Some might sneer, say that the point of videogames is in their interactivity, and that taking a screenshot removes that. But that’s missing the point. Some games are truly beautiful and you might miss that while playing. The pressures of playing a game – the need to find ammo, the need to take cover from enemies, the need to solve a puzzle – can easily distract from the beauty of a scene.

One expert at videogame photography is Duncan Harris, who’s been putting up snapshots of games on Flickr for a while now. He’s covered a massive pile of games – taking a role dependent on the game in hand. He’s a war photographer in Crysis, Half-Life 2 and Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, a gig snapper in Rock Band and Guitar Hero, an explorer in Aion and Bioshock, an urban photojournalist in GTA IV and even an abstract artist in Mirror’s Edge Pure.

In each game, he expertly captures the essence of the title, as well as a few things you might not have seen on first look. Whether it’s the occasional humour of Mirror’s Edge, the fantastical settings of Aion, the neon-streaked rain-swept metropolis of Liberty City or the lush foliage of Crysis, it’s all beautifully framed with a real eye for detail. Some shots are flabbergastingly beautiful.

I’ve only really attempted in-game photography in World of Warcraft – a game that does occasionally deliver the odd stunning panorama, impressive building, or curious architecture. Henceforth, though, I’m going to be sure to work out what the screenshot button is before I start playing anything, or install an application that lets me take pictures with a hotkey combination. Then, when I see something pretty, I’ll pause for a second to grab a shot.

If you have any suggestions for good apps to take screenshots with, or any beautiful pictures of games that you’d like to share, then do so in the comments.

If Small Worlds was a guided tour through a beautiful city, This Is Infinity is a frantic run at 2am through its nastiest slums, chased by unknown assailants. To sum up the difference in a word, you’d go for “distress” – the player is dumped, with absolutely no guidance, in a flickering, flashing monochrome world. The way out is to explore.

Initially, you won’t find the presentation too jarring. There are trees, cats, and birds, But step into one of the four portals dotted around and you’ll find yourself in an explicable landscape of moving shapes, shifting perspectives and utter confusion. Only by a little exploration and observation will you work out each area’s puzzle, which returns you back to the central point again.

The puzzles aren’t difficult at all. What makes the game very tricky, though, is that they’re masked by a complete lack of pointers. One area, in particular, is hopelessly disorienting, and you’ll need to keep stopping to get your perspective back. Another frustrates you endlessly until you work out the trick. However, you won’t get anywhere with them without a bit of experimentation – you can’t fail, or die, so you just have to keep plugging at it until you ‘get’ the answer.

There’s no time limit within the game, but you might find the graphics a little hard to take for too long without the aid of asprin. Call that a ’soft’ time limit, then. Thankfully it doesn’t last too long – which is an odd thing to say about a game, but the short time you play will speak volumes to you about the value of proper direction in games, and how you can mask the simplest ideas with distracting presentation.

You can download the Windows-only game executable from Cactus Squid’s original blog post about the game, which also comes with a video of it in action. If you’re struggling, there’s a walkthrough which also includes some non-spoilery tips, but this isn’t too tough – if you’re having trouble, just observe for a minute, and try different things. You’ll get it.

(via EGP)

It’s about imaginary friends, in a way. You control a little figure in a rather fetching hat who wants to get to a series of green squares because he wants to be their friend. The problem is that in between you and those green squares are vertiginous drops, towering cliffs and humming forcefields. You can’t do this alone.

So you have to employ echos of your past existence to help you. They retain some corporeality, meaning that you can jump on their heads, and they can jump on yours. Together, any objective is surmountable. The implication being, of course, that you don’t need anyone else to help you in life – enough attempts at something will give you the experience to accomplish anything. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

You’ll run up against forcefields that you can penetrate but that your ghostly doubles can’t, and ones that can be passed by the doubles but not you. As a result, you often find yourself controlling the future, without being able to directly see your actions on-screen. A keen sense of timing is vital, particularly when you come to some of the Braid-inspired switch-puzzles, and you’ll need a reasonable grasp of basic platforming skills too.

