gamesthatexist

new album out today weeeeeeeeeee https://alexpieschel.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-strangers

my brother cut & synced some live footage from a recent show to one of the songs from my new album. the effect is strange, but I kinda like it

i like this one too. i think this is a good strategy for making music in itself, but it could also be interesting to try to superimpose lyrics on a later draft of the song. i think the david lynch stuff is often both (sincere and ironic). the Just You performance is a perfect example of this to me. James appears to the audience as sort of a laughable character, and the love triangle circumstances of the song are comic, as well. But his performance of the song is so saturated with melodrama as to be creepy. I feel both amused and creeped out by James' level of sincerity when I watch the video.

this is pretty! i like the lyricless vocals. v heartfelt

released a new single

planet noise

thanks so much! You're actually the first person I've heard to pick Waitin' Around as the favorite track! It's the only one I recorded by myself on my computer (my sister did the backing vocals). love your description

oh my god thank you for listening & for posting. it means everything. and YES IT IS A DIRECT REFERENCE TO DANIEL JOHNSTON.

Will post more ambient stuff as it comes, but this is probly a better representation of what I do & how I perform live: https://alexpieschel.bandcamp.com/album/waitin-around-ep It's an EP I recorded with friends on a four-track cassette. Hope to expand to a full-length album by the end of this year!

This is very pretty & soothing! I like the transition to eighth notes around 1:30. How did you record this?

Yeah, I'm gonna try to compress it some. At first I kinda liked how the clips got caught in the delay loop, but now they seem kinda much, and I think they might be more intense on some speaker systems.

I like the irreverent vibe of this album, and I like the sound of the guitars. For that price range (or any price range actually) I would get somethin old school. The Yamaha DX7 is rly cool even though it's from like 1983. It's got midi connections too. I'm a big fan. http://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/dx7ii.php. It has really nice piano sounds and can also sound like a laser and also has a very supportive online community with tons of sample packs and some tools for making sounds for it on the computer. Depending on where you are, you might be able to find one for 250-300ish dollars on craigslist. Because I don't live near any music hubs I found one online for like 300 and got it shipped to me. I just started learning keyboards too; it's my first synth and I love it.

hey friends, lookin for a place to share & discuss music. I'll start workin back thru this thread and listening to stuff that's already been posted. I made this tonight: https://soundcloud.com/apieschel/fall-remix001 I took a track that I made with a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a cheap Boss loop pedal, then loaded it into Reason 4.0 as a sample. I ran the sample thru one of the echo reverbs in Reason and recorded myself messing with the echo effect settings while the sample was playing. the result is......a lot of delay

lmk if anyone finds anything outside the factory

My favorite GIF is of Synderrblok. Beautiful animation. I DID NOT KNOW about the 51st game!! Did I really never click exit? I guess we can never leave..............

EXCLUSIVE BONUS CONTENT (Launcher screens analysis): On the first page, we see Mogey standing triumphantly on the moon with rocketship, planet earth rotating in the background. This leads us to believe that 50 short games were just an elaborate prequel?!! Was Cynderblock on the same planet the whole time?????? [Edit, this is clearly Meepo, not Mogey. Rewriting fanfictions.......] Page 2 is the obligatory "underwater level." Ghastly. On page 3 we get cameo appearance from TV's Cynderrblock!! (undercover, shhh) So strong, so stoic. Our last hope......all other Operative Assailants have been gruesomely slaughtered. On page 4 is pictured Pamela either in or nearby Dreamland. Pamela finally seems content to be haunted by horrible spiders (in 3D even!!) both IRL and unconsciously forever. Page 5 is Rainbow Quilt shore where Mogey blasts off. The horizon seems endless. The flora wraps around the trees, dressing them with melancholy faces. Thanks for doing this, clyde. Thanks for makin games, stephen.

Auf Wiedersehen Mogey: I like the idea of an unassuming goodbye, one that acknowledges, but doesn't try to draw too much attention to the spectacle. One that doesn't keep trying to put it off. The "waves crashing" sound extends here from the launcher, like we were always drawn towards this place. This rainbow quilt tiles feel like the brightest we've seen. The clouds are kinda sad, but this is to be expected.

Haven't quite said farewell to Mogey yet, but I've been trying to draft some thoughts for a piece I'm working on - about pinning down a sensibility of games made wt the Klick N Play software. Part of what’s interesting about playing Glorious Trainwrecks games is exploring the range of gamefeel this clunky little engine is capable of. Something as innocuous as liberal collision detection, avatars or objects getting stuck in walls or ignoring them entirely, can nourish a sensibility that becomes a shorthand, a discourse community. In Unity games it often feels like you’re wading across vast, abstract spaces, feeling small in comparison to the architecture around you. There's an emphasis on floating around, studying the rough edges and implied history of the space. Klick N Play games are more about performing a role. They feel more present (tense), which lends well to quick punchlines, sharp poignant reflections, weird insights, open questions. 50SG is a study in how an engine along with an author can shape familiar tropes, make them strange again, similar to the author’s experience of importing another country’s pop culture, consuming it a few years later, digesting it with their own literary culture, then regurgitating it as something else. Digested kitsch. The author calls it “oscillating kitsch.”

Ahhhh ok. Well all the browser ones I've played have worked perfectly for me.And I think they make the individual games more accessible to folks

perfect vidgame message. truly blessed to be alive on this internet Are HTML versions different from the browser links you've been providin clyde?

