused sessions after 4 hours, and all cookies will be lost.

Where Next?

It strikes me that the various forms of text adventures are excellent as a sort of mini-IVR. A nice little finite-state-machine which can quite happily run for years. Services like Frontline SMS are great for information sharing, but they're really not designed for this sort of work.

Could we use interactive fiction in places where SMS is cheap but other forms of entertainment are expensive? Could IF be used to augment existing media events? SMS is lowest common denominator - even iPhones can use it.

But, for now, all I have to worry about is someone texting me "Go west'); DROP TABLE ..." ;-)