My Tribe by Grubby Games is an island simulator in which a tribe of people are stranded on an island and have to learn how to survive. This includes gathering food, building shelter, chopping down trees and harvesting rocks (um…) among other things. I’ve debated with myself whether or not to call it a blatant clone of Virtual Villagers, but there really is no getting around it – My Tribe is a blatant clone. But it’s also a very good game.

The graphics are adorable. The intro was very cute and I like the look in general – a slightly more painted look than the standard CG colored or pixel art look often present in casual games. The animation also receives some bonus points as it’s fluid and pleasant, and the game screen is full of life. Butterflies and stuff fluttering around everywhere. Very nice. At times it’s hard to differentiate between objects one can interact with and a colorful bird that’s just decoration, but that’s a small price to pay for a lively background. The audio is also quite pleasant, and I was impressed by the speech in the tutorials. Nice touch.

The gameplay quite simply is fun. There’s a lot to do, a lot to explore, and you always have the urge to solve the next mystery or see what the next technology level will bring. While My Tribe is a ripoff of Virtual Villagers, it does bring some new things such as random islands instead of just a static one. Also, the island is a bit bigger and more dynamic – chopping down trees cause them to disappear and you have the option to plant new ones as well. In general there are more ways to affect the environment than in Virtual Villagers.

After a while I started feeling that the island was limited, though. I think that there needs to be more stuff to do – a bigger set of things to interact with. I may not be the ideal person for these kinds of simulators but I feel that there ought to be more to do all the time. Sure, I need to let my little islanders work in order to improve their skills, but I’d like to have minigames to play at the same time. Something to occupy my restless mind with. The game is still fun, but I can’t concentrate on it since there’s often nothing to do. Which brings me to another aspect of the game…

The game is progressing even when it’s not running, so while you’re away your islanders are still chopping up wood and fishing and researching. This is a neat idea, but also a very frustrating one: you need to remember to play now and then in order to not wipe out your entire tribe. I left the game a couple of days and feared that white skeletons would greet me upon my return, but I was pleasantly surprised. They had managed to take care of themselves and had given me an excrement-load of science points to boot! Great! I assumed that the game wasn’t all that keen on that death thing, so I got cocky and left the game a couple of more days.

Disaster! Tombstones littered the island. My once proud tribe was reduced to its bare minimum. I did find two survivors though: Jeremy and Hannah were starving but mysteriously still alive. Also, a young girl was alive as well. I wonder if this is a contingency plan by the developers? “That lame dude left all his islanders to die! Well, we’d better make sure that he has enough to breed more people at least.” If so, it’s a brilliant idea. However, it doesn’t work in practice.

This is where the game enters a downward spiral. With so few people left it’s no fun to play the game, which means that you won’t be arsed to start up the game very often. Which of course means that the tribe won’t expand very quickly – or at all. In the end I had a tribe consisting of 54 year old Xavier, an aged woman and a young girl. It’s impossible to breed more people once they are too old, so these few are the remnants of a once proud budding civilization now destined for extinction.

By the way, when you click on an islander you can see his or her thoughts. I kept seeing “Xavier is very happy to live on the island” and “Xavier thinks this island has no equal.” No shit. Here’s a guy who’s lived a nice and cozy life alone with two women on a deserted island. You old goat, you.

Finally I have to mention that despite the game’s flaws it’s strangely addictive. My current tribe is doomed but I have the urge to start a new one – see if I can get things right this time. The game is still a bit limited, but fun nonetheless.

Graphics

Quite nice! Good animations and lovely painted look in the intro.

4/5

Sound

Nice music, and good sound effects. Extra credit for the voice acting even though the girl sounds smug. You biatch! Don’t smirk at me while you tell me how to play!

3/5

Gameplay

My Tribes is fun, there’s no getting around that. A bit lacking in variety and things to do on the island.

