Well, in my personal view, it's art if it manages to emotionally touch you in any way (anger, sadness, fear, drugs)

drugs? the emotion?

Eh, maybe phrased a bit unfortunate.
Was talking about games that make you feel like you're on "drugs", meaning extremely trippy games. It's probably a fine line between being a trippy and being a shitty game, so just forget I said that :D

For some reasons this makes we want to play Parodius again :D

Here are some more slightly disturbing 80s-ish lyrics for no particular reason:

kiss the beast
pucker up and taste the feast

fight the fight
before the end of time
pick a destiny
before fate begins to chime

the flavor of infected yeast
mixed amongst the pickled priest
lips that god forbade - meet
locked in ecstasy of sweaty heat

hairy beast lips
grant me your power
sighing hips
deny you not my flower

That sounds like the movie Kull the Conquerer

Well, in my personal view, it's art if it manages to emotionally touch you in any way (anger, sadness, fear, drugs) so I think it really depends on who you intend to "watch" your art when designing games.

What's just beautiful for one group is pure gay for the other group and what's a terrifying masterpiece of a game for one is a gory, poinless slaughterfest for the other.

And if you're not addressing anyone in particular, then you'd just go with what would cause a emotional reaction with you.

Do want.

JForce is a joke, helloooo. Literally, it's a pardoy of doomed indie projects. I'm surprised this conclusion hasn't been reached yet. It was obvious on page 1 with the ninja made of sand & glass and the herd of wildebeests.

Thanks, Professor.

Hrm. I wanted to start in Germany, but was a bit surprised when I ended up in Dusseldorf, Sweden. Now I'm working in a fast food chain for our swedish oppressors, since nobody gave me a job in the hospital business.

This is a surprisingly depressing game.

I really like the style of your games.

The face in the upper right is freaking me out a bit though.

Build yourself a smokebomb and pull a disappearing act on him. Nobody messes with Ninjas.

If you want to make a change, you have to target normal people who haven't been playing video games since the cradle. It's not a case of dumbing down an existing game so that you can complete it by pawing at a button every few seconds, you've just got to make something new. If you think about it, it's mainly a user interface issue and a marketing issue. You got to make it accessible, and you got to get the message out that it exists, and is worth playing.

Hrm, but all the energy you'd need to get the people that matter to play the game could just as well be put in a medium that reaches them in the first place.
I also fear that some people just can't be "won over" for games, not matter how simple or accessible you make them. My father for example (who is around 50-55) is absolutely dumbfounded by anything gaming related. He just doesn't get it. He has absolutely no clue what I like in all those blurry colours and sounds swooshing around the screen in a manner that makes absolutely no sense to him. The only game I could ever get him to like and play was Brain Age for the DS and that took me about one week of explaining.

Although arguably Nintendo reaches the "normal people" with some Wii games pretty well already, but I also fear that you won't ever get a message across that way. Wii Sports and Wii Fit may be fine and all, but the concept is hard to translate into something with a thought-provoking message.

The media probably makes it hard, too. Games are the current evil, so a lot of people are probably pretty biased against them vidjagames.

I went under the impression that the Open Pandora thing falls more into the category of those super-small notebooks (like that Eee thing) that are all hip and snazzy currently. Just for gamers.

Haha, thanks for the info, I think when I was last around the Gamepark scene the first GP2x was just being announced :D

For the sake of collecting I'm probably gonna get all three models eventually, too.

Weren't there two handhelds in development when GamePark split? I remember the GP2x and some other one, who supposedly should've been 3D and all the shiz.

Never heard of it again, though xD

Probably gonna get this one, as I have yet to get anything past a GP32.

On a sidenote, the depiction of point 01 in that pic is incredibly hilarious.

God. Why is everybody a PC whore? Really, the accessibility on consoles is far greater than that of PCs. You have to boot up the computer, get everything ready, and then play the game. The Xbox is ready in seconds. Jeez 

My PS3 is readier, though, and makes it easier for me to buy stuff in the store. Just like my PS3 better than my 360, that's all.

I may be wrong, but I think games can't help make the world a better place, even if they tried. Sure games can try to help, but I think the gamer demographics just doesn't impact enough to really do anything world-changing.

I mean, let's assume you make the ultimate thought-provoking game. Like, a game that'd make the pope say he's been praying to the wrong God all the time.
The game's available for free on the web, has minimum requirements and works on Windows, Linux and Mac and consoles. Or to say it differently, every gamer who would want to play it could play it.

Now, the first problem would be that only real gamers would actually play it. Even if you could successfully market it, no person who never played a videogame before would note it and say "Oh, that looks thought-provoking, I'll give it a try". They'd either see the game as witchcraft, or dismiss it as boring or too complex since it's not casual.

Now, the other problem would be that of all gamers that'd play it, maybe 30% would understand what you actually tried to get across. The other 70% would give you a weird look, complain that the game was shitty and then go back playing WoW and CS/TF2. And of the 30% that understood it, 20% probably wouldn't agree with you, just because (like, I dunno, Zero Punctuation for example).
(Disclaimer: I'm going with the general "game-kid" clichee here. I'm not implying that WoW, CS and TF2 are shitty games)

With the little amount of people you reached with your game, changing the world wouldn't really be an option.

So, long story short, I think all you really can do with a game is change a few people's way of thinking, but not really for those that matter and not nearly enough.

Although, arguably, the guys that play your game now could be the presidents of tomorrow. So in long-term, there may be a slight chance your game changed something.

Xbox only = :T

Would've preferred it to be either on the PC, too, or on PSN

Aye, I saw this one in IRC a while ago. I can't help but wonder how long that took

A comment said 6 months, but YouTube comments are probably the least reliable source of information in the whole plane of existence.

I sadly can't get past the first two enemies, but it does look awesome :D

Sooo, yeah, we gotta bail out of this one. Rather unforeseen circumstances led to the whole thing taking a lot longer than I wanted it to, and I don't think we'd be able to finish it before the deadline.

Additionally, I think we missed the point of the competition completely. The game's neither really a bootleg, nor really a demake. It's more of a retro-platformer slightly inspired by existing franchises.

On the upside however, we'll still finish the game, but on our own deadline. Well, for me it's an upside at least  :D