Sorry for that. Anyway as you should be aware Eufloria, previously ‘Dyson’, has been released on Steam, D2D and through the official site. If you didn’t know this then I’m afraid you’re simply not cool. However in reading this post you now DO know this, and have automatically been saved from an awkward moment of self-doubt and an accusing glare. It’s fine, no need to thank us, we’re just doing our job. If you really do want to show your gratitude then why not pick your favourite digital distributor and play one of the most elegant strategy titles of recent memory.
If you’re still on the edge, you can also play the demo to find out if nothing else just why we needed to tell you that you could.
I’ve been meaning to mention that the Gratuitous Space Battles beta is open for people who pre-order the game for $19.95. You can follow the development of the game at Cliffski’s blog.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:07:00 GMT
Sean Maher has quit his day job at the age of 35 to make indie games. Dead Panic is his first release—a strategy game where you must position your troops to defend against oncoming hordes of zombies. You can find screens of the game and more information in his post on the forums. It’s never too late to go indie, I say!
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:01:00 GMT
I should have seen this on either Heather or Renaud’s blog, but of course I saw it on Offworld.
Stimergy is a game by Kokoromi’s Heather Kelley and Polytron’s Renaud Bédard (Team EMERGENCY HAMMER), created in under 36 hours for the Bivouac Urbain game jam in Quebec. In the game you must guide ants toward a picnic blanket using attractive and repulsive pheromones. According to Renaud:
“The game was made from scratch in C# 3.0 using the Truevision3D engine with no prior design, graphics or sound work. All the graphics in the game are procedural, and the gameplay itself is based on AI rules, basically a cellular automaton plus the notion of “stigmergy” from the insect world.”
You can find Stimergy here, along with a postmortem and time-lapse video of the creation of the game. And on the forums Renaud was kind enough to post a link to the rest of the Bivouac Urbain games, which includes entries by Anna and Messhof, among others. Pictures of the event can be found here.
Posted by Brandon "BMcC" McCartin
Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:32:00 GMT
You may have seen this reported elsewhere, but “arthouse” game creator Jason Rohrer is hard at work on his first retail release, a turn-based, two-player strategy game for the Nintendo DS “about diamond trading in Angola on the eve of the passage of the Kimberly Process.” This first struck me as a heavy subject for a handheld game, but the fact of the matter is there are countless games about counter-terrorism, war, monsters, death… I’m apparently just a bit desensitized to certain topics!
I asked Jason for more details on the game and he was kind enough to oblige. Pictured above is his paper prototype of the game. He’s still ironing out the design, but he got approved as a developer by Nintendo last week and programming should begin soon. He was reluctant to describe the gameplay itself this early, which is understandable, but he says there are no big surprises here, so all will be revealed before release. Oh, and he’s making every bit of the game himself, right down to the box art.
Here’s a new preview trailer of Positech’s upcoming strategy game, Gratuitous Space Battles. Man, this looks so beautiful. But I can’t help but feel like the opening tagline, “Imagine tower-defense with space fleets,” is doing a bit of disservice to the concept…?
Light of Altair by brothers Tom and Simon de Rivaz (SaintXi) is a strategy space colonization game. In a lot of ways it’s like a simplified Civilization set in a future space-age setting, although not quite in the way that Alpha Centauri was Civilization in space. You set up colonies across several worlds and asteroids at once, gradually building up power, food, colony happiness, defense fleets, your technology level, and expanding and exploring the solar system: each chapter is largely set in a different solar system (although there are some chapters where you have to manage colonies across several solar systems at once). It’s addictive in the way that Civilization was addictive.
I particularly liked how you could zoom in and out so far: zoom in very close to a colony and see all the details, or zoom out and see the star system from afar, fluidly. I also like the designs of the different star systems, it feels like a space game: you can see asteroid belts flying by behind your planet and so on.
Although the level of polish in the game is generally very high for an indie game, there are a few typos (especially the prevalent use of it’s for its), and I felt the story was a bit uninteresting. I also apparently don’t share the developers’ tastes in music. I’d also have liked to see a multiplayer mode (that was a lot of the fun of the Civilization series). Another thing is, I couldn’t help but mentally compare the game to Alpha Centauri (one of my favorite games), and often Light of Altair would remind me of just how good that game was. But it’s still an interesting experience in its own right: you couldn’t rotate the 3D world you just colonized while watching the other planets go by in the background in Sid Meier’s game.
Back in the day, Fallen Angel Industries, or FAIND, was a well-regarded group in the Klik community (the community of people who use Klik n’ Play, The Games Factory, and Multimedia Fusion). They released a number of entertaining and polished titles, including Super Ken Senshi, Factor X, and Siege. Some of their former members include Joakim Sandberg, who released the original Noitu Love under FAIND, and Hamish McLeod, the creator of the now-vaporware War Angels.
Of their games, Tango Strike continues to stand out to me as particularly entertaining and polished. In the game you control a squad of three operatives which you can switch between. Each operative is better at one thing or another. Johnson, for example, is the weapons expert. Miles is good with tools. Vasquez is a woman. You can outfit your squad before each mission and are given a money bonus depending on how well you do in speed, stealth, and teamwork.
The missions, which can get pretty complex, span large maps, and there is some freedom in how you accomplish your various goals, which generally involve rescuing hostages, disarming bombs, and blowing stuff up. But the flavorful briefings and varied locations make it fun to play and see what the next mission is. Which is good, because it’s definitely a pretty challenging game at times.
Speaking of Klik history, the Daily Click recently put up The Click Museum, where you can download a lot of classic Klik games, including Tango Strike! Let me know if anyone still has the RPG Sword of Cobalt. I loved that game. It’d be a shame if it were lost forever.
BREAKING KOTAKU EXCLUSIVE! Natural Selection 2, the sequel to the popular multiplayer Half-Life mod, is slated for a Fall release on Steam, according to its developers. The original game blended FPS and RTS mechanics and featured two very different playable teams – the alien Kharaa and the human Frontiersmen. NS2 will maintain the same basic mechanics, but with some new features (and obviously much prettier). It’s now running on an unnamed proprietary engine, with Valve’s Source engine having been dropped due to the cost of licensing.
This is great news, as the development has been through some rough times, with its creators selling a Sudoku puzzle game to make ends meet at one point.
Swords and Soldiers, the 2d side-scrolling RTS from the creators of de Blob, is now available in Europe and Australia via WiiWare (1000 points), with a U.S. release forthcoming (no date set). In the game you can pick from one of three factions – the Vikings, the Chinese, and the Aztecs – which each have their own unique units, spells, and abilities. The game features a singleplayer mode and an offline multiplayer mode.
I’m not anywhere near a Wii, a Europe, or an Australia, so I can’t tell you how it is, but Edge gave it a favorable review. When comes out here, though, you can bet I’ll be playing as the Chinese! “HERROW!”
