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!
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.
TIGJam 2, follow-up to last year’s extra awesome TIGJam in Phoenix, is coming up fast! October 9th—October 11th are the dates, homies. Reservations will begin soon.
Watch TIGJam.com for more information as it’s released!
(There’s also a forum thread here, if you have any questions.)
Here’s a preview of Minecraft’s Survival Mode, which paid customers will get to try out in a week’s time (September 1st). A lot has been added since we first posted about the game, like swimming cave pigs. That’s right, swimming cave pigs. And they have a taste for flesh, but only if it comes in a Hot Pocket.
Anyway, read more about the upcoming release here.
If there is one game type that I love, it’s a free-roaming space sim. Games like Elite or Freelancer come to mind, where the player has the freedom to explore a universe unbounded, to etch out a living through trading, piracy, transportation, and even mining asteroid fields.
As much as I enjoy playing the miner route in these games, the experiences is hardly ever more than a 3D Asteroids clone, where you continually shoot spinning rocks into smaller and smaller chunks. I always wanted a game with a more detailed mining simulation; similar to the suddenly popular games Infiniminer or Minecraft.
Seems like Miner Wars is gonna be my kind of game.
Inspired by games like 1991’s Tunneler, where players dug tunnels to infiltrate their enemies base, and Descent, where they flew spaceships through cramped tunnels, Miner Wars allows players to dig their way through massive asteroids in an effort to uncover precious ores and investigate alien artifacts.
Don’t be afraid you’ll roam the stars alone though, Miner Wars is an MMO. Players will be able to join guilds and work together. Will your team mine ore from the kilometer-wide asteroids? or perhaps you will lie in ambush and snatch the ore out of the hands of another hard-working miner. You are free to make your living as you please, and there is a main plot to entertain you along the way, which will evolve with future game updates.
I talked briefly with Marek Rosa, Miner Wars Game Director, about this interesting project. “The player has several factions to choose from, and this choice determines who is his friend or enemy,” explains Rosa. “This faction’s bases also act as respawn locations for the player, and he can return to these bases to upgrade his ship with new weapons, engines, shields, etc.” I was told that currently there are ten ship-types for the player to choose from, varying in things like size, cargo capacity, armaments and power.
The factions also provide NPCs for the players to interact with, and Rosa gave a few examples of missions the player might receive, “It may be rescue, fighting, exploration, mining and harvesting ore, patrolling space, stealth missions or something else entirely.” Fighting will no doubt occur between players, and faction control of various sections of asteroid field will likely be one of the driving forces in the evolution of the game’s universe. “If you dig a tunnel, and the leave and go across the universe, another player can still come across your tunnel,” said Rosa. Every interaction you have with the physical world of the game will leave a permanent effect.
Although Miner Wars has an infinite world, with asteroid fields scattered forever in every direction, players don’t need to worry about flying for hours just to complete a mission. Rosa explained that players can travel instantaneously between various ‘transportation ships,’ which will be spread throughout the game’s universe. That’s not to say that players can’t strike out on their own though, and explore the places between these transport hubs. In fact, it’s this kind of exploration that will allow the player to discover alien artifacts among the asteroids, which can be collected and sold for a high profit.
The current distribution plan for Miner Wars is a release for PC in August, with updates and expansions of the game’s story and world expected to come every few months. Shortly after the PC release, it’s planned that Miner Wars will be coming to XBLA, and there are even whisperings of a 2D version headed to handheld devices like iPhone…
Minecraft is a first-person building/digging game that is based on another game called Infiniminer, except that it’s prettier to look at and is playable in a browser using Java. In the game you can move around and add/remove various blocks, and that’s about it… fortunately, that’s all you really need to be able to do to have a fantastic time with it.
The creator, Notch, recently implemented a multiplayer mode, which makes the game even more enjoyable. I entered a public server where one guy was building a giant tower and two other players were helping each other with a stairway into the sky, where there were floating platforms all over the place. Someone else was asking for help repairing a road. I spent some time wandering around and eventually decided to build a Moai-like statue with a secret passage behind it that took you to an underground lake. It was pretty neat.
Minecraft is free-to-play right now, but will not be for much longer (10 euros or roughly $14 USD for pre-order). Development is moving quickly – I’ve heard of plans to implement everything from monsters and Dwarf Fortress-type features to various competitive multiplayer game modes like Capture-the-Flag. But for the moment it’s just a single-player and (mostly) cooperative sandbox. Also there’s no sound or music. But you know what, I rather like how tranquil it all feels right now…
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:50:00 GMT
[Guest announcement by jstckr]
Sometimes it’s hard being European. There’s Japan to the East, obscured in a haze of gigantic robots, explosions and awesome flu mask fashion accessories. To the west lie the expanses of America, presided over by the regal Derek Yu and guarded always by the mighty fists of David Whitlark. What do we have to show for ourselves? Countless failed empires, some french guy riding a bicycle with a baguette under his arm, and questionable musical adventures like Eurodance.
