Posted by Lorne Whiting
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:28:00 GMT
Arthur “Mr. Podunkian” Lee released a new The Underside demo into the hungry claws of the indie games community recently.
I personally have nothing but words of cloying praise for the game, I mean, except for the tutorial phase but that’s been talked about enough. But yeah, it’s bitchin’, and obvious that Mr Lee put a lot of love into the game. The demo’s about twice as long as the last, and features such awesome things as beating a turnip launching flower with a baseball bat, and murdering no-good cheats in order to steal their improvised grappling hooks.
Though it’s fairly linear at this moment, all the areas blocked by signs and pig-cops will supposedly be places you can explore later.
Anyway, check it out, it’s pretty goddamn awesome, and the Ruins (pictured) has some super-bitchin’ music.
Nanosmiles has been long overdue for a review on TIGSource, especially since Dong was considerate enough to have it translated by Siiseli from Japanese into English for us. The game pits the player against microbes in an arena shmup with a twist: the unarmed player must collect and guide attack units in order to clear each level of enemies. This gives Nanosmiles a blend of direct and indirect control, and it helped to generate enough innovation within the game for it to have been showcased in last year’s Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show. (In case you didn’t know, the deadline for SOWN 2009 is August 16, and there is no entry fee.)
Overall, Nanosmiles is a well rounded game with enough levels to explore the basics of its gameplay and a challenging final level to cap the experience. The darting nature of the directional controls can be annoying at times, but it’s also fitting.
Edit: Dong recently updated EngRish Games with a post about Exelinya Burst, which is a cartoony Every Extend variant with a grappling claw that is now in English.
Microsoft Research has released Kodu Game Lab to Community Games ($5). It’s a game-making tool with a very high-level iconographic programming language for making simple games using only the Xbox 360 controller as input. Geared towards kids and non-programmers as young as seven, Kodu allows players to modify terrain and preset objects to create games. The games can then be shared to with friends on XBLA.
To get an idea of what Kodu can do, check out this video from CES 2009, or this post on the Kodu blog. Sounds pretty nifty, actually! If only they could somehow combine this with the editors in Spore…
Update:Here’s Rob “Oddbob” Fearon’s take on Kodu. (He really likes it but is worried it will get buried because of the 8-minute-long demo!)
DUX, a new homebrew Dreamcast R-Type-based horizontal shoot ‘em up, is drawing the ire of hardcore shmup players on the Shmups.com forum, in a back-and-forth with the developer that I rubbernecked last night. The main problem, I gather, is that not only were many promised features left out of the final release (like multiple game modes and loops), but the game’s scoring system and continue system are also broken due to a few simple oversights and bad decisions. The creator, one of the members of NG:DEV.TEAM (Last Hope), tries to play down the bugs rather than accept them straightforwardly, drawing further criticism (okay, intense hatred), but also admirably offers up a free patch to people who purchased the game.
Why does this interest me? Well, there is, as Bill of the2bears puts it (source), the obvious “train wreck” factor of watching a developer go head-to-head with the most intense type of video game fans. It’s also not every day that a full-blown Dreamcast production comes out. But what I really found fascinating about all of this was 1. the relationship between the developer and the fans, and 2. the ideas and history behind the shoot ‘em up genre that make its fans enjoy it so intensely in a way that most players don’t understand.
To summarize the points of conflict, scoring is of the utmost importance for a hardcore shoot ‘em up player, and in DUX there is currently a bug which allows the player to “counter-stop,” or max out his or her score, in the first level. Also, by committing suicide, one can abuse the game’s checkpoints and extends to max out their lives and score. The final shmup sin that DUX’s creator committed is forcing the player to continue, which makes it difficult for players who consider continuing to be cheating and are aiming to “1cc” or one-credit the game.
For many people, the whole thing no doubt sounds like a bunch of loser assholes whining about technicalities that 99% of the population wouldn’t give two shits about, and indeed, perhaps given some of the ravings and crude insults hurled at the developer (e.g. “Don’t ever make games again”), there is some truth to that remark. But I think there’s also something fascinating about hardcore shoot ‘em up players, the purity of the genre, and how the improvements made with each generation of games seem incremental and yet appear to make a world of difference to the players who play them. It also brings in to question more generally why people play different types of games – is it for entertainment, challenge, art, completion, or what? For shoot ‘em up players it’s obviously about the challenge as well as the eye and ear-candy.
And finally, yes, the relationship of the developer to the player, of which, like any relationship, the creator is at the ultimate mercy of the consumer, who generally has no interest in the hardship of creation or the feeling of having a work analyzed and criticized. On one hand, this is the way it is and will probably always be, and perhaps this kind of artistic Darwinism is necessary to further the growth of games and art, and the creators, too… on the other hand, I think one of the great things about independent game development is that it blurs the line between creator and player in a way that I believe moves the medium forward (and backward, and side-to-side) in a more positive and proactive way.