The art, work of Luka Marcetic, is simplistic, and functional. It’s a curious match-up of soft focus and pixel art, and occasionally will go grainy to denote a flashback to both painful and happy memories. The music, from David Carney, is similarly functional. It burbles away in the background, happily ignorable, a little too busy to let you relax, but too simplistic and repetitive to be memorable.

All the while, a story plays out in text (italic Arial – there’s got to be better typographical choices than that) overhead, with the main character half-explaining what you have to do on each screen and half-telling the game’s narrative. The mash-up is generally pretty effective, except in the very first few levels where it goes through the controls. Do games really have to explain the arrow keys every single time you play?

The Company Of Myself could have been a terrible visit to the mind of a 16-year-old who never gets picked for the football team. It’s not. It’s a touching journey in the memories of someone who prefers not to seek the company of others. You should go and play it.

One of the biggest cop-outs in game design today is clouds. They’re tricksy little things, difficult to make look realistic because real clouds often have a dramatic, otherworldly appearance that looks fake already.

Think about your favourite games. How many of them are set indoors, or at night, or underground? How many have a perspective that looks down from above, meaning that there’s no need to render anything above ground level? Even those that do depict a daytime scene often just stick a sun in the heavens and leave it at that.

But done right, clouds can add tremendous majesty, presence and realism to a scene. Let’s take a look at a few of the best games of the last decade or so to see exactly how the developers have used clouds and what effect they give to the mood of a screenshot.

Starting with Monkey Island 3. Being a point-and-click adventure game, the backdrops are all hand-drawn and stylized. Clouds feature in almost every scene, from the opening vista with Guybrush in a dodgem car and a huge moon, to the duel on top of the hill overlooking the town and LeChuck’s ship sailing off into the sunset.

Each lends a slightly eerie but fantastic quality to the skies, matching up closely with the tone of the game itself. Despite tropical clouds having almost nothing in common with those shown in the Monkey Island games, they still have an evocative quality that suits the game perfectly.

Next up, is GTA IV. Instead of an artistic approach, GTA IV goes for a much more photorealistic style for the city and everything in it. As a result, the clouds are typical stratocumulus that New York might see at any time of the year. They look good, though – blending in without being too flashy.

You can see exactly what an effect they have by comparing that last image to a shot of GTA: Vice City’s sky. Instead of definable shapes, there’s just a vague whiteness which isn’t remotely convincing and doesn’t match up with the much more defined edges to clouds that you tend to get in the tropics (because they’re more likely to be made of water, not ice).

Another game that goes for a similarly photorealistic approach is Half-Life 2. But City 17’s clouds feel a lot more ominous than GTA’s, hanging low overhead and letting the sun poke in from the horizon, casting long shadows across the ground. This gives an oppressive feel to the game, suiting Valve’s Orwellian city-state excellently and keeping you on your guard.

Imagine if the same scene had blazing sunshine and gave the impression of a warm, sunny day. You’d end up thinking: “Maybe that Doctor Breen isn’t so bad after all. Do we really need to be taking down the citadel?”

Perhaps the ultimate in photorealism is the clouds in Microsoft Flight Simulator, which billow and float in an agreeably physics-generated sorta way. Thanks to the perspectives required, though, Flight Sim’s clouds have to look good – players will be viewing them from any and every angle, and so they have to be convincing to maintain the illusion that you’re really a 747 pilot, flying the red-eye.

Flight Sim is one of the few games that gets that depending on the position of the sun, clouds can be either lighter or darker than the sky around them. The refraction of light around the water droplets in a cloud means that they can dim a bright scene, but they can also light up the dark, especially at dusk. Microsoft’s cloud engineers seem to have done an exceptionally good job on them.

There’s a tonne of other examples I could look at, but let’s leave things there for now. What are some of your favourite clouds in videogames, realistic or not? Take a screenshot and post it in the comments.

Today we have a game of discovery, a game that focuses on nothing but exploring the unknown, a game of entering the darkness and making the unfamiliar familiar. Oh, and it’ll only take you fifteen minutes to play from start to end.

It’s called Small Worlds, and was created earlier in the year by David Shrute for the Casual Gameplay Design Competition #6: Explore. This is a competition run by a flash games site called JayIsGames since 2006 which takes an aspect of game mechanics and asks developers to build a short game around it.

