Game of the year, 2010

This is a headline that I will freely admit I never thought I would write.  But this is too good to pass up.  It is genius.  For a couple of reasons.

Let me list them for you!

But first, here is what it is.  It is a youtube video or several.  Also, the best twilight-themed game I have ever played.  Play/watch it here:

8-Bit Twilight – The game

So let’s get started.  Reasons that I think it’s genius.

Lets just get this reason out of the way early:  Part of me loves it because it richly mocks Twilight, and Twilight is something that I feel roundly deserves mocking.  (Or at the very least does not deserve exemption from mocking…)  So the fact that the game delivers on this is great.

The Vamps have the advantage of numbers, but the wolves are TWO SPRITES BIG!

Also I really like it because of how it was constructed.  It is a series of youtube movies, with annotations at the end that link to other movies.  These form a sort of choose-your-own-adventure series of links, which make up the game.

This is clever to me!  It represents someone who saw how youtube was set up, realized it could be hijacked to give the viewer a choice, and realized that that was all you needed to make a game.  That’s some pretty cool emergent behavior, in my opinion.

I also appreciate the craftsmanship.  Someone went to some effort to make all these little 8-bit screens.  Someone made an 8-bit Edward sprite.  For you.  Think about that.  Someone spent actual minutes of their life, making an 8-bit representation of a sparkling glitter-vampire.  For you.  How can you not appreciate that?

Have you?

And finally, I appreciate this whole effort because it is a game that someone made, which required zero programming knowledge to make.  This part is incredible!  Someone made a web game, which you can play on your computer, and they didn’t need to know how to program to do it.  That’s awesome!  Talk about a democratizing force in game creation!  I for one, hope that we see a ton of games like this now, since it represents one less barrier between someone who has an idea they’d like to see made real, and realizing it.

So yeah.  I, for one, welcome our new sparkly glitter-vampire game overlords.  Go play the game, and then bask in the knowledge that if you so chose, you too could make a game using youtube as your engine.  It’s a bright future we live in, folks.  Bright and glittery.

Give it a glance!

One thing that I’ve noticed though, is that the game features an almost comical profanity filter.  To, you know, keep people’s delicate sensibilities intact in the in-game chat.  Happily it can be easily disabled or circumvented (standard tricks like putting spaces in the word work) but so far we’ve left it on, figuring that most people will leave it on by default, and we’d rather make sure we know when we’re being bleeped out.  Because you see, it is a bit… overzealous… in what it considers inappropriate.  Read on for our inappropriate findings!

It is very common to see phrases like “I @#$! as fast as I could!”  You might think this meant that you had an uncouth partner, but really, it is just because blizzard/activision is of the opinion that “came” is a naughty, naughty word.  And it doesn’t stop there!

For fun, Hal and I spent some time finding bad words.  All the old standbys seem to be covered.  (Standard grade-school swear-words like the f-word, and racial slurs such as n-bombs.)  But then it starts getting downright weird.  W discovered that the following words are also too delicate for users’ ears.  (Gentle reader, if you are easily offended, avert your eyes now, for the list that follows will shatter your innocence like glass!)

• backdoor
• dominate
• trans
• came
• suck
• crap
• blow
• dong
• negro
• white
• black
• Hitler
• Stalin
• terrorist
• Hamas

It is surprising how often a lot of these come up in regular conversation.  “Your base defense sucks”.  “I came as fast as I could.”  “We can just blow past their sentries on the way in”.  Suddenly they all become rather comically censored.  Backdoor comes up in standard gameplay.  (Many maps have a back door way into bases that you can open up, if you want to attack someone from a direction that they aren’t likely to have as well guarded.  Also, it censors parts of words.  So if you say something like “transform the vikings!”  (Vikings being jet-fighters that can transform into robots) it will come out “@#$!@# the vikings!”, which is a bit more ambiguous.

As for the rest, they’re kind of absurd.  The colors black and white?  Seriously?  Their potential abuse now outweighs the fact that by default, they are standard adjectives taught to first graders?  And names like Hitler and Stalin?  Really?  (Churchill and Roosevelt are curiously absent…  Profanity filters are written by history’s winners, I guess?)

