Nine Cool Things About Indiecade East
This past weekend, for the third year in a row, crowds flocked to the Museum of the Moving Image in far-flung Queens on one of the coldest weekends of the year for Indiecade East. Much like years past, games, talks, competitions, inclusivity, and forgetting you’re not allowed to bring coffee into the theaters were the orders of the day. Here are nine neat things I saw during my time there.
1. Titan Souls
The full-length version of the Ludum Dare breakout was the game I felt most inclined to play for hours instead of socializing with friends, allowing other people to play, or otherwise doing my job. Instead I lost on the first boss about ten times, got frustrated enough to give up, then watched as my friend Tim defeated the gel-encased brain on the first try.
2. Bloomberg!
During Seth Alter’s talk about Post-Colonial Games, he was asked about gentrification, and how his theory of strategy games that critique and subvert colonialist ideas (as opposed to pretty much every 4X-style game ever) might account for it. He mentioned that he’d had an idea for a game entitled Bloomberg!, which played exactly like SimCity, except the only actions were “firing all teachers” and “selling public buildings.” He offered the idea up to the crowd, and I can only hope someone acts on it.
3. Home Improvisation
I spent maybe ten minutes trying and failing to assemble a simple five-piece table in this “furniture assembly experience.” I felt palpable delight as a pressboard leg screwed properly into a tabletop. An everyday standing lamp proved too difficult for my teammates and I. To whatever extent the “it can be hard to do normal stuff in videogames” genre still has any gas in the tank, Home Improvisation stands tall next to its Octodads and incompetent surgeons.
4. Earth Night
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