The first is the demo of Noitu Love 2. Created by Joakim Sandberg, who also made Chalk, this is the sequel to his first major game project, Noitu Love and the Army of the Grinning Darns. The first Noitu love was an excellent game with some nagging pacing issues and a few obviously-made-in-a-game-maker technical rough edges, but as you can tell from the screenshots this sequel is a huge improvement, both in graphics and in gameplay, and has some very fluid platformer+mouse mechanics that are clearly evolved from both Noitu Love 1 and Chalk.

The second game is World Reborn, an interesting horizontal shmup with experience points for the Gameboy Advance. It was apparently finished just a little while after Gameboy Advance games stopped being made, so rather than cast it into the void the developers made the wise and magnanimous choice to release it for free. Hopefully this move will help them find a publisher for their next game.

EDIT: The full version of Noitu Love 2 is now available for $20, which is the price that all videogames should be. Go get it now!

And speaking of baseless hyperbole, Five Short Video Game Industry Keynotes filled me with glee. GLEE!! So you should go check that out.

UPDATE: Preach it, my brother!!

I wonder if I can make a flash version of this game for the Jayisgames competition without being labeled a hack… Or maybe I’m already a hack for making Pretty Pretty Bang Bang, and I have no reputation to tarnish.

(And yes, I know that Gradius is horizontal and this game is vertical, but the subject line opportunity was too good to pass up.)

I’m splitting this into two lists: “5 games that are appropriate for — and enjoyable by — people of all ages”, and “5 games that are macho enough that your teenager won’t feel emasculated playing them — which is of utmost importance to teenagers — but are also not as violent as an R-rated movie”. I’m also going to try to keep all of these games fairly recent. So, here we go!

5 games that are appropriate for — and enjoyable by — people of all ages

1. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii): For a couple of weeks, this game was the most positively reviewed video game of all time. Now it’s been bumped down to second place by Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time which, honestly, was super-amazing when it came out but hasn’t aged that well. Anyway, most people, parents included, are familiar with how non-violent Mario is. His enemies are mushrooms and turtles, and he jumps on top of them to either squash them flat (in the case of the mushrooms) or cartoonishly squirt them out of their shells (in the case of the turtles). Sometimes there are cannon balls and bullets, but they all have big smiley faces on them and appear to hurt Mario about as much as being hit with a grapefruit. In this installment of the series, Mario travels across a galaxy of planets akin to the ones in The Little Prince, collecting stars that have fallen out of the night sky. Video games don’t get much more whimsical than that.
2. Beautiful Katamari (XBox360): This is the latest installment in the quirky-yet-beloved Katamari Damacy video game series. Developed by the Japanese artist Keita Takahashi, the Katamari Damacy games all follow the same basic formula: you play a tiny little two-inch-tall prince, rolling a two-inch-tall ball around a house. The ball is sticky, so when you roll over something tiny like, say, a postage stamp, it sticks to the ball and the ball gets a tiny bit bigger. As the ball gets bigger and bigger, it can roll up bigger things, until you get