Indie Rock: LA Game Space

I’m not sure what the LA Game Space actually is. I’m sure it’s a building, I’m sure you can walk in and out of it through a door (such things are known to occur commonly). Further than that I’m aware that certain highly influential game designers and creators from other media have shown up there and produced games during the last few months after a successful kickstarter awarded them the funding to do so.

But, like, can everyone show up? Could I go? Will I learn how to make a video game if I’m there? I don’t mean to ask if I can take lessons, I mean if step inside will the knowledge be briefly downloaded into my brain for as long as I remain? I don’t know better. I have to assume that’s where all the money went; into Evil Sorceries.

Plus, where even is LA? That doesn’t sound like a real place. It just sounds like letters.

I backed the aforementioned kickstarter and as a result I’ve been able to play a few games of varying interest and quality over the weekend. If you want to pick up the bundle when it’s open to everyone else you probably should. There’s some really interesting stuff in it. I’ll list the best ones here.

Alphabet

Keita Takahashi made Katamari Damacy! He also made Tenya Wanya Teens! And now he’s gone and made “Alphabet”, which is a game about holding down keys on the keyboard to make them run and letting go to make them jump!

It’s a fine concept. It gets gradually more difficult by adding more keys that are of greater spacing between each other. Mostly it’s just bloody adorbz to see some plush letters run along smiling while a child and what sounds like Pendleton Ward sing a remix of the alphabet song.

Depth

Blue cubes. We’ve all seen them. We think we understand them. We’ve never been more wrong about anything.

In Depth if you look at a blue cube at the correct angle, then click it, it will retain the new size and position it would be relative to your viewpoint if looked at from any other angle. It means that you’re capable of turning a tiny close up blue cube into a massive blue cube further away from you.

It would probably have been called Perspective, but there’s already a game called Perspective. They’re quite similar.

The difficulty balance is off by quite a bit. There’s some attempt to convey new concepts in a vacuum and then paired but, given the way that checkpointing works when you make mistakes, it’s just needlessly frustrating. It’s fine in theory but just needs iterating on.

Inputting

You’ll quickly think that everything about this game is revealed within the first level. It looks like a pretty simple game about pressing the right keys to get a ball to the end of the level and that it will just get harder with stranger key positioning, but I urge you to stick with it a little longer. It is very smart about what it asks you to do and how it asks you to do it.

That’s not really saying anything, is it? That’s just me going “play this good game” I suppose.

VideoHeroeS

I’m never going to play this game with an intent to do what it actually asks me to. You’re supposed to work as a clerk as a VHS rental place and hand the right tape to the right customer, but what the developers have also done is create a “knocking shit the fuck over” simulator that’s as fleshed out as it needs to be. You grab a tape on a stacked shelf and move it around long enough to knock everything else off. It feels great.

Perfect Stride

The thing about skateboarding games is that they don’t feel enough like skateboarding. I don’t mean they don’t simulate it properly, I mean as almost an Ethos. Perfect Stride makes you feel like a skateboarder.

Perfect Stride feels like a world that you’re allowed to be in, one where your only verb is to Skateboard. Even if your avatar wasn’t on a skateboard, you’d still be skateboarding. It’s down to visual aesthetic and a few other design choices that effortlessly give Zero Fucks about anything while giving The Most Amount Of Fucks Humanly Possible about how that effortlessness is percieved.

It’s really silly. It’s really great. I’ve not really described what it is or what you do in it. That’s probably fitting.

Oh, Also

One of the unexpected benefits from backing the LA Game Space kickstarter is that it came with a code for Noitu Love 2, which is a game that I’d never played before but I’ve listened to the soundtrack constantly since it was released. I’m not sure why I started doing that. Probably because it’s great?

So I’m having a weird experience playing it now, because it feels as if it’s a game shaped around songs that came before it rather than a soundtrack produced to help provide tone. It’s almost as if I’m playing Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf.

The game’s alright. The soundtrack is best bit.

You can get all these games and more if you buy the LA Game Space Experimental Game Pack