Hammerfight came out unexpectedly on Steam this week. Formerly known as Hammerfall, the game is set in a unique fantasy world and puts you in control of a flying machine that can be equipped with various knives, swords, flails, hammers, axes, and guns. Use the mouse to fly and to fight – Hammerfight employs a physics engine to let you swing weapons using the motion of your machine.
This game is strong and very manly in an ancient sort of way, kind of like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. Because of the direct control you have over swinging your weapons, getting a solid hit in Hammerfall feels REALLY good, and you’ll be doing a lot of it during a variety of manly activities like hunting giant cave worms with a ball and chain or fighting for your life as a slave in the arena. After each battle, a victory screen will pronounce your glory and say things like “You are now known as Derek the Barbarian,” or “You are the Worm Slayer,” or something like that. Also, as you progress, you’ll get decked out with all manner of sweet flying machine armor, and have banners hanging off of you that flap around as you kick ass. It’s awesome.
When the game was still called Hammerfall there was a playable demo available. Hammerfight is still the same great experience, but with all the polish it needed to be a full commercial release. (For one thing, the English text has been cleaned up considerably, making the storyline much more easy to follow.) It’s just as gorgeous, detailed, fun, and challenging as it was before, just better.
Hammerfight is a masterpiece, and $9.99 is a bargain. Go grab it!
So it’s not quite the season yet, but what would an MGS game be without a little bit of hype? Arthur Lee will be once again providing a swish parody of the famous series, featuring a suprising amount of gadgets/weapons which seem to mix functionality and the funnies quite nicely.
Release date should be fairly obvious, which hopefully will give some time to improving the music which isn’t quite as accomplished as the rest of the game’s presentation appears to be. The puns however are fantastic enough that I will completely ignore that this isn’t ‘The Underside’.
Star Guard is a short and sweet action-platformer from Vacuum Flowers available for either PC/MACs. Set in a minimalistic and dark world, you play a green guy fighting red guys who are controlled by an evil wizard. You shoot the red guys with X and jump over their cowardly bullets with Z, though a gamepad is recommended if you’ve one available as you’ll need to squeeze off a lot of bullets in quick succession.
This is especially true in the later of the game’s nine levels, each featuring the same charmingly simple aesthetic, although the larger enemies feature some slightly more stylish flourishes. It’s a rather strange game because the pacing and difficulty doesn’t quite mesh with the infinite lives given to you on a normal playthrough. Where as typically mines/traps would require caution and dexterity, these will simply not respawn so even if you die you can just get through the section without worrying about the consequences. Which is fine, however I would’ve preferred if they came back when I did so I could effectively ‘beat’ that section rather than skip it.
That’s literally my only problem with the game and other than that it’s a wonderfully conceived platformer, and if more games could do plot exposition in such a seemless fashion so as to not even slightly interrupt the action then I’d be pretty damn happy with that.
BIT.TRIP VOID, the third entry in the series of groovy, retro arcade games from Gaijin Games (the previous two being CORE and BEAT), is coming to WiiWare later this year. VOID seems to be less rhythmic than its predecessors, and more like a shooter, which is okay by me. I’m pretty bad at the BIT.TRIP games generally, but I just can’t seem to resist forking over my Wii Points for them…
We originally posted the preview of this a month ago, but Hideous and Andy Wolff’s Let’s Jump is finally ready for consumption using the eyes and ears on your head and the fingers on your hands.
You control a sky diver by firing in the opposite direction to the one you want to travel in, pushing yourself with the blasts. Score as much as you can before your altitude hits 0m and above all just enjoy the sights and sounds of this sweet sojourn in the sky!
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.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei (A Werewolf Thriller) is a fun flash game from Waremsoft in which you play a character on “a bloody quest to rescue the girl that hurt you from the hands of the planet’s dominant race: The werewolves.” Sneak by the werewolves and tackle them when they’re not looking—and enjoy the glorious blood effects as you mutilate them where they stand. (They seem pretty evil, so I guess that’s okay?)
Play Vox Populi, Vox Dei here, on Kongregate. (Requires Flash Player 10.)
Adam Atomic and Danny B are at it again with Canabalt, a flixel powered one-button platformer. Your incredibly suave protagonist continually runs to the right and all you are required to do is hit the jump button, varying timing and length in order to avoid the obstacles in your path.
So it’s a simple game to play then, but so much of the game is executed gloriously. The atmosphere is fantastic, with the multitude of greys creating a distinct world that’s easily identifiable even when your hero is at his fastest. The scheme even flows into the browser window itself, which frames the game in a similar style, which is a great touch. The wide resolution of the game also helps with seeing the oncoming obstacles without having to slow the game down to help you cope with the pressure.
The sensation of speed throughout is intensely gratifying. It’s often been said about the classic Sonic games that the speed sections were simply rewards for careful platforming and beating enemies, but here the whole game feels rewarding. He doesn’t take long at all to build up speed and it just increases as he tears across randomly generated rooftops. I also love the feeling of being out of control of the character, which sounds fairly silly, but it conveys the feeling of speed akin to say a runaway train. There’s no way to stop him, the best you can do is use the one button you have to get the hell out of the way of anything that will put a premature end to your rush.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:16:00 GMT
Bombie Zombie is a lofi action game from forum member Codemonkey, “made in a couple weeks just to see what a zombie game with only landmines would be like.” It also seems to be some sort of a commentary on swine flu? I had trouble following the storyline.
Run around with the arrow keys, jump with Z, place mines with X. Avoid getting swarmed by zombies and other hazards. It’s quite fun!
Download Bombie Zombie here, in the forum release thread.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:54:00 GMT
Adam and Matt from Flashbang Studios, The Brothers Mechtley, have released a side project they’ve been working on since January: Touch KO, an iPhone boxing sim that quite reminds me of Fight Night, with its hilarious ragdoll knockouts and everything. From the video it looks to be polished and fun—if I had an iPhone, I’d be playing it right now! You can find the App Store link here.
In semi-related news, Matt has announced he’s leaving the world of indie games to pursue a career in super science, going for his PhD in Astrophysics at ASU. Next thing you know he’ll have his own island fortress and army of spider robots and all that. (That’s what scientists do, right?)
Matt: You have been a consummate gentleman, and you will be missed! Best of luck to you, sir.
