Au Sable is a game by the maker of All of Our Friends Are Dead, Amon26, and appears to be at least a spiritual sequel to that game. Fans of the previous game might enjoy the new one. For those who didn’t play that one, they are both platformers which focus on delivering dark and creepy feelings.
There’s more variety than the first game, and the controls feel tighter, and the art is just as nice. My only complaint is that the mouse cursor is off by default and the only way to learn how to turn it on is in the ReadMe file (which I missed and played through the game with that difficulty).
Again, you can get a taste of the game from Ortoslon’s playthrough if you’re sleepy or unconvinced by this review.
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’.
Tom Sennett and Matt Thorson’s RunMan: Race Around the World elicits a kind of primal joy in me that I was worried had left long ago. It’s just a fun game, through and through, super-injected with whimsy, full of surprising moments and fun characters who feel like old friends. You can’t ever really die, but the game is challenging enough. Still, I imagine one could get through RunMan pretty quickly by playing straight through… but it’s so enjoyable to run, bounce, swing, and fly through some of the levels that I’m more than happy to play them over and over to improve my time or collect medals.
The game’s music warrants its own paragraph. Tom Sennett is fond of using public domain jazz and bluegrass songs in his games (most notably, the original RunMan’s Monster Fracas), and they really add to the charm. I’m pretty accustomed to hearing either chiptunes or orchestral music (or occasionally metal) in games these days, and it’s refreshing to listen to something that deviates from those genres. I like sitting around on the map screen just to listen to the music.
But yeah, this is by far my favorite of Tom and Matt’s games, and possibly one of my favorite indie games of the year. I’d love to see more collaborations between them in the future, ‘cause this one worked out really well. Great work!
Joe Larson has released ASCIIpOrtal, his ASCII demake of… Portal. I’ll be honest, I know that there are other demakes of Portal out there (at least two from our Demakes Competition), but I’m not very familiar with them. This one is well-made, however – seeing “through” the portals is a nifty visual effect and the puzzles are nice and challenging. The game comes with a level editor as an added bonus.
Just One More Game conducted an interview with Joe for the launch of the game.
Admittedly somewhat of a wry smile, but then I imagine that’s just how you would smile when you’ve just allocated half of your £4.5 million budget on british indie games. Alice Taylor is the Education Commissioner for Channel 4 as that linked interview reports, Channel 4 being a UK TV network already responsible for funding the BAFTA winning web-game Bow Steet Runner, which is a stunning FMV-Adventure style georgian crime drama. And really quite good.
A somewhat worrying figure in the interview is that the scheme will be supporting projects which currently have a budget of up to £800,000. Braid is one of the more recent examples I can think of where a large price-tag was admitted by the author, somewhere around $200,000 dollars, so the idea of helping out £800,000 productions is kind of confusing. The people I think it could help out most are the ones working for a hundreth of that sum, if not less. Still, if there is that much money around and brit-indies are confident in asking far less than that amount in terms of support then I’d be cautiously optimistic for them. Maybe I’m just intimidated by anyone with that much money.
What’re peoples immediate reactions? Are they any british developers who’ll be looking into this as a source of funding?
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.
First of all, Derek Yu’s super popular platformer-roguelike Spelunky has finally reached version 1.0! I’m assuming everyone here has played the game. If not, give it a try already—it’s one of the best freeware titles ever, absolutely.
You can find the latest version here, at Spelunky World.
The other, almost bigger news is: Spelunky will be coming to XBLA in 2010. Derek says, “it’s going to be much more than a straight port of the PC game – I’m planning on stuffing it with new graphics, audio, and other features for XBLA users.” The game will be developed under his new label, Mossmouth. (Support of the original will continue, of course!)
All in all, pretty exciting. Check Spelunky World for more information as it’s released.
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!
So I’m happy to announce that Indie Brawl, one of our two community projects (the other being BMcC’s Balding’s Quest), is seeing a public release today. IB puts many of the virtual heroes of indie games together in a multiplayer fighting extravaganza. This build has three “complete” fighters to choose from (Naija, The Golden Knight from Bonesaw, and Liero) and several WIP ones (The Dwarf, Trilby, Nikujin, Xoda Rap, and Iji).
One of the things that makes me really proud to be a part of the TIGSource community is that our collaborations and projects see fruition. It’s not an easy task to complete a project over the ‘tubes with so many disparate people – it requires a lot of dedication from the community and management on the part of the project leaders. That we have people who are passionate enough to take a “hey, that’s a cool idea!” and turn it into something real is nigh incredible.
Big props to Soulliard, the tireless team leader and programmer, without whom Indie Brawl would not exist. And also to godsavant, Oracle, and Clemens, who put a ton of work into the pixel art. And Josh “TwiTerror” Whelchel for the music. And everyone else who contributed! Hope you enjoy the build! Remember, the project is always looking for more help!
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.
