Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
(John Cooney, 2008)
Resistance
This simple platforming game also serves as a commentary on the proliferation of nearly mean-
ingless rewards in games: you earn your first achievement simply by loading the game, and you
earn three more for watching and clicking the opening screens. Once play begins, you unlock
dozens more just by using the game's controls, moving and jumping around its single scene,
and dying by colliding with its spiked obstacles. There are 99 achievements in all, displayed in a
list on one side of the screen; completing them all requires a little bit of platforming skill as well
as guesswork and math to solve what the names of the still-locked achievements signify. The
resulting experience hovers somewhere between the satisfaction of solving every last task on a
list and the awareness that these rewards are simply being handed out like candy.
Platform
: Web
Price
: F r e e
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
American Dream
(Stephen Lavelle,
and Jasper Byrne, 2011)
Scenes, Resistance
The player assumes the role of a novice stock trader who lives in a modestly furnished apart-
ment and aims to make a million dollars. In each of the game's days, the player can spend her
money on upgraded furnishings or go to work and invest her money on various stocks that can
be bought and sold. One of the game's few instructions is “Buy low, sell high,” and the stock-
trading gameplay hinges on seemingly random price fluctuations that the player can predict
to some degree by watching the patterns of highs and lows. After finishing trades, the player is
returned to a brief moment of pause (and perhaps furniture-buying) in her apartment.
American Dream
lets the player return to stock trading immediately, however, and the tempta-
tion to see the latest price changes and cash-in can mean that players spend very little time in
the apartment. Because the simple, pixellated graphics of the apartment don't feel drastically
different even with the most expensive furniture, the ostensible rewards of the gameplay are
eclipsed by the drive to gamble and earn. Unexpectedly, a maximally furnished apartment
turns out to be critical for optimal success in the stock market because having the best furniture
at later stages of the game allows the player to get an “insider trading” tip that guarantees huge
