Vital Stats

Genre: FPS
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: DigiPen Institute Of
Technology: Tag Team
Publisher: DigiPen Institute Of
Technology
ESRB Rating: Unrated
Release Date: 1/09

Platforms

• PC

Tag: The Power of Paint
Tag gives every impression of being a FPS about paint. You’re armed with a paint gun and placed in a colorless world where all you can really do is tag the place up. However, this conceit belies Tag‘s real gamplay: sandbox navigation.

So Tag drops you into an Escher-scape that your flimsy human legs couldn’t hope to navigate. Instead, different colors of paint impact the way you cross a surface. Red paint makes you run faster, green paint makes you jump, and blue paint makes you stick to walls and ceilings. After that, it’s just you, an exit, and a few bottomless pits in between.

By letting you literally paint your launch point on the level itself Tag solves the age-old FPS problem of looking at your feet when you jump. This unprecedented control in FPS navigation along with clever level design won the Independent Games Festival Student Showcase award, where we offered our initial impressions.

Vital Stats

Genre: Action
Players: None
Online: Leaderboards

Developer: Trino Team
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
ESRB Rating: Unrated
Release Date: 5/11/09 (XBLA)
9/28/08 (PC)

Platforms

• XBLA
• PC

Trino
Like CarneyVale: Showtime, Trino is a professional quality game lurking among the XNA community games. You assume the role of an alien microorganism being harassed by nanites in a polygonal pen. Your organism can plant vertices for triangular stasis fields to trap and disable aggressors. Once you’ve eradicated enough of the proper enemies, you can plant stasis flags at the vertices of your pen to secure the area once and for all.

The emphasis on geometric shapes makes makes Trino look like a puzzle game, but it really isn’t. The game is much more about tactical enemy avoidance as you dash to the arena’s vertices than anything else.

That’s not to say that the game is braindead, however. It’s just that your clever planning is more akin to last year’s Schizoid than to Bejewelled. Trino’s gameplay is fairly straightforward, but the claustrophobic polygonal arenas can make it tough to maneuver. The nanites give no quarter in their pursuit, and many have abilities that undermine your carefully laid traps. Add it all together and Trino demands situational awareness and smart tactics.

Vital Stats

Genre: Interactive Storybook
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: Story Fort
Publisher: Story Fort
ESRB Rating: Unrated
Release Date: 2/23/09

Platforms

• PC

What is Bothering Carl?
The PAX 10 is all about rewarding independent innovation in games, but if you look at the 2008 roster, it was packed with clever spins on largely traditional types of titles. What is Bothering Carl? breaks out of this mold and reaches past the gaming core to children learning to read.

That’s right, one of the PAX 10 nominations went to a game that targets outside the 13-24 year old male demographic. What is Bothering Carl? isn’t even a traditional video game so much as it is an electronic popup storybook, with context-sensitive clicking instead of pull tabs. This does afford some advantages for developing readers, as highlighted words in the text can be clicked for a picture depicting the word’s meaning. Frazzled parents will probably also appreciate that the voiced narration can be turned off at the click of a button.

It’s been noted elsewhere that mainstream game criticism doesn’t really serve parents at all, so it’s good to see some recognition for the diversity of interactive media. I’ll bet that developers for these games face completely different challenges when designing for a young and possibly completely unfamiliar audience. We’ll be sure to drill the Story Fort reps about it over the weekend.