#blendo games

[andmaybegayer]

don't know how I missed the Skin Deep demo dropping. Gotta play this later!

New Blendo game! I was so hype for this two years ago and I still am!

[throwupgirl-deactivated20240906]

I hate how things you see at a younger age affect you later on. I’ll be watching a movie scene where people are quiet in a small space and my mind always goes “this is just like the orange-peeling scene in Thirty Flights of Loving” without fail. It is just silence.

[tinysamm]

Whenever the player has to bypass a technologically connected obstacle through hacking in Quadrilateral Cowboy, the actual code is represented in very abstract terms that ultimately simplify everything down to a noun.verb() setup. While this is somewhat of a simplification of programming, it does render in terms where a large number of players will be able to digest and implement it through a shared understanding of sentence structure.

[burningcartridge]

[whentheynyan]

There are more idols than realities in the world

[vgprintads]

‘Quadrilateral Cowboy’

[PC / MAC / LINUX] [WEB] [VIDEO, RELEASE TRAILER] [2016]

Uploaded by Blendo Games, via YouTube

[titleknown]

BTW, thinking about Errant Signal’s video on Blendo Games, I kind a realised that there’s a far earlier example of the sort of “actions that feel good that convey no mechanical benefit” that he mentions characterizing Blendo’s work, in mainstream games in fact.

Namely: Fatalities from Mortal Kombat. Like, as far as I know, they convey no mechanical benefit to an actual fight, in fact only occurring after the fight as over, serving as n especially gory “victory dance.” And yet they’re considered a vital part of the series splatter-comedy-kistch appeal.

Now, one could go EllaGuro-type and say that the reason these aren’t stigmatized like art games’ use of the trope is is because they’re linked to the aestheticization of hypermasculine violence, but I’d actually say that that is the exact sort of dismissive attitude that keeps us from understanding prescedents like that in “mainstream” games and building bridges between the world of “mainstream” games and “art” games...

[andmaybegayer]

Replaying quadrilateral cowboy because it's a fantastic game and it's been long enough that I've forgotten most of the level solutions.

The entire game is dripping in character and atmosphere, the props are so simple yet so effective, but one of my favourite parts is the way that everything you're using feels like a prototype. Your automated suitcase gun and your infiltration robots have to be controlled by issuing very direct commands like "GO FORWARD 400; TURN 90; GO FORWARD 20, PITCH 45; FIRE;. This is distinct from Using A Finished Product or Actively Making A Novel Thing.

Quadrilateral Cowboy feels like, okay, we built these tools and they work, but we're in too much of a hurry to put the user interface together, so here's the development console, you'll be fine. It grants you more speed than if you, say, had to build everything from scratch, while still providing idiosyncrasies and quirks you have to work with and around in interesting ways. For example, each little program for your different tools has a slightly different syntax because each one was written by someone else.

If you were actively doing the technical side of intrusion, something like Hack.Net or a Zachtronics programming game, it would be different, those are slower and more methodical games. If you just pointed at the target and hit go it would be more like Watchdogs, which is a fast-paced action game with technological trappings.

When I was building control panels at my last job, the first trials involved manually setting up the test patterns you wanted to run in the controller software. Then, I was working on the rest of it so I made a little prototype command line program that could quickly toggle the outputs when I wanted to check something, but you wouldn't want to give it to anyone who had never used it before. Finally I wrote a GUI app with usage notes and help text for the technicians to take out to site for their installation checklists. Quadrilateral Cowboy falls very firmly into that middle land of prototype testing software.