After playing through Fieldrunners 2 I was in the mood for a TD game that was more explicitly innovative. I guess my brain doesn’t appreciate the monotony of slowly building out vast mazes of very loud machineguns over and over. My mind jumped to Anomaly Defenders and Space Run Galaxy, both are fairly innovative yet I never gave them too much of a chance the first time around. After spending tens of hours in both, I have some thoughts on them that other people may or may not have had before. And you are going to be reading them because you clicked on this post and are therefore contractually obligated to listen to my ramblings.

On a recent trip, my brother and I were up late at night lying in bed and reminiscing on our childhood. We do it at an abnormal frequency when we somehow find ourselves in bed in the same room at night, probably due to a combination of undiagnosed ADHD/autism and ADHD/autism induced insomnia. This time, we were talking about our early gaming experiences and how it shaped our childhood. It was quite comprehensive, we went from 00s PC games to DS/Wii to Adobe Flash. Then my brother mentioned Fieldrunners and my brain got one of those flashback unlock moments. For some reason, my brain had hidden those memories away and I had not ever remembered it when thinking about my childhood games.

Can a painting generated by a machine be called art? I would argue no.

Not too long ago I was having a discussion on whether AI art should be labelled, and my thought was that labelling was a good thing because without the distinction it undermines the effort and investment that human artists makes. It is no different from labelling hand made textiles vs machined, or factory farmed chicken vs organic.