Codemasters is a well-known game publisher, creators of the fairly interesting Prisoner of War (in which players use their wits and stealth, not weapons, to escape a Nazi prison camp during WWII) and the rally race games based on the Colin McRae franchise. So it may seem odd that they are releasing a set of games branded after the “cult” UK phenomenon The Turds.

Created by Vanessa Smith, founder of Pacemaker UK and originator of the concept, The Turds have been making steady headway in the figurine, animation and videogame realm. Codemasters saw game gold in the franchise, and has released the first of a set of free web games on its casual gaming portal, Funsta.com.

The first Turds web game is called Donkey Pong and the Adventures of Rimdiana Jones. Seriously. It is, obviously, a clone of Donkey Kong and free for the playing on the Codemasters casual gaming portal, Funsta.com. For a full description, you can’t really beat the marketing copy, so, taken directly from the press release:

Donkey Pong And The Adventures Of Rimdiana Jones sees plopular action hero, Rimdiana Jones, and agent Marilyn Muckroe, on a search for the legendary fartifact, the Lost Arse. However, disaster strikes: Marilyn is captured by giant ape-shit, Donkey Pong, and is to be sacrificed to a mysterious giant turd, worshipped by the lost Pongo Tribe.

Can Rimdy get his gal back and find his Lost Arse? To rescue Marilyn Muckroe, help Rimdy jump, run, climb and smash his way to the top of each increasingly difficult level. Watch out for those evil Islanders and pray your nostrils don’t catch a blood curdling wiff of the mighty Pong!

Donkey Pong pretty much plays like it ought to. The other games lined up to come out all sport similarly scatalogical titles: “Bogger” (sounds like “Frogger” to us) should be released in the next day or two. “Dung Bettle Rally” should leverage Codemasters’ experience with racing games. “Turd Heroes: Men in Cack” is the most unclear title, but we smell a Contra-style shooter. And the final game, “PooBert” leaves little doubt that it will be a Q-Bert clone.

All of the games are infused with Turds-flavored humor. This methodology applies to the entire Turds line, which features characters such as The Bogfather, Freddy Pooger, The Turdinator, Wayne Pooney, and characters from history, including Shat the Ripper, Brave Fart, and, of course, Adolf Shitler. The Turds also has an animated series in the works called “Tales of the Crapped” which satirizes the horror series “Tales from the Crypt” with episodes featuring characters like Hannibal the Sphincter and Joe Turd, the cop trying to stop him.

The most interesting part of the Turds casual web games is the Turd Calculator. This little application allows you to divide the amount of your annual work salary by the time you’ve spent playing the games . If you’re playing the games at work, then the resulting figure tells you just how much money you’ve been paid to play Turds.

Even if the Turds isn’t the thing for you, it at least makes painfully clear the differences in how the Brits and the Americans view their bodily functions. But after years of South Park, and the perennial resurgence of gross-out toys and gadgets, maybe the Turds can find a cult in America.

Plasma Pong is a completely tripped-out version of regular Pong that incorporates fluid dynamics. In addition to deflecting the ball with your paddle, you can now use jets and vortices of fluid pressure to help guide the ball. And all of this is rendered in a super-colorful “plasma” style. If you love the visual style of games like Geometry Wars, Mutant Storm, and Darwinia, then you need to check this one out. Click here to download Plasma Pong, free for Windows PCs.

Coming up on its second birthday, and the anniversary of its completion, it’s a perfect time to take a look at Not Pr0n, play it again, and consider it as a well-established Web game.

Each level of Not Pr0n is a puzzle or riddle based on geeky web-based knowledge. There’s little that gets incredibly complicated here, but a savvy websense in needed to proceed. The first few levels introduce the basic mechanics of the game: Level One requires you to click the door in the image. Level Two requires you to change the URL in the location bar of your web browser. The player is immediately taken away from the traditional point-and-click puzzle game and required to interact with the browser and the larger Web. Some puzzles feature Google search boxes, making clear that users are expected to mine for specialized knowledge in addition to using their own smarts.

Playing Not Pr0n is a a roller coaster of difficulty. Some levels are easy, some are maddening. There is plenty of help online. In the year since it’s completion, over nine million players have attempted it. Only 101 have completed all 139 levels, which gives it a completion rate of 0.001%, putting Not Pr0n in a category of difficulty usually reserved for niche Japanese twitch-shooters. (Full disclosure: I am NOT in the elite 101 who have finished Not Pr0n.)

