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.

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

Battlefield 1942 is a first-person shooter first released [...]]]>

Planes are in high demand, as proven by the number of campers in the airfield. They range from heavy bombers (B17), light bombers (Ilyushin, AichiVal, SBD-5), and fighters (Zero, Yak9, BF109).

As of writing, Battlefield 1942 is still available for free on Origin – you just have to download it via this link because it is more difficult to find it on the Origin program. Get it before 1 March 2013.

Bring the boom boom pow to your enemies.

Battlefield 1942 is a first-person shooter first released in 2002. When it came out, it represented  a breakthrough in this genre. You know a game is successful when you keep getting the same thing again and again for years – see the Battlefield series, The Sims and Call of Duty.

It added a variety of ways you can have a rampage over your enemies including blowing them up with a plane’s cannons, blow them up with explosives, or just run them over with your jeep. Have a battle on sea, land and air. Work in teams to coordinate artillery fire, or work alone and climb up a mountain to snipe your enemies.

Each class and each spawn point gives you different abilities and vehicles to choose rom

The game is primarily a multiplayer game, and single player merely means playing the game on the same maps but with really dumb bots. On this note, the game is still highly playable because there are still many servers and players online.

The game runs quite poorly, unfortunately, on a netbook with internal graphics. Playing the game at 640x480x16 with everything set at low, and a disadvantaging visiblity of 50 to 75 per cent, you get a framerate of about 5-20 depending on how many people there are and how many objects there are on a map.

On the other hand, if you have a separate graphics processor, such as an ION 2 like the netbook  that I have, you can play this game without much slowdowns. Running on the ION 2, you can play at Medium settings with a 100% visibility and get a framerate of 15-40, again the same slowdowns will apply, especially when there is a lot of action.

The game runs at a 4:3 resolution, so if you do not want to play with a stretched image, follow this link.

Overall, I’d get the game whether or not you have a discrete graphics processor. It is one of the most entertaining game to have on your computer when you are bored – in class with the university’s WiFi or when you are travelling and can’t bring your main computer.

Tanks: from heavy tanks like the TIger to tank destroyers such as the M10, and everything in between.

Like

The pioneer BF1942: still with all its lustre and nostalgia.

A great variety of weapons and vehicles

Dislike

Runs poorly on integrated graphics

If you’re used to the newer Battlefields, the features in this game might feel limited. I see it as simplicity.

Verdict

It’s free – until 1st March 2013 – you have nothing to lose, so get it. If you have an AMD C-series processor or a Nvidia graphics card in your netbook, you will have a good time. It is playable on integrated graphics, but you won’t get a good score due to a choppy framerate.

An excellent game, simple and varied.

Gameplay: GG

Graphics: Great… unless you have integrated graphics

Work needed to get game to play: Plays right out of the box.

Future patches might change it, but as of now, you’re stuck with either playing it on an external display or a different [...]]]>

Faster than Light is not really netbook compatible... this is how the game looks like at a non-native 1152x864 resolution.

Here at Netbookist, I take pride in helping my readers. So here’s something from the get-go: Faster than Light will not display properly on netbooks that do not support at least a 1280×720 resolution.

Future patches might change it, but as of now, you’re stuck with either playing it on an external display or a different computer altogether.

This is how full-screen on a standard laptop screen looks like.

The game is still playable if you really, really wanted to play it on a netbook. The game’s native resolution is 1280×720, which means that on a typical netbook, you’ll have a lot of horizontal resolution truncated. The fix to this, to make this game playable, is to familiarize yourself with the way the game works before attempting to play it on a netbook and playing it at the maximum resolution which your graphics card will allow. More crucially, play the game in windowed mode, so you can move the window around to see parts that are truncated.

Finally, for the majority of netbook users with integrated Intel graphics drivers, it can be hacked to 1152×864. If you haven’t already hacked the drivers, follow this link.

Readers, if a future patch solves this problem, please do let me know!

Quick Review

Faster than Light is a unique game. For ten dollars, you get many, many hours of fun.

The game is basically a point-and-click game, where you have to manage the roles of your party. For maximum efficiency, you have to match certain jobs to certain people. Each space race has attributes that make some better at attacking, some immune to fire and some can repair your ship faster. Your job is to make sure you’re getting most out of your (non-)human resources.

With that done, your job is to constantly upgrade your ship so that you can fend off the final ‘boss’, the Rebel Flagship. On you way to meet the Flagship, you will attack lesser enemies who will dispense resources such as Scrap, which is the currency you use to buy upgrades for your ship.

With these two elements – a good ship and a good crew – you will then be tasked to defend yourself against pirates and other aggressors. Combat involves choosing your target and crossing your fingers, much similar to X-Com games. In Faster than Light, you will have to choose discrete faculties of the ship you want to destroy – you can destroy the shield regenerator,  the weapons first, if your strategy is max damage to them, and less damage to yourself.

On the other hand, you can pick an alternative strategy of maximum resource gain, by teleporting your best troops to their ship, and killing the crew in it. Leaving the ship in tact will generally give you more resources per battle.

All these minute considerations might seem unnecessary, but the real test of how well your strategy is will come together when you face the Flagship. And fear the Flagship much, because this game has no save game feature that features like a “backup”. Instead, the save game feature is there only to allow you to pause and resume the game once. A deliberate feature that was annoying at first, but I learnt to appreciate it as a means to keep the game challenging, and to make you keep coming back for more.