I got the feeling that Darwinia was going to be something special when I heard that Gabe Newell from Valve had been raving about it. He points out that most games don’t capture his attention long, but he and several other people at Valve are hooked on this one. In another post, they even warned you not to make plans for the day after the game’s release, because you’ll be up all night playing.

I got even more excited when I found out that Darwinia was made by Introversion, the same company that produced Uplink a few years back. It was a computer hacking simulation that was pretty cool, if a bit limited. Honestly, the coolest thing about it was that it was actually made by a few guys who met in college and started producing games because they didn’t like the direction the games industry was heading. They bill themselves as “the last of the bedroom programmers,” though they’re obviously a bit larger nowadays.

It’s fun to read some of the background materials on their website showing the history of the game. They are not afraid to talk about mistakes and lack of direction during development, which is oddly endearing. The game’s roots come from the Indie Game Jam, which had developers experimenting with placing thousands of two-dimensional sprites in three-dimensional landscapes to simulate massive battles with a very low processor hit. The developers also freely admit that the game had little or no direction from an early date, and it was only later in the process that they were forced to admit that the game wasn’t any good, and revisit their initial assumptions, leading them to the game we have today.

Darwinia is their second game, and it is the sequel (at least in spirit) to Uplink. The basic premise (which is outlined briefly in the game manual, but barely touched upon in the game), is that “the world of Darwinia is a virtual themepark, running inside a computer network built by a computer genius named Dr Sepulveda.”

Sepulveda is presented as a sort of anti-Steve Jobs. He produced computers once upon a time, but a scandal that his computers were defective (apparently false) ruined him. He dropped out of the public eye, and only resurfaced recently with his “themepark,” which runs on a supercomputer composed of all his “defective” computers networked together. His virtual world is populated by little A.I.s called Darwinians. The world The Darwinians have an entire world, complete with mining, manufacturing and power generation facilities, as well as a unique life cycle and apparently a religion of sorts (I’m unclear on this because I haven’t hit the higher levels such as the Temple yet).

You arrive at the themepark and are verbally assaulted by Sepulveda, who is frantically trying to clear a virus that is killing the Darwinians and taking over the virtual world, and is irritated with your intrusion. He quickly relents, and asks you to help him clear the level. This “tutorial” level consists of Sepulveda walking you through the basics of running programs and killing viruses. From there, you proceed through more heavily infected levels, gradually cleaning and restoring the Darwinians’ world.

The gameplay is a neat twist on the usual RTS games, in that it doesn’t allow you to control the Darwinians at all. You can influence them by promoting individual Darwinians to Captains, who can issue movement orders to the masses. You can also create Squads, which are simple soldier programs that do very little on their own, and Engineers, who can be used to capture buildings and harvest resources. The “resources” are the souls of dead Darwinians and Virii, which are put into an incubator, and eventually released as new Darwinians, who you then direct to man various bits of equipment to bring their world back to life.

The interface is very simple, and is clearly meant to remind the player of a Unix environment (albeit a highly stylized one). Squads and Engineers are utterly disposable programs with no souls, and so you feel no hesitation to send them to their deaths, because you can instantly create new ones by running the program again. You are only limited in the total number of programs you can at once, and where those programs will “spawn” on the landscape. The only time you try to conserve your programs is when you have a lengthy march from the spawn point. You feel a bit more sympathy for the Darwinians, since after a slaughter, the battlefield is littered with little green souls. Even if you can gather them all up and bring them back with the Incubator, you feel guilty about killing them, or failing to defend them properly.

One of the most trumpeted features on the website is the lack of icons on screen and the gesture-driven interface. These are clear headnods to Black & White, which did the same thing. In fact, it may have been too clear, since with the default configuration, the game shows some icons on screen (program selection) and mouse gestures are disabled by default. Still, it is quite nice that the bulk of the game interface is hidden, and is revealed by holding down Tab and mousing to the top or bottom of the screen, which reveals the game objectives, or the program selection screen. On the whole, the interface is very nice, but I was frustrated by the inability to invert my mouse. I’m constantly zooming up when I mean to zoom down. This is such a standard feature on other mouse-driven games that it’s hard to understand its absence here.

Darwinia is the first real advancement in RTS games I’ve seen in quite awhile. The changes they make to the standard gameplay elements are fascinating and addictive, though I doubt many of them will catch on in more mainstream games. Still, it’s good to see there are still developers out there trying to focus on doing more with less, rather than just adding polygons. You could do a lot worse than drop $20 on this genius little game.

I first heard that Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman were working on a movie a few years ago, and I tried not to get too excited, because who knew how it would turn out? But I was already thinking how cool it would be to get a good story with full-motion visuals by McKean. That movie is Mirrormask, it’s out now, and it’s excellent.

