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Play PS3 Title flOw Right Now

Posted by Zonk on Sat Sep 23, 2006 04:38 PM
from the so-shiny dept.
Entertainment Games
The folks at the Tokyo Game show are sending back high resolution screens of titles like Heavenly Sword and Warhawk, but a smaller title that will be on the console is available to play now. Recommended by Tycho in Friday's post to Penny Arcade, the game fl0w has more to offer than just good looks. It's actually a part of a designer's thesis, using the concept of flow theory to make a title more enjoyable for the player. Despite its roots in academia, this beautiful gem may go on to have a fond place in the hearts of console gamers. Joystiq has a hands on with the PS3 version: "FlOw was running at 525p (480p) -- the graphics were akin to what we've seen the Nintendo Wii produce. We aren't sure if the title will available brick-and-mortar or as a download (or even packaged in the console's hard drive). If priced correctly, flOw could end up an essential title similar to what Geometry Wars represents for the Xbox 360 -- a small, casual game with mass appeal sold for pure profit." Download the game, and give it a try.
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Despite the high hopes of Xbox 360 fans Gamespot pegs it as unlikely that Lumines Live will drop this week, or that there will be a Gears of War Demo on the Xbox Live service. In news that does seem to be legit, though, you can see screenshots of the first downloadable games for the PS3 service over at Game|Life. Titles include the previously mentioned fl0w, Lemmings 2, Blast Factor, and Go Sudoku. Commentary on the games available at GameSetWatch.
[+] Grad-School Thesis Becomes PS3 Game 167 comments
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes, "USC student Jenova Chen's Flash game, 'flOw,' attracted interest from Sony, which commissioned an enhanced version that will be sold through its PlayStation Network, WSJ.com reports. From the article: 'Gameplay is incredibly smooth, particularly for a Flash game. But it's the design touches that set flOw apart. Players will notice faint outlines of the creatures lurking at lower depths, a foreboding sign that vicious manta- and squid-like enemies await. The water darkens as the creature advances to deeper levels. The game's ambient sound is somewhat hypnotic. The intuitive controls and design simplicity are among Mr. Chen's mandate: build immersive games for people who don't consider themselves gamers. 'My parents and grandparents don't play games. My girlfriend, she doesn't play either,' he says. 'I want to make games that those people can appreciate.'"
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  • Hmm. (Score:5, Informative)

    by rjstanford (69735) on Saturday September 23 2006, @04:50PM (#16170159) Homepage Journal
    . If priced correctly, flOw could end up an essential title similar to what Geometry Wars represents for the Xbox 360 -- a small, casual game with mass appeal sold for pure profit."


    Of course, making it available for free download months in advance may - just may - reduce the number of people lining up to pay for it. But who knows, miracles can happen.
    • 480p for a bunch of circles? The Wii better be able to render this game about as well as the ps3.
    • No kidding. I posted about this on my blog [blogspot.com] back on March 19th (sorry for shameless plug, just giving proof of the date). My hope at the time was that this would be developed further into a game with even more evolution, similar (but perhaps not as far-reaching) to Spore. But it looks like it will just be the same game, and they'll try to charge for it, but this is Sony, so no surprise there.

      Although honestly I am a bit curious as to how they intend to give gamers a snowballs chance in hell of completing

    • It's called TGS, where the bulk of all the Japanese gaming news for an entire year is released in the span of a few days. By now, you should also have figured out it's pronnounced Nintendot , 24 hour Nintendo bias, all day, everyday.

  • Poor Chen (Score:3, Funny)

    by Morphine007 (207082) on Saturday September 23 2006, @04:59PM (#16170233)

    I was playing this game this morning after reading penny arcade. It's incredibly simplistic... if strangely addictive...

    Not surprisingly, we appear to have killed his server

    • Penny Arcade was killing it first. If you keep refreshing, it will load, seriously.
    • Okay, maybe I'm dumb, but how do I play?! I can't figure it out! I'm gonna try booting into Windows to see if it's a wird Linux flash issue, but I can't figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do!
      -Trillian
      • Move your mouse; the thing you control follows your mouse cursor (as long as it's in the flash window that is). The left button makes it go faster. You just move it around and eat stuff. The red guys (shown by a red circle 'ping' when they're off the map) make you go down a level, the blue guys make you go up a level.
      • yes, it's linux flash issue. The game requires flash 8.