3/5

Addictiveness

I want to make my tribe great! I want to solve the mysteries! I want to explore lots of islands! I guess that means that the game is pretty addictive?

4/5

Technical notes

The game started up in fullscreen and did awful things to my two-screen setup. Everything was restored fine when I put it in windowed mode, though, so no harm done aside from messing up my desktop brightness. I like the loading screen – “sailing to your island” and a boat moving to the right to indicate the progress instead of a simple loading bar.

Edit: As was mentioned by Olivia in the comments below, the game can be set in slow mode if one intends to leave it for a while. The problem for me is that I never know in advance if I’ll be gone for a few days – I play games when I feel like it and have the time to spare, so it’s not always easy to predict these things.

I went through my X: drive today in search of old screenshots of Might and Magic games (don’t ask), and I found these hilarious newspaper clippings. Thoughtful as I am I thought I’d share them with you:

Ironically, if line six is to be disregarded then the instructions for how to read the notice should be disregarded too. I smell a paradox.

Sooty is a legend. He’s become part of my standard repertoire of drunken anecdotes. “He slept for two days” is just the icing on the cake. But no matter how funny Sooty is, I found something even better:

Sweet mother of the f-word, I can’t stop laughing at that. It has to be a fake…but if it isn’t, it’s the best captioned picture ever.

It’s December 20 and this could be the least Christmassy Christmas ever. No Christmas songs playing, no snow, no candy or xmas foods, no Christmas beer at home, no presents planned (except for one) – this place isn’t exactly bursting with holiday cheer. So, what better way to make things brighter than to create a little Christmas card from KarjaSoft to you all.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year well in advance! Just in case I forget to mention it later.

Now I’d better get back to my cactus tea and a that stupid movie I was watching.

My recent non-public release of Wildhollow (v0.2) has received some very interesting feedback. First of all, many seem to enjoy the art and the writing. Yayness! That’s actually pretty damn cool – I’ve been freetting over whether or not I’m a moron for putting so much emphasis on dialogue in the game. My reasoning is sound: Spandex Force received praise for its humorous writing, so this time I’m concentrating on much more of that. But it is a bit of a gamble. The audio received some mixed comments, but the only thing I really have to change is the typewriter sound in the dialogues. I agree that it’s a tad anachronistic in a fantasy game…but on the other hand I’ve added heavy metal songs for the dramatic scenes as well. What can I say, I like contrasts!

Other than that there are three worrying tendencies in the feedback: the minigames suck (I’m fixing that), the animal management needs to be improved (I’m fixing that)…and I have a sneaky suspicion that some people feel that there’s not enough guidance in the quests.

I’m all for easy-to-play games that one can pick up instantly. But Wildhollow requires you to read a lot of dialogue and deduce what to do based on that. I’ve done my best to have “quest hints” for each stage of the quests and have characters repeat important bits of information if they’re relevant to a quest, but there still might be a lot of exploration required to solve some of the puzzles.

I’m still on the fence whether or not this is a good thing. My initial response is “It’s a good thing, dammit! It encourages immersion and makes the quests flow naturally rather than appear forced.” But yesterday I played Rise of the Argonauts and now I’m not so sure anymore…

I consider myself a casual gamer, and Rise of the Argonauts is a pretty casual action RPG. I click some buttons, and the dude runs around like a scorched ferret, cutting and clubbing people all over the place. I love it! Epic violence, beautifully performed, that requires almost no skill at all. I don’t have to spend hours to learn how to do weird combos – they simply appear out of nowhere!

But all is not well in ancient Greece… The game gives almost no indication as to what I need to do next. I can’t be arsed to read all the text in an action game – I’m playing the game to spear people on my enormous barbeque stick! But if I skip too much I end up with my hero standing around looking dumb, and me sitting there feeling even more dumb. “So… Uh… What? What do I have to do now? Do I have to talk to someone? Is there a list of active quests? I don’t know what to do!”

