Pieces of pipe come in various shapes and they come randomly, [...]]]>

Gas is flowing! Boss is demanding! The crowd is complaining!

Obstacles abound!

Pipe Trouble is similar to the game Pipe Mania; a game where you must install pieces of pipe that link the start point to the end point. Netbookist first encountered it at the Bit Bazaar Winter Market.

Pieces of pipe come in various shapes and they come randomly, so you would have to think how best you can assemble them such that you don’t waste various pieces.

Like Pipe Mania, Pipe Trouble pits you against the pressure of ensuring your pipeline is ahead of the gas flow. In addition, Pipeline includes two major elements which you have to care about : your boss and the people of the land. Your boss wants you to build pipelines as efficiently as possible (i.e. short and direct so as to save money), however, the people want you to build your pipes with as little disruption as possible (i.e. don’t build over their farms, forests and possessions).

Getting judged at the end of every round

These two interests conflict, and if you anger the locals, they’ll start stonewalling your project. They’ll send protest teams that will linger around your pipes and block you off. If you anger the government, you’ll get fined or they might blow your pipe up.

After every round, you’ll get judged on your performance. Your boss and the people will give you a score out of three stars each, and ideally, you would have attained six. Along with the score, a tidbit about the pipeline will be read which can range from telling you about gas prices to fears from the local population about environmental pollution, giving the game a shallow storyline.

Unfortunately, the game is not made for the PC. The full game can only be bought for the Android and iOS, although you can play a full level on the website.

Link

Steam is currently down and reports have that you must both add it to your account and install it to be able to keep the game.

Link

As you sit in your booth, you call people to show their papers. You check whether the names, serial numbers, dates and data match. If all is good, [...]]]>

Dealing with immigration: the best way to understand the word "bureaucracy"

Papers, Please puts you in the hotseat of an immigration officer in a fictional country of Arstotzka where you get to decide who gets in, and who doesn’t.

As you sit in your booth, you call people to show their papers. You check whether the names, serial numbers, dates and data match. If all is good, you can approve this person. If it isn’t, you deny or detain him or her, depending on the severity of the issue.

Detecting a discrepancy of wrong issuing city by cross-referencing your official handbook and a person's passport

There is a backstory to the game. It goes like this: a border has just open and you have been given the job as the one and only immigration officer in this border. For thirty days, you will go to work and every person you correctly approve or deny will reward you with money, along with bribes, bonuses and other one-time events.

You have a family to take care of, which will cost you money to upkeep due to rent, heat and food. Your efficacy at work will determine if they flourish or perish.

The game gets increasingly complicated. You start of dealing with two or three documents, but because of different world events such as terrorism, deteoriating relations between nations, and disease, you will increasingly need to deal with more paperwork, weapons and dilemmas.

A dilemma you will encounter: do you help your government or assist a clandestine anti-government group? Do you take bribes? Each choice you make will lead to a different ending, of which there are 20.

A miserable ending awaits if you make the wrong choices

The game runs very well on a netbook and you can probably play it with a trackpad should you wish. It is certainly advantageous to play with a mouse since speed is of the essence in this game.

The only issue is that you must play fullscreen, because windowed mode is way too big for a netbook’s display of 1024×600. Fullscreen resizes it down, but oddly, it will scale it down such that Papers, Please will only take up half the screen, leaving a substantial perimeter of black bars on all four sides as evident on the first two screenshots.

Papers, Please offers some of the best value for money and an addicting factor that is up there with highly rated regular games. You can play it through once to get the story, or you can play it again and again to experience the different endings. It’s fantastic.

Like

A unique game with a good replay value

Great storyline, thrilling endings

Fun because of the constantly changing environment

Dislike

Suboptimal fullscreen scaling

Verdict

Great fun, great value, good replay value.

Gameplay: Great!

Graphics smoothness: Excellent

Work needed to get game to play: None

Do note that you will have to sign up and these three games are extremely popular. This might result in GOG’s website going down, or disallowing you to login because they are being overwhelmed.

This event was housed in a townhouse-sized building which spanned two storeys. In it, there were many games, usually with the developers alongside to answer any questions and to sell you their merchandise.

I tried out a [...]]]>

Queer games. Both in the "LGBTQ" and "weird" sense.

The Bit Bazaar Winter Market hosts a small exhibition of indie games, comic books and art in Toronto.

This event was housed in a townhouse-sized building which spanned two storeys. In it, there were many games, usually with the developers alongside to answer any questions and to sell you their merchandise.

The first floor

I tried out a few games there, and they ranged from awesome to weird.

Oculus Rift: what a toaster looks like on your face.

 The most interesting thing was the Oculus Rift. This is a headset that has two monitors in it, each for an eye. With head tracking that allows you to physically control your point of view. If you look right, your game looks right. This allows you to be completely immersed in the game, as if you were in the game.  

The Canadian interpretation of Papers, Please.

