New Games: Action Aplenty, Less Gore

When you think of video games, you probably think of guns, violence, and plenty of gore. But a new wave of games are winning high accolades by offering plenty of action while spilling scarcely a drop of blood.

Of the 20 games honored at the recent Independent Games Festival, not a single title involved handheld rocket launchers, grenade guns, spinfusors, or even plasma rifles.

Action-Packed

Only one of the ten finalists even hints at violence in its title. But Teenage Lawnmower isn't on a par with Doom II: Here, the player has to avoid running over furry woodland creatures like moles and squirrels. If you accidentally hit one, a splash of red spurts out of the mower and the level ends prematurely.

Deemphasizing blood and guts doesn't translate into passive games, however. The grand prize winner, Wild Earth, turns the player into a wildlife photographer on assignment in the Serengeti desert. It gives a whole new meaning to "first-person shooter," the term coined to describe blast-away games like Unreal Tournament and Quake III.

Presented with a shot list of specific animals, you play by making your way across a spectacular landscape to photograph cheetahs, elephants, zebras, and other African wildlife. Scoring is based on the aesthetic quality of the shot, and how closely you got to the animal.

Another crowd pleaser was Pontifex II, actually the third game in a series that teaches the principles of bridge engineering and construction. The game assigns you to build a particular style of bridge out of specific materials; then it lets you test your success by running a car or a train over your bridge. Beginners can have fun watching their not-ready-for-Amtrak bridge slowly tumble into a canyon under the weight of a steam train.

"It's kind of geeky, but a lot of people I know are addicted to this game," said one enthusiastic fan who wished to remain anonymous, but rushed up to shake hands with the developers.

More Accessible

Terraformers won the IGF award for best audio design. The game, scheduled to ship at the end of the year, features a unique 3D sound engine designed to permit blind gamers to play the game along with sighted friends. The game lets players navigate and reshape a 3D world.

"There are a lot of blind people who play games," says Jay Leventhal, editor-in-chief of Accessworld, a magazine published by the American Federation for the Blind. "For years, there were no Windows-based accessible games."

But things are changing. Terraformers is only the latest in a series of recent game releases for the blind, though most others are simple, speech-enabled board or card games.

The programmers of Garage Games, another independent developer, could barely keep up with the crowds of people who wanted to play Marble Blast and Orbz. In both, the player controls a spheroid and maneuvers it through a 3D world. In Orbz, several players compete over the Internet to shoot their ball into airborne targets. In Marble Blast, players move their marble along a Rube Goldberg-esque map.

Justin Mette, who leads the team that developed Orbz, says the game evolved into one that shot balls into the air from a planned golf game.

"Another developer and I were playing online, trying to see who could sink the most putts, and we found we were both going after the same holes, getting competitive," he says. "It was a lot more fun just to shoot the balls at targets in the air."

Mette says he applauds the "refreshing games that put a new perspective on gaming without all the violence."

"The most recent designs we are coming up with don't require violence to sell the game play," Mette says.