still a lot to figure out
Holo Sim is a Virtual Reality game for the HTC Vive and the Microsoft Holo Lens. Holo Sim is a deep city building game that stretches across human history. The game is intended to be played in a reasonably sized room with plenty of floor space. As the player starts the game, a wide landscape stretches out in front of them, rendered in stead of the previous floor. Game sessions start in the prehistorical era by default, although this can be changed before starting the game. Players get access to basic buildings at first and have to increase their population and manage their happiness in order to grow their cities. This is achieved by planning the city and building it to accommodate all of the inhabitant's needs. As time goes on, players can research new technologies and slowly, bit by bit, their civilisation levels will increase, bringing along new challenges and new ways of managing their cities. The unique aspect of this game is that the player is the camera – the game's camera tracks the position of the player's head's position and rotation and centers the view on that, so players can get right into the midst of their city. Before the game, the player selects an environment scale and the actual usable landscape is locked to the room's shape and dimensions. If players choose a low scale, they won't get a lot of room but all buildings will appear bigger. Should a player choose a high scale, everything in the city will appear smaller (or rather, the player will feel bigger) so that there is more space to play on.
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Image retrieved from: http://www.gamerstemple.net/games11/001367/001367s004.jpg
Game: Empire Earth 3, 2007. Rockstar New England
Rainfall is a 2D physics platformer. The central mechanic explored in this game is how physics influence the environment. Players get through the levels by walking, climbing, jumping, swimming and digging. There are different types of materials the player will come across, divided into 3 categories: solid, soft and liquid. Liquid elements will generally flow and pool at the lowest point it can reach, solids are relatively static, however, with enough force they can break. Soft elements are dirt-like, in that the player can dig through them and they do not have a lot of strength to stand on their own. On digging, no material is destroyed, rather it is displaced but always stays in the game world, as to enable players to use the mechanic to their advantage.
These simple mechanics bind together to enable a huge breadth of possible puzzles. Players might have to dig out underneath a solid to throw the solid out of balance and make it break off and slide down in order to cross a lake. On other occasions, players may have to flood a room with water in order to reach a point that's too difficult to reach by jumping and players may have to find a way to dig a tunnel through a soft material without it reaching a tipping point and collapsing.
On top of this, there are twists on these established mechanics that will come in later through the game: different types of liquid could be oil, which is heavy and flows slowly, lava which moves similar to oil but sets fire to anything it touches, gasses that act like water but pool at the top of the level or zero viscosity superliquids which envelop any object they touch. Solids can come in a number of hardness, going from near unbreakable to highly brittle and come in a range of weights, whereas soft materials could be encountered as dry powders, large rocks or viscous clay. Going beyond this, materials can interact with each other, too: a sandy substance submerged into a liquid will create mud, lava and water create rock, sand and fire will create glass and gas and fire will trigger explosions.
The theme of the game is tomb raiding, inspired by the likes of Indiana Jones and the original Tomb Raider series. Players have to best ancient tombs and reach hidden treasures, proving their abilities to make clever use of the physics they're given to play with.
image source:http://i.cubeupload.com/Yuehvy.jpg
In Adventure Based Text Game, a simple text based RPG/Adventure game, the roles of the computer and the player are reverses. You are the narrator, telling a story to the computer who will dynamically respond to your story with generic but suitable "player" inputs.
This program is half game and half writing tool, as the player can establish their own world and assign different characters with different traits and behaviours to the computer. These characters will respond to situations as they would. If the program is unsure about what the player is describing, it will prompt questions such as "Who are we?" Or "Where are we" in order to train the player to write effective fiction.
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In this 3rd person PS4 and Xbox One game, players take control of a well regarded hero: the Weatherman. The Weatherman is an exceptional person with the unique power of controlling the weather and being able to predict the weather. One day, an evil entity called Disasterman invades the metropolis in which Weatherman resides and begins attacking the city. It is now up to the player to banish the evil that has invaded the city.
The abilities the player has to their disposal are all variations on weather themed powers. Players can summon hurricanes, blast hail at opponents, summon rainfall or targeted gusts of wind. The catch however, is that since Weatherman is supposed to be the good guy, it's important to not kill any civilians, as that would further Disasterman's agenda.
In the final act of the game, a twist occurs in which it is revealed that Weatherman and Disasterman are in fact the same person. If the player was reckless during the game and killed too many civilians, Disasterman will win and take over as the primary personality, wreaking havoc on the world. If the player took care not to have too many casualties, Weatherman will take over as the primary personality and protect the citizens for all the future.
