I'm not sure why I haven't touched on reviewing the goldmine of questionable quality that is Xbox Live Community Games. For those of you unfamiliar with what this is: A year or so ago, Microsoft released a development kit for fledgeling game creators to use to make simple (or complex) games relatively easily. Any game made with this kit can now be put up and sold in the Xbox Live Community Games section. What people don't understand is this: For every great game making genius out there, there are literally jillions of people who just don't get it. They are the people living in the proverbial shack. But like independent music, sometimes the crappiest results are the ones that shed the brightest lights on the human condition. Corporations spend millions on games, so the games made with the big money have to have a broad appeal. Not so with community games where if a dude in Mexico wants to make a platform game about collecting burritos and somberos called "Welcome to Mexico", he can (this game actually exists now and my heart sings at this flagstone of possibility.) Maybe nobody will buy this game. But maybe one person will be touched so deeply by it that it doesn't matter. That's the true face of creation and art. You make for yourself and also for the small hopes of touching at least one other person with your creation. When you have the possibility of getting your stuff out there, it's all up to just the powers of your imagination and your intelligence. That said, Welcome to Mexico sucks but it brings me to the point of this review: DROMEDARY.
Is Dromedary a GOOD game? I don't know. Does it boast amazing graphics? No. It boasts hand drawn images of a camel and various other desert things. Badly hand drawn images. What it does is this: I played the demo thinking "whatever" yet I played it until my demo time ran out. Will I buy it? I don't know. Wait.. no. It's 2 effing dollars too much (at 2 dollars.)
What is it?
Dromedary is a game where you are trying to cross a desert on a camel. On the top of the screen you have a meter with your camel showing how far across the desert you are. Every turn you have a few options: walk, run, sleep, drink, wait. That's it. Every time you pick one, another panel is added to a small comic showing your progress and what events occur and your camel moves a centimeter further towards his/your goal. There are no meters saying how tired your camel is, no meters for how thirsty you are. There is nothing really gamey here. Instead you just get a panel and a descriptor like "You walked further today and see an oasis" or sometimes the exciting "you are captured".
It is alot like a choose your own adventure story EXCEPT instead of giving you different options every turn based on complex story developments, you always have: walk, run, sleep, drink, wait. If you run too much your camel grows tired and dies. But walking gets you further faster. Also important to note is that there are lions chasing you...
So how is this good? It is because in simplifying everything for you, taking out any gamey meters and whatnot and making your situation so simple (get across the desert), your options, minute as they seem, are the ONLY options you would have in the real situation in the grand scheme. In this way, a Choose Your Own Adventure novel feels claustrophobic in comparison.
In a book like that, you could find yourself in a deadly situation involving ..space pirates or something. You will be offered 2-4 options when in reality there are SO many things you could probably do, but you're are just moved alone a few different tracks.
In Dromedary, since the story is barely a story, it is just survival, you feel less wrangled in and therefore it feels limitless despite it's minute limited scope. Therefore in it's small reality, it is entirely realistic. It's all something like the uncanny valley. Pong is such an abstraction of tennis that you don't feel limited by it. Its entire reality is submitted right there. In a modern tennis game, as the game gets more real, you notice what is taken away from reality rather than what has been added to what used to be Pong. Even that crappy art seems to help the game maintain an odd cohesive quality. It's an oasis from.. good games. Yet a compulsive one.
It's hard to explain, but I enjoyed the structure of Dromedary and the fact that someone had the balls to make a game this wierd and small. WTF is wrong with people.
Still
Grade: B-
That's a generous B because I have such odd admiration for this basically shitty game.
There is a always a strange small delineation between the world of popular "rock" type music that even avant garde/indie/underground artist walk on "song" side of rather than the classical composition side of things. Even many instrumental artists such as Four Tet or Books seem to construct what a person would call a pop song rather than a composition in the classical sense. Dan Deacon's new album "Bromst" seems to toe across that line while containing "pop" vocals in the songs and even choruses and verses. The new album seems to be the work of a more profound and beautiful statement than his previous outing "Spiderman of the Rings" which was part excitement and part quirk but ultimately it rang a bit hollow to me. Not to say this album is not quirky, with it's many choirs of chipmunks and the barking sample on the track "Woof Woof", but even in these instances there is more of a conveyance of an actual emotion than the showing of weirdness. Instead of just "a weird song", you get "a weird JOYOUS song". The results are truly alive and beautiful if not in any conventional way. Song structure protract and compress seemingly randomly but in the end they all flow perfectly together. A song will go from extreme 8bit noise to what sounds like a hyperactive composition by Steve Reich in no time flat and these moments are among the most stunning on this album. There is no real stand out track and while the album may seem almost one note in its tone and structure, the intricacies are in there and make it reward repeated listens while maintaining an almost monolithic joy. What's it sound like for those who don't know? Crazy nintendo music is what most people would say. Still, this is actually some heady (and hearty) stuff.
