Posted by Guest Reviewer
Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:43:00 GMT
[This is a guest review and interview by Fuzz.]
“I don’t remember my line…
Snow snowball dreams ghosts white ele (elegy) stripes…
Talk with eyeball in the bed…
Mental station…
I passionately like how helicopter flies under the eye nerve…
Undercarriage of the airplane, which looks like the blood vessels…
Am I not healthy?
On the aviation field planes fly away one by one…
This story of the broken equilibrium is about a guy, who was in the psychward, but once flew away…
My art does not suck…”
Space Spy is a puzzle game by Vasily Zotov, the creator of Quite Soulless. It is a series of 5 vignettes set in and around the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. What starts off with a seemingly innocuous shot of keys dropping into the sewers escalates into an adventure of epic scale featuring the hypnotization of police officers, 8-sided eyeballs in psychiatric wards, a romance between an actress and a yeti, and the destruction of a courtroom by a fascist with a rocket launcher. And all the while the crazy director Canavati is watching you…
The graphics can hardly be considered “good” by any stretch of the imagination, but they are fascinating in an eerie, surreal sort of way. An IGF judge described Zotov’s art style as “so amazingly complex and interesting that it’s almost ‘folk art’”. The models and backgrounds are obviously very amateur, but they have a certain charm and atmosphere to them which would just not be quite the same if they were more polished.
The gameplay primarily consists of puzzles involving various objects being pushed to certain coordinates on a grid. The solutions are often quite obscure, but the developer includes a walkthrough for each level within the game so there’s no need to fret about how to complete a particular section. The lack of sound and extremely slow movement were the only real barriers to my enjoyment of this wonderfully insane creation, but neither of those are major problems. Those who must consistently be absorbing sounds can just listen to their own music, and slow movement, while annoying, didn’t particularly bother me.
Vasily Zotov released his magnum opus, Quite Soulless, about a year ago as shareware, but this game is free. You can view the trailer here and play the game online or offline here.
Hit the jump for an interview with the creator, Vasily Zotov:
Amanita Design’s Machinarium was released last Friday. The game is superb. It’s a beautiful adventure game set in a unique world populated with all kinds of lovable, crazy robots (the protagonist is especially endearing). In my opinion, the visuals are peerless – every room is gorgeous, and filled with little details and surprises that ignite the imagination. The puzzles can get pretty difficult, but by and large I found them to be relatively intuitive and well-done. They’re quite varied, too, and include a mix of hotspot-hunting, inventory-management, timing, and mini-games.
Machinarium marks a very high point in the adventure-gaming and I highly recommend it. Even people who are put off by the slow pacing of most adventure games should try it, as there’s no dialogue in Machinarium and you are sucked into the game itself very quickly (even the title screen is fun!). You can play the demo right in your browser on the game’s website. The full game is $20.
The indefatigable Brandon Boyer has posted some lovely concept art by Amanita Design. These are sketches for Machinarium, their adventure game which is coming to the PC and Mac this Friday. You can download a short demo and also pre-order the game from the Machinarium website.
Having played it, I can safely say that it is a must-buy for fans of adventure games.
I am excited about this! Aquaria co-creator Alec Holowka, now of Infinite Ammo fame, has released the first teaser for his upcoming adventure/exploration game Marian. (Which was first announced a while ago.) As he’s said before, Alec is all about crafting a deep, personal experience for the player. And I wouldn’t pick anyone else for the job. I am sure his style of holistic game design will result in something truly special.
This is quite an ambitious endeavor, and one that Alec cares more about “than any other project” he’s worked on. If you’re interested in supporting him, head over to the Infinite Ammo site. Godspeed, Alec!
Fans of Ben There, Dan That! and its excellent follow-up Time Gentleman, Please! will be happy to know the saga of the two bumbling brits is confirmed to continue for an episodic series featuring some Day of the Tentacle style gameplay where Ben and Dan will seperate from each other, which given Dan’s malady regarding solo adventuring could be pretty great indeed.
The series so far has been a brilliant mix of great writing and some smart puzzles and I can’t wait to get stuck in to another game. Another key appeal of the series is the insane value for money, as the first game is still entirely free or alternatively can be bought as part of a $5 pack on steam featuring the even more sublime sequel.
On top of this, this month’s edition of GamesTM in the UK features a four-page interview with the creators as well as a review for TGP. A great month for the duo so far then, and with the new episodic series focusing much less on parody I think there’s far more comic originality left from the creators yet for us to see this year, and it’ll certainly be worth waiting for.
A while back we previewed a great indie co-op RPG, Wanderlust: Rebirth, shown here in a great tongue-in-cheek trailer (hooray for TIGSource citing!)
Recently, development for this project has picked back up, and an official demo has been released. The demo is a big update from the version we previewed, and now includes several new features.
3 Chapters
4 Bosses
Items to craft & collect
Dedicated Hosting options
New “Crawl” Game Mode: Where you can fight unlimited waves of enemies who increase in difficulty each level. After each level you get treasure and/or tokens for you and your team.
The team continues to work hard on the project, and I look forward to seeing the game reach completion.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:56:00 GMT
78641: A TARG ADVENTURE is “the hit Esperanto interactive simulator ‘Pato Viro Simulilo’ available in the English Language.” “Dedicated in loving memory to the late Patrick Swayze…”
In 78641 you play as a frying pan named Doug (full name: Dougleskoy Fluoride Beachanowicz) who crashes his convertible and dies, but is sent back before the accident by the Time Genie to… pay his insurance premiums?
Okay, your guess is as good as mine. I just started playing. But so far this the best adventure game I’ve seen in a long while. Definitely check it out!
Research and Development is a mod released for Half-life 2: Episode Two, made by someone named ‘mbortolino’. I really can’t find anything else on the man past that name, which is a real shame because if this isn’t the only product of his work then I really want to see the rest.
RAD is a short two-hour adventure in the HL universe, where you again battle combine and zombies as you travel from point A to point B. The key difference here is that you don’t actually use any guns, with the Gravity Manipulator only showing up after the first 45 minutes or so. Instead you have to pass a series of physical obstacles by putting your mind hard at work, and this is where the mod really shines.
Hideous and ‘Andy Wolff’ have been hard at work on an awesome flash game entitled ‘Let’s Jump!’, which is all about the thrills of throwing yourself into the sky and gunning down all manner of winged critters before landing effortlessly on the earth with the graceful elegance you would expect from anything you threw out of an airplane 10,000 metres in the air.
Sadly, we can’t play it yet because the game is still looking for a sponsor. This is distressing, as I really want to play it, so if anyone could solve that problem they would forever be a swellephant in my book. For now, enjoy the music.
The long-awaited third installment of the Blackwell series of games is here! Dave Gilbert’s The Blackwell Convergence reunites medium Rosangela Blackwell and her spirit helper Joey for another adventure. The initial release of the game was plagued by some technical problems with the e-commerce site (I know what that’s like), but they’re all fixed now and Convergence can be purchased for $14.95. There’s also a demo.
The first thing you’ll probably notice about Blackwell Convergence is that the game looks and sounds quite nice. I’m a big fan of Ian “Big Brother” Schlaepfer, who did the character portraits (he and his brother Greg are adventure game stars in their own right), and the background art and voice acting are very competent. Regarding the puzzles, it’s worth noting that the Blackwell games generally eschew typical item-based combinatorial puzzles for clue-based ones – Rosangela keeps with her a notebook in which clues can be jotted and then used (in a similar fashion to items).
By the way, this isn’t supposed to be anything approaching a review of the game, which I just started playing. For that, I’d wait for Adventure Gamers to write one! I thought their reviews of the first two games were pretty good.
