And speaking of domestic violence, making it the subject of Ludum Dare’s most recent two-day mini-competition should have been asking for very thin-ice type trouble, but out of it came noonat’s flixel-powered Queens, a short (and, in keeping with the theme, appropriately brutal) treatise on patriarchal indifference, and, as auntiepixelante aptly puts it, “the expendability of women”.
Certainly the best of the entries I’ve played thus far, though I haven’t found anyone yet to sit down with me for Don’t Look Back creator Terry Cavanagh’s The Best Years of my Life.
Lego Arcade, by YouTube user MlCHAELHlCKOX, whose Lego/game obsession goes back several years to his original Lego Marios (the first of which is below the fold). [via Morgan Tucker]
(more…)
How do you inoculate against all the underlying domestic horror and tension in Tale of Tales’ coming-of-age game The Path? If you’re Sarah Lomba, you re-imagine all of its key players as adorable, un-corruptible little bears. There’s probably a fairy tale Red Riding Hood/Goldilocks pun in there somewhere, too, but I’ll leave it to your imagination. [via GameSetWatch]
Not to go Jude Buffum overload, but as long as he keeps making them, I’ll keep plugging them, as with this: cover art for We Are Error, an album from game music metal cover band Year 200X, a name which Buffum adds is a pun “only the nerdiest of gamers would understand,” but shouldn’t be too hard to suss out. [via the always reliable alinear]
The most important thing you need to know about Treasure World — the just-released DS game from developer Aspyr — is that it, and by it I mean the actual DS cart that you snap in and execute — is not the game, it is the tool. The game is out there, and by out there I mean the actual away-from-the-internet world, with your DS just the conduit that makes the magic happen.
The second most important thing you need to know is that it is essentially a little bit of magic — which may come as less of a surprise when you remember that it’s the brainchild of Justin Leingang, developer of the recently covered and similarly magical Glum Buster — and one of the best prestidigitations we’ve seen someone conjure for the handheld, or any handheld, to date.
Here’s the storybook premise: a Star Sweep — he’s the beardy one whose facial hair not coincidentally is teased into the shape of a star — crash-lands onto Earth alongside his robo-sidekick the Wish Finder. In order to get the necessary fuel to re-power Halley, his starship, he needs you to help him collect star dust. In return, he’ll trade you some of his vast collection of some 2500+ treasures, 20 star-dust-currency-units at a time.
How do you collect star-dust? By setting the Wish Finder to hunt for treasure by taking your DS out into the wild, where it can scan stars — stars here meaning the thousands of now-ubiquitous Wi-Fi signals that canvas and cloud every major metropolitan city. The DS catalogs every signal it runs across, and will, at times, also find its own special Treasure locked away in that star, above and beyond the ones you can purchase from the Hunter.
That’s the technical explanation: the practical one is where you flip your DS to scan and set out by car/bike/bus and hear it ping and clink like a slot machine jackpot as it wildly grabs signals out of the thin air around you, the Wish Finder’s telescope swinging madly from new star to new star, unlocked treasure chests suddenly flinging open for a split second before moving on to the next. (more…)
I love spam poetry. I horde it and treasure it and dream of one day releasing it as a short anthology and making my fortune, as so many poets do. I got some very fine stuff through the other week, from Haley, who thought I might need some herbal penis enlargement pills and hoped these words might sway me to buy them from her:
Expand tog fab rococo,
Bawd parley meat palpal.
Dense murray glum racer!
Suet doomed horn crunch.
Coop detour confab.
Expand cower parley.
Confab jumpy tamer.
Boon echo whorl top?
Crikey, tamer sanded yule.
Jumpy parley confab.
Tog docile.
I didn’t order, despite her best efforts. If only she’d sent me something more like this, I might have acquiesced:
Angry mailman, great dane, mustang.
Robotic persona. I’m Spartacus!
Get away from me.
Used police car,
sports buffs, million eyes.
Granddad vacation.
Masticating incredibly
gentleman bitchiness.
Maul, give, bump
nitrous oxide, testosterone.
Hollow, sluggish, maggot.
Show biz.
Mannish ukulele demon.
That, though, isn’t spam. It’s level 2 of Typing Of The Dead. And Typing Of The Dead, put simply, is a light-gun game where you type words rather than firing bullets. It’s absurd, of course, and your first instinct is that someone at Smilebit simply raided an English dictionary at random. To ace a ten-zombie challenge, you’ll need to nail the following: abstinence, acrophobia, air kissing, airsick bag, apostrophe, back up!, backbiting, beefy hands, bionic boy, bobbed hair. Random, right?
But soon enough, you’re not fighting with spam, you’re fighting with fleeting little haikus. Arch little combos. Is it really fluke that the game follows ‘Hate the bitch!’ with ‘Which hole?’ Or ‘mixed bathing’ with ‘neurotic mother?’ And then tiny, fragile stories start to appear. Some sad – ‘Paediatrician. Overworked. Disappear.’ Some happy – ‘Lisping. It’s love. Chill out.’ Some down-right disturbing. ‘Limp-wristed. Mr Pervert. Tell your wives. Beat to a pulp.’ A core delight of the game is never quite being sure who’s got the dirty mind – you or it.
It’s little surprise, then, that I love it so much. It’s absurd, it’s funny, it’s got words I actually had to look up in it. It has dirty jokes and knowing little winks to camera. I’d love it without any of those, though. I love it because it’s typing. (more…)
[UPDATE: ngmoco have reversed course on the decision, which, as suspected, was simply intended as a short term experiment:
We did not intend to deprive you of the ability to re-download or update our games. Rather, we had wanted to learn how well Rolando 2 would do at launch without the competition generated by its predecessor. The App Store is an entirely new animal, and we’re always learning what it takes to deliver what you want.
]
The most interesting development of the past weekend: in a post on the Touch Arcade forums, ngmoco very quietly announced that with the July 1st release of Rolando 2 (that’s this Wednesday), the original Rolando will be wiped from the App Store, as ngmoco recently did, even more quietly, with the original Topple (something I didn’t realize until putting together the top 15 game list).
This has, of course, raised a bit of ire with a few sites who justifiably note that part of the App Store’s appeal (as with any digital distribution outlet) is its never-ending/long-tail shelf life. The flip-side of that coin too, though, is one of the Great Gaming Fears of an All Digital Distribution Future: that with no physical copy to packrat away, once the bit-stream is turned off, so goes all your purchases — that, in whatever long, distant future where Valve’s Steam dies, along with it goes all our copies of Portal.
I suspect the chain of events here is considerably less dire, and I presume ngmoco are using this 3.0/Plus+ launch shift to test a theoretical model for the future: when a sequel is released, the publisher can create artificial scarcity and thus artificial demand to wring one last bump from the App Store’s traditional steadily decreasing downramp of sales.
At that point they launch the new game, which sits undistracted by other search query results, and — just as sales of the sequel start to similarly taper — they relaunch the original in a quasi-Greatest Hits line, now with new Plus+’s social features/achievements, and hope to gain a new bump from fans of the sequel who weren’t around for the first.
It’ll be an interesting development to watch, but, in the meantime, consider this your warning that, yes, you’ve only got a day and a half or two to get on the boat for Rolando, and, as always, it’s recommended that you do.
…something… lies beyond the summit of Craig D. Adams’ Kurosawa-inspired in-progress work Alpinist (which is mountain-high on my most anticipated list), as shown at Toronto’s recent Hand Eye Society event.
