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:
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.