SHARECART1000 games have been coming out this winter. The website has practically no instructions, so what is this?
SHARECART1000 allows (forces?) participating game creators to have their game’s data all save to the same file. So playing one game (and having your data saved) will cause changes/glitches to other games. All of the games are very different, created with different software, with different visual aesthetics, and with varying levels of play and fun and style. All of the games work on PC, but Fjordsss, Post-Future Vagabond, Player Piano and Patient Number have Mac applications too. Not surprisingly, from the man known for his glitchy rogue-y games, Michael Brough's Post-Future Vagabond appeared super glitched after I had played through several other games. Want to see some results right away? Try using the Player Piano cart, and then switch back to Post-Future Vagabond. I couldn't get Fjordsss working at the time I'm writing this capsule review, but I'm excited to try that one (the only game that costs money: $7 suggested to download).
The games themselves vary in their quality. SHARECART1000 definitely hasn’t quite hit its stride. It needs a few more games (the goal was 13). And the need to drop new games (after the first one) into a single SHARECRAFT1000 folder was a bit of a minor confusion. My other criticism is that I wished the games overall would glitch a bit more.
Still, it harkens back to the chaos of those 1000-games on a CD-rom that I used to love as a kid, with hundreds of crap and a dozen mini games that were golden. Which is also the inspiration for Pirate Kart. The game world could use more kludge and confusion and new approaches.
And I hope more people make games to work with it.-LT