I have nothing to say myself. Usually I am able to overcome this feeling and post a blog entry anyways, but today I merely point to other things.
There is an interesting thread developing over at Seedlings (the comments seem to be wandering away from the original intent of the post), and stumbling through the blogosphere, I just found this very relevant plea for an honest debate about ID. It ends with “more to come”, so I will have to watch to see what might develop.
On a more frivolous note, limejelly is right: “Ferry Halim is clearly a genius“. The games at Orisinal are charming, clever, nonviolent, wholesome, elegantly simple masterpieces of graphic design. This is the kind of mind that can think up blockbusters like Tetris. My favorite (although I’ve only tried a few) is Bugs. I even find the repetetive music relaxing, not annoying.
Filed under: General |
Blogorrhea 
Wow, I’m hooked. Ferry Halim is not only a genius — he’s positively inspiring. The music on many of the games is so beautiful and tender. Like limejelly, I loved Pocketful of Stars — having the little girl grab stars in the frozen lake is so neat. And have you seen High Delivery? That’s not a videogame — that’s art.
I’ve never seen videogames like these before. I’m astounded. Orisinal is something I will want my son to play when he gets older. Ben was on my lap when I was playing Bugs, and his eyes were transfixed. How sweet.
By the way — how many bugs can you scatter on a single jump, without the green invincible bubble? My record is 17. I got 19 with a green bubble, but that’s a bit easier.
If you were to get to “prosthesis” from Jenny’s blog, you’d read a lot about ID from a very nuanced perspective.
Barb, I couldn’t find it; can you paste a full URL into a comment, and I’ll edit it into a nice link? Or Jenny?
Forester, it appears that one of the characteristics of Bugs is 20 bugs on screen at all times; either that, or I can’t get any more than that with a green bubble. I’m not sure whether I ever got 17 with a red bubble. But I think the scoring should incentivize multi-bugs more, esp. a “perfect” 20 — and even more for 20 with red!
I really like High Delivery in the beginning, when there are still buildings, but when it’s just sky it gets kind of old. I think it would be cool to have it just continually rise through an infinitely-high skyscape. Two more I like are Summer Walk and Cats. Friends is also really cool, but I think it would take more practice to gain mastery.
I looked in the Orisinal Store, and I couldn’t find the one thing I would buy: CDROM with all the games to play not from over the web.
And I’m not sure how you saw your comment; it was in my moderation queue because it had 2 links. I upped that spam-detector to 5 links, so hopefully it won’t happen again.
Hmm … I agree with your criticism of High Delivery — but did you play the game to the finish? It seems not.
Prosthesis is on my blogroll — http://prosthesis.blogspot.com/
The pseudonymous “Macht” has interesting things to say about ID among other topics.
Got my first orisinal high score — on Cats, first time playing. The concept took me a minute to figure out, but it’s a great game that uses the mouse (no pun) in a new way, as most orisinal games do. Eventually it builds up to 10 cats, the music drops out, the game continues indefinitely from there. It needs more time pressure, and more cats (I really wanted to see 20). At 10,000 points I still never came close to running out of time, and since the game wasn’t getting more difficult I stopped there. Someone went all the way to 14,000 …
I played cats once, and thought it was pretty cool. It took me a while to figure out I could just “mouse” over the cats, and I didn’t have to click. maybe the game is really just a test of your willpower…
#1 has discovered the games at Orisinal, and he’s hooked. His high score on Bugs has topped 20K, and he is addicted to trying out all the other games (which are all self-explanatory enough for him to figure out by himself).