Sunday, September 30, 2007

Where the Paramecia Flow Like Wine

The Minneapolis Star Tribune ran an article about the current revolution in video gaming to simplify. FlOw certainly does this and does it beautifully. You start your life as a short, multi-cellular worm and dive deep into the drop of water that is your home in search of food. As you eat, your body evolves, allowing you to move faster and eat more. As you descend into the water droplet and eat the final organism, you split off a piece of yourself and start the game anew as a different, single-celled creature.

Providing hours of chompy, evolutionary fun, flOw hits the mark. According to Casual Gameplay, flOw was Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark's masters of fine arts thesis at the University of Southern California. I certainly hope that they graduated with honors after a masterpiece like this one.

Enough reading. More playing! Check it out in the link dump to the right.

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Why play it? It's games like this that keep me sifting through all of the crap that's out there. On the days where I think "If I have to look at one more add for Adventure Quest, I'll kill ever last game designer out there!", I'll think of flOw and be at peace with the universe. Thank you Nicholas and Jenova. Thank you.