In The Year 2013, There Are Still Video Games

2012 had a ton of video games in it. In a vague order, here are handful of games from (or played in) 2013 that really stuck with me. If you haven’t played Journey, Walking Dead, or Hotline Miami, you should! Journey and Hotline Miami are both short little things that won’t take up too much time and deliver strong experiences. Journey at the high end with upliftingness and positivity. HLM showing how dark and grimy and gross a game can be. Taken together, they kind of hit two opposing endpoints of the emotional spectrum.

  • Journey
  • The Walking Dead
  • Hotline Miami
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown
  • FTL
  • 999
  • Fez
  • Planetside 2

Over my Christmas holiday break, I got more work in on my Dungeon Keeper riff and made a tiny, tiny competitive game prototype called either Ships or Fluid depending on what name I remember to call it. There will be more progress on those. More of the missing Flash animations will go up. I’ll look into adding YouTube versions of those (would anyone find this useful?) to go alongside the Flash versions. Ascend will get finished and someone will get to play it.

A Brief Two Part Note With Future Updates

Point the first, my friend Roberto Oeste’s game Gnomoria is up on Steam Greenlight to get it available through that service. Currently, it’s available directly through his site and Desura but visibility on Steam would be amazing and a great opportunity for a one-man dev team. If you wave your cursor in this direction and click, it will take you to the Greenlight page for Gnomoria and I would sure love it if you could help him out with some upward thumbs.

Point the second, while backing up some old machines, I have discovered all of my old source files for the Flash videos on here. Tremendous! That means I can re-export them and get them on YouTube which would be more convenient for everyone. As an additional crazy thing, a half-created, unreleased video was discovered which I will attempt to clean up and smooth over and get up here.  A brand new unreleased thing! Also, I have been tooling around in Unity in my off time on a few video game ideas. One of them is a Dungeon Keeper evolution but the announcement of Impire has muted my enthusiasm. More on those as they develop.

I attended PAX this year and it was another really fun, crowded year. It seems the smart thing to do is to not get too caught up looking at the new big games because those are mostly very well known. It’s better to wander around and look for unknown games and see what’s up with them. Spy Party is still really cool, RetroGrade looks like it might release sometime, and there’s a Netrunner revival!

Stay frosty.