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:
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:59:00 GMT
Here’s a bit of GDC news that slipped through the cracks. The Area 5 guys (formerly The 1UP Show) made an excellent video special on IGF, highlighting a number of indie and student games. You can find the original post here. And if you’re not familiar with Area 5 / CO-OP, check out the rest of the site. They’re uploading excellent videos all the time. It’s good stuff, trust me!
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:49:00 GMT
Just a quick little post—here’s a Super Meat Boy Nintendo Channel Featurette with Tommy and Edmund blabbing about the upcoming WiiWare title, which is promised to be “the most epic game ever, that ever will be.”
UPDATE: Another video I missed, featuring stills of the latest build as well as one of DannyB’s excellent tracks, after the jump!
Rob Cummins did a great interview with Sarinee Achavanuntakul, the founder of Home of the Underdogs, one of the earliest and most important abandonware sites (now defunct but in various stages of unofficial resurrection). Aside from abandonware, HOTUD was one of the first big sites that I remember featuring indie games and developers. I think the modern scene owes her a lot – thanks, Sarinee! And thanks, Rob, for the interview.
Posted by Lorne Whiting
Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:10:00 GMT
I don’t do enough around the site, so here’s an interview with Casey Flynn (AKA Lumin) of Faery Tale Online, a unique browser-based MMO that involves a lot more incest, fratricide, and thievery than its name implies. Some of the main hooks of the game are its unique birth system, coupled with a perma-death system, so player deaths have a lot more weigh than in a normal game, and its lack of premade history, so players create the whole world.
It’s got a lot of focus on role-playing, something I’m not too keen on, but the game’s approach to, well, being a game is too cool for me to not like it, even with the sizable wait just to be born.
Posted by Leigh Christian Ashton
Mon, 11 May 2009 14:18:00 GMT
I’d find it hard to believe anyone visiting these pages would need an introduction to Jonathan Blow, the amazingly talented game developer/guru seems to be everywhere at the moment, his game Braid being the darling hit on Xbox Live and having recently stormed onto the PC. I took the opportunity to fire some questions over so that he could pour some honey into my ears in reply (except, being an email interview, i guess it would be my eyes? and metaphorically at that?)
Anyway, without further ado, please read on..
Leigh: Jon, hello, thanks for taking the time to answer some of my questions. Could you please introduce yourself to the crowd?
Jon: Hi, my name is Jonathan Blow. I make games! I started out in games as mainly a technical guy, but recently I have been thinking ever-more about design, and on Braid I cared much more about the game design than the technical parts.
Posted by Leigh Christian Ashton
Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:48:00 GMT
Following on from our recent interview with Alex May, I contacted his colleague and co-creator of Dyson, Rudolf Kremers to find out his opinions on Indie gaming, the IGF, feature creep and Astro Chickens.
Leigh: Rudolf, hello. For those who don’t know you, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you?
Rudolf: My name is Rudolf Kremers; I was born in Spain, grew up in the Netherlands, and have been a UK resident for nearly ten years. For all that time I have worked in games, at big studios like EA and smaller ones like Curve, and have worked on anything from Harry Potter to Championship manager to Joystick games. Before that I have been making games as an amateur since the 80s, and indulged in most creative disciplines out there. Last year I decided I had enough of traditional development and started my own company ion order to create games independently.
Leigh Ashton, AKA Gravious, recently interviewed his good friend Alex May about Dyson, IGF 2009, and what it’s like to be a part of indiedom.
Leigh: So Alex, for those who don’t know who you are, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your games?
Alex: I’m Alex May. I am fascinated by interactive systems. I currently work in the games industry full time and write the real stuff in my spare time. That’s actually a bit unfair to my current employers. The project I’m on at work is rather fresh, and our own thing by and large. I wrote Cottage of Doom, which won the TIGSource B-Games competition and wrote Dyson along with Rudolf Kremers.
There’s this one which stars a host of TIGers, including the host of TIGers! It was made by 1UP! Downloading it? Good. Now read the next post already! Go Go Go!
Earlier this year the shmup god ZUN, creator of the incredibly popular Touhou series of doujin shoot ‘em ups, was interviewed (YouTube, 8:30 in) on NHK’s The Net Star, a Japanese television show about internet culture. (NHK is Japan’s big public broadcasting network.) So if you ever wanted to see the face of the man behind “Team” Shanghai Alice, here you go. Nice hat!