Now, Wildhollow and Rise of the Argonauts aren’t comparable at all. Not in the very least, and not only because RotA is a frigging multi-million production. My choice to rely on text in Wildhollow is a major part of the design – it’s an integral part of the game. RotA’s focus is on action, with text added on. In Wildhollow you can quickly click around to try out things or talk to people; in RotA you have to physically move your character between the scenic vistas to see if this was where you needed to go…and retrace your steps if not. But at its core, Wildhollow relies on the player to explore to proceed – just like RotA.

I’ve been toying with the idea of adding graphic indicators for whom to talk to next, but… That feels cheap. It breaks the immersion. And it just might make the puzzles too easy. Another approach might be to make conversations pop up more often – make some NPCs initiate conversations on their own. That’s probably a better approach, but I’m still not sure if that would work. What I want is to make a game that’s easy to play and follow, but still not ridiculously simple or lacking in immersion.

Any suggestions for good games I ought to play to get inspiration for how to solve my dilemma?

No one?

Not a single suggestion?

Man, you suck.

I saw this thread on Indiegamer.com about Antair Games’ most prestigious Indie Bake Off 2008 competition, and I simply had to post a picture of my delicious Pac-Man saffron buns I baked a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t planning on entering the competition per se, but Gavin from Antair Games just told me that the pic was added anyway…despite its blatant disregard for competition rules! (He didn’t say the last part explicitly, but I can tell!)

It’s been a semi-annual tradition for me to make these every year around December 13. It’s my own particular way of celebrating Saint Lucy’s Day. Normally the traditional saffron buns look like this, but I prefer my geeky buns:

As you can see, my Pac-Men are a little darker and maybe not quite as yellow. I blame that on two things: my covering the buns just a tad excessively in eggs…and the fact that I used some strange unlabeled saffron that I bought in Tunisia. I think it was saffron at least…

Now go check out the other entries!

2008 has been a stagnant year for Internet browsing. I’ve pretty much kept to my old favorites, never straying far from the well-trodden path of news sites, Tom’s hardware, Kotaku, xkcd, etc etc. But amidst the stagnation there have been a few golden nuggets; a few new websites that I have discovered. Not many, mind you – I had to struggle to come up with a top 5 list that anyone would find interesting. Some of the sites I have discovered in 2008 have been sites that everyone else has used and forgotten all about already, such as Facebook and StumbleUpon. I won’t even bother mentioning those; I don’t want to appear a totally inbred and pathetic loser.

Well then… Without further ado, here is the Cynical Stuff list of:

Top 5 New Sites of 2008
——————————————

5: The Minus World

This humor site is filled with irreverent parodies and references to video games. I’m not a rabid fan but there are some brilliant pieces like the Grand Theft Auto IV Activity Book For Kids. Absolutely hilarious at its best; pretty meh at its worst. Definitely worth checking out regularily, though.

4: GameProducer.net

Juuso is an indie game developer/entrepreneur with an interesting blog and forums that I – unfortunately – haven’t spent much time in lately. I used to check both the blog and the forums regularly before my recent minor hiatus from the online world; I think it’s time to re-discover this newly discovered site soon.

3: Passive Aggressive Notes

What can I say? I’m a sucker for ridiculous humor pages filled with short, quick and funny things to check out. Notes with passive aggressive messages are funny – and a whole collection of them is even more so.

I’m not so good at writing these kinds of subtle notes, myself; the only time I’ve left a note in the laundry room, it was a death threat.

2: The Official King’s Bounty Forums

King’s Bounty is the best game of 2008, and there’s nothing you can say that can make me change my mind! Play the game, read the forums! Do it, now!

Finally… It’s time for number one… What could it be?! What could it be?!?!!

1: LOLCats

I don’t think there’s a single site I’ve spent so much time at in 2008 as LOLCats. I can’t help it – I adore the kitties, and I love the captions. Yes, still! This is a fad that’ll never grow old for me. I squeal like a little puppy when I see those adorable pics, and every day I hope and wish that there’ll be a new hedgehog or squirrel picture along with the normal kittens.