Well, Europe, your fortunes are about to change. It’s time to stand up and be counted. We give you…
This summer, from Friday, July 31st to Monday, August 3rd, an indie game jam will be taking place in the lovely city of Berlin, Germany. Cunningly titled the Berlin Indie Game Jam, it offers the opportunity to meet a bunch of awesome, like-minded people and work together with them on some cool games, as well as participate in a smattering of events such as 3-hour game development competitions.
We’ll be kicking back on the second floor of the lovely St. Oberholz café. The café not only guarantees a smooth atmosphere to jam and work in, but also offers an assortment of beverages and tasty foodstuffs to help you ward off death by starvation or thirst.
Tickets are limited, and cost 5 Euro each. More information about the jam and further discussion can be found here.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 23:16:00 GMT
[This is a guest review by Duckmeister.]
GeneRally is a top-down, offline multiplayer racing game by Hannu and Jukka Räbinä that would remind one of Micro Machines. You can play with up to 5 other players, either human or AI, and drive until you cannot drive any longer. At the surface, it’s just that simple, a couple of guys sitting around the computer playing a straight-forward racing game. But once you look deeper, you start to see all the work that was put into it.
I’ll show you a glimpse at some of the features in this game. There are changeable difficulty levels for the AI players. Extremely customizable driver profiles, with custom colors, controls, and full statistics. 50+ tracks and 8 cars, plus thousands of community-made tracks and cars. Semi-realistic physics. An extremely detailed track and car editor. Ghost car (for time trials)! Full mod support! Changeable timescales! Completely customizable race conditions, like how much a full tank of fuel weighs, or how fast the tires wear off and the fuel burns up. That’s right, for such a minimalistic racing game, there are pit crews and pit stops! The list goes on and on…
Basically, GeneRally is everything you want in an arcade racing game and more. If you like Micro Machines, or just fun games in general, you’ll like GeneRally. It’s got features you’d never expect in a minimalistic racing game (like pit crews), full statistics, and some of the best and smoothest offline multiplayer I’ve seen. As a bonus, the full mod support, with the very much alive community means the replay value is endless.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:40:00 GMT
[This is a guest review by ForTheUSSR, who first encountered the game on a CD called 300 Arcade Games.]
XEvil is a fun, free, ultra-violent, 2D side-scrolling deathmatch arena. It was developed by, believe it or not, an M.I.T. student named Steve Hardt (it’s freeware and open source). Released in 1994, it runs on Windows, Linux, and Unix platforms. You can play as many different characters (including a soldier, ninja, alien, robot, and several others) in a variety of game modes. You have your run-of-the-mill elimination mode, team deathmatch, and even a campaign mode. Also, the levels are randomly generated. Each character has unique abilities (ninjas can crawl on walls), but there are weapons and items that all the characters can use (like a pistol, laser, and my personal favorite: the chainsaw).
You can play by yourself against computer opponents, but the best part of this game is, in my opinion, the ability to play networked multiplayer. You have to manually type IP addresses, and I had some problems with this at first (if you’re not sure which IP you should tell others to type, use ipconfig in a DOS prompt). Once you get it working, it’s really addicting. The cooperative campaign mode is a fun challenge, and you get a short title after you die depending on how well you played (e.g. Hell’s Gatekeeper). You can play against bots in team deathmatch or just have a free-for all with your friends.
There are several things that I think make this game fun. The plot, characters, sound effects, and backgrounds are ridiculous and somewhat humorous (There are signs in the backgrounds saying things like “Strangle Your Pets”). The variety of items ensures that the game doesn’t get too repetitive, and lets you develop strategies. And nothing, NOTHING, beats co-op games (unless you can’t find anyone to play with).
At times the game is a little buggy, and the AI isn’t very intelligent. In addition, the control scheme takes some getting used to. But none of that seems to matter when you’re chainsawing your way through a screaming cluster of aliens, robots, ninjas, and Flying Burger King Guys while high on PCP. And the best part is, you don’t need a fancy computer to play it. If you have some cruddy old PC and a bored friend, just hook it up to your network and play away.
Anyways, check it out if you’re in the mood for some fast-paced, old-school action. You might get a kick out of the website, too. Especially the character page (look under the Characters and Weapons tab).
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.