the ball big enough to leave the house and roll up some garbage cans and mailboxes, then some people, then some cars, then you come back and roll up the house itself, and then the neighborhood, and so on until you’ve rolled up all of the world’s continents! The games’ graphics have a goofy, blocky, Lego-like style to them, and even though you do roll up people and cows and giraffes and other living things, everything the ball picks up stays fully intact, and the people and animals you acquire wave their arms comically in a way that’s more likely to provoke giggles than nightmares.
3. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (XBox 360, Wii, DS, PSP): If you’ve had this list handed to you, then you’re probably a parent shopping for your child, and if you’re a parent then it’s likely that you’ve played Bejeweled at some point. Puzzle Quest, despite the “Warlords” in the title, is like a typical “knight on a quest” video game, except instead of fighting bloody fights against monsters, you play a two-player version of Bejeweled against them. Just like the typical “knight on a quest” video games, you learn new fighting techniques and buy better weapons and armor as you progress through the game, but having a more powerful sword just gives you an edge in the two-player Bejeweled game, and has nothing to do with bloodshed.
4. Meteos: Disney Magic (DS): Special tip for parents who don’t play video games: 99% of the time, video games based on movies, TV shows, or other licensed properties are total crap. One of the few exceptions to that is Meteos: Disney Magic. Disney is surprisingly savvy when it comes to getting video game companies to make good games out of their properties; Meteos was originally one of the earliest games for the Nintendo DS, and was a puzzle game, along the lines of Tetris or Bejewelled, where the player had to link falling blocks together to fling them back up into the sky. The gameplay was very catchy, and Disney collaborated with Meteos’s developer to create Meteos: Disney Magic, a game which keeps the established, abstract gameplay of the original Meteos and gives it a thick coat of Disney characters and charm.
5. Chibi Robo: Park Patrol (DS): The original Chibi Robo for the Gamecube put you in control of a four-inch-tall silver robot with a plug for a tail, who ran around a family’s house cleaning it and doing favors for the family members. Video games have a strange way of making entertainment out of things you’d consider to be chores in the real world. In this sequel, you control a Chibi Robo who’s been assigned to clean up a run-down public park, and doing so primarily entails watering flowers so they grow and dancing for the flowers so they produce seeds. Helping out plants, animals, and people in the game rewards you with “happiness points”, which you exchange for “watts” to power your tiny robot (by plugging his plug tail into an electrical outlet) or to spend on tools to help you with your gardening. There are enemies in the game, but they are things like “smoglings” which are allergic to water and which will simply make your flowers wilt if they go unchecked. The game’s most convincing endorsement is the fact that it’s exclusively sold at Wal-Mart in the US, and as Wal-Mart is famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) for muscling edgey bands into sanitizing their album art and even their song lyrics, you know it has to be wholesome for them to support it so strongly. Fortunately, this is one of those few games which is very wholesome and still manages to be very entertaining.

