PlanetInAction’s web-game Ships obviously skews heavily toward the Flight Simulator X/Densha De Go! niche of the games sphere, and is therefore light on what we might call ‘thrills’ beyond taking in the scenery, but its premise is too keen to ignore: it’s entirely built on top of Google Earth tech, letting you take the wheel of cruise ships (and zeppelins!) and travel along a true to life simulation of the globe.
I’ve noted a few games that use satellite imaging tech to bring in some semblance of realism and recognition to action games — The Last Guy and Square Enix’s 0 Day Attack on Earth, most notably — but this is a much more robust beast, and tech that hopefully will evolve over coming years.
Ships [PlanetInAction, via Google Earth blog]
Attn. all indies: GDC organizers Think Services have just officially announced that this year’s GDC Austin will be including, for the first time, a two-day Independent Gaming Summit similar to the one that’s been gaining big traction at GDC’s conventional convention earlier in the year.
The call for submissions has just opened via GDC Austin’s IGS site, noting that the summit hopes to bring together and “highlight the brightest and the best of indie development, with discussions surrounding business models and methods, promotion and marketing, deep game design techniques and inspirational case studies.”
On a more personal note, I’ve joined IGF Chairman and Gamasutra director Simon Carless, Flashbang’s Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink, and fellow Austinite Adam Saltsman (coincidentally the creator of the just-released Fathom) as one of the Austin IGS’s advisors, and we’ll be banding together over the coming months to make sure there’s many excellent things happening both on-site and off- that week.
The Austin IGS will be held September 15th and 16th, 2009, with the main GDC Austin running through the 18th. More information on the GDC Austin proper can be found here.
GDC Austin Independent Gaming Summit [Think Services, via Gamasutra]
Valve teaches the rest of the industry how best to deal with a PR flub (say, oh, I don’t know, accidentally leaking your own video over the weekend): you own it with class and style by awarding yourself an unlockable achievement, and publicizing your internal HR rampage to hunt down and back stab the person responsible.
Team Fortress 2 [Valve, via Tom]
UK writer Duncan Harris (whose original postcard-pretty set I noted in Offworld’s earliest days) returns to Fallout 3‘s Wasteland six months later and finds dangerous high school girls in trouble, and.. jesus christ.
View his entire set of images here for more from the apparent new master of in-game photography.
Today’s other best Fallout 3 development: Japan’s ‘agoministrator‘ re-imagines the game as a 70s TV drama, with perfect pitch freeze-frame introductions of all its major players. The coup de grâce groupshot at 1:27-1:40 is a little bit mindblowing. [thanks much, Super Punch!]
Created for Kokoromi’s recent Live Game Sounds event I mentioned a few weeks back, Future Boy’s 8-bit Megamix clocks in at nearly two whole hours of chiptune and low-bit excellence from Freezepop to Treewave to Glomag to Anamanaguchi to Goto80 and everyone else you’ve heard of before, and more you will wonder why you hadn’t heard of yet.
Use it as a primer to the scene, use it as your Jetsons treadmill running mix, just don’t not download it immediately. If it weren’t 139 megs large, I’d embed it here.
While you’re there, also grab A Maze of Death, his ‘eclectro-pop’ opera produced in collaboration with Johnny Cashpoint and based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, or his Strange Little World EP (both of which hover somewhere around Atom and His Package meets Magnetic Fields meets Cabel Sasser, when he can be bothered to compose), or any of the extra tracks and more traditional mixtapes he’s posted to his blog.
BLOG.POST[156] – 8-Bit Megamix [Future Boy]
Though progress on bringing Super Meat Boy to WiiWare has slowed Edmund McMillen somewhat on finishing off his “album” of retro inspired mashup games called No Quarter, he’s just posted the latest look at the first of six “tracks” in the game, now called Hitlers Must Die! (though I have to admit I prefer Destroy All Hitlers).
Originally described as ‘Mario + N + Wolfenstein‘, you now get the clearest view as to how that might work: a heavily physically modeled world with the protagonist running, jumping, and, of course, brutally defeating reams of Hitler clones.
It also strongly brings to mind early indie favorite tar-ball platformer Gish, a game which Edmund McMillen helped design, and which he says he’ll be returning to soon, with “awesome Gish 2 news in the next month.”
Like a number of the “less said, the better” indie games in recent months (see also: Gravity Bone, etc.), the best thing Adam ‘Atomic‘ Saltsman’s just-released web game Fathom has going for it is the one secret that it would be a letdown to reveal before you’d even had a chance to play.
Suffice it to say: there’s considerable serenity packed deep within its outwardly militant core (a core guarded by, as you’ll see, this decade’s best flower-pot-security-bots), and a disquieting ending that its creator assures me shouldn’t sink my heart as much as it does.
If Saltsman’s name rings a bell it’s because — along with collaborators Infinite Ammo and Flashbang — he had a hand in designing recent Blurst release Paper Moon, as well as physics grappler Gravity Hook, the recently mentioned Dr. Dobbs promotional game, and the iPhone’s original word game best-seller Wurdle.
Saltsman’s pixels are effortlessly charming, his underlying concept — once you “get it” — is genuinely quite brilliant (here’s a hint, if you find yourself a little lost in the dark: the things around you? They’re trying to tell you something), and the game’s chiptune-prog score by Danny ‘dB Soundworks‘ Baranowsky (previously featured for his work on Flashbang’s Blush) works perfectly in concert with the rest to make a fantastic, thoughtful short-story of a game.
As a bonus, Saltsman and dB have given Offworld an exclusive track from Fathom‘s soundtrack, “Boss of Doooooom”, which you’ll recognize from the struggle pictured above. Stream it below, or download directly here.
[mejsaudio src=”http://venuspatrol.com/ofiles/danny_B_-_Fathom_-_Boss_of_Doooooom.mp3″]
Fathom [Adam Atomic, dB Soundworks]
Just for those that hadn’t seen: over the weekend, Valve released its official SDK/authoring tools to “create your own campaign maps, character skins, 3D models, sound effects, and music” for ever-green fave Left 4 Dead, which I mention here because if someone could make us the perfect 70s suburban shopping mall, I would be eternally indebted.
Authoring Tools/SDK (Left 4 Dead) [Valve, via shacknews]
Spotted in this week’s batch of Threadless updates: designer Ian Summers suggests that Mario’s mushroom supply might not always have come from question-mark blocks…
Magic Mushrooms [Threadless]
