World of Goo

I found a fantastic game. It's named World of Goo. Here's a trailer. And here's the Wikipedia entry. Check those ratings - 9/10, 9.5/10, 10/10, 93%, 96%.

It's hard to summarize what's right about this game. Most everything is.

Let me start with few obscure details that might appeal specifically to a computer geek like me.

First, this game runs on Windows, on Nintendo Wii, and on Mac OS X. Linux version comes soon. And guess what, the Mac OS X version is not a lame "Win32 API linked with Wine" kind of port. Proof that it isn't is that Wine-linked Win32 API using Mac software only runs on Intel CPUs. Not so this game. It runs on Macs with PowerPC CPUs (either a G4 or a G5). It's pretty much a native version on Mac OS X. It runs crisply on my iMac G5. I asked the developers in e-mail about their development methodology, and the developer Ron Carmel was kind to reply. (The whole company seems to be just two guys, working from wi-fi equipped coffee houses in San Francisco. They have years of experience working for big name game companies, though.) Anyway, Ron's response was:

at some point, when we realized we're going to go multi-platform (wii/pc at the time) we simply abstracted away anything and everything platform dependent from the code. this meant graphics, sound, input handling, window creation, threading, that sort of thing. the game only deals with a set of abstract classs that it gets from a singleton "environment" class. those classes provide a set of services (like graphics, sound, etc) and we have different implementations of those classes for windows, mac, wii, and soon linux.

I can't say just how much I respect people who take this approach. It's one of hallmarks of professionalism in my book. More often than not, even much more complex software systems can (and should) be developed to be really multiplatform. At least on unices, it is fairly common to maintain software as CPU-agnostic (and often OS-specifics-agnostic) source code with small CPU&OS adapters. These guys however didn't only do it across different unices, which are all closely related OSes. They did it across Windows, Mac OS X, and whatever is the OS of the Wii. That's 3 operating systems, and likely 3 different CPUs too (Intel, PPC, and whatever the Wii CPU is, although AFAIK, it's also some PPC variant). Consider how most large software houses can't be bothered to do this - they just target Windows primarily, even though they'd have lots of internal benefits if they cleaned up their source code to be multiplatform.

Second obscure detail, the game has no DRM. None. These guys were smart enough to realize it'd be a waste of resources to bother with it. Another big tip o'the hat to them.

What this game does have though is: captive, immersive, innovative gameplay based on building structures out of gooey balls that bind to each other, and leveraging mechanics in a very realistic physics simulation (on various levels, you'll need to use tension, elastics, gravity, wind, flotation, and so on). It's tremendous fun. Immersion is further helped by the fact that there's no UI aside from the mouse pointer - all interaction with the game world is by directly dragging and dropping the otherwise aimlessly wandering goo balls with the mouse.

There's lot of humor and cuteness baked in. You can get emotionally attached to little goo balls as you could to those lemmings back in the day.

And then there's the beautiful visual art (that at times reminds me of Tim Burton movies, particulary The Corpse Bride), and music that perfectly matches it to create the immersive atmosphere. There are overarching motives and hints of a backstory that are intriguing on their own.

It's ideal for a casual gamer who needs to blow of steam for an hour after a hard day's work. My son is playing it every evening. My daughter is playing it every evening. I am playing it every evening. You can play it too in minutes - there's a downloadable demo with the full first chapter of the game (the full game has four chapters and an "epilogue").