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Games

7 Games That Harness The Power Of Pong To Make Geometric Shapes King

Video games today are cut from the same pixel. Except for when they aren't.

Let’s make a checklist of attributes every good modern video game needs. You have levels, some semblance of a story, fleshed-out characters (even if they’re zombies), a point system, maybe an army’s worth of weapons, and graphics so photorealistic they’ll make your brain question its own bitrate. We realize that this is a gross over-simplification of the medium but, for all intents and purposes (and espeically when surveying the mainstream titles), video games today are cut from the same pixel.

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Except when they aren’t.

A new breed of video games, whether playable online or as desktop downloads, are overturning the trend of increasing complexity and harkening back to the simple elegance of a formula mastered back in 1972. That year, Pong, considered the grandfather of video games (even if it wasn’t really), made a 2-dimensional activity jut out into 4-dimensional transcendence. (Leisure) time and space were never the same.

But within a few year’s span, video games set out on a course that drew inspiration from its entertainment predecessors--like novels, films and television shows--and because these mediums are chock-full of narratives and characters, a video game could no longer be a video game without them.

Yet, waist-deep into 2013, we’re beginning to see an uptick in games that revert back to the Pong philosophy where geometric shapes rule the land. We compiled a list of some of our favorites, that are keeping it real by keeping it classic.

From mastermind Jeppe Carlsen, 140 is a sidescroller much like the Super Mario Bros. or Battletoads franchises were, but it has settled for a more minimalist flair. Dictated by audio elements and cues, players must help one of three basic geometric shapes (whether a circle, a triangle, or a square) travel through an environment that is married to the sounds that make up its universe. Playing it is a quick way to fry a brain.

Bombball

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The only intended sports game of the group, Bombball is the product of ten days of intense designing by E McNeill for one of Kill Screen’s game jams. It’s meant to be a multi-player game that plays like a mix of soccer, table hockey, and warfare.

Feedback

You can’t get anymore Pong than this. Feedback is described by its creators as a spruced up, music-based, radial version of the classic game but it differs from Pong in that gamers must protect themselves from within an amorphous blob that morphs according to the song being played. Those songs can be anything the player uploads. Like Pong of old, players only have a pad to stop moving obstacles from venturing past a certain point, but it takes that concept to brave, new heights.

Proun

Dutch-designed Proun gives inertia a cubist facelift. Like other racing games before it, players must navigate a course in the least amount of time possible. But this isn’t your run-of-the-mill, drive-of-the-mill, or fly-of-the-mill speedster faceoff. A ball rolls on a cable according to the will of its inertia and those controlling it must spin it around the cable so as to narrowly miss the geometric shapes that occupy Proun’s abstract worlds. The experience is so charming and expertly designed that the game has been exhibited at various museums worldwide.

Sound Dodger

Your goal in Sound Dodger is easy enough: dodge the music! Armed with only a mouse, which registers as a hollow circle on the screen, users must navigate around pointed triangles that are generated by the texture of the music playing in the background. Without a way to die, players must avoid these points at all costs on a circular field that looks fittingly like a turntable.

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Each level is essentially a track on an album that users can access after reaching a point strata. Released by Adult Swim, it might be the most “mainstream” of the bunch, but that doesn’t detract from its multi-colored addictiveness.

Super Hexagon

The work of Terry Cavanagh is highly respected in the industry and one look at Super Hexagon reveals why. Driven by thumping music, lines around a shifting hexagon fall into its center as the player, marked by a miniscule accent, must avoid the doom they bring. The longer users can avoid getting crushed by the lines, the faster those geometric lines cave in, and the more addicting the experience becomes. Highly recommended.

Turn Based Breakout

The original Breakout debuted in 1976 for Atari. This new version, available online and dubbed Turn Based Breakout, is not much different than its predecessor. This time around, as the title suggests, players must plan their moves before the paddle shifts in an effort to keep the ball from falling offscreen. Simple stuff.

What makes this version especially great is that it was developed using Processing, an open source programming language that anyone can build upon. That means that anyone with a little time on their hands, and the desire to learn, can build upon the design elements of the original Breakout game, as well as those made famous by geometric shape-reliant Pong.