Well, the end of *a* world, at least. At the start of Dino Run, your character’s plans for an idle day lounging around the nest looking at some eggs are rudely interrupted by a meteor crashing in the distance and the end of 99% of all life on the planet suddenly bearing down from the left. Seeing as how you’re a small, bipedal dinosaur rather than Bruce Willis, your only hope for survival is to leg it in the opposite direction. While not the deepest of stories, it certainly provides the necessary motivation to send you tearing across the landscape in hopes of outrunning the wall of burning earth bearing down on you.

Of course, not all your dino-chums are so lucky. Along the way you’ll run into creatures great and small, some of which are small enough to be gobbled up (earning you points to be used later for upgrading your little dino – y’know, obviously) while others, like the lumbering stegosauruses, will need to be lept over or sort of climbed. There’s also petrodactyls flying in the background, happily flitting ahead of the wall of death bearing down from stage left while ignoring your plight on the ground. This only confirms what archaeologists already suspected – petrodactyls were the pricks of the prehistoric world, and nobody was sad to see them go.

What else? There’s eggs to gather along the way, either to be scooped up off the ground or snatched out of trees through sudden, frantic jumps. Your momentum, that thing keeping you alive while the rest of the world around you gets smashed to little bits by meteor chunks, can turn against you in a flash, with a mis-timed jump carrying you just far enough to bounce off a cliff instead of landing on it or sending you flying over eggs or critters you meant to eat. It’s light and fun, full of little surprises and more than a little sweet, and even comes with a multiplayer mode to see who among your group of friends is fit to survive the coming destruction of the Earth. Between this, Velociraptor Safari, and the forthcoming Jetpack Brontosaurus, PC gaming (this one is browser-based, by the way, and can be played on whatever) seems to be having a little dinosaur renaissance. Is there any better kind?

But enough about allergies, as much more of this talk will see me turning into Warren Ellis. Fantastic Blood Boy! is a late entry in The Independent Gaming Source’s most recent contest calling for people to create games to fit a randomly assembled name. I don’t know what won the contest, as that would require a level of investigation I’m not quite capable of at the moment, but it’s hard to imagine anything that could top Fantastic Blood Boy had it been entered before the deadline. And it’s not just the wonderful name – FBB manages to bring the sort of new idea to the table that feels so familiar and obvious when first encountered you’ll spend the next hour or so after playing trying to remember where you’ve seen it before.

Playing Fantastic Blood Boy is simple enough – the eponymous main character, controlled by you, is invulnerable. The crystal linked to you by a dotted white line is not. As the game progresses, more and more of the identical sockpuppet enemies will spawn and try to destroy the crystal. Touching the crystal sends it flying away to safety, while leaving it alone (and, of course, exposed) causes it to create platforms and weapons to help you destroy the sockpuppets and earn points. Befitting a high-score hunt of this type, the longer things go on, the more they hectic they get, with more enemies and more crystals to watch over filling the screen.

And that’s it, really. It’s yet another game about how long you can last before dying, but the tricks it manages along the way are (as far as I know) unique and remarkably innovative, reaching past the usual “new-idea-for-the-sake-of-having-one” to create an experience that stands apart. You can’t be hurt, therefore you don’t matter. All that’s important is the crystal, and who reaches it first. It’s a shame Fantastic Blood Boy! wasn’t finished in time for the contest, but really, I’m just happy it was finished at all.

As starts go, Bonus Level’s isn’t without its missteps – of the two games currently available CoBaCoLi is a bit on the boring side (and a pain to type), with almost-there mechanics buried under sloppy physics and a distinct lack of the momentum this sort of game needs. The idea is sound, with you smacking a white disk into colored ones in an effort to knock them into their respective walls while being mindful of your ever-diminishing cue, but playing it the way you’re supposed to – that is, like a tricky game of pool – inevitably leads to frustration when the game refuses to play along. Some of the player-created level patterns are lovely to look at, making it all the more shame that I have no interest at all in playing them.