5 games that are macho enough that your teenager won’t feel emasculated playing them — which is of utmost importance to teenagers — but are also not as violent as an R-rated movie

1. Rock Band (XBox 360, PS3, PS2): At $170, this is by far the most expensive game on the list, but that’s because the game includes a four-head electronic drum kit, two guitar-shaped-and-sized controllers, and a microphone. Players invite their friends over (or kick it Partridge-style if you’ve got a big enough family), and use the instrument-shaped controllers and microphone to play along with 58 different popular songs. The XBox 360 and PS3 versions of the game also give you the option of buying and downloading more songs for the game after you’ve blazed through those first 58. At $170 you’re probably wondering why you don’t just shell out a little more and buy your kids some REAL instruments. The answer is that it will take your kid about a year to learn to play “Next to You” by the Police on a real guitar, by which time he’ll probably have lost interest, and it will only take him an hour to learn to play it on Rock Band, and he’ll be elated. The reason Rock Band is in the teen category is that although the makers of the game are careful to pick teen-friendly songs, they’re still a little edgey, and also because teens seem to be more interested in rock and roll than their raging-hormone-deprived younger siblings.
2. Guitar Hero III (Pretty much every system that doesn’t fit in your pocket): See Rock Band above, but remove the drums, the microphone, and one of the guitars and halve the price. You can add a second guitar for two-player action.
3. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii): First-person shooters are typically a very violent genre of video games, and have spawned Doom, the most maligned video game in the history of mankind. Metroid is a series of science fiction games about a female bounty hunter named Samus who explores space stations and caves in search of space pirates and life-sucking jellyfish called metroids. The games are built on a balance of exploration and fighting alien monsters; for example, in almost every Metroid game, the first thing Samus gets is the ability to roll up into a little ball to squeeze through tight passages and do more exploring. The second thing she usually gets is the ability to fire missiles at the monsters. For years, the Metroid games were two-dimensional, side-scrolling games, but the Metroid Prime series combines the series’ balance of fighting and exploration with a 3D, first-person perspective, with spectacular results. And while most first-person shooters pride themselves on their realism, arming you with authentic guns, pitting you against human opponents, and rewarding you for shooting them in the head, the Metroid Prime series is filled with the same sorts of outlandish alien monsters as earlier games in the series, which flash when you shoot them with your lasergun or your space missiles, and “pop” when they die rather than exploding in a shower of vicera. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is the first installment of the series for the Wii, and the “corruption” in the title refers to a living computer in the game being infected by viruses.
4. Bleach: The Blade of Fate (DS): Bleach is a popular cartoon about a cocky, red-headed teenage boy named Ichigo who more or less accidentally becomes a “God of Death”, and spends an average of 3/4 of each episode in a swordfight with other “Gods of Death”, or against evil ghost monsters called “Hollows”. Despite all the swordfighting and talk of death, however, nobody ever dies, except some of the more monstrous Hollows. There is blood, and there are bruises, but all of the injuries are the kind you’d expect from a schoolyard fistfight, not from a deadly swordfight. Bleach: The Blade of Fate is one of the video games based on Bleach, and by far the most enjoyable. It pits characters from the cartoon against each other in one-on-one swordfights with lots of spectacular effects, but even the most vicious attacks have as much visible effect on opponents as being whipped with a wet noodle. Note that, like Meteos: Disney Magic, this game is one of the very rare exceptions to the rule of “video games based on licensed properties are crap”, so be careful not to pick up a different Bleach video game or a crappy game based on a similar cartoon by mistake.
5. Odin Sphere (PS2): Odin Sphere is an absolutely beautiful video game in which all of the graphics look like moving oil paintings, and the plot of which is based on Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” operas. The primary gameplay consists of running around a side-scrolling area that loops back on itself (like the 1980 video game Defender), fighting through waves of monsters. Although there are some human-looking monsters, most of them are things like frogs and ghosts and dragons, and the oil-painted violence in Odin Sphere is significantly less gratuitous than the violence in the Lord of the Rings movies. It’s not all mindless violence, however, because when you defeat enemies they release points of light called “phozons”, and you have to choose whether you want to absorb the phozons into your weapon to make your attack stronger, or if you want to plant seeds and feed the phozons to them to grow fruit which will make your defense stronger, and which you can brew into potions or cook into meals which provide a variety of different effects.

For more suggestions, check out the “family” section of Gamespot’s holiday gift guide. They don’t have a “suggestions for teens” section, though, which I think is important, because “family” game lists are usually comprised primarily of cutesy games that teenagers wouldn’t be caught dead playing, and “benign” games like golf and “edutainment” which would bore most players of any age to tears.

• The merger of Activision and Blizzard shall henceforth be known as “Actiblizzion”.
• The merger of Square, Enix, and Taito shall henceforth be known as “Squanto”.
• The merger of Bandai, Namco, and Banpresto shall henceforth be known as “Banampresto”.
• The merger of Sega, Sammy, and Dimps shall henceforth be known as “Smegma”.

That is all.

The first dozen times I heard the name The Orange Box I had no idea what it was; at first I thought it was some kind of new computer company or productivity software, and when I figured out it was from Valve I presumed it was probably a repackaging of all of the original Half Life games (with their orange Half-Life logo), maybe remade in Source like Half Life: Source. Eventually the information finally trickled down to me that The Orange Box was a collection of five games, some old and some new, and that two of the games I’d been mildly interested in — Portal and Team Fortress 2 — would not only be part of it, but would only be available as part of it (unless you bought them separately via Steam, which Valve didn’t advertise at all). At that point, I assumed that The Orange Box was a working title or codename, and they’d change it to something more marketable at launch, but I clearly need to stop expecting non-utilitarian, “friendly” names from a company that officially calls its game engine “Source” because the source code for it was in a folder labeled “source”. (YARLY)

