#harmonyzone

[lepertamar]

GAME REVIEW: PERFECT DARK, RARE, 2000

i think that this was one of those games that were generated in the weird transitional periods when technology is suddenly open enough to do more shit without the traditional workarounds but where nobody has gotten around to taking full advantage of that yet. if you look at the graphics or music for old Amiga games, they had a much higher resolution + soundcard then the guys were obviously used to dealing with, so there’s this awkward feeling of trying to fill up the newfound space: cartoony spriteart suddenly gets pillowshaded and there are gradients everywhere, goofy chip music where all the instruments sound like weird keyboard presets and there’s this hollow void around each note. i think perfect dark is basic’ly a straight descendent of stuff like Quake but it comes at a point where all the additional details added were at a point where they were kind of grinding against the core of that system. you’re still this faceless murdergod zooming around corridors at 90mph, effortlessly sucking up bullets and killing everybody, but there’s suddenly all this superfluous detail in the guys you’re shooting. you can disarm them or their guns can misfire or you can shoot them in the leg and watch them limp around or you can keep plugging bullets into the corpses to generate more bloodsplatter and make the limbs twitch. there’s no real reason to disarm people except to see them freeze up with their hands above their heads while you draw down your lastersighted pistol on their crotch or legs or head to see the specific death animations or just to hold them there while they whimper. the discrepency between this fast-paced arcadey shooty game and enemies carefully programmed to simulate detailed responses to being maimed or killed is very unnerving to me and the fact that it’s entirely unremarked upon in the narrative or objectives just heightens this feeling. i think i felt something similar crushing skulls and pulling out eyes by the eighth or so level of hotline miami. being so obviously able to go further in these things than your opponents means being more aware of a power imbalance built into the structure of what you’re doing and the fiction in which you’re doing it, which in itself can be enough to fuck up the default narrative of the Heroic Underdog / One Against The World.

[myfriendpokey]

sorry, i’m dead

harmonyzone.org/text/monsterparty.html 

my internet was pretty bad and tumblr used up all my bandwidth recommending I follow an account called “just shower thoughts” so I posted this on my own site - an essay about the guy in monster party who says sorry, i’m dead.

will probably keep trying to post more to own site in future at least until I've figured out a way to kill just shower thoughts with a rolled up telephone book.

[glimby]

is your url from that one harmonyzone game

absolutely

[xn--ko8h]

i played through all of garmentdistrict's "Of the Killer" games and you should too

garmentdistrict/harmonyzone is still the greatest game maker ever and a poignant voice in these troubled times

[hanglizue]

💇🏽🍟🍹 Vape. Barber. Cafe. Big Cup. Super duper cool place for those looking for complete one stop centre out there. Congrats for the grand opening ceremony of Harmony Zone, @harmony_bigcup ! Selamat maju jaya! Siapa orang Rawang tak mai lepak sini, dia tak cool. 😎 #vscocam #harmonyzone (at Harmony Zone)

[rifualk]

Magic Wand by TheCatamites

[finalrevenge]

[mymathlab]

http://harmonyzone.org

this is "thecatamites" website, who makes super-intense absurdist DIY video games. you all should download all of his amazing free shit and play it, TRUST ME. 

[lepertamar]

3. Well, Gassy Choose Your Own Adventure Weirdo is the top new game from A1 Reviews favourites Square-Enix. This is actually a compilation of previously unreleased material from all of their games. When pressed a company representative said no context was included for the pieces as it was felt they were compelling enough in their own right. No comment was also given as to persistent rumours that the company was beginning to stockpile ammunition or how this squared with persistent rumours of financial disarray.

4. Reportedly Angela Carter’s favourite parts of Shakesphere are the awkward throwaway lines that just exist to baldly move the plot forward to the next collection of speeches: “The King’s ship has arrived in Spain.” It can be very strange reading novel synopses and realising how much convoluted junk narrative is involved in communicating the ostensible real meaning. Similarly Final Fantasy games which are about all kinds of things asides from the moral stated at the end: all that running from place to place! The most elaborate thing in GCYOAW is the Dragon Quest style interaction menu, which is alarmingly never really used for anything in particular. Scaffolding without a building - the strange involuted structure of narrative without communication..?

[lepertamar]

GAME REVIEW: BIO ATTACK, TAITO, 1983

the human body, a place of many mysteries and crevices, can any of us say we truly know the secrets of the body? we are dependent upon its inexplicable functioning and spend our whole lives wandering the corridors without coming any closer to the truth. king lear’s famous announcement that he was “bound in a nutsack / of infinite space” remains man’s most enduring recognition of the horrifying and eternal hold of the body, this heavy and remorseless hand we cannot shake loose. BIO ATTACK contains both a cheerful affirmation that the innermost recesses of the body may yet be explored by the conscious mind with a representation of the internal structure as a vast, sealed labyrinth of indeterminate application.

BIO ATTACK:88 STARS

[lepertamar]

GAME REVIEW: GASSY CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE WEIRDO, RAGNAR, 20XX

[ed. note: A1 Reviews was hospitalised in the course of writing this review due to terrific brain lesions. What follows are his unedited and hysterical notes.]