  • Old. Old old old. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Rallion (711805) on Saturday September 23 2006, @05:02PM (#16170251) Journal
    I played this at least six months ago! It's an intensely simplistic (though cool) game that will take a grand total of about an hour (tops) out of your life. It's been freely available for a long time.

    Everybody's acting like it's some big deal. I don't understand why.
    • Yeah, I was about to say, this has been around for a while. And all it really is, is a proof of concept for the idea of flow in games. Which the designers believe, is the optimal level of challenge versus reward for a game to have to keep the player entertained and happy.
      • the optimal level of challenge versus reward for a game to have to keep the player entertained and happy

        Whoa.. that's kinda creepy. Academia is busy reducing us to ratios.

    • They're acting like it's a big deal because it's a cool game in a simplistic interface that a lot of people are just finding out about for the first time. Hell, I just saw it for the first time a few days ago myself.

      It's sort of like personal hygiene - even though the concept has been around for a very long time, every time I go to a con it seems like there are plenty of people there who had never heard of it...


  • Server Load:
            151 Users
    Remaining Wait:
            11 Minutes

    Mirror plz?
    • No, thats part of the game. It's called bandwith flow. See its using a series of tubes to flow your information to you like water. Posting a mirror would open more flows and be like cheating.

  • Filecloud Trick (Score:3, Informative)

    by oskard (715652) on Saturday September 23 2006, @05:05PM (#16170269)
    Two servers appeared in the "Select A Server" combo box.
    Both had a waiting time of 9 minutes
    I select one, begin waiting.
    I become impatient, hit back, select another.
    Viola, the download begins immediately.

    Try it out, hope it works for you :)

  • Yawn (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MeanMF (631837) on Saturday September 23 2006, @05:10PM (#16170297) Homepage
    Crappy frame rate (in a 2-d game!) and kind of interesting for about five minutes. Not quite Geometry Wars, sorry guys.
    • Yest another moronic anti-PS3 post, you can practically set your watch by them at this point. Perhaps, just perhaps, they would actually do something a little different or enhanced for the PS3 version? The flash version was written eons ago just to prove a point in a thesis.

      Does hating Sony kill brain cells? It would appear so.
      • Re-read my comment as tell me where I even mentioned Sony or the PS3. This game would suck just as hard on a 360 as it does in Flash.
        • Re-read my comment where I stated they would probably spruce it up for a console.

          • The original comment was not about the PS3.

            • Nor was my reply, entirey. Aside from one dig at you for being overly supportive of the 360. Put that aside and my comment was neutral as well, it would apply equally if Flow were being put out on Live. You seem to miss the basic fact that the online game is very, very old and a proof of concept, not a finished product.

              • Nor was my reply, entirey. Aside from one dig at you for being overly supportive of the 360.

                Uhm... What the hell are you talking about? The entry you just replied to was the first thing I've said in this thread.

                Let's go through this thread:

                MeanMF says: "Crappy frame rate (in a 2-d game!) and kind of interesting for about five minutes. Not quite Geometry Wars, sorry guys."

                Please note that he's talking about the Flash game. Nothing about the PS3.

                You reply:

                Yest another moronic anti-PS3 post (...) Does

    • It poses no framerate problems for my three year old laptop, so I'd say the problem is at your end.
      • If you can stay awake long enough, play for a few minutes and see what happens when the big critters appear. Framerate drops drastically and it becomes hard to control.
        • The framerate slows to a crawl when you start becoming a big critter yourself and really struggles when you are a big critter trying to eat other big critters. I noticed the most problems while playing as a fairly evolved jellyfish trying to attack other largish jellyfish towards the end of level 2...
          • Never had this problem myself on a 2ghz Athlon XP. This was the web version, not the downloaded version however.
      • Speaking of Spore, the little bit of this flow game I played reminded me of the video footage of Spore. The part when you're a single celled organism and you run around eating things.
        • Enough!

          We will sue this guy until his pants drop down, we got all the patents for anything related to the Spore game and it seems this game is balantly infringing our patents and the author hasn't paid royalties.