Not Pr0n is, in many ways, like a hardcore computer geek’s Myst. Like Myst, most of Not Pr0n’s gameplay centers on still images that give the reader a view on a fictional world. And, like Myst, there is a fairly obscure and difficult to follow narrative that emerges from the play. Even according to Münnich’s own admission, Not Pr0n’s story loses focus after level 13 or so.

But this is not a narrative game. This is a seriously strange set of Internet puzzles and riddles. It is both a gameplay experience and a tribute to late 20th Century Web culture. Incorporating javascripts, embedded ads, frames pages and generally 1995-2002 contemporary design concepts, Not Pr0n already seemed retro when it came onto the scene in 2004. At this point, the retro aesthetic and approach is working like a dream, giving the game a weird time-machine feel that enhances the gameplay. And it is easy to see that in a few years the knowledge needed to solve these puzzles will become more and more historical and rarefied.

Not Pr0n has been successful: nine million players is no small feat, but by Münnich’s own admission, most of his players drop out after the third level. It is consciously targeted to players with computer knowledge, but that fanbase has grown to worldwide proportions. Still, Münnich has kept Not Pr0n free, and has not polluted it with loads of in-game advertisements. In an interview from August 2005, Münnich said he has made as much as $360 from the Google search bars, which double as gameplay elements and revenue-makers. It is not enough to live on, but it is enough to keep Münnich happy about having created Not Pr0n, which he says he would have gladly done for free.

No plans are underway to continue Not Pr0n or create a sequel to it. However, Münnich remains busy with other game and music projects.

If you’ve played Not Pr0n, take some time this summer to work through it again. And if you have never tried Not Pr0n, it’s a must-play. Nobody expects you to finish it, but it is certainly a classic of alternative gaming.

Millions of Games is just that: A web database cataloging as many browser-based games as the collective Internet can spew forth. What a lovely thing! It’s kind of like New Grounds meets Digg with a little Shadows thrown in for taggy-meta goodness. Right now there are not quite 7000 games listed, which is more than enough to kill a few afternoons at work. A lot of these are sex games, and plenty of them are so amateur they’ll make your Stupid Internet Crap Meter go *ding*, but there’s plenty of gold to mine from this here database. Click here to visit Millions of Games.

The thirty (female) winners from the Technical Ambassador Competition attended the 2006 ChicTech Retreat where they served as live, teenage judges for the 2006 Games 4 Girls (G4G) Competition. The G4G Competition is open to any group of female game developers currently enrolled in a college or university. Twenty-three teams entered the competition, although only eight managed to finish their game projects. Judging is split between the ChicTech girls and a panel of actual game developers.

Of the eight entrants, four were noted for honors. These include teams from Cornell, UC Irvine, North Central College and the University at Buffalo. Each team created a small game in Game Maker, a well-known authoring system developed to teach game design concepts in courses to students with a wide variety of backgrounds. All of these games are playable on standard Windows XP-based machines and withstood the gameplay testing of 30 high school girls as well as two professional game designers and a representative from last year’s winning G4G team.

Cornell University’s Green Eggs and Pan, took First place. Green Eggs and Pan is a platform game where two players must cooperate to win. It was described by one TAC girl as the “The best game ever!” One player plays Pan, a young girl who must collect all of the dragon eggs that have scattered across the countryside. Pan is controlled with the arrow keys. The second player controls Greeny, a cute little dragon who can blast baddies with his fire and stun them. In a brilliantly innovative move, Greeny is controlled with the mouse, allowing two players to comfortably share a computer and collaborate in interesting ways. In later parts of the game Greeny can blow smoke clouds to assist Pan in her platform jumping, another cool gameplay element. It is easy to see why Green Eggs and Pan took the competition, and encouraging to see such new ideas in gaming.

Second place went to Eterative Tale, an RPG created by a team called AssemblyLine at the University of California, Irvine. The team brought elements of their own backgrounds to the storyline, which features multiple endings and mini-games to boot. It’s a full-fledged RPG, albeit a bit shorter than any Final Fantasy title. Eterative Tale is for RPG fans who love to read and read and read. It has absolutely the best graphics and graphic design in the bunch, and feels very much like a traditional anime-style epic RPG.