——————————————

Note that this is a list of sites that are new to me in 2008. I don’t care if you knew the webmaster when his site was still indie and hardcore back in 2005, before he got corrupted by fame. The term new is a pluralistic and highly relative concept after all, wouldn’t you agree?

I adore The Princess Bride. The movie, that is. It’s a wonderfully witty tale of true love, courage, enormous rats, six-fingered murderers, swashbuckling, miracles, torture and everything else that belongs in a great story.

The Princess Bride game, on the other hand, is a casual game aimed at… At… I’m not sure… It tries to do everything all at once, but you know what they say about jacks of all trades. They end up with stress and ulcers when they attempt to act like masters in a particular area.

The game features a time management minigame, a hidden object minigame, a trivia minigame, a platformer, and a very original form of hidden object adventure thingy. Except for the last one, I’d say that the game’s components are all sub par for their respective genres.

The time management minigame is dull and repetetive. It’s as if a couple of managers played Diner Dash and decided that they know all about how to make a good time management game. The hidden object minigame is uninspired and repetetive, even though it features a very cute colour mixing component. The platformer minigame is great in theory: you control both Wesley (who has a sword) and Buttercup (who can leap high), and switch between them in order to get past various obstacles. But it’s not all that fun to actually play. It’s a real pity, ’cause there are too few platformers that utilize the use-different-characters-to-advance mechanic a la Lost Vikings.

The trivia minigame’s difficulty is pretty uneven but at least it’s short and quick to play. It also features some of the most ridiculous multiple choice questions that I’ve ever seen. E.g.

Be careful with roses because you might hurt yourself on…

A) A thorn
B) A wild badger

That’s bloody brilliant! And on that note I have to say that The Princess Bride game is pretty funny overall. Not hilarious and witty like the movie, but cute and worth a brief smile. Speaking of things that bring a smile to my lips (aside from naked women and beer): the game’s fifth minigame is really innovative! Storm the Castle it’s called, and it’s nothing more that placing objects in their assigned positions. “What’s so innovative about that, you silly sod,” you ask. Well, the innovation comes from the fact that all of these objects have to be found in the intro and outro movies played throughout the game! Sure, it’s not all that fun to have to watch all the movies and click on random things, but the concept, the idea, is absolutely brilliant.

Finally, the game’s production values are excellent: smooth animation, funny characters, good intros and outros that follow the movie storyline, and a lot of voice acting. Voice acting that’s actually pretty good! The music isn’t bad either – although the title tune doesn’t fit in at all. I’d really like to see this game’s budget. I could probably make dozens of games for half that!

Graphics

Great characters, mostly great animation, great backgrounds, great movies. Some of the minigames could have better art.

4/5

Sound

Horrible title tune. Quite good music other than that. Tries to sound like the movie soundtrack (but fails).

4/5

Gameplay

A lot of variety in game styles but often too repetetive and simple.

2/5

Addictiveness

Not awful, but the shallow minigames doesn’t exactly leave a player yearning for more.

2/5

Technical notes

Just one small thing to mention: the game doesn’t pause when I alt-tab away.

I have a ginormous backlog of items to fix on Wildhollow, but today I chose to spend my precious time on research instead. “Research?” you ask in a bewildered tone. “Indeed,” I answer with a wry smile. Keeping myself informed about what’s going on in the indie games world is essential to success! Which is why I chose to play Kudos 2, a game that came out months ago and has nothing in common with the style of Wildhollow. Ehm. Wait a minute… That may not have been so smart after all.

Kudos 2 is the sequel to the life simulator Kudos (no surprise there), which was a stats-based game centered around balancing all the little elements that makes up a young person’s life, and ensuring that he/she becomes a healthy, wealtyh, social and happy member of society. Or, if one is thus inclined, an ugly moronic misfit shunned by everyone.

