Kianis wrote to let me know about this year’s Swedish Game Awards, a PC game competition for Swedish students. The winner of this year’s competition is a rather uninteresting block puzzle game, but definitely check out some of the other games! Kianis pointed out Streambolt Desero , which has music by none other than Joakim Sandberg, and great graphics by Gustav Kilman, who I’m a big fan of. I remember seeing this game a few years ago, I think, and I’m sad to see that it’s still not a full game (although it’s fun while it lasts!).
And definitely take a look at this trailer for Fret Nice, a sidescrolling platformer that’s played with a Guitar Hero controller! (Fret Nice won “Best Concept” in the competition.)
The winner of this competition to make the crappiest game for the Korean open-source handheld GP2X was NOT the game depicted in this screenshot (Run, Hitler, Run!), but studies show that including a picture of Hitler on your website automatically increases the traffic by 0.001%, and quite frankly, that’s enough for me.
The way Hitler looks in the screenshot really reminds me of a Boris Artzybasheff painting!
Actually, one of the reasons why I posted And Yet it Moves is because I found Which Way is Up on Tim’s site and the idea behind it is rather similar. It’s another platformer that allows you to rotate the game world, although in this case you can only do so via levers that are scattered around each level (6 in all).
However, each lever can only be pushed once, and you can only reach one lever at any given time, so I ask… what is the point of the rotating other than it looks kinda neat?
And why does every level look the same and feel the same? And where’s the story?
Well, the game was an entry for the PyWeek game competition and is still being worked on. I guess that’s why.
Oh! But it’d still be nice if the rotating actually affected the gameplay somehow.
Mayoneez describes Kumoon
as “a hybrid of a third person shooter and a puzzle game.”
I prefer to call it the abandoned child that resulted from a one
night stand between a shooter and a game of billiards, but either
description is good enough.
I like how the game makes light of shooters. The guns fire bouncy
balls instead of bullets. There is nearly no violence, and it’s
devoid of enemies. The boxes that count as targets must be shot
indirectly to achieve a positive score, which is necessary to reach
the next level. And it pokes fun at all the chick-with-a-gun centric
shooters out there, since the main character is a fluffy, yellow
chick.
Kumoon won first place in the GameDev competition at Assembly
in 2005. Last year’s winner was the previously covered Frets
on Fire, which was updated once again and relocated
to SourceForge last week.
If you’re interested in trying other entries from Assembly’s
competitions, the games for 2002-2006 are available at Mbnet.
Since the site is in Finnish, the games will be listed under headers of
pelikehityskompo, pelikehitys, or pelinkehitys. For those who are
easily intimidated by non-English websites, the Scene
also hosts the games in the public directory of their ftp site.
Luckily, most of the games’ readme files are in English despite where
they’re downloaded from.
Those contemplating the possibility of submitting a game for
Assembly’s Summer ‘07 should check out the GameDev
rules. The deadline is July 15, and, yes, there are prizes. Also,
those who are simply curious about attending Assembly’s next computer
festival in Finland with thousands of like-minded people should head
over to here.
[Originally written by Shih Tzu for Independent Gaming; reposted with his permission. -Derek]
This actually happened a month ago, but the winners of the 2006 XYZZY Awards for interactive fiction have been announced! Top honors went to Eric Eve’s science fiction story The Elysium Enigma, while Andrew Plotkin’s Edward Gorey homage Delightful Wallpaper and Emily Short’s Floatpoint were among winners in several other categories.
The Elysium Enigma casts you as an Imperial officer charged with contacting a mysteriously technophobic settlement on a remote planet. I’ve only had a chance to play the first five minutes of it, but the premise seems intriguing so far.
For elegant multi-platform interpreters that should be able to run most or all of the nominated titles, I recommend Gargoyle for Windows or Spatterlight for Macintosh systems.
The 3Punge judges
have cast their preliminary votes, and now the entries for the 12th
competition are available for the public to play before voting
(Engrish
translation of the ballot courteous of Google). There are several
mediocre games once again, but there is one gem: a vertical shmup
called Gaism (direct
download). It has a wonderful old school feel with its pixelated
graphics, swarms of enemy formations to blast through, myriad of
energy units to collect, and progressively more difficult boss at
the end of each of the 3 levels.
The cannon, the ship’s only weapon, rotates to aim in the
opposite direction of your movement when not firing, which is a
crucial feature at times. The collected energy increases it’s
firepower, but shooting also uses up small increments of it’s stored
energy. However, the onslaught of enemies provide few moments to
release your trigger finger. And it doesn’t help that you get only
one life, which isn’t as bad as it sounds, since the game uses a
damage = -1 firepower level system.
As a shmup packed into 3 intense minutes, Gaism is the perfect
shooter to celebrate March as ShmupMonth
during your coffee break.
Update: 3Punge is now hosting the games on its own server, so the direct download link has been edited to include Gaism’s new address.
Posted by Albert Lai
Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:06:00 GMT
In case you were not in the know, the Shmup-Dev
Autofire 2007 competition has finished! Clean
Asia comes in first, Excellent Bifurcation (which you may recognize from
the title of this post) comes in second, Force
Majure comes in third, Blessed comes in fourth, and, finally, Gravitron
fifth.
Excellent Bifurcation
is really an excellent game which, unfortunately, has not been brought to the
attention of TIGSource readers.
The premise is this: You have two ships. The government sends one into another
dimension and keeps the other one. You’re forced to pilot both simultaneously.
Now, it’s not as bad as it sounds (or, depending on what you have been thinking,
it’s worse). Both ships are ‘tied’ to each other. Where one ship is on one screen,
the other ship is on the other. If one dies, both die. Did I mention they were
unique? One is a ‘heavy and powerful’ ship, the other is ‘fast and small’ ship.
You can switch them between screens at will.
On the plus side, the levels are marginally easier than normal, and there are
plenty of delicious upgrades available, which change in form depending on type,
the ship that collects it, and the amount of powerups you have. What happens
if you have the maxed level of a weapon? Who knows? I certainly don’t!
Excellent Bifurcation is a most excellent game to improve your peripheral vision.
Personally, I have developed the habit of staring at a person’s right ear whenever
I talk to them. It’s all right, I’ve already made a lot of new friends. Lost
many more, but in the end it works out.
JIG’s Casual Gameplay Compo Showcase is well under way, though only two entries are playable at the moment. The current highlight is a puzzler/adventure entry entitled Gateway II. Some of the latter puzzles can be rather ambiguous, and the story itself is a little contrived (perhaps due to the requirements of the compo), but any game with a torture scene definitely gets my vote. (Alright, just MGS)
You can grab hints/the entire walkthrough from their comments section.
“All IGF finalists who were able to submit a playable demo (or had significant public play opportunities in the last year) are eligible, and the one with the most votes picks up the $2,500 prize.”
Well, can’t say that these guys don’t stand a chance to win something now. (The madness resumes tomorrow.)
Okay, the forums should be okay for the time being, but we're moving to a new server soon. We'll keep the extension on the Bootleg Demakes Compo, and give you guys until September 7th!