1. Meaningless vermin experiences have potential to exist outside of the economy of sensation by which time is strategically invested in things so as to optimise profit in either enjoyment or knowledge; a process which transforms the raw matter of life / perception into a kind of uniform casino chip, worthwhile only as means to an end! Purposeless and scrappy things can only trade one kind of equivalently valueless experience for another and thus highlight being as an act in itself rather than a kind of empty space to be filled with other things.....

[.........]

6. Note #12: I am slowly drifting through the walls of the castle due to unspecified tileset errors.

7. Author’s statement for GCYOAW: “ [….]for some reason teleports teleport you into trees and water and stuff in Gassy Choose Your Own Adventure Weirdo so you need the No Clipping in Test Mode where you hold down ctrl. Also you need to set Switch 1003 to ON or you can’t explore the town.” What is Test Mode??????

8. Most ethics of vidcon design based on humanistic principles eg not wasting a person’s time or money, not being coercive. A hypothetical offshoot or degeneration would consist of not even daring to take up any of the player’s time, of tactfully assuming he or she has better things to be doing, building games presumed upon the natural disinterest or contempt of every possible audience - things not meant to be played, but if they should be, that would consist of trivial meaningless activity spaces for people to tinker with if they should so graciously deign while occupied with their own infinitely more important thoughts and emotions, like a philosophical conference hall which is also a jungle jim[sic?]. Nonlinear and nongoal oriented due to excessive modesty but also no real aesthetics as that would imply the submission of viewer -would just consist of vague presence moment-to-moment. Recall the quietists who thought that to make any change to the world was in some way to defy god.

Possible that such sect already exists, in abandoned angelfire.com ratnests and untagged tumblr pages, or working on Advanced Dumptruck Simulator 2013 in hyperspecialised german forums. How would we know?

I’m stuck in a dead-end game loop with excellent music.

9. found it very sensuel[sic] moving around as the saucer note don’t put this in review

10. Aiiiieee!!!! My brain!!!!

Gassy Choose Your Own Adventure Weirdo: 400 Stars

[lepertamar]

GAME REVIEW: SPACE SPY, VASILY ZOTOV, 2009

gui (or “graphical user interface”) elements can be layered on top of each other in increasing order of abstraction to frame and contextualise the action onscreen, providing a sense of depth and perspective. putting all the gui elements on the same plane where they grind against each other, where they resist being mapped to a hierarchial space that assumes the distinction between the universal and particular can be easily distinguished or even distinguished at all, where modular representation cannibalises itself, why would you do this? why can’t we get along?

Space Spy: 199 Stars

[lepertamar]

DAVE’S DILEMMAS - M. HODGE, 1987

realisation that my liking for this game has more to do with aestheticised image of workingclass life as sentimental drabness ”local colour” or Hovis advert than any actual social content has little impact on sudden awareness of how the faces, places, voices i grew up with and which mean something to me are entirely absent from every videogame ever made. this is a “power game” and surprisingly sharp in sections.

Dave’s Dilemmas: 100 Stars

[lepertamar]

GAME REVIEW: A BANJO-KAZOOIE LEVEL, RARE, 19XX

”[..]he unfastened his wristwatch and scrambled the setting, then slipped it into his pocket. Making his way out to the car park he refected on the freedom this simple act gave him. He would explore the lateral byways now, the side doors, as it were, in the corridors of time.” Hypothetical complement to thinking about strange videogame spaces would be strange videogame time, how it’s represented and how it’s perceived. Chopped up, sped up, deferred, halted, looped and reloaded, cross-sectioned across menus and SHOP screens or projected flatly across static locations, happening tangentially to player experience or else too close to it like the unnerving seasonal events in Animal Crossing. the ballard quote above works by applying the language of nonlinear space to time, in a way not unlike rpgs using continuity of event and dialogue with your own ingame activities to provide the illusion of continuous time to the modular network of frozen cities that flicker past in the background

[lepertamar]

A 'bad' game design is one which generates uncertainty, noise. Often it revolves around information which the player couldn't or shouldn't be expected to know: which walls can be blown up, how many times one must click the wall to have a character kick through it, etc. One example which sticks with me is the first battle for the RPG Maker game "Bat Castle", a game which has kind of fascinated me since I first played it. This battle is extremely difficult and adding to this is the fact that the item and skill descriptions are written in fragmented, semi-comprehensible pseudoenglish. Rather than a strict application of known values the battle consists of constant experimentation coupled with a sort of vague, associative reaction to the names of various items and skills. It should be pointed out that (importantly) random or pseudorandom chance is a factor; certain skills may deal varying amounts of damage, or miss entirely, or accidentally yield a critical hit. Even winning the battle, it was hard to replicate apart from crudely copying my (mostly guessed) strategy from the first time and trying to reapply it as verbatim as possible. Later sections of the game include the ability to collect valuable healing items from apparantly random, visually indistinguishable sections of wall......

--[MYSTERY BOG]

[lepertamar]

the dream of the ninja is that of enclosing yourself entirely in black felt and running around the grounds of your school for 2 hours. having the mouthless but expressive head in the lower right react to what’s happening in the “action” segment of the screen really highlights the struggle of the impassive ninja as he tried to move around the many convoluted cube rooms and do basic things. the world can’t be surmounted, it can only be endured.