In a way the result is kind of comical.  It’s the lesson of the Unnecessary Censorship videos.  When you start bleeping things out, it doesn’t matter what the original was.  We’ve been so trained to assume that whatever was bleeped must have been bad that we automatically fill in the blanks in our mind.  So with Activision/Blizzard bleeping out fairly common words, that come up in fairly common conversations relating to their game, suddenly everything is naughty.  And frequently hillarious.

I’d still rather have the ability to communicate unencumbered.  But if the consolation prize is hilarity, I guess I won’t turn it down!

All of that is interesting, fascinating and tremendously important for the future of the industry, etc.  As a programmer, the “is programming free/protected speech” issue is naturally somewhat important to me.  I would be saddened to see a law that made it illegal for budding programmers (who are minors) to make crappy remakes of Double Dragon and show them to their (also minor) friends.

But that’s not the part I want to talk about right now.  All of this got me curious enough to look at the law in question, and one part in particular seems really really odd to me.  I realize that reading through legal texts isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, but bear with me for a moment, and check out this part:

It would include within the definition of harmful matter prohibit a person from knowingly distributing or exhibiting to a minor any video game that appeals to minors’ morbid interest in violence, that enables the player to virtually inflict serious injury upon human beings or characters with substantially human characteristics in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, as defined, and that lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

So far pretty much as expected.  Don’t give violent games to minors where the get to pretend to do horrible things to people or things that look like people.  But then it throws out this curve-ball:

The bill would exclude from this  prohibition any game in which the visual depiction of violence occurs as the result of simultaneous competition between 2 or more players, as specified.

So let me get this straight.  I’m no legal expert, but this seems to read that shooting dudes in the head in GTA = bad, while shooting dudes in the head when they are controlled by real people, like say, Modern Warfare II = A-Ok?  Is this really the message we want to be sending?  Virtual violence is only permissible when it is inflicted upon real people?

Also, it seems to cause some funny situations where things like Street Fighter become illegal to play (as a minor) against the computer, but are fine if you can lure a friend over to play vs. with.

How did this provision get put in, and what is it trying to accomplish?  I’m really kind of at a loss.  Maybe this is just a sign that Goombas have one heck of a good lobbyist on their side?

Also, somehow we seem to have made it to the top google search for “Boss Rush”!  Which is surprising, but still pretty cool!

(With a special thanks to Shih Tzu, (yes, that Shih Tzu) who found a lot of these!)

Full list under the break!

• Rock Paper Shotgun:  Pick on someone your own size!
• IndieGames Weblog:  Browser Game Pick:  Boss Rush
• Game Set Watch:  Boss Rush Shoot’em up crawls out
• JayIsGames:  Boss Rush!
• Two Fedoras:  Productivity Killer:  Boss Rush
• Gamer Crave:  In Boss Rush, You’re Finally the Big Ship
• Soap Creative:  BOSS RUSH:  Reverse SHMUP/Bullet-Hell
• Elonian Nomad: 3rd Strike: Boss Rush = Reverse Shmup
• Just One More Game:  At last, the answer is NOT Tony Danza…
• Revlry.Com:  Boss Rush Review

Also, a goodly bit of non-English coverage, which I can’t read except through the grace of google translate.  Congratulations Boss Rush, you are a citizen of the world!

• Rincón Indie:  Boss Rush
• Player1′s GameBlog:  Boss Rush
• Oyun Maymunu: Boss Rush – Shoot’em Down
• Crie Jogos:  Boss Rush
• Jandan.net:  Boss Rush  (They seem to have grabbed a [now out of date] copy locally for their site, too.  Hrm.)
• Games and Chocolate:  Boîte de chocolat: Boss Rush!
• Every Day is the most Enjoyable Day:  Boss Rush
• Devant ton écran: T’es le boss (Boss Rush)
• Geek Zeitung:  Trailer de Boss Rush  (Focuses on the trailer, but also links to the game itself)
• Fluctuat.net:  Boss Rush!
• Zehn.de:  The 10 most thrilling action games on the internet

[Last updated 4/18 with Zehn.de link]

Remember Boss Rush?  The game about being a boss, that seemed like it wasn’t ever going to actually come out?  Well guess what.  Boss Rush is done.  Released.  And playable.  Finally!

BossRushGame.com

So what are you still doing here?  Play it already!  Go!  Go!