Small Worlds starts you as a tiny pixellated figure surrounded by blocks. Using wsad or the arrow keys, and the space bar,  you explore your surroundings, getting rid of the “fog of war”, or “shroud” so beloved by strategy game. As you uncover more of the environment, you zoom out so you can see things better.

It seems a little ridiculous to avoid spoilers for a game that’s only 15 minutes long, but given that exploration is the whole point of the game, it seems cruel to discuss the environments in too much detail, suffice to say that you’ll want to uncover the entirety of each of the five available maps before progressing.

It’s tightly focused on its goal – it doesn’t have coins, powerups, scores or lives. There’s no way to die, and it seemed impossible to get stuck for long. But what it does do, expertly, is conjure up the magic of beginning a game of Civilization, or Age of Empires – a lone settler in an unknown land.

The concept of that single character starting alone in a dark, featureless expanse of nothing is one that’s unique to videogames. It’s a fantastic feeling – full of promise and possibilities. Will there be a mountain in this direction, or the sea? Ohcrapohcrapohcrap, I’ve stumbled into the enemy base.

It’s something that’s kinda echoed in reality, too. When you move to a new town for the first time, you begin to form mental maps in your head, and although you might know one road like the back of your hand, the next one over could be a complete mystery.

If you have 15 minutes, spend them on Small Worlds. You’ll get a surprising amount of joy from the lovingly created and detailed places that you end up. It’s certainly one of the most pleasant fifteen minutes I’ve spent in some time.

(via Kotaku)

The humble playlist is a powerful force in the world of music. Music geeks obsess over them – spending hours getting their mixtapes just right, a real labour of love. It’s quite a curious phenomenon, and a deeply personal one – for many people, a playlist that has been built by two is a painful compromise.

There are loads of questions for the playlist maker – do you open with a gentle track, to ease the listener in, or smack them right in the face with a pop classic? Do you end on a triumphant note, or should there be a quiet postscript to the proceedings? Each and every decision can and should be read into in enormous depth.

The idea of a playlist likely originated from an amateur musician or an orchestra choosing what a crowd would most like to hear. The concept is a little cruel – ripping apart the context of how the creator wanted his music to be heard, and jamming in your own versions.

Of course, the idea has come a long way since then. Jimmy Saville has a part to play –  he was the first person to combine two turntables and a microphone for continuous play of music without a gap in between, becoming the world’s first DJ.

But the real star of the show was the humble cassette tape, which brought the concept to the masses, allowing them to tape tracks off the radio, or off other cassettes in whatever order they liked, and then play that back at any time. Before the cassette, compilation albums existed, but they weren’t easy, or cheap to create.

Burnable CDs moved things forward once more, as did the USB drive, but today, any digital music system worth its salt has a playlist functionality and YouTube has begun to introduce the idea to short videos on the user-generated-content site.

So, why do playlists not exist in videogames? Given that almost every game going back a long time has a level skip cheat, why not use those to create a patchwork of levels from games that have a common theme running through?

Sure, there are obstacles – finishing one level, you’ll have at least a five minute gap while you shut down that game and start up the next one – but games last longer than songs anyway, so that doesn’t seem to be an artistic obstacle in the way. More problematic is you have to install an entire game to get to the one level you want – a lot of preparation is required.

But those issues aside, here’s three short playlists of games that I feel have a running theme through them. There’s one list of the best Zombie levels in games, one of videogame representations of the D-Day landings, and one of some of my favourite boss fights. I’ve tried to begin and end each list sensibly – starting easy and with a gentle introduction, and then moving onto the more hardcore end of things.

