S.T.A.C.K.E.R. by Pishtaco blends the two really successful “Soviet” game exports into one: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Tetris. The game mechanics of both stay intact. Blocks, items and artifacts drop from the sky, developing the story as you are advancing further into the zone and serving as “power ups”. Dogs, barbed wire and bandits attack you on your way.

Then come the mental effects: The radiation starts affecting your sanity if you don’t protect yourself from it. The deeper you get into the zone, the harder it gets to stay calm. Where Tetris builds up pressure by speedings things up, S.T.A.C.K.E.R. evokes real fear by tightening the narrative. A narrative told by dropping blocks.

Lots of people might go and called this a failed hack, but retroyou’s R/C series, released under the RIAA warning of “Fuck the gravity code!”, is more of an exploration of the limits of control. It could be as simple as transferring the technical limits of RC cars to the actual computer game – you just cannot really control what goes on on screen anymore. It could be as simple as using a once commercial game to create psychedelic colours, kind of like circuit bending – using something that was not built for this purpose to create something beautiful.

And, of course, it does question our belief in digital reality. And I am pretty sure that Re-Volt was very easy to hack.

The only authentic statement of the author that can be found on his equally antagonistic website is:

.·let it play, let it play alone…

The rest of it are broken manuals, useful cheat codes and resources. Neat.

For everybody who is about to try his luck at shooting mean aliens in lose/lose, a nice game of chess is really the only way not to lose. Not to lose data, actually. New York based artist Zach Gage has programmed a nice looking and “mildly challenging” (Symantec antivirus squad) space shooter in which the killing gets real. Every alien, floating around in front of your little space ship, is generated based on a random file in your documents folder. For every alien homicide, this file will get deleted. If you lose the game by having your space ship destroyed, the application will terminate and delete itself.

Gage’s concept of lose/lose explores the meaning and importance of digital possession – how can we trust we really own things that we don’t even fully understand? Have we already reached the point where we value some of our real physical possessions less then our data?

Of course the game has quickly made its way into the antivirus databases of our beautiful globe, and in the meantime has even been garnished with warnings of possible code mutations or alterations – a terrible fear of an art space shooter running wild, and you yourself as the killer of your own creation, giving your power point presentations hell, slaughtering your mp3 collection and annihilating your summer holidays.

If  anybody is to hack or make use of lose/lose, I’d like to make this very constructive suggestion: How about combining it with an antivirus program, so you can game away your time and at the same time zap spyware and trojans on your system yourself? DIY adware removal! Keep your computer clean with your own two hands, no matter what these kids come up with next!

lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo.