If you were at Unit last Thursday, the 27th of August, for the fourth meeting of the Hand Eye Society (made up of a group of individuals who meet in secret to discuss AI path programming and why pineapples should never touch pizzas, amongst other things) then you bore witness to the awesomination (a pairing of awesome and abomination) that was Metanet's in-progress game, Office Yeti. In short, you play a yeti in an office, and you don't want people to know that you're a yeti, despite your desire to consume the succulent meat off their bones. The more succulent meat you eat, the more likely people are to realize that you are, in fact, a murderous beast with a name tag and a cubicle.
That's what I got from it, at least. Word is that there might be a reverse-version, where you play a human in an office full of yetis. I'm gonna assume that this is the survival-horror mode in the game. The whole shebang is a grand departure from their magnum opus, N and N+, which had you play as an occasionally break-dancing ninja who, while very agile, didn't really do anything ninja-like; there weren't any stealthy assassinations, no shurikens or katanas, and definitely no pirates in the N series. In contrast, it seems that the yeti you'll play in Office Yeti does exactly what you expect a yeti would do in an office full of humans.
The pony of the show, however, was Alex Austin of game developer Cryptic Sea. This is the company that made the critically (and to a degree, commercially) successful indie darling of a game Gish. Once the computer was up and running, he went on to showcase Cryptic Sea's latest project, No Quarter, a "gaming album" of sorts not entirely dissimilar to Jonathan Mak's Everyday Shooter (in terms of the idea behind it, not gameplay). He started by showing us all the original and low-fi early-development versions that were done to hopefully prove good working gaming concepts, and later showed what they had so far become.
While fine and dandy, most of the games didn't really do much to stir the senses. There were, however, two definite stand outs in the album, the first being Hitlers Must Die, a game about killing lots of Hitler clones as a "Soviet special forces guy", that's positively oooooozing with charisma and style with it's stark colour palette and sharp wit (see the video below for some gameplay). The second standout was called (I think...) Trivium. It's essentially a physics-heavy version of Tetris, if all the Tetriminoes were squishy and bouncy and if they weren't confined to solid stacks of blocks. It blew my mind and made me wonder if it shared any genes with the PSN downloadable title Trash Panic. Hitlers Must Die and Trivium are two games that I would pay to own separately, and preferably on my couch with a PS3 controller in hand. The other games, while cute experiments, serve only to divert attention away from these two hidden gems.
There were other things that happened at the Hand Eye Society meetup, but nothing official. There was talk about a rumoured XBLA project from an unnamed member in attendance that would "blow our fucking minds" (quote attributed to me, though I know nothing about the project that might not even exist), there was much discussion about what, exactly, Ben Rivers puts in his hair that makes it do what it magically does, and I managed to piss more than a few people off with my camera's flash, further lending credence to the stereotype that nerds spend all their time in lightless environments out of the sight of the rest of society.
But the biggest and most awesome news of the event? It was easily Craig D Adams' of SUPERBROTHERS fame's recent purchase of the Metroid Prime Trilogy for his Wii. Below you can see him asking Jonathan Mak, "HAS U CEEN MAI MET ROYD? IT IZ FUL OF SAMUS AM I RITE."