I think this is an important way to understand how we have been responding to these games, and I think this is true of most things, in the sense that most of our fantasies, even when we have some kind of real world analogue, are about these preconceived, competing sets of generic conventions. Genres are how we arrange and sanction, perhaps even understand, desire. I've been thinking about the way people talk about "realism" (whether or not a fiction passes as "realistic") after playing Her Story and following some of the conversations around that game, and I think it mostly has to do with genre conventions. Like with your example of the cowboy - people would talk about whether or not the cowboy was behaving realistically based on how they would expect him to act in their sort of Platonic Ideal of whatever form of media cowboys are supposed to exist in. And anyone who's not into those genre conventions in the first place just doesn't care; they have zero stake in whether or not the cowboy seems realistic because there's no generic grounds for realism. I think it's pretty easy to underestimate the extent that these conventions in turn shape the way we act, create us even. They feed on the reality we cook up with the ingredients they provide. Quiet Man is, like, really aesthetically coherent. The gyrating screen simulates that whirring, blinky motion of an old black and white film reel, but in a way that dramatizes it. Similarly, the music helps abstract this feeling into something we can grasp, the excitement of witnessing a technology bound by a specific moment in time. The score is a steady 4-4, pounding and echoing, as opposed to something perhaps more "historically accurate," like some shambling ragtime keys or whatever else would be appropriate. These references are clearly filmic, but the technology is reimagined as live performance. The audience treats it as such - chatting amongst themselves, shushing each other but never hushing up, failing to contain their anticipation, their suspension of disbelief, their utter reverence for the leading man - as does the player, their every move and non-move sharply scrutinized and wondered at. It's really quite effective and beautiful.

Candy Planet extends the clever use of text in these games even further. The poetry in the sky is the ship narrator, someone documenting the journey, while the astronaut dialogue down on the surface is by contrast appropriately whimsical and sporadic, reacting to things and labeling them, so that you have both the wide lens and the close up, the long game and the limiting immediacy of experience that ignores exegesis. Paying attention to one jerks your eyes away from the other, establishing a distinct divide between ship and surface, between purpose and live sensation, and also between planet and outsiders. The game also builds on the idea of doubling the player avatar; the explorers you control just keep multiplying, pouring out like sprinkles, pleasant as toppings, but expendable and inconsequential. I like the way the game conceptualizes candy because it doesn’t feel like a crude, direct metaphor for something like drugs or consumerism or whatever; it’s more of a general tyranny of comfort and how stupid it is that something like that even exists (I ate too much. I’m uncomfortably full). It feels like some of the guilt that comes with the failure to be satiated by comfort, the sense that it can be hard to enjoy comfort because I probably don’t deserve it and by indulging in it I’m probably contributing to some kind of status quo. Then again, sometimes it feels like comfort is the only reasonable thing to aspire to, but that’s probably just the capitalist realism talking. There’s kind of a pushback against this guilt for feeling comfortable towards the end, with the use of the word “repent” and the halting, bureaucratic syntax of the phrase, “form questions commensurate to the response.” Presumably, a life of indulgence is not one of meaning, subversion, or change, but neither is one of devotion to Protestant work ethic. When the little astronauts collapse from diabetes, is that a teevee next to them? A ham radio? The Wonka factory is a really apt connection that I didn’t make when I played. Yes. Excellent. "Progress" in this game relies both on the fresh motivation of new arrivals and on their descent as they assimilate.

From Tattoo Assassins Ancient Warriors: Excessive collision and meta-game interruptions approximate some forgotten fighting game. Premise is that a Private Eye Collective has been trapped in this ancient ruin, presumably after investigating Indiana-Jones style, but then they decide to stay and colonize because there’s nothing left of the world outside (?) Meanwhile big totem monsters have been using the ruins to LARP Street Fighter tournaments, and the PI mini-narrative happens alongside those battles. So two separate, equally inscrutable threads of consequence play out in close enough proximity to one another so that each can view the other as an interruption. Each group assumes that it’s the one that matters. Except, the relationship between the two isn’t even that balanced. Though it’s impossible for the PIs to ignore the fighting tournament, the totems, untouchable monoliths of prowess and fortitude, don’t even seem to notice the tiny PI plot unfolding around them. On the screen where one of the PIs says “I’m shutting this thing down,” at first I didn’t even notice the little detective scrambling around at the bottom of the screen that you move with the arrow keys as you participate in the warrior battle simultaneously. The blocks and columns that get bounced around as the warriors collide emphasize the smallness of the detectives, especially as none them can be touched by the wreckage. Without health bars or anything, the totems mindlessly shove against one another until one gets pushed offscreen, a good approximation of the stubborn, blunt resistance of fighting games. In a way the competitive play envelops the narrative exercise. At the same time, the battles are sort of just an animated backdrop for the detective plot. You get to walk around (and jump, as in many games you can jump for no reason) with the little detective after the battle’s over, “YOKO WINS” still plastered on the screen. This corpse of conquest is simply a stage hosting humanity’s narcissistic tragicomedy, punctuated at the end by contrived symbolism that reduces an ‘exotic’ society to a parable warning against nuclear power.

I like how the "groan" is a cross between a sigh and a grunt. Too forgetable for a face, too selfish for feelings, too sad for anger, too lethargic for words, too confused to refuse, just a lump on a screen, got those groaning at my baby blues.

Robot Factory: One of those where you have to squint and fumble around with the keys to make out what’s going on. Thrilling once you do. Reminds me a lot of the music games. For robots, autonomous machines who have shrugged off their ostensible purpose of transferring value for the sake of creating their own, there’s no difference between an assembly line and a parade.