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image source:http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gamelife/images/2009/04/15/inf_gdc_1.jpg
In this PC game, you are Hades and in charge of running the underworld. This game is a 3D isometric top down strategy game, in which the player must manage their resources to accommodate all the damned souls and cater to their suffering needs. As time goes on, more and more souls will enter the Hades and the player has to make sure that everything runs smoothly.
The game starts in a mostly empty cavern. All the player will find there is Hades and an empty soul chute in which new arrivals stay. The game runs on 3 main resources: Misery, Anger and Rocks. Misery needs to be kept high in order for soul driven buildings to perform correctly, Anger is the motivation to build and speeds up building when high and Rocks are the primary building resource required to build anything.
As the game progresses, players can unlock more buildings and upgrade previous ones. As time goes on, the Hades will also start to be invaded by Greek mythological figures such as Hercules and Zeus. The player will have to create fortifications and an army of critters and demons to keep them out and players can also summon unique creatures such as Cerberus or the Hydra.
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hot hot picture:http://lilstinker.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/KG_HADES_001.jpg
Crystal Cave is a zen-like simulation game in which the player grows pretty crystals. Players are given a toolbox of different materials, minerals and liquids. Using these, players set up an environment in which crystals grow at an accelerated but still slow paced rate.
Through the use of dynamically introducing new elements to the environment, players can influence the growth of their crystals, making them change colour, shape or translucency. This way, players can even achieve layered crystals or crystals that grow in very odd shapes.
The game features an online gallery, where players can upload their creations with the starting parameters so other players can take those and experiment with the setup to see what they can create.
Crystal Cave is a mobile game with a focus on tablets due to the larger screen, although a port is also available for PC and an HD remaster is scheduled for PlayStation 5.
Image source:http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20081129142254/finalfantasy/images/3/3a/Crystal_Cave_DoC.jpg
Radiance is an abstract puzzle platformer in which the player controls a simple sphere. The goal is to guide the sphere through an environment made of geometric shapes to the goal with a number of optional pickups along the way.
The sphere begins as a black dot on the screen in a very dark environment. Players can move it around and jump, although at first the sphere feels very heavy and useless. Throughout the game, there are different blocks at which players can fuel up with colours. There are 3 different types of colour blocks: Red, Blue and Green. As players stay close to each colour block, the sphere fills up with that colour until it reaches 100%. If the player moves away from the coloured block, the colour value will slowly tick down. If the sphere is filled with any colour, it will emit a strong glow, illuminating the area around it. If the sphere is filled with different colours, they will add to new colours with a sphere that's filled with all three colours glowing white.
Each colour has a different effect on the player: Blue makes the player move faster, Green increases jump force and red increases weight. The effects scale with the intensity of the colour. Players have to cunningly combine colours in order to cross ledges, push switches and jump cliffs. However, simply filling the sphere with the maximum of every colour won't be a quick way to victory, as Jump force and weight cancel each other and high movement speed also means less accuracy of movement.
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Image source:http://www.jurn.org/dazposer/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/glow.png
Dreamcatcher is a Japanese style action RPG in which the player takes control of an anti-social teenager called Mugi. Mugi loves to day-dream at any chance she gets, despite a habit of forgetting her day dreams quite often. One day, she gets a visitor from the spirit world, informing her that she is the last of a bloodline of so-called dreamers, people who have the power to create worlds by dreaming about them and to destroy them by forgetting about them. After this revelation, comes another: Creatures of the dark have begun invading Mugi's daydreams. The visitor from the spirit world begins training her in her day dreams to prepare her for battle and before long, Mugi enters her own dreams to fight of the dark ones and protect the worlds she created.
In this game, players first move through the tutorial level, in which the spirit world visitor trains her up to face her challenges. After that, players get to visit different tiered worlds in a similar way as Kingdom Hearts II's world selection. In visiting each world, Mugi learns different powers that can be used to fight critters and huge bosses.
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Saucy source:https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/shacknews/assets/editorial/2015/06/kh3-gameplay.jpg
In this mobiles endless runner game, players jump off cliffs using paragliders. As they glide through the air, the phone is turned to simulate shifting the glider's weight. This creates drag and allows the player to slightly control where they drift. Players can also tap the screen to pull the gliders' brakes, allowing them to drop further. As they move forward, players will pass air currents which propel the player upwards, allowing them to stay in the air for longer. Every now and then the player will also encounter birds that can collide with the glider and cause the player to drop and lose height quickly, although this can be adjusted for by using the brakes and drag properly. Or even better, players simply avoid the birds altogether.
