[This is a guest article by PerrinAshcroft. If you’d like to contribute a guest article to TIGSource, go here.]
Digital: A Love Story is a free to download interactive story by Christine Love available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The game is set in 1988 and you begin the game with a threadbare interface closely resembling the Amiga’s workbench. To progress through the game you must use your modem to dial into bulletin board systems (BBS), make friends and enemies, download utilities, hack into protected system and commit phone fraud to make long distance calls. The game has a wonderful retro feel that’s going to tug strings of nostalgia for anyone who built up astronomical phone bills dialling into BBSs back before the internet became so widespread.
Parallels can be drawn to Introversion’s Uplink but Digital is very much its own experience. While Uplink was driven by the game elements of upgrading your deck and breaking into systems in a cool cyberpunk-esque world, Digital keeps its focus on characters and storytelling and draws instead from the unglamorous nerdy reality of the pre-internet digital world. The tools at your disposals are primitive, but are interactive enough that it doesn’t just feel like passive story.
I don’t want to elaborate too much on the content of the story as finding that out is what makes this game worth playing, but the story is really well structured and paced taking you through quite an emotional three-act tale in only a few hours. While the primary story is a fairly serious affair, Christine is smart enough to include humorous side plots such as getting into arguments with Star Trek nerds, a level of attention to detail that keeps the world interesting.
On a technical level I was very impressed once I realised the game was built with Ren’Py, a python based tool for building Japanese style visual novels. The game has been customised to the point where it’s unrecognisable from most projects build using those authoring tools. The interface is slick, the graphics are retro in a perfectly fitting manner and it includes a fantastic ambient soundtrack.
A game like this is unlikely to appeal to everyone, heavily story driven games are not to everyone’s tastes. But for those of you willing to spend a few hours, working slowly through an intriguing piece of interactive narrative there is a lot to enjoy about this title. I considered nit picking at a few minor issues but it seemed silly when for the most part this is a game with a specific purpose in mind and it executes it brilliantly. Ultimately for me, when the ending finally came it was a truly emotional moment where I just didn’t want to let go but knew I had to.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is an iPhone game collaboration between superbrothers (aka Craig Adams), singer-songwriter Jim Guthrie, and Capybara Games, the creators of Critter Crunch. These two videos are from the GDC build of the game, where the player engages in some exploration and combat. I got a chance to try it at the IGF Pavilion, where S&S EP was being shown for winning IGF Mobile’s Achievement In Art award. It’s great – the stylized art, the evocative audio, and the detail in each area makes you excited to see what’s coming next. The combat was also fun, if simple.
The winners of the AGS Awards 2009 have been announced. These are the best Adventure Game Studio games as voted on by the AGS community. The big winners are Zombiecow’s Time Gentlemen, Please! (Best Game, Best Gameplay, Best Dialogue Writing, Best Non-Player Character), Team Effigy’s The Marionette (Best Original Story, Best Background Art, Best Music, Best Tutorial or Documentation), and Ben304’s Shifters’s Box – Outside In (Best Puzzles, Best Short Game). There are a lot of other games and awards, so check out the award page for the full line-up.
Posted by Alex Macqueen
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:33:00 GMT
“I WAS A TORTURE VICTIM BEFORE I STARTED TORTURE MYSELF”
Ah, Vasily Zotov, our constant purveyor of autobiographical, surrealist snippets of something-or-other. In preparation for his upcoming trial, which will determine whether or not he’ll be granted asylum in the U.S., he’s released the first chapter of his newest puzzle game, Refugee. It’s in the same vein as Space Spy, but with better music and bigger explosions. This one attempts to encapsulate his feelings on the corruption of power within Homeland Security, although there’s not much of that as of yet. You can expect more levels to be added in the coming weeks, provided that he comes out of his trial unscathed. Come for the “crazy juridicial prostitutes”, stay for the B-Game appeal of this absurd experience.
Let’s hope Thursday’s trial works out for Vasily; he seems a reasonable guy, if a bit out of the ordinary, and it appears that a return to Russia would do far more harm than good.
You can play Refugee here, while the trailer can be viewed here.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:44:00 GMT
[This is a guest article by Shade Jackrabbit. If you’re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]
Recently Team Effigy released the final version of their adventure game The Marionette. After three years of development it is now playable, and it is quite interesting. Taking the role of Martin, a struggling sculptor in the big city, you begin by simply opening a letter. Soon you are transported into a surreal mystery of ghosts and the past, which you must solve if you ever want to get back home.
