Posted by Alex Macqueen
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:47:00 GMT
“Mouse click on gerbils to shoot them, get scores, youre winning, YOU ARE WINNING FOREVER”
Let’s Win Forever is the latest creation of Amon26, from whom sprang the wonderful Au Sable series and a number of other short, humorous titles. In Let’s Win Forever, the player aims their crosshair at the members of a large crowd of colourful gerbils. Shooting them results in their gaining jetpacks and a seemingly arbitrary number being added to the player’s score. There’s not really any objective or purpose to the game, but that’s okay since it allows you to WIN FOREVER (!). The music is quite brilliant, as always with Amon’s work. If you enjoy this, it’s also worth checking out the more experimental Let’s Win Everything.
Download Let’s Win Forever here; get Amon26 merchandise (including art-books and a CD of Au Sable/AOOFAD) here.
Posted by Alex Macqueen
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:43:00 GMT
Miner Distraction, by Bento Smile, is a game made for Ludum Dare 15, which had the theme of “caverns”. It lasts a mere 5 minutes, and yet it feels like it has entirely fulfilled its purpose by the ending. There is no narrative or sound to speak of; it consists only of its visuals and its gameplay. No enemies are to be found, either; Bento Smile seems to get by very well with only friends, although there are none here. Miner Distraction utilizes the purest aspects of the exploration game in such a way that it is a perfectly serene experience. It opens with the image of a yellow-clad miner inside a cavern with red and black walls. The miner treads carefully through this underground land, and as he walks the walls fade from red to purple to a somber shade of blue. He encounters various imp-like shadows on the walls and castles that were obviously built by these subterranean creatures. The playing area is presented such that it appears to be very non-linear, but with subsequent playthroughs it reveals itself to be non-linear only inasmuch as that several inconsequential details are shown when different paths are followed. The path is self-correcting; if you fall off of a platform, you will reach a lower level that will gradually get higher and take you back to the central path. Beginning with the fiery tinge of the first area, the miner walks and jumps through a lonely underground paradise until he reaches a patch of sunlight; this is the way out, and this is the end.
The colours are quite minimalist and are carefully chosen in order to place the player’s focus on the act of exploration, rather than the particular details of the world. The animations of the miner evoke a sort of calmness in the viewer rather than being overly showy. For the most part, the design of the game means that there is little to no backtracking, although there were at least one or two places where I felt the placing of the platforms was slightly off, not allowing the player to correct their mistakes as easily as elsewhere. Being able to constantly be moving forward is allowed due to the excellent placement of most of the platforms, and thus the player can feel like they are progressing without the need for many visual rewards. The lack of sound can make the game a bit tiresome, but if you’d like some background music, I highly recommend Brother Android’sSpace Hymns. All in all, it is a perfect game for the length of time that it takes to play.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:42:00 GMT
[This is a guest review and interview by Fuzz.]
How does one begin to describe Dildo Tank? Is it a porn game? Is it a brilliant re-invisioning of the side-scrolling shooter? Is it a meditation on the eternal differences between man and woman? A philosophical treatise on stupidity versus wrong-headedness?
Dildo Tank is all of these things and more. The latest collaboration of Jazzuo and Amon26, it opens with an awe-inspiring duet between the two artists, culminating in the final, repeated lyric, “you are weak in the knees”. Here the option is presented to play the game in either normal or censored mode. If you click on censored, the vaginas will be blurred out, as part of an attempt by Jazzuo to make all his games family friendly, regardless of subject matter (see Boobza Sports for US Kids). Proceeding to the first story screen, we learn that a man named Joon has need of our pilot skills in order to help destroy the women with no heads, who are trying to destroy mankind. From here on, the goal is simple: shoot your nude adversaries with poison dildos in order for their vaginas to absorb the harmful chemicals contained within these phallic objects. The implementation, however, is rather difficult, as you will be forced to confront all manner of giant naked women, including ones with spiked boots, laser shooting vaginas, and drills for feet.
Jazzuo’s work may be crude, but it shows a keen eye for design. The stages are carefully constructed to gradually acclimate the player to greater and greater amounts of spikes and enemies. Technique is taught through accidental experience; every player is sure to notice soon enough that the feet of the women should be ridden upon in order to more easily target them and avoid the spikes. One section in particular forces the player to ride a horde of women across a field of lethal spikes, while still attempting to shoot them. The choice has to be made: should I kill the women right away, or allow them to carry me across this spike field? Each new type of enemy is first introduced as a boss, with more health than they would normally have. The whole experience feels as though it was intended to be exactly as it is.
The graphics, while sub-par, are charming, and it is obvious that a fair amount of work went into them. The music perfectly suits the atmosphere of the game and again showcases Amon26’s stellar compositional skills. Jazzuo’s sound effects, entirely composed of his own grunts and squeals, are exceptional. The story is revealed in small portions through intermission text, as the main character’s instant messenger communications with his friends or enemies. I was not able to learn of the conclusions made by the game, as I was incapacitated by a large woman with a metal thong covering her genitals, but what I did see impressed me, as it explored much more than would be expected for a game with such a premise.
The game is available for download here, while the trailer can be viewed here.
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.
