David S. Gallant’s new game, I Get This Call Every Day’ (IGTCED), about working a day job and the miserable difficulties that accompany it is available now at David’s website.

As you all know, whether you be ManDate fans or Twitter fans, I have a fairly close relationship with David and have one of my songs from my most recent indie album featured in IGTCED. So, do keep that in mind while you read this. I enjoy being forthright with info like that.

David was kind enough to give me a copy and I played through a few times. The phone call is a daunting task to sit through. It feels as though the caller is intentionally screwing with your head and trying to dead end himself. At one point I asked for his full name and he gave me his first name. Billy Swarth knows nothing about anything and you have to sit there and hear him complain to you about the security questions you have to ask him to avoid getting fired. The experience is in no way “fun”.

But that is the catch and the point. David does not want the player to have fun during the game and it shows. There are a couple laughs because of how ridiculous the occurrences are, but overall the experience is a bleak and miserable affair, which is obviously the way David feels about his job.  This is not a game focused on entertaining you, but rather a game set on teaching you about how miserable a government job can truly be.

If you would like to give IGTCED the college try you can purchase it from David’s website for a minimum of $2 or $1,000,000 if you are inclined. You can obtain the music for $FREE or more on my gumroad page (shameless self promotion is always a good thing). IGTCED is a worthwhile purchase, especially if you are looking to see how truly personal the video game medium can be.

Jonas and Verena Kyratzes presents a sort of magical and mystical aura in most everything they create, which includes one of the best games of the year, a fantastic and psychotic mythical world, and Jonas’ new interactive fiction piece titled ‘Moonlight’.

‘Moonlight’ is a free and fully text-based adventure in which the player attends a party where immense shenanigans and life-affecting moments occur. Also, there is plenty of Stephen Fry involved. The game features plenty of Jonas Kyratzes’ classic over-the-top symbolism and ridiculous reality-defying moments. I became a bird and flew to the moon at one point with a renowned member of history. It was all outrageous and induces giddiness throughout these twists and turns.

Yet, with any Kyratzes piece the real world lingers near and the tangibility can sometimes choke you into submission. ‘Moonlight’ remains true to the nature of existence. It captures our moments of whimsy and contrasts them to the deep hole that is realism. ‘Moonlight’ is a condensed taste of the bipolarity the human mind is capable of and the crushing feel of a panic attack, all packaged in another fantastic Kyratzes adventure.

Maybe I am gushing. Maybe I am a plant. I do not know. I do know you should play through ‘Moonlight’, which you can find here. I hope you enjoy and please be willing to tell me how wrong I am about everything below!

Game Jams are an enigma to me. Perhaps it is my inability to code, write, and program, but those are issues for another life. What matters is that the concept of creating a game in a matter of 24, 48, or 72 hours tickles me in a way that only Futurama and our own ManDate Podcast ever could. One of the more popular versions of these so-called “Game Jams” is the Ludum Dare 48-Hour Game Jam, which was held between December 14 and 17th this year.

Ludum Dare is, well, explained best by the people who make it possible:

“Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated game development Event.  Participants develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community.

 Ludum Dare was founded by Geoff Howland, and held it’s first competition in April of 2002. Since then the community has run more than 22 regular Events, several dozens of practice competitions, collectively creating many thousands of games in just a weekend each.“

The theme of LD25 was “You are the Villian” so all games were made using that theme. The game jam produced an incredible 1325 games, an incredible number. Each of these games is stored and playable on Ludum Dare’s website.

So for perhaps eternity, or just the next week, I will be sorting through and playing many of these games. Hopefully you go out and give them a shot too. Oh, and devs, LD26 will be held in the Spring, so check that out and try to gain some more info.

Mi-Clos Studio has announced ‘Out There’, a new space-bound gaming endeavor. You can view the teaser video above, which is a tantalizing taste of what’s to come. The trailer teems with graphic novel-inspired visuals, which captures the feel of 70′s space-themed comic books.

Gameplay details are still slim, but a collaboration with FibreTigre (an interactive fiction expert), and Mi-Clos Studio’s first outing, ‘Space Disorder‘ suggest a mixture of multiple genre elements. All that is known as fact is that players will take the role of an astronaut stranded in space trying to find their way back to earth. To do so the player must manage resources, mine planets and probe stars, communicate with exotic civilizations, and craft powerful equipment.

