Archive for February 11th, 2010
3 items.
An enchanting game, Miner Dig Deep is indie in every sense of the word. Created by three brothers, James, Brendan, and Will Ribaux, on a small budget and managed to come together in just three months while each of them had some time away from their academic and professional responsibilities. It is the confluence of all of these development characteristics that I always imagine and relish when I think of a true Indie game and their development, real people having creative ideas unhindered by the plight that is development by board that takes place at most large publisher funded developers.
But that’s enough corporate bashing for one post, lets talk about Miner Dig Deep. As the name implies, this XBox Indie Marketplace game literally is a game in which you are a miner who ventures deep within the earth to exploit its riches. As you acquire more riches and wealth, you’ll be able to procure items to aid your descent, similarly the deeper you go the more valuable the minerals are. Sounds simple right? Not so fast.
Gameplay
As you may expect from a game based on the exceptionally safe career path of a professional miner, the ground is anything but ready to yield its mineral wealth to the likes of you. Boulders, cave ins, and cavernous voids are all too ready to render you immobile and in need of rescue. These obstacles appear to be procedurally drawn throughout the map and can only be seen in advance with the lantern. The lantern itself runs on kerosene and runs out gradually diminishing your range until you are mining blind and must return to the surface where a refill may be acquired. This mechanic creates the necessary sense of urgency to encourage the utilization of the elevators as well as tool and lantern upgrades. In addition to the minerals within the ground there are also unique items, for example a set of blue prints to create a new mining pick and a teleportation gate, no doubt left their by ancient mining aliens, that will quickly get you back to the surface for selling and restocking.
Look and Feel
The visuals of the game are very simplistic and use bright bold colors that give it a warm and welcoming feel. The colors of the surface in contrast the the darker subterranean areas make you happy to see the bright blue skies and the subtly swaying trees. The miners character design also feels just right with his big helmet and oversized pick and drill. The controls themselves are fairly simple with a button to jump, dig, and access the inventory. The movements are equally simplified in that the character is able to traverse irregular surfaces with relative ease, as such surfaces are quite common as you may imagine.
Audio
As far as audio goes, their isn’t a whole lot to say. It works well for the games design and feels right with nothing too complicated. It also did well to avoid any unnecessary irritation somehow, It may just be that the sounds are just understated enough that they don’t really get to you. The reason I point this out is do to the repetitiousness of the actions performed such as swinging your mining pick.
Summary
Miner Dig Deep is 80 Microsoft Fun Bucks on the Indie Marketplace, that’s a buck folks. You will easily get several hours of play out of it due to its style of gameplay allowing for multitudes of ways to build a mine and progress to its various depths. The game functions well and is a great pick up and play title. And if your mind is still not made up it has a game demo available as well so give it a try. I give this one a Buy without reservation.
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Here on Two Fedoras, we like figs. We like figs a lot. Some might even speculate that we have an “unhealthy preoccupation” with figs. So we try and post one daily. Today’s shot comes from figure.fm featuring Kagami and Konata from “Lucky Star“, be sure to click on through and check out what’s happening over there.
Yesterday, Jim Sterling posted on Destructoid, a rather rousing article discussing the often pretentious nature of indie video games and their developers. He goes into great detail about his recent experiences with the game “The Path” and his previous experiences with other Indie games both good and bad. Of course the debate of art vs. entertainment has been around substantially longer than that of the video game industry. Examples of similarly pretentious works can be found in every other medium for example John Cage’s 4’33″ and Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square.
Unfortunately in the world of video games we have a severe shortage of words to describe games that are purposely not fun and thus do to their typical underfunded nature get wrangled into the category of Indie. We have seen this become a fairly substantial issue in IGF where games with considerable muscle behind them get tossed in the same category as a game made by a single chap programming in his skivvies simply because the game is offbeat or stylistically unique and isn’t propped u p by by “the man”.
Personally, I think art is at heart something that is intended to communicate a meaning to its audience and while interpretation is the audiences responsibility, it can often seem like the artist simply had nothing to say. And as Mr. Sterling stated in his article “there is always a subgroup of people too terrified of looking stupid to argue against “art.”" thus leaving the rest of us to put up with that particular sub-groups vigilantism when it comes to works of those types.
In the end, I haven’t played “The Path” and can’t confirm nor deny his claims, but if it is anything like he describes my gut says he probably nailed it. As far as Indie games acting like Indie games, I think that is probably symptomatic of the lack of a subcategory labeled something along the lines of “Pretentious Shit”.
Be sure to go and interpret Jim’s article however you like, but be warned if you are one of those who resides within the aforementioned subgroups, the piece’s meaning may be all too clearly laid out for you. Also, the topic has continued discussion during this weeks Podtoid.