BLockoban, on the other hand, is thankfully both easier on the Shift key and much more fun to play, offering up a seemingly endless variety of familiar block sliding puzzles. While probably nothing new to most people (I think the last time I ran into these particular puzzles was in the Ice Temple of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess), flicking through the devious challenges the players have provided is an interesting look at the dos and don’ts of level design. The tool sets Bonus Level provides are simple enough for pretty much anybody to wrap their head around, but perhaps the most useful thing they provide would-be designers with (other than a review board keeping out the actually impossible to solve submissions) are the following guidelines:

A good level is polished and unique.
- Try to play as many official levels as possible before creating your first level.
- Try to pay attention to every little aesthetic detail.
- Try to avoid player frustration and impossible levels.
- Try to fun and original.

Emphasis on try, of course. while I was able to slap together a beatable level in about half fifteen minutes or so, it’s a hard little thing, and far trickier than the sort of thing I would normally produce. It’s waiting approval from the reviewers at the moment, but should hopefully be available to play before too long. In the meantime, here’s what little “Expertology” looks like:

It’s hard to say what will become of Bonus Level. They’re desperately in need of new good games, as BLockoban’s charm and simplicity will only hold attention for so long. These sort of community experiments are always tricky, with the biggest questions coming along the lines of when and how to turn things over to the masses. With any luck, the brains behind it all can get another game out in front of the audience before they move on to the next thing.

It’s winter throughout the universe, see, and only you, a scar-wearing astronaut, can save the little guys scattered around each level from the evil ice creatures that have frozen them. You start each level with one unit, using the space bar to switch between his two states: unfreeze and attack. Unfreeze rescues more of his friends when you find them and recovers any of your units that have been frozen, while attack blasts the ice creatures into smaller bits. When all your guys get frozen (or if your suit temperature bottoms out), you have to start the level over again. Simple, right?

Simple, and yet all the little elements at work here – your units, enemy behavior, the planetoids’ gravity – come together to create an experience unique enough that, by the time I was thinking about putting it down to write this, I’d nearly beaten the game. Attacking a group of enemies takes on a surprising tactical twist, as a single blast from them is enough to refreeze one of your guys, allowing them to cut your force to ribbons. In later levels, this means that sometimes the best way to approach them is by leaping to the edge of gravity’s pull, causing it to swing you at a dangerously fast orbit through the middle of them. It can get pretty tense, with an attack quickly turning into a retreat and then a rescue mission as you tip-toe back into their firing range to rescue downed units.

Frozzd is a fun little thing,a brief glimpse at a unique mash up of platforming and tactics play that I’d love to see explored further. You can download the game for free or play it in a browser window if you’re running Windows, and a Mac version is supposed to be in the works.

It’s a hard game to play, using the arrow or WASD keys to steer a rocket as drunken as its payload through a storm of cheerful meteors while searching for bags of money hanging from balloons, but so short and sweet it really doesn’t matter. You’ll take off, you’ll wander, you’ll get battered back to the Earth or explode in flight, and you’ll try again. Along the way you’ll encounter aliens to pester for change, if you can get your hobonauts close enough to them without blowing up. After playing a few rounds, the whole thing about hunting down bags of money became secondary to making aliens look as awkward as possible while they made excuses and hurried on to somewhere else. Nice to see space is remarkably like Tompkins Square Park in the summer.

What’s really interesting about Twin Hobo Rocket, though, is its multiplayer aspect. You and a friend can huddle around the trashcan fire computer and rocket into the stars together, with one of you using the WASD keys and the other on arrow keys. It turns a fun distraction into a neat little cooperative challenge, with the rope attaching your missiles meaning you’ll have to work together to get anywhere. You won’t, really, but that’s hardly the point. Multiplayer mode can also be played on your own, which bumps the challenge level up to ridiculous proportions and makes playing even more of a comedy of errors than it was before. So obviously you should try it at least once. The game is Windows-only, I’m afraid, but worth taking a crack if you have the chance. Because honestly, when else in life are you going to have the chance to do this sort of thing?