No release date has been announced for ‘Out There’, so everyone is going to have to suck it up and wait for this promising release. In the mean time you can learn more on Mi-Clos Studio’s official website and on Michael Peiffert’s Twitter page.

Petey, aka myself, did a live cast of his/my first time playing FTL last night. You can check out him/me dying constantly and killing viewers nominated as crew members. It makes for entertainment and catastrophe! Enjoy!

ManDate Dudes!

Welcome to yet another edition of ManDate; a podcast where two men sit down, have dinner, and discuss the latest and greatest in indie gaming. If you managed to sift through last week’s 5 hour marathon you caught plenty of goodness and an interview with guest David S Gallant. This week we forewent a guest star and discussed point-and-clicks.

This Week’s Topics: Primordia, Charlie’s lingering absence, Wadjet Eye Games, The Sea Will Claim Everything, the future of P-A-C’s, Pete’s Shack on the North Coast of Africa, time travelling to Korea, Gemini Rue, Miasmata, Miner Wars 2081, Stealth Bastard Deluxe, I Get This Call Every Day, Deponia, Deponia: Chaos on Deponia, The Light, Frank selling his soul to Thermos, Frank gets Pete hyped, ***dle Sticks

Thanks for listening! Enjoy the show!

ManDate Ep 3: A Point and Click Dinner Adventure

‘No Time to Explain’ appears to be some awesome combination of Douglas Adams’ humor, classic platforming, and immense time paradoxes. The trailer is one of the funniest I have seen in awhile and I was happy to see tinyBuildGAMES game get Greenlit. We at IGAAA definitely appreciate humor and believe in the artistic qualities of humor. Plus, we like to hold our bellies and laugh.

You can learn more about ‘No Time to Explain’ on their official website, Twitter page, and purchase the game for $10. You can also wait until ‘No Time to Explain’ releases on Steam, which I would imagine would be sometime in the near future.

Award shows are fun extravaganzas of opinions and ranking games. I too, like most people, enjoy having fun. So I have decided to hold my own awards show! An end of the year cacophony of guest stars (hopefully) and awards all held by me and my ManDate podcast co-host Frank Collins!

The show will be held in a live audio format, between December 17th and 24th, and we will be calling in devs from around the planet to ask them about their favorite games of the year! If they played any. As they are all busy creating games! Hopefully they will make time to come on the show.

Categories will include but are not limited to:

Best Art, Best Graphics, Genre Awards, Best Soundtrack, Best Sound, Most Innovative, Best Story, Most Anus-Injuring, Most Underrated, Most Overrated, Best Multiplayer, and many more!

The IGAAA Awards are the opinion of 1-3 men who in no way disagree with your noble opinions.

Now out on Steam for $8.99. Learn more at the official website.

So, why are numbered reviews so popular? The easy answer would be because it makes an entire opinion palatable simply by condensing that assessment into a single number. A normal consumer can click on your page, thus earning valuable page views for your site owned, most likely, by Google. It also allows for a baseline on which users can judge games. “Oh man, ‘Gears of War’ got a 9.5 on Gamespot, while COD got a 9.0. I guess I will buy ‘Gears of War’. This method, however, is incredibly flawed and speaks volume about our society for a number of reasons. Here are a few:

Games Are Different and Cannot Be Judged on a Single Scale: Games are entire experiences. They can span anywhere from 15 minutes to 100 hours or beyond. So how can someone compare ‘Super Hexagon’ to ‘Skyrim’? Would you even bother doing so? They are both revolutionary and incredible experiences, but they would be almost impossible to compare. They fill completely different roles in a gamer’s library. Because of this it amazes me that someone could possibly give both games a number grade based on the exact same scale. Any gamer would obviously have polar experiences with the two, but both games were graded at a 9. The judgment of a 9 likens both games to each other and suggests I will gain an equal experience from both. I can assure you, they will not.

Maybe I will buy a game that is an 8, but that 8 gives me no suggestion as to whether or not I will enjoy that game. ‘Tryst’ could be given a 9 and ‘Resonance’ could be given an 8, but that is a number that does not guarantee my experience will be great with ‘Tryst’. I hate strategy games, so that 9 could be a 5 for me. Likewise, that 9 could suggest ‘Tryst’ transcends the strategy genre and reaches an audience extending beyond those who enjoy the RTS genre. I do not know, because a 9 tells me neither of those things.