Valve makes great games, but they’re really really bad when it comes to naming them. Half Life is not a title that evokes running around and shooting things; it sounds more like something akin to The Sims (especially since the release of Second Life). And once you learn that Half Life is a first-person shooter, what about Half Life: Opposing Force, Half Life: Blue Shift, Half Life: Generations, and Half Life: Source? What do those titles even mean? Are they remakes of the original Half Life with better graphics or a better engine? Are they sequels? Prequels? Side-stories? Completely unrelated games that all use the Half Life engine? What order are you supposed to play them in? (Yes, I know the answers to all of these questions, but only after actually asking these questions and researching the answers.) If Joe Average has heard a lot of good things about some game called Half Life 2 and heads down to the store to pick it up, is he supposed to start with the box that says Half Life 2, or the box that says Half Life 2: Episode 1? Probably the latter, he reasons, since Star Wars: Episode 1 is a prequel to Star Wars… and certainly not that Orange Box thing, because it has all kinds of confusing stuff crammed into it, and prominently displays Half Life 2: Episode 2, and that’s definitely not the right one to start with. Or, wait, maybe it IS the right one; maybe he’s been mis-hearing it all along and maybe Half Life 2 is shorthand for Half Life 2: Episode 2 and that’s the one that everybody’s REALLY been telling him to play. Or maybe… aw, fuck it. He’s just getting Bioshock. Now there’s a title that sounds like a game where you run around shooting stuff, there aren’t any numbers so he knows he’s not gonna be jumping in in the middle of a series, and it’s even got a big-ass monster in a cool environment on the cover, whereas the cover of Half Life 2 just has a big picture of Elvis Costello on it.

Seriously, Valve, Half Life 2: Episode 1 is the most confusing video game title EVAR.

The most unfortunate part of this is that The Orange Box is the perfect introductory package to first person shooters, and with the number of moms and other unlikely characters that the Wii is turning into gamers, there sorely needs to be an introductory package to first person shooters. Portal is extremely accessible, presenting its layers incrementally, beginning with the fundamental basics of how to move in a first person shooter, and with very very few ways to die in comparison to every other game in the genre. Likewise, Half Life 2 begins with the same amount of hand-holding and simple instruction, before slowly layering on the standard conventions of first person shooters in a natural way that makes them easy for new players to grasp. (Team Fortress 2, on the other hand, is a whole different ball of wax with no learning curve at all that just dumps you into the action with no idea what’s going on and nobody to teach you except the other players on your team. I stumbled onto my first server pretty much by accident, I still have no idea what the two or three letter acronyms at the beginning of map names mean, I don’t know how much lag is too much lag, and The Official Team Fortress 2 Manual, while quite entertaining, doesn’t really help.)

At this point, of course, it’s too late for Valve to rename The Orange Box, but since everybody else is playing armchair-marketing-executive, I will too. Re-package The Orange Box as KICKSTART: The Definitive Collection of Valve’s First-Person Shooters. Split the cover into three, equally-spaced frames. The top frame has a picture of the portal gun on an off-white background, and says “PORTAL rewards you with cake”. The middle frame has a picture of the gravity gun on a sepia background, and says “HALF LIFE 2 rewards you with freedom” (at the bottom of the middle frame, in small print, it says “Also includes the follow-up HALF LIFE EPISODES games: HALF LIFE 2: EPISODE 1 and HALF LIFE 2: EPISODE 2!”). The bottom frame has a picture of the minigun with a red background and says “TEAM FORTRESS 2 rewards you with the cheers of your teammates — other players from around the world”. The back of the box has the same three frames, with the blurbs and screenshots for each game in its corresponding frame. The order of the frames on the box is echoed by the setup menu, to hammer home the message: Start with Portal, graduate to Half Life 2, and once you think you’re really hardcore, go get your ass kicked in Team Fortress 2. Since nobody reads instruction manuals anyway, the manual can just be liner notes that explain the histories and backstories of HL2 and TF2, and give instructions on how to get the previous games in those series via Steam, because the instruction manual is the first place anyone who’s actually curious about such things is going to look.

If the promise of cake, freedom, and social accolades doesn’t bring in the Wii moms and casual gamers, I don’t know what will.

