Wait...what? Yeah that's the best headline I could come up with. Mountain is available for Linux for $1 and promises 50 hours of watching a mountain do...stuff.
I'm a little confused as to how this is in any-way a game. Would someone care to educate me on this one?
Features
- no controls
- automatic save
- audio on/off switch
- time moves forward
- things grow and things die
- nature expresses itself
- ~ 50 hours of gameplay
- once generated, you cannot be regenerated
So, it has no controls at all. You are literally sitting there for the "~ 50 hours" watching a mountain go around and get a bit snowy and grow a few trees. I am all for experiments, but come on this isn't a game surly? It's much more like a show of game art than anything else or a tech demo.
It's great in a way that on PC developers can do little experiments like this. Imagine if this turned into some sort of god game based around a Mountain, now that would be quite interesting.
I'm a little confused as to how this is in any-way a game. Would someone care to educate me on this one?
Features
- no controls
- automatic save
- audio on/off switch
- time moves forward
- things grow and things die
- nature expresses itself
- ~ 50 hours of gameplay
- once generated, you cannot be regenerated
So, it has no controls at all. You are literally sitting there for the "~ 50 hours" watching a mountain go around and get a bit snowy and grow a few trees. I am all for experiments, but come on this isn't a game surly? It's much more like a show of game art than anything else or a tech demo.
It's great in a way that on PC developers can do little experiments like this. Imagine if this turned into some sort of god game based around a Mountain, now that would be quite interesting.
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Heh, also worth noting is that this was made by the guy who created the fake game in the movie "Her", the game with the obnoxious little alien guy.
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Does anyone know a hack to make this into a screensaver? Would be kind of like having digital sea monkeys.
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As much as "that's not a game" often fills me with vitriol (often used as a lazy way to discredit a game one doesn't like), here I think that's actually a legitimate observation. For me, the fundamental difference between games and film is interaction and a sense of agency. If you control nothing than I'd say this is more of a simulation instead of a simulation game.
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Does anyone know a hack to make this into a screensaver? Would be kind of like having digital sea monkeys.
That! Having this as a screensaver would be great, but it may be a little taxing on the resources of the computer. CPU use is c.10-20% at least for this.
So far, I have this running at work where I have two monitors on the monitor that I do not use. It is a nice thing to have on the side, not too distracting, but still animate.
I think of it as a "mineral & organic" tamagochi.
Calling it a game is farfetched I admit, but it is a nice experiment.
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<strike>This falls into a niche in the market that has been neglected for years. I fills that critical gap before tamagochi and after the pet rock.
Pet Rock 2014... https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/rock-simulator-2014
Digital picture frames are what old laptops are for.
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