Meanwhile, ‘Resonance’ may be the perfect point-and-click for me and suggesting it is 1 worse than ‘Tryst’ is completely ill-fitting for me. I cannot look at any site’s scale and see a number that fairly compares two games.

It Lessens the Value of the Art: Numbers have never been used to judge art, and for good reason. Giving ‘Braid’ an 8 for example would suggest it is a good game, but that is the most I can ascertain from that number. Games now have artistic value, as well as entertainment values. It would be like saying Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, “OK Computer”, and “BLOPS 2″ are all 10′s. We do not sit around a table and judge art by numbers, because art’s value is far too high to be condensed into a number. It has been a long time coming that video games can be seen similarly. They are emotionally-evoking works of art and in that transition games have become more prone to individual emotional experiences. Games must be played to be understood and judged personally. A number simply makes a game understandable and marketable; however, it does not truly describe the value of the subject.

Words Say What Numbers Cannot: The true value of a review comes from the in-depth analysis of a piece of work. Words can list the positives and negatives of an art work. Words can describe a writer’s experience with a game. Words can tell you why the writer was partial or impartial to the game’s offering and why. I could write a book on why ‘Dark Souls’ is one of the greatest games ever released and for me to do nothing but say it was a 10/10 would leave so many aspects of my experience and why I believe in the title so fervently unsaid.

You too may also believe that ‘Dark Souls’ is nearly perfect, but it could be for completely different reasons. The number 10 would say we both believed the game was incredible, but perhaps we believe it is perfect because it affected us differently and by reading people could realize why we both believed that game was perfect. In that same vein of thought, I could give the game a 10 and you would assume it is fitting for everyone; however, if you were to read the review perhaps you would not see my reasons for loving the game compelling or a reasonable fit for your gaming tastes.

We Only Do It Because People Hate Reading: This one is a generalization and does not fit all people. I am aware of that. For some people, however, it is very much true. You could easily ascertain my opinion of a game by reading my review, but by putting a number at the end I am essentially conceding that you do not need to read my review. I want you to read what I am writing and I believe most journalists do.

By putting a number at the end, I am essentially conceding to you that there is no reason for you to read my review and I am almost going to assume you will not. A number sits at the bottom of the page for those who simply want to scroll down and see a score. It is not there for the literate consumer who is honestly interested in reading opinions about a game.

As a response to those who say they need a number because they do not have time to read a review I would argue that the purpose of a conclusion is to summarize. My final opinion is clearly expressed in the conclusion, which should only take 10 seconds to read.

Games are not One-Tenth Better Than Others: Operating on a scale that utilizes tenth points is one of the most ridiculous aspects of game reviews. Tell me, what makes a game 1% better than another? Was one operating at 60 FPS and the other at 61 FPS? Was one quest simply the only quest better than a quest in another game? That one-tenth of a point is ridiculously non-sensical. The same came be said for half-points, which leads me to my final point.

There is Nothing Mathematical About Game Grading: When you received or receive a grade in class it usually is for a reason. The teacher gave you a 9/10 on your Math Homework because you got 9/10 problems correct. The same goes for baseball. A player is hitting .333 because he/she gets a hit every 1/3 at-bats. These systems are mathematical grading systems. They are factual and the grade is not debatable.

Yet, we insist on trying to use a mathematical grading system for something which is in no way mathematical. Percentages are given when a possible max score is established; however, games have no mathematical maximum score. The maximum score of a video game is a mythical imagined number, which have no true weight.

Conclusion: If mythical numbers were useful in expressing an opinion, would we not use them in debate? “In conclusion, I give President Obama a 9.5/10 as a political candidate” is an argument I have never heard, nor do I think would hold any weight in a debate; however, we seem to amply use them to finalize an opinion about a video game. This is because facts hold weight as well as valid expressable opinions, but mythical hastily conceived numbers do not.

We are simply making things easy and consumable for a consumer base not interested in reading or respecting our opinions. I do not want to give into that and hope that if people truly want or respect my opinion they will be willing to read my reviews. I know I am in the minority in my opinion, but hopefully people are willing to read and discuss this opinion, just as they should about the games devs slave over.