2005 Game of the Year: Innovation

Independent games have become known for their innovation.  Each year independent game developers create some of the most interesting ideas to grace computer screens and this year was no different.

From glass boxes to mental boxes and even to dealing with square cubes this year's independent games show that no matter how hard you try you can't box independent developers in.

5th Place - Fish Tycoon

Developer: Last Day of Work		Players: 1
Website	Download
System Requirements: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, 500MHZ, 96 MB RAM, DirectX 7+

Fish Tycoon  isn't exactly a game. It plays something more like an interactive screen saver, but even that description is a bit off. While it may be hard to characterize, it certainly provides a different take on the traditional tycoon game that makes it an easy inclusion among the most innovative games this year. Probably the closest game to the style of play in Fish Tycoon is Nintendogs. Both of them force the player to take breaks from the game and limit the actual time that a player can interact with the game. In Nintendogs this is done as the dog gets tired and can only participate in so many events or learn so many tricks.

Fish Tycoon forces player interaction to even smaller amounts of time. Whereas Nintendogs has you playing for about 30 minutes, Fish Tycoon's style leads you to play in 5 minute chunks. In the game players cross-breed fish and sell them at their personal pet store. However, fish take time to grow and to be born. Growing a fish up will take from a couple hours to a day depending on what speed you have the game set at. While the fish are growing you can feed them and stare at the screen, but there is little more to do.

With the option of making your aquarium in the game your screensaver, Fish Tycoon becomes the perfect office game. You can leave your desk, come back in a couple of hours and play for five minutes, and then get back to work. This innovative approach to game play which keeps the player entranced even when they aren't actually playing works very well and puts the game among the most innovative this year.

4th Place - Rumble Box

Developer: DigiPen		Players: 1
Website
System Requirements: Windows XP/2000/ME, 1.0 GHz, ATI Radeon 9500 or GeForce3+, DirectX 9.0c+

Rumble Box is a very conceptually interesting game with a perfect price (free) that should make it easy for anyone to check it out.

In Rumble Box your goal is to fight your way through the level.  However, the level doesn't consist of streets, a city or a subway.  Instead, the level takes place entirely inside a box.  Your character is, well, a bunch of blocks and a single circle connected to create the appearance of a person.

You have one main move at your disposal, punching, with other moves that you can execute if you are running.  As you beat up the other characters in the box they explode into the component parts that made them up, and the parts end up on the bottom of the floor of the box.  In order to pass the level you need to create enough debris to get over the wall.  Rumble Box hails to Super Smash Bros. for inspiration, focusing on quick fighting instead of carefully crafted attacks. 

3rd Place - Curator Defense

Developer: Curator Defense		Players: 1
Website
System Requirements: DirectX 9+

Curator Defense has indie written all over it. The plot of the game is simple, and hilarious. The player is charged with keeping a museum free from all of the modern art that threatens to invade its walls and galleries. The best thing to do with modern art, of course, is to blow it up, and that is exactly what you have to do in this quirky strategy game.

If you were desperate to categorize it, playing curator defense  feels something like playing an RTS game. You have a number of different items available to you including different types of turret guns and banisters that will guide the art back and forth across the floor while your guns blast away at it (for a real treat you can use banisters with blades that will damage each piece of modern art as it comes by).

The game is persistent, with wave after wave of modern art coming through the door towards the defenses, leaving players scrambling to build up ever better defenses in the short pre-wave phase and while the art is actually coming through the door. The creativity in the game is really a treat with each phase describing the piece of art that is coming at players next (heavy on the 'piece'). The weapons aren't limited to just guns either, as you can place things like real art out in your defense plan to shock the modern art into stopping in amazement as it comes face to face with real art. As a freeware game, Curator Defense is something that you just can't go wrong with. Even if the game cost money it would be well worth it for the number of hours of great gameplay and entertainment found in this title.

2nd Place - Oasis

Developer: Mind Control		Players: 1
Website	Download		Purchase
System Requirements: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP, Pentium III 600 MHz, 128 RAM

Oasis is a game that flat-out shouldn't work. The huge amount of time involved in playing a world-building game can certainly seem excessive, but paring that time down to a matter of minutes should be an impossibility. You would think that,  at the least, if you cut the time down that far you would have cut so much of the guts out of the game that it wouldn't be recognizable to the strategy fan.

Oasis flies in the face of all the conventional logic and delivers the most amazing game you can play in 3 minutes or less. It takes all of the complexity of a game like Civilization and the simplicity of Minesweeper and combines them into a game that is entirely its own and absolutely riveting.

In a matter of minutes, players will explore the map looking for civilizations to add to their empire, find followers to assign tasks, determine placements for roads, choose a technology advancement strategy, search for high-powered weapons and prepare for an attack. After players have completed their strategies and finished all of their turns, seeing what technologies have been amassed and constructing their army allotments and battle plans, the oncoming horde either wipes out their civilization, or they move onto the next level, to undertake the entire process again (though often with the addition of advisors to improve their abilities).

Oasis is a tremendous game that has already walked away with the Strategy game of the year with good reason, and the execution of so much in so little time was certainly enough to win this game a place among the most innovative games of the year.

2005 Game of the Year: Innovation - Façade

Developer: Procedural Arts		Players: 1
Website
System Requirements: Windows XP/2000/ME, 1.6 GHz, 256MB RAM

Façade is such a mind-blowing game it is hard to think of any way the innovation award wouldn't go to it. Certainly, the game isn't perfect, and it isn't for everyone. In fact the developer even concedes that there is a struggle during the second half of the game to create the same open-ended experience that players get during the first half. However, when everything comes together, it is one of the most compelling games ever made.

It's rare to hear someone with the stature of Wil Wright talk about how interested he is in checking out an indie game, but at the GDC '04, Wright brought up Façade, which was then in early development, in the experimental gameplay workshop as an example of attempting the mind-blowingly impossible-- creating a game where you have a pseudo real-world experience with the characters in the game. Notably, very few games have ever created the type of bond between player and game character that would lead you to feel that the characters in the game were real, with real emotions that truly responded individually to you.

That is exactly the ground that Façade heads for and while it certainly can be improved upon, the window it opens for the future of gaming based on how well this game worked is one of the most significant achievements in game development in recent memory. There are moments in the game where you really feel like you are affecting the lives of the severely messed-up couple that you are chatting with, where each word that you input into the game really impacts the way they react both physicallly and in what they say or do next. Trying to replicate the same experience from one game to the next is nearly impossible. Even if you repeat the same phrases, if the timing is off it can create drastically different results.

Façade starts to show the kind of interaction that is becoming possible with current technology and teases players with the dream of what things will come. It does this while being a pretty good game in its own right, one that most players will immediately see the genius in even if it isn't quite for them. At its best, it's a compelling adventure that will bring players in again and again as they try desperately to come to a better solution in the game (or perhaps just play with the emotions of our fragile stars Trip and Grace).

Façade is a game that, years from now, will be looked upon as breaking new ground and being the first of its kind to succeed so well at taking the game out of gaming and making it instead an interactive work of fiction with plots and storylines that are created by the player instead of the game developer. Certainly we aren't there yet, but Façade stands as a triumph of how much more possible that future is than anyone might have believed. It walks away with our 2005 Game of the Year award for Innovation. Somewhere in the machine, Grace and Trip are silently smiling at the news.

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By: Russell Carroll
Posted: Sunday December 25, 2005