In an interview, Gaiman is quick to point out that this is McKean’s movie. He helped write it, but the core concepts came from McKean, who is also interviewed, and paints a more collaborative picture of the writing process. It appears that McKean had the big ideas, and Gaiman helped flesh them out. In particular, Gaiman says that the existing ideas were a bit too straightforward, and he “roughed it up” and added some more complicated issues.

To brutally summarize, our heroine Helena performs in her parents’ travelling circus. Her mother falls ill one night after a fight with Helena, who feels intense guilt for not apologizing. Her father tries to keep the circus afloat as Helena withdraws into a fantasy world of her illustrations, where she discovers the world divided into light and dark, with each side ruled over by a Queen. The light queen is asleep, and Helena embarks on a quest to find the charm that will wake her and restore balance and light to the world. In the course of the classic hero-circle storyarc, she befriends a local who guides her through various locations on the quest, including the Orbiting Giants shown in the photo.

While this is certainly not as deep as Gaiman’s stories usually are, the classic fairy-tale structure is immediately recognizable, and McKean’s touch is also evident, especially when paired with the incredible visuals.

Now, not to take away from the story, but the real reason to see this movie is the visuals. This movie looks exactly like the covers to the Sandman comics, come to life and walking around. It was exactly what I was hoping for, and a lot is gained from the translation. Especially nice are the lingering rotating landscape shots that the movie delights in whenever we follow Helena into a new area.

In his interview, McKean points out that aside from the live actors and two sets that were built, the entire movie was built on the computer, and it’s easy to believe when we see his trademark visual distortions and color blooms. Many things in the movie retain the collage look from the covers, as if they were built from clipped photos, but they take on a life of their own, and some familiar-looking characters like the sphinxes or the monkey birds are startling when they speak.

This project is the culmination of a 20-year professional relationship, and despite the difficulties they describe in their interviews, this movie clearly shows that they understand each other very well, and their efforts compliment one another. These two are at the peak of their talents, and this movie is an incredible animated visit into their imaginations.

What do you get when you cross ragdoll physics in a game engine with cheesy kung fu movies? You get a crazy little fighting game called Ragdoll Kung Fu, which is like nothing you’ve ever played before.

When you start the game, you are treated to a hilariously bad loading movie styled after low-budget 70′s kung-fu films. It has clearly been filmed by the developers themselves in costumes consisting of skullcaps, fake moustaches, and video game t-shirts. Once the menu loads, you immediately notice that in addition to the usual “campaign” mode and multiplayer options, there are several “Secret Features” which can be unlocked by playing the single-player campaign. The menu music is a surprisingly decent hiphop tribute to martial arts styles. Under the Options, you find the usual resolution and controls, but also an option to enable the “film grain” filter, which gives the same beat-to-hell third-generation-VHS-dub quality so familiar in kung fu films from the neighborhood video store.

Bookending every single-player level are more of the awesomely low-budget movies with the developers introducing the characters being played or fought in each level. The storyline is an unremarkable journey from the training dojo garden level through to fighting the bad guy (a black boxer with an afro – possibly a tribute to Jim Kelly?) who kidnaps the girl. However, it’s delivered with a wink and a nod, and it’s clear that the “actors” had a blast filming the scenes.

The basics of the gameplay are simplistic, and the training level does an excellent job of showing the basics. However, the ragdoll metaphore is not quite accurate – the characters behave more like puppets on strings, that you can throw around the screen. Walking consists of grabbing a character’s hand (or head) and dragging across the screen, leaving their feet trailing behind, attempting to keep up. Jumping is accomplished by hurling your character around, which is great fun. Fighting is slightly more complicated, with basic attacks being done by right-click-dragging a body part towards the foe. The strength of the hit is controlled by your “chi” level, which is controlled by constantly spinning your mouse cursor. It quickly becomes natural to keep your chi level high by always spinning your cursor, but fast-paced fights against multiple opponents can be overwhelming.

In fact, it seems that the developers never intended for serious fights to go beyond one-on-one, because in every case where you fight multiple foes, you are provided with butterflies, which allow you to power up to throw fireballs or lightning. This is awesomely powerful, and can easily allow you to defeat multiple opponents.

While the storyline is cheesy fun, and the movies are goofy, the thing that kept me playing was unlocking the secrets. Almost every multiplayer or single-player (non-campaign) mode are unlocked by collecting stars during the campaign. You can also unlock “mixer tracks”, which are visible on the main menu, and allow you to control the volume of several different audio tracks, to customize your own theme song. It’s not a full-fledged mixer, as each track is more than a single instrument, but it’s still fun, and surprisingly addictive when you unlock one and the game informs you that there are still more to find.