North Central College took Third place with DummerUnfall, an adventure game set in a somewhat more shadowy world (albeit with ample sarcasm). DummerUnfall is cool because it has interesting hand-painted backgrounds that really make us wonder why we don’t see more variety of visual aesthetics in mainstream-published games. The gameplay is the classic point-and-click adventure games style with plenty of dialog and RPG elements.

Honorable mention went to the University at Buffalo for Fluff, another unique take on platforming. The player controls the only spikey fluff born into a tribe of much more rounded fluffs. When an evil dragon and his minions threaten the peaceful fluffs, only the spikey fluff can save them. As you jump through the forest, you must avoid the other fluffs, which flock to you as their hero, because your spikey outside kills everything it touches. The goal is to kill as few fluffs as possible and use yourself as a cannonball to defeat the dragon. It’s a clever premise with nicely done gameplay and excellent animations. The sounds of fluffs dying when you make a mistake tugs at the heart-strings.

Other teams who entered the G4G competition were Ohio State (Angels & Demons), Bradley University (Angelous), Franklin University (KeyholeChaos), and University of Illinois (Prince in Peril).

All of these games are now available for download on the competition website, and each one is well worth the effort. They are each playable as stand-alone programs on any Windows XP machine. The G4G Competition entries illustrate some excellent new ideas about game design and dynamics. These kinds of competitions are wonderful ways to encourage students to produce something beyond what they ever considered possible. Sure, the results might uphold some conventional wisdom (Is it a surprise that of the four winners two were RPGs and two were platformers?), but although these games fit into mainstream genres, they each also exhibit some innovative new feature, element, or concept that makes each game a bit different than what we’re used to playing.

Arcadia is not a new game, but it’s one that is worth returning to, and if you’ve never played it, then you absolutely must. Created by indy game dev house Gamelab, Arcadia asks players to manage four old-school games at the same time. At first the slow-motion pace of all four is manageable, but soon Arcadium becomes a manic multitasking challenge. In the words of its creators “Arcadia may be the first postmodern arcade classic.” And these are creators worth noting: Founders Peter Lee and Eric Zimmerman should be well-known to game scholars for their critical writings. Plus, these are the folks who made Diner Dash! ‘Nuff said. Click here to play Arcadia (for free, of course).

My Sim Aquarium is not a huge game, nor an overly ambitious title. It is admirable that it tries to do one thing right: Simulate an aquarium. However, for all the claims of “realism” made on the packaging and in help files, My Sim Aquarium is not very realistic at all. There is no decision to create a freshwater or saltwater aquarium; they’re all salt water. But don’t fear: You won’t ever have to deal with salination levels or overly sensitive fishes.

That’s not to say that nothing bad ever happens: It’s possible to starve your fish, and some fish might get grumpy with other fish. But there are really no species available that are highly incompatible. Most of the species are labelled peaceful and until they get overcrowded there isn’t much interaction between the fish species.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, buying fish when we don’t have an aquarium set up. My Sim Aquarium begins with building your aquarium. You choose a background theme from a dozen or so possibilities, and then you set up objects and decorations around the tank. At first I went for an Asian theme with pagodas and temples, but then I switched to a Parisian theme creating a miniature Louvre complete with IM Pei’s pyramids. I filled in the rest of the area with sea flowers, plants, rocks, wood, anemonae and mollusks.

It is easy to be satisfied with your designs in My Sim Aquarium. There are quite a few objects to put in your tank, and you have no limit of funds or resources. The only limitation in the design phase are the tools and the space of the virtual tank. For some fish species you’ll want certain types of shelter over other types, but in general you don’t have to pay any attention to substrates, plant species, or other concerns that you would encounter with a real aquarium.

Once you have everything set up, you can buy fish. Well, the fish shop gives you fish. You can sell fish back to the fish shop, too, but that’s only necessary when you aquarium becomes overcrowded. The fish shop only has a certain number of each species of fish, but you can breed more in your own tank.

In order to breed, your fish must be comfortable. To keep your fish comfortable you must keep them fed and keep the water cleaned. Feeding is accomplished by selecting the food and clicking to distribute it. There are several types of food available including: Good, Big, Small, Angry, Neon and Pizza. Of course any dedicated fish-fan will recognize these types of foods, right?