Braaaaiiins…

Half-Life 2: Ravenholm

Call of Duty – World at War: Der Riese

Left 4 Dead 2: Hard Rain

Plants Vs Zombies: Survival mode

Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold and Juno

Medal of Honour – Allied Assault: Operation Overlord

Day of Defeat: dod_charlie

Company of Heroes: D-Day

Combat Flight Simulator 3, D-Day 1944 – Invasion Of Europe

Bossa Nova

World of Warcraft: Flame Leviathan (Ulduar)

Legend of Zelda – Ocarina Of Time: Ganon

Wolfenstein 3D: Hitler

Final Fantasy 7 – Sephiroth

Of course, these are just examples. There’s a whole range of different things you could do with videogame playlists, from the pretentious (“six levels about darkness”) to the practical (“five impossible jumps in platformers”) to the ridiculous (“sex in games”). That last list could include Mass Effect, Leisure Suit Larry, the Witcher and some scary Japanese titles.

If you come up with any playlists of levels in games that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them. Post them in the comments below.

Back in 1994, I was 9 years old and my dad bought me my first PC. It had a Pentium 60 processor, 14-inch CRT monitor, and came dual-booting OS/2 Warp and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I loved it, spending hours glued to the screen playing demos of games that came free with computer magazines at the time.

But I didn’t just play demos. I had one game. The incredible Sim City 2000, which perhaps my dad thought would be educational and might prompt me to become a town planner like his brother. That didn’t happen, but it did come with one of the best manuals I’ve ever come across, written – it seems – by one Michael Bremer.

It wasn’t like the other manuals of the time – a brief explanation of the basic functions and a list of troubleshooting tips, then a run-down of the credits and a couple of pages of “notes” – instead it had a detailed description of every single tool in the (large) game. Best of all, though, were the quotes peppered throughout that discussed the “spirit” of a city, and the philosophies involved with urban planning.

Looking back, those quotes – which I obsessively read when my computer wasn’t working because I’d deleted autoexec.bat or command.com or something – probably expanded my pre-Secondary School mind quite considerably. I loved it, and the game, to bits – mainly because it made me think about a city as a thing, rather than a collection of things.

All of my cities in that game were always absolutely utopian. There would be no crime, no traffic, no lack of electricity or water and no budget problems – thanks to my liberal use of cheat codes. After all – in the future, money’s no longer an issue, right?

I whiled away hours and hours on those cities, while sunny afternoons came and went outside. I meticulously constructed railways, high density commercial zones and fusion power plants, while planting as many parks and laying as many rivers as I could get away with.

…

Fast forward to January 2009 and Mirror’s Edge arrives on the scene. Trailers had already taken my breath away thanks to the light, colour and motion that were demonstrated. The game unfortunately didn’t sell as well as EA hoped, but it’s gained a cult following – mainly for its setting.

EA dropped the ball, really, with the protagonist – a 24-year-old girl called Faith who comes with dark hair and tattoos that was perhaps designed to appeal to 16-year-old kids of an “alternative” persuasion. Nothing wrong with that, except that the game dumped those kids into a brightly lit, colourful world of glinting glass windows and soaring skyscrapers.

The sense of place was incredible – I was suddenly on top of the arcologies, monorails and office buildings of the cities I had built in 1994. Being able to explore the interiors and exteriors of those environments was incredibly liberating – particularly in the early levels in the game, before it devolves from the awesome platformer it starts as into the lame FPS it ends up as.

While the environments were ultimately a little on the linear side, it’s still an absolutely incredible, and beautiful experience to hit up the time trial modes that challenge you to run as fast as you can through the levels without the hassle of the police chasing you.

Stripping out the police turns the city from an authoritarian dystopia into the shining, glimmering places that I had meticulously constructed fifteen years before. And while that might be a personal thing, the setting was one of the aspects of the game most praised by reviewers.

Dystopias are overused in videogames. It’s easy to build a plot in a hive of scum and villainy. Let’s see some more paradises, fairylands and Shangri-las, and some creativity in how they’re applied.

This post has a soundtrack. Choose YouTube or Spotify.

On a flight to cold, dark Scandinavia recently, I was thinking about how one of the delights of Peggle – other than its ridiculous addictiveness – was the rich, interesting backdrops that the levels are built around.

They’re used in all of the editions of Peggle – most notably in the free Peggle Extreme that was distributed with the Orange Box by Valve, which had a range of screenshots from the various games included in the bundle. Here’s an example:

It occurred to me that this was odd for two reasons. Firstly, this was a game highlighting its backgrounds, rather than hiding them away in the, er, background. Would Peggle be as great without its insane backdrops? No way.