I haven’t had much time to try out the multiplayer modes yet, but I checked a few single-player ones, and along with items like “long jump” and “high jump”, there is the “soccer” mod (pictured above), where you fight a computer apponent to kick a soccer ball to the opposite side of the screen. I sucked at this. I’m very interested in the possibilities of the movie recorder mode, however, which seems to hint at the ability to produce machinima quite easily. You can import your own soundtracks and skins as well, so now you can finally make that movie you’ve always wanted where Conan O’Brian fights a Combine Trooper from Half Life 2 to the tune of “Fly Me To The Moon.”

In summary, the gameplay is groundbreaking and entirely new, while the laughably bad storyline and movies are made up for by the secret features, skinnability, and infectious spirit of fun that the game was made with. Plus, it only costs $15 on Steam.

Right now, I should have just been getting home from seeing King Kong. We got our tickets online almost a week ago, and a whole group of us were going to go. Unfortunately, I caught a cold which hit me like a ton of bricks a few days ago, and I’m only just now starting to feel human again. I still wanted to go, but I think everyone around me would have gotten tired of me coughing and blowing my nose through all the dramatic scenes.

I was prepared to sit at home and watch some DVDs while everyone else went, but at the last minute, it started snowing, and one by one, everyone else decided not to go. Annie and Sean were the last ones to give in, but even they had to reconsider the idea when Annie’s brakes started acting a bit funny in the cold.

A couple weeks ago, I got the 1933 version of King Kong to watch before we went to the new one. I was surprised at how well it held up. Aside from the effects looking dated, and the 1930 acting style seeming a bit forced, the storyline was genuinely good, and you actually do view Kong as a character, rather than an effect. Walking away from it, I could see why everyone made such a bit deal of it, but I probably wouldn’t have watched it again or given it much further thought other than as a jumping-off point for Jackson’s remake.

That all changed when the special features disc arrived. It was perfect timing, really, since I wasn’t up for anything more challenging than lying on the couch watching stuff. Even so, I was surprised by the quality of the two documentaries included on the disc.

The first was an hour-long bit called “I’m King Kong,” about Merian C. Cooper, the director of King Kong whose real life rivals Indiana Jones. He flew a biplane bomber in World War I, nearly died in a horrible plane crash that left his hands scarred for life, was taken prisoner by the Germans, flew a biplane to defend the Poland from the Russians, nearly died in another plane crash, was taken prisoner by the Russians, escaped a Russian work camp, returned to the US and started making movies with a friend he met during the war, assisted an army fighter squadron as a tactician during World War II even though he was over the age of service, made King Kong, and promoted the use of widescreen, stopmotion, and technicolor in movies. Needless to say, the guy’s life is pretty startling, and the documentary features interviews with army generals, Fay Wray, Ray Harryhousen, and even voiceovers from the man himself.

The second documentary is the real goldmine, though. It’s called “The Making of King Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World,” and it is just like watching the special features on the extended Lord of the Rings movies. There’s an excellent reason for that – it appears that it was made by Peter Jackson and his crew. It features tons of interviews and bits about the making of the movie, but it also features extended information on the special effects, soundtrack and sound effects, and what made them so groundbreaking. I didn’t understand until I watched this just how much of the stuff in Kong had never been done before.

The coolest bit for me, however, was when they talked about how the stopmotion effects were done. There was so much secrecy around the making of Kong that there is no footage of the stopmotion and no interviews with the animation crew. In effect, Jackson pulled aside a group at Weta and told them that in addition to working on the new movie, they were going to reverse engineer the entire process used for the stopmotion, and recreate a scene that was cut from the movie and has never been found.

So there’s nearly an hour of documentary just talking to the guys at Weta about building armatures and miniatures, the tricks that were used to create certain shots, and how they had to figure this all out from old diagrams and the final film reels. In the end, they film an entire missing scene (the legendary “Spider Pit” scene) and present it as an extra. Jackson in fact goes out of his way to tell other fans that this is by no means definitive, it’s just his particular group’s attempt to recreate the scene, which is why they didn’t edit it back into the movie. They just made it for fun.

As far as I’m concerned, Jackson should get as much credit for his DVD extras as he does for his movies. He has set the standard for the way special editions of DVDs should work, and it’s nice to see that his gold touch isn’t limited to his own movies. Thanks to his special features, I now understand and appreciate the 1933 King Kong better than I did before, and I can’t wait to see his remake.

Which I should be able to do in a week or so, when I’m over this cold and the roads aren’t covered with ice (and idiot drivers).