The goal of the game is to reach the farthest distance without touching ground by using currents and avoiding birds and getting the high score on an online leaderboard.
What would fight club have been like if there were dragons involved?
Sweat not, I'm here to answer that. Dragon Club is a reality game where players register their player name and get to customize a dragon with randomized (but balanced) stats. Players then verse each other one by one. First, both put on Vive VR headsets and motion controllers and then enter a large empty factory hall. To the players however, this hall appears as a randomly chosen battleground. Players pit their dragons against one another by yelling commands for special moves and by moving their hands to control the dragon. The first player to either yield or lose their dragon loses.
After the game is over, the winning player receives Dragon Gold, which can be spent at the counter to upgrade their dragon in stats, equipment or visuals. Players can also buy additional Dragon Gold with money if they like.
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sauce:http://www.socwall.com/images/wallpapers/34597-1920x1140.jpg
Space Empire is a board game where players establish trade routes between planets. The board is divided into hexagonal tiles, each containing either a planet or empty space. Those are shuffled in the beginning of the game and distributed randomly across the board. Players then place one orbital station each on one planet of their choice.
Planets buy and sell different resources which are represented on cards. Money is represented through playing money. Players get equal amounts of starting capital and have to spend it to buy resources and build ships to transfer the wares through space and sell the resources to other players. Players can also buy from or trade things with other players. Eventually, with enough resources and money, players can build new orbital stations around other planets or upgrade their current ones to get better prices. The game only runs for 20 turns, at the end of which players count their wealth and the richest player wins. There is also an additional side board which keeps track of the number of turns, with random events being triggered at turn 5, turn 10 and turn 15 that are drawn from a deck of event cards that influence the game in any number of ways by introducing a variety of situations that change the balance of the game.
Image retrieved from:http://www.spacesector.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/hegemonic_space_4X_board_game_screenshot2.jpg
Riddle of the Sphinx is a 3D point and click adventure game in which the player is a archaeologist thrown into the world of ancient gods. The game can be played on a screen or VR and focuses on puzzle solving the old school way.
Drawing from adventure games like Myst and Atlantis, this game is a simple point and click in which the player interacts with the environment and uses clues to solve complex puzzles. The graphics are very high end and all scenes are rendered in beautiful quality with lots of HDs. To move, the player simply clicks where they want to go and if they are able to move there, the animation will play.
The story is about an archaeologist working in Egypt, helping with the first uncovering of the Sphinx of Giza. As the player enters the inner sanctum, they are drawn into a strange world to meet the interdimensional creatures that inspired the gods of ancient cultures. As the player moves through this surreal afterlife, they have to solve a major puzzle for each god creature they encounter. Every god creature has its own environment, although all of them are very different from what the real world looks like.
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Image came from here:https://retrogamesappreciation.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/images-games-myst-3.jpg
Nautilus is a steam punk underwater game set in an alternate timeline. At the height of the industrial revolution, an asteroid hit earth, melting the ice caps and irradiating the surface. In a last resort escape, humanity built a number of self-sustained capital submarines and descended under the ocean. 200 years have passed since and human kind has flourished in its new habitat. Underwater cities have sprung up with submarines of all kinds zipping between them, creating a vibrant economy that is exploited by traders and targeted by pirates.
Nautilus is a massive-multiplayer online ocean sim. The player creates their character and ventures off into the deep blue to make a name for themselves. Be a miner, a trader, a pirate or a bounty hunter and visit the wonders of the sea. The controls of the game are similar to games like Star Citizen or No Man's Sky, in that the submarine is piloted through open world 3D space.
The look and feel of the game is very steampunk, with Jules Verne-esque machines and inventions and many gentlemanly mustaches.
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image source: http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/bioshock/images/2/20/3-00-A-14.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140213165541
On starting the game, the player will find themselves on an empty plane. Surrounding them, are a number of different people, representing chapters, or rather individual stories, with the person's first name floating next to them. The player can move towards each person and focus their eyes on them, which triggers the story to start.