Secondly, it’s odd because this is a rare example of art purposefully having an effect on the mechanics of the game. Mostly, in game development, the level designers tell the art team what to do. This was the other way around.

So I thought about what would make a good backdrop for a game and, in the same manner as a kid playing “I Spy” picking the car that he’s sat in, decided that a plane window would be the perfect venue for a calming puzzle game.

Perhaps it’d be a game where you had to connect up droplets of water, ice crystals or even clouds to make patterns. Of those, I’m a biggest fan of the second one – the patterns formed by some of those ice crystals can be beautiful.

The tutorial could be a view out onto an airport tarmac, while waiting for the plane to take off, complete with instructions from the captain over the PA system.

“This is your captain speaking… uh… please connect up the crystals so they form a line… uh… and make sure that your seat back and tray table are in an upright position”.

It’d be easy to repurpose the kind of design you find on airplane safety cards into a set of menus and instruction windows, if voice isn’t an option. I’m not convinced that text could convey the awesome distorted sound that an audio recording would.

If you like the idea, and you have the knowhow to create something good, go ahead and make a game out of it. Then send me a link – I’d love to see what you’ve done with it.

Eufloria is an independent real-time strategy game for the PC created by Alex May, Rudolf Kremers and Brian Grainger. The concept behind the game is based on a theory by physicist Freeman Dyson, who suggested that a genetically engineered plant – a Dyson Tree – could colonize a comet and produce a breathable atmosphere.

Players are set the task of colonizing various asteroids with seedlings. When enough seedlings are on the surface, a tree can be planted – shooting a deep root into the interior of the asteroid which lazily curls around the core. That tree then generates new seedlings slowly over time.

Different asteroids are different sizes and the larger the asteroid, the further the seeds are able to travel. Different asteroids can grow different types of seeds, too – some are fast, some are strong, and some are able to take control of hostile asteroids more quickly.

The game’s art style is very distinctive. It takes a minimalist, almost diagrammatic approach to displaying the cosmos that you’re battling in. Your seedlings have a stalk, wings and a body area – and they change in size depending on their strength, speed and energy attributes respectively so you can see at a glance what’s happening. Asteroids are rendered as giant cell-like circles that are penetrated by seedlings when they take control.

The team that created Eufloria say: “The game allows the player to explore a beautifully realized universe rendered in a style that is both unique and compelling. Eufloria’s aesthetics are reminiscent of children’s books like The Little Prince“. That’s certainly visible in the game.

It’s deeply relaxing. The sound direction is superb – all ambient chimes and dings. The music, by Brian Grainger, is similarly ambient, taking cues from Brian Eno, Eric Satie and John Cage to envelop you in a soft, velvety cushion of noise, perfect for headphone play late at night.

The low, low difficulty contributes to the relaxing feeling, too. You’ll likely finish each level first time, and the pace is such that you can alt-tab to a browser window to read websites while waiting for your army to build, and you’re not wasting time. In fact, a very viable strategy is to send all your seedlings to one planet and then just wait and build. You’ll eventually create an army of overwhelming size.

As a result of the minimalist design, you feel very detached from the action. Although your seedlings are waging fierce wars, fighting and dying on the surface of these asteroids, its as if you’re cocooned in a command centre an immense distance away. That recalls the “Death from Above” mission in the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, where you slaughtered hundreds of enemy soldiers from an infrared viewscreen on board an attack helicopter. It was a powerful statement about how soldiers can be conditioned against feeling remorse for taking by distancing them from the action.

But I digress. Eufloria is a great little game. It won’t challenge you – you won’t spend your time cursing and banging your fist on your desk. Instead, it’ll relax, calm and chill you out in a way that is all-too-rare in a world of videogames that try and thrill you at every step.

In the same way that organizing your bank in World of Warcraft can be a great way of calming down after an intense PvP session or a raid, a quick game of Eufloria is a great way of quelling adrenelin from a round of Team Fortress 2 or Modern Warfare 2 so that you can go to bed. Eufloria is a calming, ambient, beautiful title, well worth having in your Steam account.

Eufloria