Adventuring is rarely so beautiful

Release Date: 16^th October 2009

Developer: Amanita Design

Genre: Point and Click Adventure

Mode: Single Player

Machinarium is a point and click adventure game built on the Flash platform. It involves a world of robots with personality who break the mould of efficiency quite a bit. Our hero launches into the game as dumped in a rubbish tip. You first goal is to pull you bits and pieces back together. Along the way you meet you bully opponents and save everyone including your girlfriend which is all quite typical. All in all perhaps 4-5 hours play for an experienced adventure gamer.

What is not typical and what aids this in being a positive game is the innovation. For one thing this game does not involve speech at all. Instead messages are conveyed via animation, simple sounds and thought bubbles. This alone is a nice change. For example, when you try to do something in the game which is not possible or going to work you get a short cute shake of the head ‘no’. As opposed to tired old lines like “I can’t put those two things together”.

What’s more, there is a reach mechanism in the game where you can only interact with objects you robot can reach, unlike in most adventure games where all on-screen is within reach. You can activate a crouch down or reaching high to help. The puzzles in game are interesting and varied.

In fact that’s the thing that is great about this game, it always offers more. So many small touches which add up to heighten your enjoyment of the game.

Machinarium graphics are truly a beautiful work of art. The are done in a free-form, light grunge style and naturally include robots. The animations are smooth and often quite cute. Amanita games have taken care to animate the game from start to finish giving it a feel of life. The interface, while simple is attractive and functional. The game resolution is limited which is hardly surprising given the drawn nature of the game.

Music in Machinarium is pretty good too as are the sound effects. They have to be in order to better convey information which would usually be done via speech.

The difficulty of Machinarium is well balanced. There’s a thought bubble hint you can activate and there is also a brilliantly done built in walkthrough which shows you, comic style, what you need to do but not exactly how and when. This walkthrough is accessed via a locked book you can unlock via an arcade minigame.

Machinarium runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. A demo version is available on their main site and is great for getting a feel of the game. There are also plans to make it available on the Wii, PlayStation 3 and possibly some computer tablets.

Machinarium is available for $US20 on it’s main site and is also available at Steam, Gamersgate, Direct2Drive and Impulse.

Game: 4½/5      Positive:

You want retro? Seriously retro?

Hipopotam delivers at Pica-Pic. These handheld LCD electronic game recreations are absolutely amazing and delivered on a rather flashy site. I’ve played some of these and everything is as it should be including my stumble fingers. I wonder if you can clock them the same. There’s 19 games to chose from.

One of the ways to understand positive entertainment is to know its opposite.

Facebook and other social networking games have very much shown that. As Facebook rode up the wave of popularity the applications embedded into the social networking sites that really struck it rich, were games. Zynga games which released Farmville, Mafia Wars and others, was symbolic of this rise. Zynga is now a very wealthy company employing over 1300 people who serve over 50 million players per day.

Now the games from Zynga are kind of the icon for negative games. These employ copious amounts of the challenge-reward system in a style of upgrading and virtual items style which is deliberately restrictive. Thereby they have gotten those enormous numbers of people who might otherwise be productive, wasting huge amounts of time. The restrictions are in order for the company to make money on virtual currency sales. These high priced sales for such poor quality games was bad enough, but then these games integrated what can only be called scams. ‘Free’ products with hidden charges scams. Mobile phone subscription scams. The list goes on.

The pull of challenge-reward was so great, those not foolish enough to fall for such scams found ways to reverse the rip off and ultimately harm legitimate companies who were not scams.

As a result these Facebook games have been disastrous. Not for Facebook or the games companies but for regular Facebook and other social media users and companies who tried to advertise legitimately.

But does it end there? Not really. Zynga is still around, still thriving. I think Facebook and companies like Zynga have a lot of pressure to clean up their act. It appears to be slowly working. Zynga have even enacted some limited charity work to improve their image, including an integrated charity to assist Japan.

In the main though, the small devices market is still in growth and these small mobile games are still in demand. They can also easily be positive or at least neutral in nature as well. I hope to see changes in this direction, if not from Zynga, from other more nifty companies.

At the very least it’s now easy to block out the bad game and scam noises on Facebook. I recommend you do so if you have not done so already.

Do you know of any positive facebook or other social networking games?

With the nuclear disaster in Japan it’s clear to all knowledge about nuclear power plants, radiation and meltdowns are not at all well understoof publicly.  A lot of that is of course fear and secrecy from the nuclear heyday in the 50s.

Geoffrey Noles made a highly simplified nuclear plant simulator using Adobe flash.  It can help to understand some of the most basic principles in the plant operation including…. you guessed it… meltdowns.  What I do want to stress is that the real nuclear plants are run by experienced professionals and have redundant systems ensuring the chance of these sorts of disasters is very rare.  That being said things like earthquakes and tsunamis interfere with operations quite drastically.  You can give it a go here.

h/t Boing Boing