Terrible Game Ideas: Lose/Lose
Here's a pretty interesting... er, idea. From Joystiq: "Lose/Lose, [is] a top-down shooter that generates aliens based on files in your computer; files that are permanently deleted when said aliens are killed." You read that right; each alien creature you kill corresponds to an actual file on your machine, which gets deleted at the same time you kill the monster. Gameplay itself is pretty identical to the classic shooter Galaga, but the risk of total system destruction via extended play is a M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist, I suppose.
The author of the game has a rather grandiose explanation for its purpose, which is allegedly less about "let's delete random files on your computer" and more of a surrealist statement on what it means to kill, good vs bad, and what is right in war. Personally I'm not buying it, I think his explanation was the first alien to get nuked.
The official site has further extrapolation as well as a gameplay video if you're not brave enough to download it yourself; it's also got a list of high scores for the "lucky" few who managed to clock in. What about you, are you guys willing to risk it?
(No lolcats were harmed in the making of this entry.)
mixvio
Posted to Miscellany on 1 October 2009
· Comments (13)
Other stuff like this: aliens, catastrophic destruction, deletion, galaga, lose-lose, pc, shooter, zach gage
No Way....I have too much po---Important files on my PC
Run it in a virtual machine, problem solved :>
Yea, I kinda value my Yaoi collection and my desire to not re-install World of Warcraft is sealing the deal on me never playing this game.
the concept
could be promising
like turning it into a kinda of virus/trojan antivirus program
=p then I might play it
It's not a game meant for people to play. It's art. You're just supposed to think about what playing it would mean. I did something similar for my MA project. You scanned your hard disk and then manually defragmented it as a (really boring) puzzle game. I didn't have the nerve to commit the changes back to the drive, though.
The very concept of this infuriates me.
I thought the existence of Scribblenauts rendered the concept of games as art moot.
There actually WAS a PC game very similar to this concept.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/operation-inner-space
Inner Space was a really neat Windows 3.1 game that took various files and "corrupted" them. You'd have to shoot them and absorb power ups to free all the corruption from your system. It was actually pretty addicting.
Alternatively you could hook up an old computer, copy over your porn files (I'd love to know what kind of enemies they could possibly generate) and then install it on that old computer.
I'd hate to imagine what those enemies would shoot back at you. :P
There was a version of Doom where all the monsters represented running programs/processes on your computer, so killing them would kill whatever you were running.
It'd be fun to play this game if you could just point it at a folder you were going to delete anyway (maybe your MP3 collection, delete the songs you no longer like!), instead of your entire machine.
As I understand it, System32 is the boss of the game. (unless I was mislead [not likely] by my friend who gave it a go on a crapbox)
Hm I don't know if that is likely; the only way something could delete a running process in Windows (which System32 would be) would be via an exploit or itself being a system process, which I doubt this game is technically set up for.
I doubt any in-use system files will be nuked by virtue of the operating system's protections, but anything not in use is fair game.
I'm not brave enough to try though so I couldn't tell you if it is the case though.
"a surrealist statement on what it means to kill, good vs bad, and what is right in war. Personally I'm not buying it, I think his explanation was the first alien to get nuked."
Nah, I totally get what he's trying to convey. You must not have had to face death. After the first body I saw I was a little phased, and it affected me for a while after that. Even watching the stupidest stuff on TV, if someone got shot in a casual sort of way I would have this internal struggle of "holy shit life is impermanent and fragile... violence is a tremendous abuse and profanity against life."
By the second body it was back to business as usual. And business was good.