Also, I am now taking bets as to which mod will be made first: Lucky ☆ Fortress, or Touhou Fortress. My money’s on the first one, since someone already created models for the Lucky☆Star / Grand Theft Auto mod, but it’s entirely possibly that a crazy one-man team will come out of nowhere with a polished Haruhi Life 2 mod and surprise everyone.

Portal’s already been thoroughly covered by the other video game blogs, however, and they’ve already gushed about it just as much as I could, so I wasn’t compelled to post just about Portal. What really got me to sit down and evangelize this morning was an amazing mod called MINERVA: Metastasis, created solely by a guy named Adam Foster over the course of two and a half years. It was started as a Half Life 2 mod, but switched to a Half Life 2: Episode One mod to make clever use of Stalkers, Zombines, and some beautiful HDR lighting effects.

I first checked out Minerva a couple years ago when only the first chapter of the game was available. I was very impressed by the design, but was sad that it was so short, and presumed that that 8-minute-ish first chapter represented about a third of the finished game. The premise is a very clever use of Half Life 2: Episode One’s existing assets; rather than yet another Gordon Freeman adventure, you control a nameless Combine soldier who’s been reprogrammed, Terminator 2-style, to be more or less one of the good guys, and is airlifted onto an isolated island fortress to do some reconnaissance for “Minerva”, a mysterious scientist who watches your progress through your eyes and talks to you throughout the game via on-screen text. Being a Combine soldier has its advantages; you can actually open most of the “Combine locks” on doors in the game. Of course, the other Combine soldiers on the island immediately sense that you’re no longer one of them and open fire on you as soon as land, which makes the beginning of the game somewhat of a pitched battle, but once you’ve cleared the beaches the difficulty calms down, and then steadily ramps back up as you descend deep, deep, deep beneath the surface.

The original release ended shortly after you began your descent, and like I said I presumed that the final version would be about three times that length, making it a very polished little mod with a 20-30 minute play time. The final, full version of the mod was recently released, and since Portal got me interested in Source games again I gave it a whirl, and was amazed to discover that that first chapter really only accounts for about a tenth of the complete game. Not only that, but as you move deeper into the facility beneath the island, the game literally becomes deeper in every possible way; the plot thickens, the map design improves, the fights become more complicated, and the puzzles become trickier. Minerva actually develops a sort of “Zelda” feel, with weapons and physics being used in clever ways that the official Source games never thought of (and without the over-used Gravity Gun making a single appearance!), and just when I thought I’d reached the end, I discovered that it was actually just the halfway point, resulting in the most entertaining “there and back again”-style game I’ve ever played (which is saying a lot because I usually hate that design choice). It has numerous, spectacular set-pieces, and is so well constructed that I honestly think it’s just as good as HL2: Episode One itself, and am absolutely astounded that it was all built by one person. My one and only suggestion for improvement is for the developer to replace the text communications from Minerva with actual voice acting (and I’m sure many quality voice actresses would be willing to work for free on a project this impressive), although by the end of the game I’d gotten used to the text, and Minerva thankfully only talks to you during breaks in the action, so you’re never trying to fight off enemies or solve puzzles with a screen full of text.

Because Minerva is an HL2: Episode One mod, you’ll need HL2: Episode One (which is only $10) to play it, but Minerva itself is free, and to tie back to the top of this post if you don’t already have Portal and Half Life 2 either, then you might as well splurge and get The Orange Box, because then you’ll end up with Portal for $20, HL2: Episode One (and, by extension, Minerva) for $10, and Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and HL2: Episode Two (that’s a lot of twos!) all for another $20.

Valve, if you’re reading, please offer Adam Foster a job on HL2: Episode Three, and please work with him to port MINERVA: Metastasis to an XBL download for the Orange Box so the 360 people can also enjoy this masterpiece. Adam Foster, if you’re reading this, thanks for making the best mod I’ve ever played. (The second best mod I’ve ever played being Don’t Eat the Mushroom, for the game Knytt Stories.)