Each story begins with an insight to the person's normal everyday life, to enable the player to gain an understand of their person and to allow for an empathetic connection to be made. The player needs to be introduced to the person through normality in order to allow them to relate and to have the rest of the story unfold to its full potential. After spending some time getting used to the person's circumstances, the story moves on and follows the events of whatever has happened to the person in an unflinching, but not over-the-top or glorified way.
The stories inside the game are all reconstructed from the accounts of survivors of tragedies, including a civilian view of the Iraq wars in the 2000s, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian travesties of 1975 and many other dark chapters in the recent history of humanity. For this game, it's imperative that the designers work closely with the sources in order to represent and preserve their experiences in a respectful and understanding way that doesn't cheapen the value of human life.
The goal of this game is not to be entertaining for the viewer. The intention is to give people access to a view of events traditional documentaries and text books are unable replicate and hopefully in the process of that, to give people a better understanding of one another and the fact that there are real lives tied to the stories you hear in passing on the news.
image retrieved from:http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article9033088.ece/alternates/w620/Oculus_Rift.jpg
Lyra is a fantasy RPG stripped down to the part players generally spend the most effort with in most RPGs: character creation. The game is a beautifully rendered 3D 3rd person game available on PC.
In Lyra, players create their character in one of the most advanced character creation menus of all time. They get full control over every aspect of their character and can do whatever they want. Then, as they enter the game, they are given a base. This base can be dressed up as anything, ranging from castles over fairy forest to volcano lairs. At the same time, this base acts as a dungeon for other visiting players, which can also be configured and upgraded. At first however, players options are very limited and players have to visit other players' bases and traverse the dungeons, battling monsters and getting to the huge treasure chest which is hidden in every player's dungeon. Upon opening the chest, players are rewarded with currency, which can be spent at home to upgrade the character's equipment from a huge roster of outfits with different bonuses, customize their base or customize and upgrade their dungeons and dwellers.
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image source:http://oi59.tinypic.com/290vexs.jpg
This is a game targeted at people who would enjoy the presence of a cat to meow at but can't get a cat for any reason. The game is available for the Nintendo 3DS and mobile uses the built in microphone to let players meow at a number of cats that can be unlocked through the game. To keep things interesting, the different varieties of cats include fictional types of cats like sphinxes and even bigger varieties of cats like lions or panthers.
Players have to imitate the meow of the cat they're presented with and get a time limit of 90 seconds and only 3 tries to get it right. Once the tries are used up or the timer has run out, the game grades the player on their best meow and gives them a grade from D to S+. With more success, more types of cats are unlocked automatically which the player will be notified about and they will then have a random chance of encountering that cat in the game.
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Kitty retrieved from:https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xfa1/t51.2885-15/s320x320/e15/11373728_723381874450832_366183509_n.jpg
Colony 3113 is a first person roguelike survival game in which the player must terraform faraway planets using a very limited amount of supplies.
It's the year 3113 and recent advances in technology have enabled travel between the stars through wormhole technology. These early wormholes however are still very experimental and can only be kept open for a few seconds before they collapse. Due to the astronomical expense of operation, their range is limited to only a hundred or so light years and their use is very rare. This has led to a situation where a single brave pioneer is equipped with the bare necessities for terraforming and sent through a wormhole that is opened on a random planet. There, they must build a base, begin filtering the atmosphere and cover the planet in vegetation to make it habitable for when the space flight component of the mission arrives decades later.
Planets are randomly generated to have varying environments, atmospheric conditions and in some cases even native life. If players come across extraterrestrial life, they can choose to exterminate it or attempt to coexist, both choices of which will present different challenges. Often, players must be creative about solving problems as random events can malfunction their equipment and they must survive against the odds at all costs - at least until the process of turning the planet H-congrous has been kicked off and their mission is complete.
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Space telescope true colour composite generated from:http://www.minecraftdl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Asteroid-5251-A-Medieval-Space-Epic-Map-1-640x260.jpg
Dream Quest is a mobile app which gamifies sleep. The game monitors sleep times, duration and quality by being placed next to the player's pillow. This information is gamified and shown to the player in the form of an RPG, where their character goes adventuring during the night. If the player sleeps less time than ideal, the avatar spends less time adventuring and thus gathers less rewards and exp. If the player sleeps too much however, the avatar becomes exhausted and eventually starts loosing loot and exp as a result. The better the sleep quality, the more successful the avatar is on its adventures and the more rewards the player will earn.
