Lady Eklipse, from Odessa in the Ukraine, has recently posted some excellent articles on game accessibility. Her History of Accessible Gaming blog post takes knowledge from my 2005 Pioneers of Accessible Gaming and other existing sources fleshing it all out into a very fine read.
"This programme of sounds and voices is an attempt to re-create in five movements some sensations of dreaming—running away, falling, landscape, underwater and colour. All the voices were recorded from life and arranged in a setting of pure electronic sounds."
Baseball star wars from Specialbites is a likeable and hugely accessible one-switch baseball game. Great on a cause-and-effect level as for those developing timing skills. Click the picture above to play.
I recommend taking a look around the site, as there's a good range from the likes of Farting star wars to some nice slide shows you can trigger from one press of a switch.
Fancy an eye-gaze unit that is the price of an Xbox or PC Kinect and $60? Sounds good doesn't it? The NUIA eyeCharm from 4tiitoo.com is looking to be just that.
The device will come with developer tools including a scripting language to set-up controls that will interface with other main-stream eye tracker units. There's three weeks to go to help them reach their goal of $100,000.
David Vincent's Specialbites switch activities site goes from strength to strength. I rather like the idea behind his latest one-switch accessible Money games. The idea (with agreement) is that an adult in the room has a pocket full of change. As pennies (or alternatively cents) pass from left to right, pressing your switch on-target, rewards you with 2p from that adults pocket.
The teletext preservation project has just uploaded 125 editions of Digitiser from between 1995 and 1998. Amazing recovery of what I assumed were lost for ever pages. Brilliant stuff from Rob and Ant.
RRODE by Emanuele Feronato is a simple one-switch game requiring immense patience and skill. Thankfully, this also features a Pop Cap style Relax Mode, enabling you to retry a failed level until you beat it or it beats you. In an ideal world there would be speed control options on this, but sadly not. I did try slowing this down with CPU Killer, but it's a jerky mess when you do.
Left-click to play. SPACE bar to reset a level. Click on the image to play. More to follow...
The game magazine Digitiser, on Channel 4's Teletext channel was a wonderful thing. It ran for 10 years from 1993 to 2003, and for the main part was bonkers fun. Completely up to date before most people had the internet whilst using 1970s Teletext graphics. You had to be there (and probably be of a certain age range) to have fully appreciated how good it was. The following links may give a small taste.
I've got a simple idea: Post up a one-switch playable game for people to try once a week. I remember back in 2003 how rare it was to find such games, but there's an unmanageable amount now. I'll try to sift through some and pass them on, especially if they don't require pin-point timing as many do. If I treat it as research for the later stages of my "One Switch 100" book, I might even stick to it. Anyway.... to Silent Skies....
Silent Skies (free download for PC) from Michael Todd is a short flying game with four levels to complete. I first learnt of it about three years ago from the Kokoromi Gamma IV competition, but I gave up checking Michael's web-site when it didn't appear. Well it's there now.
The first level is the most peaceful, with the aim being to collect a batch of floating stars. Things get more violent from level two on, with shooting and bombing runs and a demonic end boss level. Apart from level two, you get a helpful arrow pointing you in the direction that you need to go. It looks great and plays nicely. It does require held presses (of the SPACE bar or "A" button on an Xbox 360 pad or you can most other USB joypads using the likes of JoyToKey), and pretty good spatial awareness. It also made me feel a bit motion sick, which could be an issue for some players. Makes me think how nice a one-switch sky-writing game might be.