First, just to get it out of the way, The Graveyard is not a game. Not really. In the press release that appeared when the game launched last week, Tale of Tales referred to it as “an explorable painting”, which is about as close as anybody is going to get to nailing down what’s happening here. There are no interesting choices, no real rules to obey. Instead your job in The Graveyard (free demo for Mac/PC available at the link above) is simple: you steer an old woman down a straight path through a graveyard to the bench waiting at the end and then help her sit down. After a few seconds a song begins to play, the sort of thing Tom Waits might sing to himself while washing dishes. At any time you can leave the bench – stay and the song continues to loop, leave it begins to fade away – and walk back down the path towards the exit. The game ends when you both leave the graveyard.

So that’s the “explorable” part, but what about that says “painting”? The devil is very much in the details here, as The Graveyard does more in its ten minutes of play to create an atmosphere than most longer titles ever manage. Realistic birds twitter around you, landing on the path to peck at unseen morsels before taking off again. Clouds pass overhead, momentarily blocking out the sun and covering the graveyard in shadows. The sounds of traffic and the outside world fade out the farther you get from the main gate only to swell up again to welcome you back to the world when you leave. For all the little details in the environment, however, the old woman remains the star. As you walk together her limp becomes more pronounced, her reliance on the cane increasing as she makes her way past the gray slabs. She moves slowly, visibly creaking down the path, and when you reach the bench you both let out a sigh of relief at the chance to finally rest. For all its non-game status, The Graveyard still manages to capture what it is that makes games so unique: if this were a short film on YouTube, it would a pretty, if ultimately forgettable experience. By putting you in limited control of the old woman, however, it creates an immediate bond between you and what happens to her that adds weight in a manner nothing else can quite manage. By allowing you to take every slow step with her, Tale of Tales has created a thoughtful piece that, despite (intentionally) not saying anything specific, makes you pause to consider what’s happening and what feelings it’s stirring up in you, if any.

But wait, there’s more. As mentioned above, this is just a “demo”, an incomplete experience offered to entice you into purchasing the full product for five dollars. Complete the demo, and you get a screen with this text:

If you enjoyed this trail version of the Graveyard, you may be interested in acquiring the full version. The full version completes the experience with one extra feature: death.

Giving us this information beforehand is an interesting approach on the part of the developer, if only because it makes us ask so many questions of ourselves. If I know that all my five dollars gets me is the same game with the added possibility of the character dying during a given playthrough, do I still spend the money? Is knowing what the experience will be the same as seeing it happen, or will her death provide some new context to appreciate the game through? Am I paying because I want the full experience of what they’ve created here, because I support what they’re trying to do, or out of some morbid curiosity? Or all of the above?

I think ultimately that whatever reasons people buy the game for, they will all fall under the scope of Tale of Tales stated objective of giving people space to think about the themes The Graveyard touches on in its slow walk there and back again. Love it, hate it, or waffle somewhere in between, its a worthwhile endeavor on a number of different levels: the environment and mood it creates, the contemplative nature it handles life and death with, the anti-climax of her head slumping forward and eyes closing, and a dozen others. Choose the one you like most and spend a few minutes walking in the sunshine.

Well, mostly happy. Lately (particularly since the birth of Xbox Live Arcade), it seems “shmup” has more often than not come to mean “lazy reskin” as more and more people take an older game they really loved, change the graphics and name (if you’re lucky), and then shove it back out into the world. It’s a bit depressing, really – for every Assault Heroes there seems to be a dozen Raiden clones. Thank God then for Kenta Cho’s Aba Games, home to some of the most varied and interesting shooters around.

Cho is an interesting developer to watch – he produces games all on his own, releasing them for free at the rate of one or two a year. While nearly everything he produces can be neatly categorized as a shmup, each game is completely unique, home to an innovation or twist you find anywhere else. Take TUMUKI Fighters, for instance: while the side-scrolling shooter aspect is familiar to pretty much anybody who’s seen a videogame, its great idea lies in the way you upgrade your ship. Rather than blowing up enemies for powerups, you add their entire ship to your own, knocking them (or pieces of them) out of the sky and snatching them before they fall off the screen. The result is a completely different looking ship every time, a deadly mash-up of your fallen foes drunkenly stumbling through the skies like a drunken Katamari.