          Sincerely,

          EA

          p.s. Mmmm. we may better wait until the game makes some cash and then go for him.
  • I'm still not really getting this game, to be honest. Can anyone better explain?
  • I got to the second boss (yellow-brown world, you play as a sphere) but I can't beat it. Never got it below 4 dots, and we've been exchanging attacks for last half a hour or so. Anything beyond the 4th dot (the one with 2 spikes) is easy, but getting anything closer to the head is nearly impossible, results in being bitten and losing any advantage as the enemy regenerates.

    Any solution?
    • I had a lot of difficulty beating him. I managed to get him down to 2 dots by charging in from behind, but the last two were tough as hell. Basically I charged in from behind, then released the mouse button so my dots were beyond his head. Then I tried to snag one of the dots and zip out of there before he could eat part of me. It took me a ton of attempts since you have to try to slip part of your outer ring that isn't lit up by his head, but finally managed to do it. The only problem was...I didn't s
      • It seems that the game is a work in progress and (at least, the Flash version) isn't finished yet.

        Apparently not so long ago, it was only one level. Hopefully it won't take long until it is several more levels with more creatures to play against and become.

      • Yeah, same here, it sounds like. Once I beat the 2nd boss, he just kind of froze there, and didn't explode into lots of goodies. It was truly sad...

        But your strategy is a good one, and is probably the only way of defeating him. When I played the game, I was trying to just charge in and wasn't getting anywhere either, then I tried keeping my dots in an outer ring and it became incredibly simple to beat.
      • I had exactly the same problem, and I did search many levels for anything I missed. I think that's as much of the game as was developed, and it just ends there. Pretty sure at that point I was out of the "flOw" and it wasn't fun for me any more.
    • I beat the yellow-brown final boss, but didn't get the key needed to move on to the next level. I even went back all the way to beginning and all the way down again to make sure I'd killed and eaten every single thing, and no luck. Finally I gave up in disgust. What this game lacks is communication. I didn't even know I was supposed to fight the other creatures until my second try.
      • The problem is "strengthening myself" doesn't help - it increases my survivablity which is more than satisfactory (I spent nearly half a hour in a futile battle and neither of us managed to seriously hurt the other), but doesn't really increase my attack power/speed (instead, it decreases it - it takes longer to refill a spot and take another bite off the boss). For a good while I considered the suicidal strategy of going right from the start to the boss, simply because the beginning "empty" state would mak
  • or maybe im just way to easily entertained. Man, i'm not sure what the point of the game was but damn, that was fun.
  • According to this new-fangled theory, an activity is only fun while we are engaged in a challenge that we can actually accomplish; and that if it gets too hard, we get anxious, while if it gets too easy, we get bored.

    And they can now prove this with colorful charts and some vague numbers.

    This prompts a very big and loud _DUH!_ for whomever came up with such insight.

    If you need some pseudo-scientific, quasi-psychiatric thesis to understand this, perhaps you shouldn't be designing games -- GAMES!

    You know, gam
    • From my reading, the "innovation" is supposed to come in tuning the game's difficulty automatically to the user's performance, not merely the idea that a game should be between "frustrating" and "boring".

      This can be a good idea, but it's worth pointing out it's not new at all. I recently started in on a task that I've had planned for a while working on the same basic idea, only applied to a learning program (can't even call it a "game"): Dynamically deciding which new concepts to introduce when, depending o
      • But this is precisely the point I was ridiculing: They took an ever-present concept of designing games -- one that I'm sure predates videogames themselves -- and market it as an "innovation", claiming it is an implementation of some two-bit psychology thesis with a fancy-sounding name and a colorful chart.

        But guess what, games have been fun and addictive before, way before, and I'm willing to bet that it was not by accident that game makers ended up finding that sweet-spot between boing and frustrating --

      • From my reading, the "innovation" is supposed to come in tuning the game's difficulty automatically to the user's performance, not merely the idea that a game should be between "frustrating" and "boring".

        This can be a good idea,

        It isn't. When I learn the game, I want to be able to breeze past the levels I previously had to struggle through, and take on new levels. I don't want the enemies to mysteriously develop resistance to bullets.

        A game that automatically adapts the difficulty level to the playe

  • Needlessly difficult in places for people like me who are a bit color-blind - the red radar is impossible to see on some levels, as are some enemies. And that bit on the second level against the long enemy is so "difficult" as to be broken. It's not fun difficult, just annoying.

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