It’s a great-looking game for one, deciding to go with a painted look as opposed to photographic or pixelized. The soundtrack is really good as well, and apparently you can get a copy of it if you send in a donation. The game has been self-rated as 16+ due to content, as there’s some very violent imagery as well as more mature themes. It’s also a bit of a downer so I don’t recommend playing it if you want to have a really fun time.
Still, it has a really good story, so this is a definite play for you adventure fans out there.
Boss Baddie, the two man team behind exploratory platformer Lunnye Devisty have announced their new project to be released within the next coming weeks.
Wake is being pitched as a kind of survival platformer inside a sinking ship. As an engineer on board you have to make your way to the top of the ship in order to escape, whilst numerous obstacles line the path. The biggest of these is of course the rising sea level, which is the only element of the game capable of killing you. There’s also a scoring system in place which awards you based on how long it took you to escape and whether you fainted along the way (as well as other unknown objectives), so it appears that simply surviving isn’t the whole experience.
There’s also a ‘Rolling Demo’ available, but after the 40MB download there really doesn’t seem to be any real point to it. I suppose it’s meant to give you an idea of the atmosphere, but there didn’t seem to be anything to be gained from watching it that wasn’t conveyed simply by the screen shots. Still I’m pretty excited about the survival game concept, so looking forward to seeing more soon.
As reported today by the ever lovely Destructoid, The Misadventures of P.B Winterbottom will finally be released on the XBLA come Febuary 17th for 800MS points, which is probably something like $10. As I understand it the game is good enough to be deserving of any quoted sum. Regardless of your stance currently though a demo will naturally be released on the same day so if you aren’t happy putting down the money straight away then be sure to check it out then!
The one major grievance is that there doesn’t seem to be any news of a PC release. Given the amount of XBLA titles we see make the jump to PC, with relative ease too, it’s rather disappointing. Still it’s been a long road for The Odd Gentlemen and I’m glad they’ve finally reached the end of it. Expect impressions come release day.
Posted by Alex Macqueen
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:39:00 GMT
I posted about the bizarre adventure game Space Spy a while back, but now it is finally finished. Vasily Zotov has added an extra level entitled “Portrait of Isabel Bronzina” as well as creating music and sound effects to complement the visuals. Most of the sound effects appear to be recorded from life, which adds a realistic touch to what is otherwise a completely fantastical experience. The music is very dramatic and atmospheric, perfectly suiting the style of the game, but the final level and the ending are what really make this worth downloading again. A chilling indictment of the American justice system, “Portrait of Isabel Bronzina” portrays a soulless judge sitting at a desk surrounded by framed paintings. As she speaks, her head fluctuates between large and small, and she throws paintings at the protagonist, and indeed anything in her way. By bringing a particular painting to her and plugging in two electrical cords, the ending is triggered. Suffice it to say that the final cinematic is likely one of the best endings in any game ever released. Vasily is currently looking for a publisher, with the ideal goal of having Space Spy released with Verizon Wireless, but for now you can play the game on PC or in-browser with the Unity Web Player, although the online version does not contain sound.
Space Spy can be downloaded here, while the newest trailer can be viewed here. If you’d like to see what feedback the game received from IGF judges, you can see a selection of comments here.
PS: I’m a new editor at TIGSource; you may know me as Fuzz from my previous guest articles and from my account on the forums.
Though there’s no demo available at the moment, the trailer does seem to be reason enough to be interested in this game. The basic idea appears to be that you use your ship in order to solve immediate puzzles in an attempt to accomplish your greater goal of collecting all the parts of your ship in order to return home. However, the more pieces of your ship you recollect the more you can alter the actual ship itself to better solve the puzzles. This could mean improving your score on earlier levels, or perhaps entirely alternate methods of solution through far more imaginative machinations.
The presentation appears to be pretty solid, with some nice looking ice effects and physics, and at less than $10 the overall package is rather tempting. Hopefully a demo is the next logical step from the developers, but I think the price point is quite well-pitched to my own curiosity so if nothing else I’ll hopefully have something more to say later on.
Xbox Live is starting to look up; with well established Indie names making their way to the Xbox in the next year with Polytron’s ‘Fez,’ and Derek Yu’s ‘Spelunky,’ heading to the XBLA in 2010, and XBLIG starting to have actual, non-massage games, the Xbox is slowly becoming an Indie portal.
However, even with these fine names coming to XBL, there’s a few things I demand before I will consider XBL a true host to the Indie community.
First and Foremost: Roguelikes, and lucky me – not one, but two roguelikes are headed to XBLIG this winter.