Elsewhere, Gunroar drops you into naval combat in a world full of bright lights and blurry images, taking your standard vertical scroller and adding two new features: the ability to lock your direction of fire, allowing you to shoot at one angle while moving freely around the map, and player-controlled progression. The two mixed together lends itself to incredibly hectic and fun situations, as you can race into dangerous situations, guns blazing, or wait for the danger to come to you.

There are many more games here to try, each one trying something different while staying true to the nature of shmups. Torus Trooper, for instance, is an incredible rush of speed, capable of causing a mild sense of vertigo at its highest difficulty levels. rRootage, on the other hand, takes the Japanese art of bullet mazes and whittles the gameplay down to a constant, ever-changing boss fight. Cho’s love for shmups is apparent in each one, and his work is something of a master study in the genre and the potential it still holds to surprise and delight us. Simple enough to learn (“N” is almost always fire, arrow keys to move, “X” or “Spacebar” for any special attacks available), each game is Windows-only and tiny enough to be played on the most antiquated of machines. If you’ve ever played a game where you piloted a little ship over a scrolling background against endless waves of enemies, you owe it to yourself to download and try a few of his beautiful little love letters.

Passage is something of an oddity among videogames – one that speaks about people nearly as much as they do about it. A simple, five-minute long maze game, it’s the story of a life; specifically, yours. At the start of play, you decide what path to take, traveling either the simple road from left to right or choosing to navigate the trickier twists and turns of the maze below. Progressing changes your position on the screen – while at the beginning you’re locked to the left side, with your entire life in front of you, you gradually move farther and farther to the right, visibly aging as you go. The game, and your life, end when you reach the other side, leaving behind a tiny tombstone and a score to mark your achievements. The first time this happens is mildly traumatizing – I’m not sure “wistful futility” is an emotion, but it really should be.

As powerful as that moment is, all it’s punch comes from how you got there. Take for example its most effective touch, the woman who waits for you at the beginning of the maze. If you choose to meet her a heart blossoms over the two of you, signifying the beginning of your life together. And from then on she’s always with you, walking just a step ahead, a bit of comfort on your otherwise lonely trek. Of course, she also ages, and will also eventually die, a moment that hit me so hard when it occurred that I genuinely didn’t know what to do for a little while. To see it effect my character as well in the form of his appearance changing suddenly was nearly too much.

If you take the proper maze-like paths, you occasionally spot treasure chests hoping to tempt you into spending precious seconds finding the correct path to them. Some hold treasures that glitter for a moment before fading and add to your high score, while others are empty, a waste of time and effort holding you up from getting on it. If you met the woman and have her with you, these sections can be very tricky – many of the paths only fit one, see, and you can find yourself trapped in snarls, hopelessly looking for a way out. If you’d left her behind, you’d b able to get to more chests and see more of the path, but you’d do so alone. As pretty as the treasures are, the only real meaning to navigating the passage comes from having her there with you, seeing her go through the same frustrations and little triumphs as you. It all adds up to a tremendously effective experience wrapped up in a tiny package – each time I play it I come away a bit melancholy and in need of a hug. Of course, that’s very likely the whole point.

But is it a game? This was the major question of the conversations last week about Passage – as wonderful as it is, does it really qualify as a proper game? Leaving aside how phrases like “proper game” leave a bad taste in my mouth, I have to fall on the side of “Yes”. Sid Meier, him of videogames royalty, once gave his definition of a game as “a series of interesting choices”. Not trying (for once) to sound clever in front of anybody, I’d like qualify that a bit by adding to the end “made within the boundaries of rules”. Rules separate play from games, after all, creating a distinct challenge to be experienced. By that measure, Passage very much is a game, and one that abides by a single, simple rule: time is running out.

There’s not a lot more to say about the game. It’s fun and funny, with the consequences of performing poorly almost as satisfying as the treasure – and the treasures’ descriptions – you get for winning for winning a mini-game. The current version only lets you play one level at the moment, though there’s promise at the end of a full, probably downloadable game to come. I can’t imagine what inspired lunacy lurks beyond the first level’s Area Lord, but I can’t wait to find out.