As for DUX, the game certainly looks pretty, and if the scoring bug and continues don’t bother you, and you have a Dreamcast, it’s probably worth the $20 for you. Future versions of the game will also hopefully have this bug cleared up.
Zombie Cow just released their sequel to Ben There, Dan That!, [called] Time Gentlemen, Please!. The original was a charming, hilarious, and distinctly British point-and-clicker that paid homage to the classic Lucasarts point-and-click adventure games. The sequel does much the same, carrying on directly from where the previous game left off. This time the graphics have been created in a higher resolution and there are swoony particle effects and stuff, and I’m told there is a full musical score and nearly three times as many sound effects. There are all manner of cunning chronological conundrums and hilarious historical hijinx, and I just made that alliteration up! Not bad!
Alex notes that what he’s played so far seems to be just as funny and even more professional than the original. The full version of the game can be had for a mere $5.
So what do Leisure Suit Larry and Mavis Beacon have in common? What would happen if Custer got his revenge in the middle of the Oregon Trail? Maybe nothing. Maybe a LOT. The choice is yours.
The first-ever TIGSource dualcompo is upon us! The themes are Adult Games and Educational Games, and you can choose to do one or the other… or BOTH! The compo officially starts tomorrow, and you have six flippin’ weeks to come up with an idea and implement it. Start your entry today, before the game burnings begin!
Sex and education – they’re both better when they’re interactive.
Game creators Chris Crawford and Jason Rohrer will be the main focus of the new episode of “Into the Night”, a joint French/German documentary series. The five minute preview above has been released to give you a taste of the full hour-long documentary that will be aired on ‘ZDF’ and ‘ARTE’, both available free on Astra on July 2nd. Not to fear everyone else outside of europe, as according to Play This Thing! who previously posted a flattering preview also announce that there’ll be an online version streamed much like the preview. Hope you’ll all catch it then when it’s released!
Bonus News: Pre-orders for Perfect Suguri on Rockin’ Android have begun, with a special sale price of $16.99 instead of the regular $19.99, which also includes free U.S shipping. They’ve got my money at least, but then again they probably already did…
(Thanks to Jsticker in tigIRC for the Arte.TV news!)
Mobigame’s Edge is available once again on both the US and UK App Stores. I shot David Papazian and the rest of the team an email to ask them if they could explain what happened, exactly, and will update this post if and when I receive a reply. Thankfully, I don’t see a “Used under license” notice anywhere on the site!
While you’re at it, you should check out the entries for the unofficial
Edge a competition for Games Competition
that some members started here on the forums. These games, which were made as parodies and solely for entertainment purposes, are pretty damn funny! Shown above is Edgecrement, an entry by well-regarded independent developers and artists Adam Atomic Burrito Farts, Pootoing, and Brandon McFartin.
After almost four years since its announcement, Greg Costikyan’s Manifesto Games is no more. The online independent games store, which was conceptualized by Costikyan following a particularly heated rant of his at GDC, aimed to provide a distribution channel for indies that was free of the typical publisher/developer bullcrap. (See: The Manifesto Manifesto)
We’ve been generally very critical of Manifesto Games on TIGSource since it went live. Greg’s heart was totally in the right place (and his words most definitely appreciated), but the implementation of his vision was subpar, in my opinion. Ultimately, the site’s selection of games did not reflect its manifesto, and it did not provide what news sites and developers themselves couldn’t do better.
These days there are a variety of distribution channels that take independent games seriously and treat them professionally – Steam, Greenhouse, GamersGate, Direct2Drive, etc. Indie games also receive a lot of promotion from The Independent Games Festival and Summits, which are now mainstays of the Game Developer’s Conference. Some of the developers are making big money from console publishers like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, too. (Castle Crashers just reached 1,000,000 players on XBLA!)
And for free games, artsy games, and general indie game news and criticism, you can’t beat TIGS, IndieGames.com, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Destructoid, and Bytejacker. We’re even hitting the gallery scene thanks to guys like messhof and ArtXGame. Not to mention all the popular forums that are indie-curious. And hell, even Kotaku gets a few INDIE EXCLUSIVES every now and then!
Some of this is touched upon in Costik’s farewell post, although I feel like his outlook is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more gloomy and cautionary than it should be. Things are good right now. They can always be better, but… generally, I think the concept that Costik laid out in 2005 (that we ALL laid out in 2005), has been realized, if not by Manifesto specifically, then by the entire community.