The foods have the effect you’d expect. The “big” food makes the fish who eat it grow larger. The “angry” food makes the fish meaner for a short time. It’s amazing to see: In a game that is supposedly about simulating an aquarium you have these wacky foods. It would be fun if this were a cartoon aquarium or something, but as it is, there’s a complete incongruity between the realism of the setting, species, and visuals and these crazy food types.

Other elements of fish care have been horribly simplified or mis-represented, too. Cleaning the tank happens in a button-press. You don’t have to manage pH levels or anything, either. Getting fish to breed is a matter of making sure they have enough habitat, enough space and enough food. Beyond that, there’s no need for the intricate methods known in real-life for getting often-troublesome tropical fish to breed in captivity.

And, of course, managing your aquarium is anything but thrilling. You have some pretty bad controls for moving the camera around the tank in full 3D, and you can have a camera automatically follow a fish, which leads to a distinct feeling of seasickness. Other than a lot of watching your fish, there’s not much to do (which is, after all, exactly the case with a real aquarium).

Once you realize how little you can really do to interact with the game it becomes very tempting to put it in “Lazy Mode” where everything is taken care of automatically. In Lazy Mode your fish won’t grow or breed, but it will maintain the status quo in your aquarium. And status quo is pretty good if what you really want is a super-snazzy personalized aquarium screensaver.

The screensaver mode is an advertised feature of My Sim Aquarium, and it’s not bad. The biggest problem with the screensaver mode is that it really hammers home the final nail in My Sim Aquarium’s coffin: The graphics are just bad. The models are not very inspiring (especially the models of decorations and elements inside the tank), and the fish movement is lackluster. A heavy-handed “light through water” reflection persists on every element except the fish themselves, making them look like they are not swimming in the water, but hovering just in front of it.

Ultimately, this is where My Sim Aquarium fails most. An aquarium is, after all the fun work of putting it together and planning your mini-ecosystem, a visual experience. Watching fish swim, plants bob in the water and the relaxing sounds of the bubblers and filters– these are the reasons people love aquariums. They are soothing to observe and beautiful to behold. Sadly, My Sim Aquarium is neither a good simulation of building a contained ecosystem, nor a beautiful visual experience. And that makes it not worth playing.

Maple Story is a completely insane MMO-Platformer. You read that right: For an idea of the level of chaos involved, check out the screen at the top of this post. What the heck is going on there? In Maple Story you become a protector of Maple World, playing with others in minigames and platform-style games. It’s free to play (users pay in small transactions for upgrades and extras for your character), although the website requires Internet Explorer, which is a total bummer. Expect more on Maple Story soon.

Really, little has changed in this genre but the graphics, so those retro games have maintained a decent fanbase through emulators and re-issues. (Anyone who has not tracked down Earthbound, Secret of Evermore, and Chrono Trigger for their fave SNES emulator has not really enjoyed an RPG.) So a package like RPG Maker, even given all of its limitations, works because it actually helps users stay within the genre boundaries and conventions.

Did I mention there are a lot of these RPG Maker games out there? I imagine pretty much everyone who has bought a copy of the software has made something, and probably half of those folks have uploaded them online. It’s not unusual to find quirky titles that work really hard to be offensive or transgressive, but it’s very rare to find anything that actually succeeds. Typically the “shock” doesn’t go beyond a couple of nudie sprites and some beer bong jokes.

However, every once in awhile, somebody creates something using a singularly mundane medium (detritis on a beach, an Etch-a-Sketch, traditional Japanese console-based RPGs, etc.) that causes many folks who would be otherwise uninterested to pause. Such is the case with Super Columbine Massacre RPG.

SCM is a short role-playing game created in RPG Maker 2000. Thus, it looks a lot like those classic Super Nintendo titles many people remember from the early 1990s. Created by Danny Ledonne, a 24-year-old fillmmaker, SCM puts players in the role of first Eric Harris, then Dylan Klebold. Traditional sprite-based game graphics are mixed with pixelated photos taken from broadcasts and articles about the Columbine shooting, midi versions of music contemporary to the event, and audio files taken from the media coverage.

