Jonathan Blow has made a pacifistic take on Flywrench called Nicewrench. Asking the question “what happens if you take a game that is about mercilessly killing the player, and remove the possibility for player death?”. Not much obviously, but I don’t think that’s what Flywrench is about. Yes you will die repeatedly on some levels but what Flywrench does really well for me is remove the tedium that usually succeeds death is games. You respawn almost instantly and you’re playing again. Making death binary and removing any grey areas such as health, damage or powerups is for me what allows for the challenging level design. Flywrench is one of the best single player games I’ve played in some time. It looks and sounds great too so if you haven’t already played it I strongly suggest you do. Ignore anyone who tries to tell you that it’s too hard, including yourself.

In game death and difficulty are popular subjects for indie and art games at the moment. Passage and YouHaveToBurnTheRope are two recent examples. By the way if you get stuck burning the rope there are walkthroughs here and here. You’d have to go a long way to better Basho’s Frogger by Neil Hennsessy though. Let’s get pataphysical.

Nicewrench via indiegames

Tuomo is running a Pixelache summer school in Kemiö on the 7-8^th August. Sadly I can’t make it but if you can I recommend you do. A top opportunity to learn stuff while having a great time. It was a bit colder when I was there but still very beautiful. I bet Kemiö in summer is a nice place to be.

It’s been threatened several time before but now it has actually happened. I have a website. For those who don’t know me and have landed here by accident I design, make and play games. So I guess that will account for a large percentage of posts. Also belatedly I’ve finally uploaded some photos to Flickr. There should be a random selection to the left and here is a link to all my photos. Here is a photo of Lisa in Spain struggling to access her email.