And the last good indie-get of the day: TIGSource’s fellow-Brandon McCartin uses the hard-nose journalistic tactic of, err, asking nicely, and scores the image at right (which, click through to see the actual full version, since he deserves all credit here): the paper prototype of Passage creator Jason Rohrer’s newly revealed conflict diamond DS game.
Rohrer doesn’t give away much with the chickpea, penny, and Go-stone prototype: you can see dueling maps of Angola (where, curiously, a new study of their mining operations has just yesterday been released), and, get hints of presumably, a struggle for both resources and territorial control.
In the meantime, Rohrer has been posting some frankly fantastic reading on the history and marketing of diamonds (specifically, artificially inflating perceptions of rarity/scarcity and therefore value, and concocting wholesale the image of diamonds as the ultimate symbol of marriage), all of which isn’t required reading to understand the game, but has surely colored my perceptions toward it for the better.
I’ve watched this video a few times over — the first look at Edmund McMillen, William Good and Justin Karpel’s Time Ufck, described now as “a game about perspective, growth and self reflection” — and I’ve still got frustratingly little idea of how it’s all going to work.
Previously hinted at as being “about finding logic in irrelevance, it’s a 1+1=2 formula that will ask more from you after you leave it alone, it’s a community experience about communication with people who you don’t like,” its actual underlying mechanics seem traditional enough, with traces of gravity and possibly color-layer switching.
But what rings through clearly is the perfect pixel pathos of its star, and that single “I think I’m in the same room as you, can you see me?” line at 00:20 is haunting me more than it should be. As per the video, the game is due for release on September the first.
It’s been a good day for early looks at indie games that have been a bit off the radar, and next is Mutatione, the adventure game from Nils ‘Die Gute Fabrik‘ Deneken, whose original concept image (embedded again below) surprisingly but rightly received a lot of positive attention on its first posting.
While there’s still not much more to glean from the image above, Deneken leaves the following comments on the game, and is very much precisely speaking my language with its outside inspirations, and introduces its new heroine:
The game mechanics remind me a lot of the 2D Prince of Persia, Flashback or the polygon classic Another World. I just love those games. Anyways, for Mutatione we try to have a stronger focus on the story and the mood of the game, especially when it comes to sound and music.
The team, now six-strong and already plugging away for the past two months, is looking for more funding for future development — Deneken will only say that much of the “development speed of the game” rests solely on that, and that he “hopes to work on Mutatione a lot more…”
So I was apparently, and embarrassingly, wrong on two counts: first in originally presuming that Taito’s next iPhone game teaser was meant to be Bubble, not Puzzle, Bobble, and second, in assuming that when Puzzle Bobble did inevitably arrive, that it’d come in tilt-to-aim form.
I suppose the latter hasn’t necessarily been entirely disproven yet, but above, Taito shows off the first video of the game and its first two control schemes, a Must Eat Birds-ish slingshot mode, and a somewhat more precise tap-to-aim, tap-to-fire mode.
Still no word on how far away the app is from submission, but it’s thus far looking like a quietly essential take on a long-running classic.
Say what you will about all the advances and unique opportunities iPhone gaming has brought with it — indie dev accessibility, previously unimagined levels of direct touch-control — but one area that’s still essentially untread is story: an engrossing narrative behind all our quick-burst prods, flicks and pokes.
At first glance, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [App Store link] — the debut game from Tiger Style, a collective co-founded by former Thief designer Randy Smith and Midway/Ubisoft/Ion Storm developer David Kalina — follows suit. But just first glance.
At its core, Spider is the game you’d expect from any led by an arachnid star. As you start your micro-epic journey through the titular Manor — one that takes you from its front porch, though its foyer, down into the bowels of its plumbing and up, finally, through its attic and out — you’ll be doing what it is spiders do: ridding the long-since abandoned house of its insect infestation by building cohesive shapes out of your finger-flicked threads.
Three or more interconnected silk strings linked around — or in the path of — the bugs will snap a web into place, where they’ll be caught and ready to be eaten and converted into more silk in your bank to spin further webs.
Taken just on this level, the game’s an absolute success: Tiger Style have managed to make simply moving through and exploring its environment fun in and of itself, and to make a rewarding skill out of building tight, precise shapes from the hooks each room gives (or denies) you.
But it’s in the course of this very simple pleasure that you — if you’re paying attention, anyway — begin to realize that the house was abandoned perhaps more quickly than you’d originally thought, and that its inhabitants left behind the story of a lifetime, literally: clues to who they were through the generations, and why, perhaps, they left. (more…)
This picture (and its accompanying YouTube slideshow) is making heavy rotation via technabob, my guess is because we’re all still nostalgic for this time where a theme park license didn’t mean some whiz-bang video-ride production, and was instead just a place to clambor and a games fantasy come to life. I know for a fact that six-year-old-me (as is glaringly obvious from the photo) would have been all over this.
Released as part of Yewknee’s ongoing Summer Mix Series — which opened up the floor for anyone to curate and upload their own MP3 mixtape (I still have yet to make my own, though you do have me to thank for the Pavement song on the Texas-themed tape) — Josh Stafford’s Songs To Frag By is most notable for not going the easy route and solely mixing in chiptunes/converted NES soundtracks.
A few of those are, of course, represented (see: the requisite YMCK), but Stafford did an excellent job of digging up songs from the game/music periphery, starting all the way back with Buckner & Garcia’s Do The Donkey Kong (the lesser-heard sibling of early 80s standby Pac-Man Fever), to the Mega Man rock-opera-concepts of The Protomen, to Del the Funky Homosapien’s name dropping hip-hop “classic” Proto Culture, to the open and closer tracks from Offworld favorite Mario-remaking one-man-band XOC.
The full tracklist:
01 Super Mario World Course Clear – XOC
02 Bit Rate Variations in B-Flat (Girl) – Beck
03 Super Mario Land (Radio Version) – Ambassadors of Funk feat. M.C. Mario
04 Mega Man 2 (Title Theme) – Year 200X
05 II B Unrest In the House of Light – The Protomen
06 Do the Donkey Kong – Buckner & Garcia
07 Technology Boy – Bachelorette
08 Sabita Tobirano Daihachi Tengoku – YMCK
09 Punch em Out – Swell +N remixes
10 Where’s My F_ing Genesis – Charles Hamilton
11 Khaos Unique Proto Culture – Del The Funky Homosapien
12 The Legend of Zelda Tribute – Swell Session vs Koji Kondo
13 Tetris – Powerglove
14 Super Mario World Death Game Over – XOC
If not the best games-related mixtape made, it’s at least one of the most novel. [via Yewknee]
Not the soundtrack itself, mind, but Double Fine music director Emily Ridgway reading the hundred-plus list of included songs representing Brütal Legend‘s who’s-who of heavy metal, from 3 Inches of Blood to Wrath of Killenstein.
My favorite addition? Two tracks from Anvil, who, if you’ve seen the recently released documentary (and if you haven’t, do so soon), you know are basically just about the nicest people on earth and who entirely deserve to have a few extra minutes to shine here.
The entire track list is included behind the jump.
And so it begins: above is the first public entry into the previously covered Mario AI contest, with Robin Baumgarten’s A*-enhanced run, which pulls off a major coup halfway through when it walljumps out of a pit (he explains: “In this version of Mario, when you’re jumping while sliding on a wall, you jump backwards and upwards away from it”).
