Current computer games can be divided roughly into two groups. 
Unfortunately, these groups don't seem to have established names, so I 
will try to explain what I mean.

In one camp, you have games like Crysis, Portal, Call of Duty, Unreal, 
Left 4 Dead, Assassin's Creed and a bazillion lessor titles that aren't 
as good.

Most of these are big-budget productions, requiring serious computer 
power in order to run. But not all of them. I've seen at least two games 
which run on the Source engine and are free downloads off the Internet. 
And I don't just mean level packs for existing commercial games; I mean 
completely original games in their own right. The tools that Valve give 
away for free apparently let you do that.

Some of these are first-person shooters, but again not all of them. For 
example, in Portal you don't have any weapons at all, other than being 
cunning. Psychonauts is almost impossible to classify at all (unless you 
just class it as "other"). There are various stealth games where the 
object is to collect stuff or infiltrate places without killing 
anything. And so on.

For lack of a better title, I call this group "delta games".

The other group comprises everything else. I call these "alpha games". 
In here you find utterly obsolete stuff like Xenon II or Uridium. But 
there are also brand new games in this category still being made today.

A lot of people seem to think that only low-budget indie stuff falls 
into this category. But PopCap makes mountains of money selling stuff 
like Peggle or Bejewelled. And it wasn't so many years ago that Abe's 
Odyssey was receiving Game Of The Year awards.

A lot of people also seem to think that reimplementing tetris makes a 
great alpha game. Like it's automatically great just because it's retro. 
This is incorrect.

Let's look at tetris for a moment. Everybody has implemented it. No 
computer hardware, programming language or similar platform can be 
considered complete until there's at least one minimal tetris clone 
available for it. But if, like me, you've seriously played a few of 
these, you'll have discovered something: Some of them are fun, even 
today. But most of them are just lame.

Just because it's not a delta game, doesn't mean you can just throw it 
together and everybody who likes other alpha games will automatically 
like this one. It doesn't work like that.

Let's look at Abe's Odyssey again. Basically it's a 2D platformer. You 
know, like Manic Miner or Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario. But unlike 
any of these, it has lush fantasy-world computer graphics and truly 
atmospheric soundscapes. And it has bizarre alien lifeforms. It's an 
audio-visual experience that you keep playing just to see what's on the 
next screen.

It's not even particularly *good*. Getting the "good" ending rather than 
the "bad" one requires 80% completion, which is approximately 
impossible. The collision detection is flakey at best. There's a bit 
where you can't get past a row of land mines without going on a 4-level 
detour. And half the time one of your few feeble powers is taken away 
because it would make the puzzles too easy. But the game looks and 
sounds so amazing, it's so much fun to explore, that you just look past 
these things. [Mostly.]

Yes, it's a 2D playformer. But no, it would have been impossible before 
the era of 24-bit graphics and digital audio playback [not to mention 
harddrives that can hold gigabytes of data].

In short, there are people who think alpha games are obsolete, and 
people who take them seriously. I'm now going to talk about a couple of 
alpha games.



When I bought something or other on Steam, I got a free copy of Peggle 
Extreme. (That'll be PopCap Games them.) It's quite enjoyable to play, 
so a few weeks ago I caved in and bought the full version (known as 
"Peggle Delux").

I'm not actually very impressed. I guess I had assumed that what's in 
the demo is just a taster of the full thing. But no, it *is* the full 
thing. The only difference between Peggle Extreme [free] and Peggle 

that's not completely true; there are a few other minor differences 
(including the other levels each offering you a different "super power", 
which ranges from useful to pointless).

Perhaps most annoying, the demo uses the same three 45-second music 
loops for all its levels (of which there aren't many). But the full game 
uses... THE EXACT SAME THREE MUSIC LOOPS! >_< Jesus, I got so sick of 
hearing them!

Each level does have a different background image, but they're all very 
low-res and utterly boring to look at. If the graphics had been pretty 
enough, this might have been an enjoyable game... but it wasn't. Oh, 
there is a difficulty curve. The later levels do get harder. But they 
get harder and a tedious, boring way, not harder in an exciting and 
interesting way. And even then, it took me 1 day to beat the entire 
game. Oh, you can replay the levels again on a harder difficulty getting 
for an extra badge. But... why bother? This game isn't fun. I'm not 
enjoying myself. Why continue?



Some of you may remember a while back I bought a copy of Osmos. That was 
another game with a nice idea. And, actually, rather beautiful graphics. 
Unfortunately, it too uses only a few extremely short sound loops 
(calling them "music" is stretching it a bit). But most fatally, the 
game is just INFURIATINGLY IMPOSSIBLE! Almost all of the puzzles are 
intractably hard. You can easily spend 45 minutes or more solving one 
puzzle, only to have one false movement suddenly destroy everything in a 
few seconds flat.

I lose count of how many times I've rage-quit that game. It's just far, 
far too hard. I applaud it for being (very) original, and it's quite 
nicely put together. It's just too frustrating to play, unfortunately.

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