Players begin playing as Eric Harris. A quote from Andre Breton begins the game: “The purest surrealist act would be to go into a crowd and fire at random.” From the outset it’s clear that Ledonne is set to frame Klebold and Harris’ actions within a larger context, although the game overall comes far too close to lauding their assault for many players to feel comfortable playing.

The game begins as so many RPGs do: It is morning and Eric Harris wakes late for his bowling class. The events of the game parallel closely the actual events of the Columbine shooting. It is clear that a lot of research has gone into the creation of the game. Elements of dialog are clearly pulled from news reports, released footage, and the two shooters’ websites, all of which was widely covered in the mainstream media.

As Eric Harris, you must gather your arsenal from the house and meet with Dylan to record the infamous final video before heading to Columbine High School. There are two problems with this opening: First, in the traditional RPG genre, we would almost certainly be forced to engage in some tedious item-collection, which would likely involve doing some favors for NPCs, and then arduous levelling to get buff enough to handle the massacre. However, SCM is a compressed RPG, clocking in at around 5 hours. The two quickly head to the school, plant bombs in the cafeteria and parking lot, then wait as their devices fail to explode. Not willing to give up, you lead Eric and Dylan, or “Reb” and “Vodka” as they’re referred to in the game, into an all-out assault on the school.

The other problem with the accelerated opening is that the whole thing feels like a rehashing of what we already know about Klebold and Harris’ backgrounds, except with a much more pro-shooter stance. According to statements made by Ledonne on the game’s forums and in interviews with media outlets, he intends the game to be an illustration of how awful it would have been to be one of the troubled shooters and also how futile their actions really are. He cites the final image of the two shooters dead in the school library: These images were never shown on prime time television, and they are quite shocking.

But the compressed opening and the writing (especially the somewhat misguided contextualization of the shooters with prominent thinkers like Breton) leads to a very Pump Up the Volume feeling, for those who are old enough to remember the movies that were popular back when this kind of game was popular. Eric and Dylan feel very much like Christian Slater’s protagonist in Pump Up the Volume or Heathers. The problem is that the Columbine shooting wasn’t a movie, and Klebold and Harris were guilty of more than running a pirate radio station. (In fact, I would put pirate radio stations high on the list of “cool things to do when you’re feeling young and disenfranchised.”)

Once the school assault is finished, the game switches to Dylan Klebold’s perspective and players can help guide Klebold through Hell. Hell is populated with all sorts of characters, including Imps taken from the original Doom, which was a center of controversy at the time of the events. Eventually, players can challenge Satan himself for power over the underworld, presumably hammering home the message that being bad and shooting up your high school is a bad idea (unless, that is, you want to become the eternal lord of the underworld, in which case it’s apparently just the thing to do).

The problem with this ending is clear: It’s a lot like 50 Cent telling kids that they shouldn’t sell drugs and get in gunfights because look at where it got him (in the back of a limo with a bottle of champagne and a dozen scantily-clad women). A perusal of the game’s discussion forums reveals the full spectrum of reactions, from the completely outraged to the completely aroused. It’s clear that most gamers will get from this game what they bring to it. It is not the game that will shape or change your feelings about Columbine; rather, your pre-existing feelings will shape how you interpret the ambivalent messages inside the game.

Ledonne’s creation is provocative and interesting. It’s worth checking out, if only to see what the concern is. Where it succeeds is in proving that even mundane game systems are capable of supporting complex content. It is not the RPG conventions that make SCM fail (if you feel it fails, that is). In fact, SCM proves the power of the RPG genre conventions. If Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris can be represented as such suitable protagonists, then what does that mean about the many other protagonists we’ve taken for granted over the years? Could it be that Cloud is actually a terrorist? (Set FFVII in Iraq and rename Shinra Corp. to Haliburton and the analogy might make sense…) And isn’t World of Warcraft overtly about racial warfare? Or am I just imagining that?

Super Columbine Massacre RPG is not a great game. But it is an important game. It is a game created by a filmmaker, not a game developer. In fact, Ledonne told the Washington Post that he would not make another game. It was created specifically with the intent of generating discussion and presenting a unique perspective on the events of the Columbine shooting. This may not be the future of gaming, but it is a step towards the future of how games will be treated and viewed in our culture–as artful, meaningful objects which represent the thoughts, ideas, dreams and nightmares of a unique creator.