I’ve had this page open for a couple days, but haven’t gotten around to posting about it. That’s approximately the pace I recommend for this page: download one of these games, give it a go, then check back once you’re ready for another dose.

These are all games you may have heard about on gaming news sites: fl0w, Knytt, The Marriage, Facade.  These games have gathered significant enthusiasm from the hard core frontier. Some of these games find promising new venues for exploration, while others show why a certain direction won’t work for decades, if ever.

Of course, I’m posting this just as we’re emerging from a long summer devoid of AAA content. High production values may rule the roost for a while, but it’s worth taking a break to check back on these art games for an interesting reminder of what’s going on at the experimental edge. Few of them require much of your time: they reveal their hypothesis and result immediately, though you may continue thinking about them for quite a while afterwards.

Featured commentary, for you MMO players out there:

[The Endless Forest] resolves one of the biggest problems of an MMO, being the useless and idle talk of the people in it. Not being a able to speak is a boon to online gaming.

What could be better than the fantastic game you’ve never played, Psychonauts?  What if you combined it with the highly literate and insightful gaming magazine you never read, the Escapist?

That’s right, it’s the Zero Punctuation review of Psychonauts.  On its own it has more profanity than either Psychonauts or Escapist Magazine do combined, which I expect is responsible for the recent flurry of strong word of mouth for the Zero Punctuation Reviews.  (Check it out– it’s hilarious.)

I finally got pretty good about updating, just to go silent for weeks. (Some friends may have noticed I’m not exactly responsive outside the blog, either.) I’m insanely busy right now, but hope to be back to intermittent posting within a few weeks. I’ve also got a direction for my game that I’m pretty excited about, I don’t expect to post anything public about it until next year.

This PS3 ad was banned in the UK, which should finally settle the question of whether the Advertising Standards Authority or the FCC is more oppressive. The real news, however, is that the ad is awesome. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for the futility of life genre, also used to great effect in this recent Onion article.

I’m currently installing Supreme Commander.  It’s been going on for… a while.  The initial 20 or so minute install wasn’t so bad.  I’ve now created a Gas Powered Games account, and logged in with it three times (each time checking both the “remember my login information” and “log in automatically” checkboxes).  Each of these logins preceded an automatic update (which requires that I click “OK” to install the update).

This all requires that you basically babysit your computer during the 30-60 minute install process, which can drag on much longer if you’re not there to click OK.  However, babysit too closely and you run into another problem: since it keeps asking you to log in, it will eventually give you errors for logging in too frequently (”that account is already logged in”).

I normally try not to post rants about completely obvious screw-ups, but perhaps they occasionally merit pointing out.  Here is one of the most popular recent PC games, and this is the experience gamers get.  Much like Old Man Murray’s famous adventure game post-mortem concluded it was suicide, the death of PC gaming may be self-inflicted.