Unique PC Games

[Damien]

I stumbled upon Drawn to be alive accidentally a few days ago.

It's a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 but changes the game completely (total conversion).

The game is about a small paper sketch that was given life. The fun thing is, being made out of paper, the main character can fold himself to get through obstacles or hide from humans. He can also hide in the paintings or posters or glide from high surfaces. If he enters water, his texture gets blurry and ruined.

Check out the gameplay video on the site to see what I wrote about. That mod's worth getting UT2004 once it's released.

And the soundtrack sounds pretty good, too.

[Nikolas]

I would like to comment on ghosts game "Flow". First of all the game that he describes is flow, not cloud. Cloud is a different game. And indeed it's highly addictive! A near perfection little game for flash. (and while I don't particularly like flash games, this one is different, most probably unique as well...)

[Andail]

First of all, great topic!

Maybe also take a look at the Game Innovation Database

The goal of the GIDb is to classify and record every innovation in the entire history of computer and videogames. Because we could never complete this daunting task alone, we have made the GIDb an open wiki, allowing anyone to easily add innovation entries for the benefit of everyone who cares about the history, study, and practice of game innovation.

The intention might be good, but so far this site is pretty awkward....they list Dune 2 but not Dune,  even though the first game must be credited for being more innovative, and they list half a dozen James Bond games, though none of them are particularly innovative.

[DGMacphee]

Regarding Drawn to be Alive, I like the look of it. I like FPS that can add a new twist, which I why I want to bring up Portal.

The trailer for Portal knocked me on my arse as far as a new twist of FPS. I like that whole reality bending element of games.

If you haven't seen it yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if3Qv2tHyfA

Here's the game it was based on: Narbacular Drop!

[Vel]

Bad day on the Midway
There's nothing quite like it, you have to play it again and again to grasp just how genius a game it is.

[Ghost]

@Nikolas : I thought that was obviousÃ,  Cloud is, IMO, the more techically impressive game, though. FLOW is an example game for a theory, yet to me, it's almost flawless.

"sub-conscious game difficulty settings".

That sounds very interesting. Tell us more.

Well, the theory is that a game shouldn't have a preset difficulty level because that's a static thing. Playing a game at an easy level means there are less enemies or they are slower, weaker; playing at a higher setting means you are weaker and enemies react faster. or there's less money, or developing techs takes longer. Whatever, it isn't flexible.
Now, the man who made flow thinks it is possible that, in any given game, you can create just the "difficulty" one needs by allowing him to set it himself with a few simple choices. FLOW is made to show how it works, and even though I will offer a link to the game, I'll also try to explain.

In FLOW you play a small organism, just one "cell" with a mouth. You move by pointing with the mouse to the spot you wish to move to, and you can acellerate with a mouse click. The controls are extremely simple. As soon as your mouth hits another cell core, this core is eaten. Small organisms have just one cell core, larger, complex ones have more. You too start with just one cell core. Apart from other organisms, there is a + and a - node in each level. Eating + makes you go deeper into the ocean, where more complex entities await. Eating - brings you back to the last.
Now, as far as I've figured it out, you can make the game easier or harder for you by deciding to quickly go down several levels, which makes you enter more dangerous organisms while you're still quite weak. Eating them is harder, but the reward is better. Or you can search all the levels for everything to eat, and then go down, which makes the game quite easy. It's not exactly sub-conscious but effective. The best thing is, you decide the difficulty of the boss for the next round, because your organism will be the boss you have to defeat after you beat the game's first round.

Check it out for yourself- Both the theory, which is explained here, and the game, which you can play online or get as a download. It has a very nice style to it, I like it a lot...

http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/

[fred]

First of all, great topic!

Maybe also take a look at the Game Innovation Database

The goal of the GIDb is to classify and record every innovation in the entire history of computer and videogames. Because we could never complete this daunting task alone, we have made the GIDb an open wiki, allowing anyone to easily add innovation entries for the benefit of everyone who cares about the history, study, and practice of game innovation.

The intention might be good, but so far this site is pretty awkward....they list Dune 2 but not Dune,Ã,  even though the first game must be credited for being more innovative, and they list half a dozen James Bond games, though none of them are particularly innovative.

I think the idea is to credit games for the specific innovative feature they have introduced, so Dune 2 is credited for being the "*first* real-time strategy game for pc" and some other innovations. I haven't played the first Dune game, but maybe it wasn't real-time?

[Andail]

The first dune was an adventure/strategy hybrid, and a rather weird one also. If any game should be credited for the real-time strategy, it should still be that one, even though it's not full-fledged, so to speak.
The reason I mentioned the 007 game was that the authors of that articled apparently hadn't come up with anything innovative with it either.
"Innovative" for me is something rather ground-breaking, but I guess it could be used very broadly.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Ghost, thanks a lot for the link, that game is quite amazing. Shame you can't save, though.