There were many other games on display at the Bit Bazaar. Featured on the left is a game called I Get This Call Every Day by David S. Gallant. In it, you work in a call centre and assist your customers to get what they want done. The customer, unfortunately, is erratic and uncooperative. Gallant said that this reflected his experience as a call center serviceman. 

GoldenGearGames's latest project, "Fate Tectonics".

Golden Gear’s booth had a new game to show called Fate Tectonics. One of its developers, Alex Bethke, explained to me how it was supposed to be played, but I forgot all of it. Maybe if I can get my hands on the game… 

Alex Bethke, one major part of Golden Gear.

"Pipe Trouble" by GoldenGearGames is Pipeline with a Canadian twist. After playing this game, you become more sympathetic to Enbridge

But Golden Gear had another game there. This game is called Pipe Trouble and it played a lot like the good ol’ 90′s Pipeline, except it has a storyline and you have to balance out the interests of your boss and of the community’s. Typical middle-rank job problems of trying to please everyone but failing every time.

In the process of building the pipelines from start to end, you must try to avoid building over wildlife, farms or trees. Or protesters will come out in droves to hinder you. You must not go over a pre-set allocated budget when laying your pipe tiles, or your boss will fume.

Pictures!

More queer game-art. Arielle Grimes's game about tits hurting. The goal of this game is to amuse yourself by pushing your cursor over the nipple and clicking. A random joke message appears.

Arielle Grimes in front of her booth.

Cool wall of cutesy stuff

wow.

Jazz Punk is a humorous adventure game where you must solve puzzles in a hilariously coloured world with funny guns, funny NPCs and many other subtle jokes.

Beat Patrol, a game involving dodging bullets, and shooting bullets to a musical rhythm.

Hey loyal Netbookist readers,

It seems I have run dry of ideas for a while, ever since my netbook went kaboom. The battery ran flat and I had to find a replacement. That took a while.

Add work in… and I haven’t had time to do any extra work on this website. I’ll [...]]]>

Hey loyal Netbookist readers,

It seems I have run dry of ideas for a while, ever since my netbook went kaboom. The battery ran flat and I had to find a replacement. That took a while.

Add work in… and I haven’t had time to do any extra work on this website. I’ll try to get it updated over the holidays!

Meanwhile, I went to Best Buy and realized that netbooks have all but disappeared! It seems that nobody sells low-powered, Intel Atom netbooks anymore. It’s all either tablets, or some hybrid tablet-netbook, or a netbook with a more powerful AMD processor.

Is this the end to the netbook?

Hotline Miami is an indie game that looks like the original GTA, is as difficult as Super Meat Boy with 8-bit music and a trippy storyline casting you as a hitman who receive hits via your voicemail. The game starts out with you in your house, while you direct your player to [...]]]>

More bloody than Breaking Bad

Hotline Miami is an indie game that looks like the original GTA, is as difficult as Super Meat Boy with 8-bit music and a trippy storyline casting you as a hitman who receive hits via your voicemail. The game starts out with you in your house, while you direct your player to the phone to answer an ambiguous and innocuous voice message that requests that you go do some errand. What it really wants you to do is to go kill a person, and off you go in your DeLorean.

Dial-a-murder! Be discreet!

The game is is reminiscent of the difficulty of Super Meat Boy because it requires a lot of well planned, well timed acts. You can’t simply go in and expect to win by just shooting everyone. In fact, there are a number of methods to kill someone – you can use a melee attack, throw an object (both to attract attention and to knock someone to the ground), or shoot your gun. Each has different consequences – the most significant being shooting, which attracts the attention of everyone in the level. Melee attacks don’t make a ruckus and attract attention, but they are rather useless if you’re confronted with a bunch of weapon.

This is where strategy comes in. However, unless you go out of your way to read some guide, you’ll never know what the best way to proceed is until you’ve played through the level for a few times. And play the same level a few times you will… sometimes to the point of frustration.

The game runs moderately well, FPS varies depending on the number of characters in the level.

How you kill someone has a bearing on the number of points you get.

Oddly enough, this is a game which I would recommend playing on a netbook because it is slower. When I played the game on my regular PC, it was really fast paced. With a more powerful computer, it feels like you are forced to react faster and think on your toes more often. However, on a netbook, the lethargic processing power does play in your favour as the game slows down as more and more enemies enter the fray.

The game has some bugs with graphics as sometimes surfaces don’t show up, but otherwise, it is quite a install-and-play game. Hotline Miami is best played with a real mouse as you would be at a major disadvantage if you aren’t able to react as quickly as a mouse would allow you to.

Like

Violent, gory, fun.

Plays even better on a netbook.

Dislike

Frustrating when you have to retry time after time

Verdict

Great fun, plays even better on a netbook because of how weak the netbook is.

Gameplay: Good

Graphics smoothness: Excellent

Work needed to get game to play: None