The game has an online leaderboard so players can compete with each other to go to bed on set times and get proper sleep. Every now and then, the game will also show up little tips on how to get better quality sleep, helping the player get better at the game and at sleeping.
Comfy picture found at:http://i.imgur.com/Xj7OtMs.jpg
Beaver Chaos is a mobile puzzle game in which the player has to build a Rube Goldberg machine to lead a little beaver to a tasty log.
The game works by dragging a variety of different pre-set parts for building and dropping them on the level. Different levels have different parts to them and different environments that can be used to the player's advantage. The game is heavily physics centred, although the physics are very exaggerated and cartoonish with overly expressive animations to top it off. The building parts are all arbitrarily forest/beaver themed and many have different properties that makes them interesting to use. There are piles of leaves that bounce the character off them, there are gnawed trees that fall over when knocked and there are bear traps that snap and make the player jump up, just to name a few.
There are different worlds with a number of levels that all introduce new unique ways of using the physics engine in the way that Angry Birds Space does, where one world may be based on water interactions and another may play with destroying planets and thus removing their gravitational influence.
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Beavers found at:http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/541/437/f37.jpeg
But, Pirates! is a whimsical figure based war game based on pirates. Players can have naval battles and land based quarrels on an epic scale while collecting miniature pirates and painting them in their crew's colours. Some rare figures are loosely based on historical or fictional figures, such as Captain Quackbeard, who has fearsome rubber ducks braided into his beard or Captain Quack Sparrow, who is a ragged antihero out to find the mystical golden rubber ducky. In fact, rubber ducks will be a prominent feature in this game.
The unique catch here is the fact that despite this game being similar to Warhammer 40K in the way players collect figures and paint them, the game is predominantly played digital. The figures, however, work in the way of Skylanders, where players by their figures one by one and scan them into the game using a special platform.
The game itself relies on strategy and tactics. The player assumes the role of a captain and commands their crew during the battle, having to mind outside factors to keep the ship afloat or performing maneuvers. Each figure has its own unique personality and will act on its own, even without the player giving commands. Players are free to give any kind of command but whether it actually gets carried out or not is dependent on how high the figure's morale is compared to the scale of the command. Figures gain morale through experience, so a new figure will resist a command to selflessly storm into battle where a higher level figure might follow the command.
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Booty plundered from: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/be/41/da/be41da574e13ea87abfa17dd2ed7a193.jpg
Homunculi is an alchemy board game where players create homunculi using element cards. The goal is to manage your energy resources to send homunculi to perform experiments that eventually lead to the fabled philosopher's stone and collect the most victory points whilst using the homunculi's achievements to further yourself or obstruct your opponents.
The board is a point to point board laid out like a spiderweb, with a number of different paths that can be taken to get to the center where players can find the philosopher's stone, figures may not however move backwards towards the edge of the board. The board represents the player's research and different fields have different effects - some award victory points, some award element cards and some hinder other players. Players have a pool of energy that refreshes every turn. Energy is used to move homunculi or create homunculi. Players can have any number of homunculi on the board as long as they can afford to create them. Players can also combine elements to burn and add energy to their available pool.
The game ends when the first player reaches the philosopher's stone, which awards a large amount of victory points. The winning player, however, is the player with the most victory points, which can be a different player if they used the right tactics during the game.
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images are mine
In the indie PC title Glorious Bureaucracy, players are put into the shoes of a sole low level administrator of a heavily communist regime. Players are given heavily worded briefs to dissect under a time limit and pass individual commands on to the hard working people of glorious mother Meruzka, a fictional state not too dissimilar from the soviet union.
The game is divided into turns where a randomly generated superior visits the player's office and hands them a brief of several pages. The player then gets 90 seconds to read through it and decipher the requirements. Then, the player gets 10 seconds to select all the correct orders to pass on to the correct groups of workers. If the player is successful, they get a positive rating and can move up in the ranks. If the player gets things wrong, they get marked down for each wrong or missing selection. If the players mark drops below a passing grade, they are fired and have to start a new game. If the player moves up in the ranks of the game, the briefs they receive get more and more cryptic and harder to understand, increasing the difficulty for the player to deduce what is expected.
The game's art style is drab and grey, similar to the art style of Papers, Please as it deals with similar themes and gameplay.
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Source: Image Archive X53-PP Section 43 Shelf 2 URL http://papersplea.se/img/Shot11-Jorji.png