When Kudos 2 was announced I saw one poster complain that it’s just a re-skinned version of the original Kudos. I don’t agree at all…but there’s no denying that – on a conceptual level – the games are essentially the same. You make choices that affect your character’s stats in various ways, and in that area nothing much has changed between the games. But Kudos 2 has received a massive injection of fun! The writing is improved, the interface is improved (I love how the diary is used to convey information), the choices are a bit more varied now and then, and so on. It all adds up.

I didn’t like the original Kudos but I kinda like Kudos 2. It’s still not a game for me, though, because I’m not sure that I can win the game. I want my character to be attractive, smart, social, wealthy, cultured, have an excellent job and heaps of friends – but from what I’ve seen I doubt that it’s possible. The game is semi-realistic in that it requires you to make hard choices and balance all those aspects against each other. I don’t like that. I tried to make Mister Fagballs smart and educated in the hope that it would give him a good job which would enable him to do lots of cool stuff later…but for some reason his lousy friends didn’t understand that he needed to concentrate on his studies rather than hang out. “It’s more work than it’s worth it, being friends with you,” they said. Well, screw them! Who needs ‘em! Mister Fagballs has his science classes and his biology, not to mention his sudoku book.

Oh, the sudoku book. It all went downhill after he bought that sudoku book. Rather than spend an evening at a pop concert Mister Fagballs sharpened his logic skills with sudokus instead. The game probably sensed his loneliness because it unlocked the “go to church” event – almost like it sensed that he was in need of some spiritual guidance. I assume that that was a sign from above. But just in that instance, another sign from above came: the saga of Mister Fagballs was abruptly brought to an end as the game crashed and burned. Well, okay, it didn’t burn. But it crashed at least.

Graphics

Simplistic but pleasant. Nice characters and portraits, although a few stood out like a sore thumb. Serves its purpose well.

3/5

Sound

Pretty varied and decent enough. Nothing special.

3/5

Gameplay

I love the concept of making choices to see how a character turns out. At least in theory. There’s no denying that there’s a good game here.

4/5

Addictiveness

I’m divided about this. It’s a fun game with a lot of replay value, but I find it frustrating to always balance different stats against each other.

3/5

Technical notes

The game started up in fullscreen and did awful things to my two-screen setup. Everything was restored fine when I put it in windowed mode, though, so no harm done. (Come to think of it… Is it my imagination or did the game alter my brightness/gamma settings?) There’s a massive delay when switching to the game window, and it appears to be crash prone.

Christmas time is here, by golly! (Disapproval would be folly / Deck the halls with hunks of holly / etc etc.) This means that lists are starting to pop up everywhere. “Best games of 2008,” “Most ridiculous hairdo of 2008,” “Top STDs of 2008″ and so on. Cynical Stuff can’t be any worse, so here’s my own incredibly well-researched and non-biased list. I couldn’t find any suitable 2008 theme, though, so I went for:

Top 10 Songs Under One Minute

My criteria are as follows:

• Only reasonably well-known songs.
• No jingles or theme songs. This means that I had to remove the Dethklok theme from my list, unfortunately.
• The length of the track as it appears in an album absolutely must be under 1:00. This excludes a lot of good material at e.g. 1:05 and 1:15, but c’est la vie.
• No interviews/sketches/speeches/thematic intros.

Enough already; let’s get to it! Click the links for YouTube links to the different songs.

10 – Dead Kennedys – A Child And His Lawnmower

This is a good ol’ punk song. I’ve never been a big fan of DK but the humor is excellent and the style is interesting. Not worth more than a 10th place here, though.

9 – The Misfits – Demonomania

If I were a cynic I’d say that this song is a good example of The Misfits’ music since many songs sound pretty similar. Good thing I’m not, eh?

