At 5:46 today, nathan smithe was on to something - something BIG!
At that precise time nathan submitted a thread called "The Chickening - Artwork", a topic about a game he (seemingly, and hopefully) has been making. The game stands out as being something far different from anything anyone has ever made and submitted to The Daily Click before, despite others coming close, and this makes it a rarity. Looking at the downloads page at the moment, my eyes scan across the numerous green coloured platform games and black coloured space games. There are a few other genres too, such as the Breakout-styled clones and the top-down racers that you come to expect from a Click-based community. In the middle of it all is the download The Chickening.
Why has this oddity only had 22 downloads since 2nd August?
Setting aside the fact we are in the height of summer and downloads appear to be lower than average anyway, it's probably because the game 'looks' crap. Judging by what else has been submitted, the game suffers from not fitting into the catagory of games most people like and associate with being fun, i.e. your polished looking platformers or your flashy looking effect-filled space shooters. Indeed, there aren't many chicken-based shoot-em-ups that have sold well in the commercial world, let alone given away for free! I decided to download The Chickening to see what it was all about...
After nearly 30 minutes downloading (the game is a whopping 99.9 megs in size, though nathane does offer a lower-res 47 meg version too) i finally got to play it. The game instantly hits you with its craziness - your character (animated like something from Monty Python) appears from within a huge foot and shoots lasers from its eyes. There's a rabbit with a gun hanging off its forehead. There are fingers i need to jump on to get higher. There's an up-turned trainer i have to hitch a ride on to progress. This game is uber-crazy and ultra-random; the slow pace of the gameplay and slightly frustrating collision detection is overshadowed by the appeal of seeing just what else you could see if you progressed just that little bit further. It is, in my opinion, a small masterpiece!
So why aren't more game makers taking this approach?
The majority of great games have a great engine underneath them with some very very pretty graphics to attract people to playing them. However, the underlying style most use in their game worlds, from character design to storyline, fall within a narrow range of fantasy/space marine/'cute' cartoon/dungeons/zombies. With nearly every game submitted as a download or presented as a project has another dozen recent similar styled games by completely different people. The Chickening has nothing similar to its style and upon looking at it you wonder just how nathan came up with his ideas. To quote Dr. James,
"You plucked out nightmares and made them real, thank you sir."
When the author of arguably the biggest and most eagerly anticipated MMF game pays that kind of compliment, you have to sit up and take notice. I doubt many of the more experienced/skillful Clickers could come up with such craziness as nathan did. And he's not alone. A while back i reviewed a game called The Terminator: Hunter-KILLER, a take on the Terminator franchise that didn't rely on high-quality sprites or sound effects and had some of the dodgiest voice acting known to man, yet the experience offered mean't that the game stayed in my memory far longer than most other games i've played on The Daily Click. The Terminator: Hunter-KILLER shares the same kind if craziness as The Chickening, despite being more resctricted story-line wise as it loosely follows a pre-written plot.
So we've discovered a new way of making indie games stand out without needing to be as good at coding as Romero or Carmack! Is it new though, and has the commercial games sector gone this way itself?
The answer is yes. Between the mid '90s and early '00s Shiny Entertainment created many new game franchises that stood out from the crowd. Though they played exceptionally well and garnered positive reviews, they first became noticed due to the less-normal lead characters and strange level and enemy designs. Earthworm Jim brought about the machine gun-firing worm in a space-suit, something gamers had never seen before. The design and smooth animation of the player's character made the game appealing to almost everyone, despite the more 'normal-looking' Aladdin having platform mechanics fairly similar (Shiny Entertainment's previous Disney game before splitting and going it alone). Most people have more fonder memories of Earthworm Jim than they do of Aladdin, despite the games both scoring fairly similar review ratings.
After the inevitable sequel came out, Shiny went just that little bit crazier with the very polished and very playable MDK, a game that swapped colourful 2D sprites for more grittier 3D 3rd-person shooting. Unlike Earthworm Jim's very apparent craziness (just looking at Jim would make you realise this was a platformer like no other), MDK had a more understated take on uniqueness. Quite opposite to most 3D shooters around 1997 (when it was released), the levels were filled with oddities such as enemies who carry targets for you to aim at and power-ups like the decoy, allowing you to deploy a blow-up balloon with a picture of the player's character on it; the enemies would blindly attack that instead you. One level that stood out for me involved you falling into a small room with an apple orchard painted on the walls. Only upon shooting the walls do you realise they are temporary, and they fall down to reveal the enemies waiting behind them.
What was the point of this? Why did the aliens decide to create a fake room painted to look like an orchard? Why doesn't anything make sense??
It didn't matter because the developers managed to succeed with what they set out to do, that is to make a game memorable to the player using the most obscure game design possible, as well as making money from it. And that's what us indie game makers have over the commercial game-makers - we can make exactly whatever we want without worrying about consequences. There is no way on this world that a major publisher would put a game on the shelves called Cunt, yet Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl could and did, making a Flash game out of it.
And there's no way even Dave Perry, the man who founded Shiny, would try and sell a game about a chicken running across giant feet and shooting lasers out of its eyes, yet we could.
I agree that it looks very Monty Python, but apart from that, I actually disagree with most of what's written in the article.
I like a game to have some kind of basis in reality, or at least an alternate reality (ie. fantasy, scifi).
There must be some kind of logic, or the player is just basing decisions on sheer luck / trial & error.
It's obviously less important in a 2d shooter than in most genres, but I generally find it more immersive - especially if there's a strong plotline aswell.
Making a game a certain way, for no other reason than just to be different (or "non-conformist") - that's pretty much the definition of a gimmick.
@Adam - a slip of the Insert key, i'm afraid. And i asked OMC to help edit it but he's having the technical difficulties no
@Sketchy - you also have a point, though during the 80's there were almost as many non-conformist games as conformist ones. People let their strange and random ideas go for people to play. Nowadays, most games publishers push for the most realistic graphics or the most realistic physics.
Don't you sometimes get bored of playing the same-old settings and scenarios in modern gaming? As much as i love 1st-person shooters (and i really do!!), the lack of imagination in my concole's catalogue is a little depressing when i think about it.
Ah, the download is a bit of a gamble. Heck, it's a major gamble.. to spend time downloading 100 MB for something that looks crap. 99% of the time, 100 MB files that look bad ARE bad. I'm sure almost all of us have done it and aren't eager to do it again.
These games are only good as long as they remain an oddity. In a sense, the entertainment world - not just games - moves in the direction of these oddities. That's why you get things like slapstick humor, modern sitcoms, obscene artwork (or paintings of soup).
Once everyone does it, everyone would have to be just a little wackier. What we don't notice is that all the blood and gore of today's games were sort of an oddity back then.. but these days, it's a normal thing. It's only a masterpiece until someone outdoes it.
I think that game has so few downloads because it looks like garbage. It may indeed play like a masterpiece, but most people don't download games that look like they were thrown together in 20 minutes.
More games DO need to break the mold of typical, boring story/gameplay, but that's not an excuse to make something ugly and try to pass it off as innovative.
You are right Kazuma, people do tend to judge whether to download a game or not based upon the screen shots, this is natural. However, with indie games more than anything, this is never an accurate reflection on the game's quality or the player's enjoyment of the game. The innovation with The Chickening, for me, was the obscure yet well animated graphics, adding something extra to a platformer game.
Whether innovation works or not is purely down to the player's taste, however before a fair conclusion can be made the player must play the game for themselves first. And let us not forget, if people never started to do things differently with their games then the whole gaming scene would get very stale very quickly!
Advertisement
