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I don't know if it qualifies as truly abstract, because some of the imagery definitely seems to represent actual objects, but this article made me think of vib-ribbon. It has a great look, but it's one that I'm pretty surprised made it onto shelves.

One of the most requested games has been Vib Ribbon!

http://cyan.askee.net/vib%20ribbon/

This PS1 game is a music game, known for these very distinctive things:

• It comes with 6 songs done in a very strange and indescribeable way, by a Japanese group "Laugh & Peace". Very good and catchy music.
• All graphics in the game are black and white, simulated vector graphics! No filled-in shapes here. Would be great if the game could output a format that could be understood by a laser projector....
• You can put in your own audio CD's, and the game will create its own steps for you to follow, based on the beat and the rhythm of the music! So the game has an essentially limitless number of songs you can play.

On the old Fresh Games forum site, in fact, it was the very first game requested.

http://forums.playfresh.com/

The game is completely in Japanese, but the characters are mostly katakana so it is easy to work through and translate. Here's the original Japanese site for the game's developers:

http://www.nanaon-sha.com/products/vib-ribbon.html

A complete English localization already exists, as Sony released the game in Europe:

http://www.vibribbon.com/

Once again, USA gamers get the shaft, because all we buy are monster trucks and extreme-sport athletes, right? Right. *sigh*

"There's no time, hurry up, everything is so fantastic...."

2. game content has changed dramatically. q bert was weird. space invaders was weird. pac man was weird. (yes, sports games did exist, but they weren't mainstream then). games today are less weird. it's either a first person shootemup, sports, or a linear fiction w/some combat.

Plenty of "weird games" still out there. You could be playing games like this, this, or this. Or even this.

I'm as big a fan of old-school gaming as anyone and still have my Atari 2600 hooked up. But there are just as many offbeat games now as there always were - and not every game back in the old days was all that innovative either (like now, most of them ripped off formulaic concepts). It's just that we don't remember the crappy games, despite the fact that they made up the bulk of the Atari 2600's 1000+ game library. There was a reason for the crash of 1984, after all - a deluge of junk on the market.

A lot of people complain about the lack of innovation today, ignoring games like those I linked above. I'll bet most of you didn't even know that those games exist, all the while lamenting about how the present game publishing system doesn't allow the "little guy" to make any headway at breaking established formulas. I would argue that the big guys are better at breaking their own formulas than any inexperienced, underfunded "little guy" ever could be - it's just that when they do, the games don't sell. Can you blame EA for putting out Madden 200X every year when a game like Rez sells fewer than 10,000 copies and Vib Ribbon isn't even released here for lack of interest?

Watch out, X-Box! VEXED is coming your way!

After trying it out, I can't really imagine this game would gain anything being ported to the PS2 - not that it would lose anything, either, but wouldn't it be better if some more interesting game concepts came out of the open source community, rather than just shoddy knock offs of existing puzzle games?

~jeff