8 – Bad Religion – 52 Seconds

Bad Religion rocks! Too bad that this song is rather dull; it only gets as high as an 8th place because it’s a Bad Religion song.

7 – Stormtroopers of Death – What’s That Noise

Okay, okay! This song is pretty much only speech with some jingle-like riffs. But I can’t leave it out!

6 – Stormtroopers of Death – Fuck The Middle-East

Well, I can’t agree with the message of the song. But it’s damn catchy and a good song despite its length of less than half a minute!

5 – Flogging Molly – The Wrong Company

A capella songs count. And that’s a good thing – otherwise this funny and pleasant song wouldn’t have made the list. To tell the truth I had never bothered listening much to it before I compiled this list.

4 – Stormtroopers of Death – Ballad of Jimi Hendrix

There are dozens of S.O.D “Ballad of” songs I could have chosen, but I selected this one because it’s the first one I heard. Awesomeness!

3 – NOFX – Murder The Government

This video misses the first couple of words. If you’re wondering, the complete first line is “I wanna see the constitution burn.” Ah, nostalgia!

2 – NOFX – Monosyllabic Girl

This is an extremely cute and catchy song by NOFX, the masters of short melodic punk songs. Sure, a lot of metal bands do the whole “growl growl grind grind” song-in-ten-seconds thing but that’s not a proper song in my view.

Now onto number one…

1 – Blink 182 – Happy Holidays You Bastard

Good band! Good song! I’m not sure if it’s truly better than the NOFX songs but given the end-of-year theme in this post I couldn’t let it slip any lower.

There are other top 10 short songs lists around (such as this one featuring not a single song I’ve ever heard of) but I can guarantee that my list is the best! Or at least very good! Or pretty nice, at the very least! Or possibly decent. Maybe just a little bit crap. It might be rather horrible, come to think of it…

A cynical person might assume that I make casual computer games because they are easy to make or because I’m simply following the latest trends. Not at all. I make casual games because I love the concept! I like puzzles and games one can pick up instantly. Most importantly I enjoy games that don’t demand that I learn a motoric skill. Ten years ago I still played an FPS now and then, but as time moved on so did my taste in games; I don’t want to spend hours learning how to get my slippery fingers to move that damn character like I want him to move. In other words: I play a lot of casual games instead.

However, there are casual games that I never seem to enjoy. Games of the overly linear kind, for example. Games like Farm Frenzy and Farm Frenzy 2.

The main premise of both games is that you assume the role of a farmer who needs to accomplish certains goals on each level in order to achieve a rank and collect stars. The stars are then used to purchase new equipment and upgrades, which give you access to new levels as well as new ways of producing foods. Each level of the game is based around feeding animals so that they produce food, which then can be refined into different foods. Which in turn can be refined into more foods. Oh, and pandas occasionally drop in to wreak havok.

While this game is masterfully engineered and strangely addictive to some, I just can’t seem to become hooked on this kind of mechanic. The levels are fun at first but quickly become repetetive. There seems to be no reason to go on – there are no surprises in store. Sure, there are new animals and new foodstuffs to be seen, but everything follows the pattern that was established in the very first level. Simply put, this is not a game for me.

Graphics

Crisp, colorful and varied. Full of character. Not all that many different backgrounds, though.

4/5

Sound

Wacky country music and animal effects. Serves its purpose, but nothing spectacular.

3/5

Gameplay

Well-designed but repetetive. I know that there are branches later in the game, but it’s still quite linear.

3/5

Addictiveness

It’s just not working for me. Sorry!

2/5

Technical notes

No bugs or technical issues found. However, I noticed that the game’s loading times are pretty slow. The game fills up 140 MB of RAM during the title screen, which then increases to a whopping 550 MB during gameplay. Seems like a lot for a 2D game, even though there are a lot of animations for the animals. I wonder if the animals are 3D models that are rendered to 2D upon starting up the game… That would explain why the game’s data file is only 32 MB, but it needs more than 500 MB while playing.