getting over it with bennett foddy review

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Framing Getting Over It as a ‘homage’ to Sexy Hiking, a 2002 DIY game that was itself ‘built almost entirely out of found and recycled parts’, Foddy’s voiceover invites us to consider that ‘maybe this is what digital culture is: a monstrous mountain of trash, the ash heap of creativity’s fountain’. ‘The hysteria around asset flips is a symptom of gaming culture’s deeply entrenched anti-egalitarian tendencies’Ĭonsolation comes from Foddy himself, who chimes in periodically with philosophical musings, uplifting quotations and reflections on the game’s design process. One infelicitous flick of the mouse can propel him catastrophically backwards, cancelling out hours of painstaking, nail-biting effort.

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Using only a giant hammer, this man must scrabble, hop and haul his way over a skyscraping mountain of debris – a seemingly random assortment of objects downloaded free from online asset libraries. Our avatar is a goateed man whose lower body is lodged in a cauldron. It’s both an absurd game and an absurdly difficult one. Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It is one of the best-known of these. In recent years, a number of designers have responded to these developments with games that are essentially interactive collages: games in which the use of prefabricated assets is not just a pragmatic design choice, but also a central part of the message. For Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh, the hysteria around asset flips is a symptom of gaming culture’s deeply entrenched anti-egalitarian tendencies. For some pundits, these amenities have made it too easy to make video games, leading to fears that retail platforms will be overrun with so-called ‘asset flips’: ‘Frankengames’ slapped together from off-the-shelf parts in the hope of cashing in. Today, clip art CDs have been superseded by online asset libraries like Sketchfab, the Unity Asset Store and KitBash3D, where professionals and amateurs alike are encouraged to upload objects, avatars, scenes and animations for others to use in their projects. In Keita Takahashi’s beloved Katamari series, meanwhile, the world comes unstuck around us as we roll up paperclips, saucepans, pick-up trucks and eventually continents into snowballing agglomerations of stuff – a premise Takahashi has said was intended to be a commentary on consumer capitalism. La delights in incorporating digitised woodcuts, etchings and photographs into its backgrounds.While most games try to hide the seams, others embrace their collage status. In Data Mutations by AAA, digital assets are recycled and recontextualised across the different games that make up the collection, performing a critique of the state of cultural labour and consumption Intrepid Doom fans have traced the mountain range that looms over the game’s first episode to a photograph of China’s Yangshuo mountains included on a CD-ROM of royalty-free stock photographs.

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There’s also a strong impetus to license assets that are already out there rather than creating your own. In a medium where designers are always running short on storage capacity, bandwidth and time, there is a strong impetus to make the most of what you have to hand (famously, the bushes in Super Mario Bros are clouds that have been tinted green and lodged in the ground).

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But how to squeeze data for all those room layouts on to the disc? And how much time could the developers realistically devote to decorating spaces that the majority of players would never see? Suzuki’s team hit on a solution that they dubbed the ‘Magic Room’ system: taking inspiration from software used in the interior design and construction industries, they wrote an algorithm that would fetch objects from the game’s database of virtual furniture and distribute them across the rooms, according to a simple set of rules.įrom a certain perspective all video games are libraries of ‘assets’ collaged together into virtual scenes and spaces – whether by human artists or, as is increasingly the case, procedural generation routines. This, however, was the sequel to one of the most ambitious and expensive video games ever developed, and director Yu Suzuki was adamant that players should be able to enter and explore these spaces. Most of the flats hold nothing of consequence, and a typical video game would simply have presented players with rows of locked doors. The use of asset libraries to build video games raises questions of authorship, ownership and exploitationĪ revenge saga set in Hong Kong’s criminal underworld, much of the 2001 video game Shenmue II plays out in dilapidated tower blocks of 1980s Kowloon.