In addition to the new iPhone 5-compatible ‘battery’ paper above (my old favorite lock-screen image), he’s slightly redesigned the new Noby GIRL image, and made an iPhone 4/4S version of that particular paper available for the first time. You can find all of the wallpapers via his uvula.jp blog, or archived here, below the fold.
Probably not coincidentally timed with this new Gamasutra feature from the studio, or the imminent PC/Mac/Linux debut of their sophomore effort Waking Mars, Austin indies Tiger Style have just announced that their iPhone and iPad debut Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor will be going free for both platforms through November 8th.
The game was one of my final major recommendations in the twilight of Offworld back in 2009, where I called it one of the iPhone’s first “unmissable experiences”. Happily, the game’s lost none of its vitality in the past three years — it’s still one of the device’s best, for its expert mix of casual arcade-like approachability laid over a thoughtful intriguing story that’s only there for those who choose to look for it.
I’ll be entirely up-front enough to admit that I haven’t yet had a chance to fully tuck into its pages, but Everything I Shoot Is Art, the just-published book from Swedish art critic & researcher Mathias Jansson, looks to be well worth your time even at a cursory glance.
An awesomely atmospheric detail — if from a sort of forgotten era — from an upcoming comic by Lamar ‘Neo-Rama‘ Abrams, due to premiere at The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, coming to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church on November 10th.
Hopefully he’ll offer copies of the comic online post-BCGF, but in the meantime, you can support his work by purchasing this super amazing Metroid print via Society6 that I’ve been meaning to grab for months.
Quite on the opposite side of the silly <--> sublime spectrum from GameCity’s Proteus Live revelations, but somehow none less awesome, Punch the Custard was one of the festival’s favorites, and works exactly as the name would have you believe.
Created by George ‘v21‘ Buckenham, the creator of Cubes, A Bastard and co-creator of the Proteus Frog God Mod, the game functions via a simple Arduino controller that completes a circuit when a player stands with one hand on a sheet of tin foil and the other is used to, well, you know, punch the custard — the mixture’s dilatant properties (I did indeed have to wikipedia that) firming the fluid as you strike it.
In practice, it’s a 2-player competitive game where each is racing to punch the custard as many times as possible in 60 seconds, with some good lessons that seem to have been taken from games like Copenhagen Game Collective’s B.U.T.T.O.N., where occasionally the game will ask you to stop punching the custard for a limited time, keeping you from simply going punch-nuts and not paying attention to the game itself.
While the game’s mostly only been played at live events like GameCity and Hide & Seek’s Weekender event in London (where the above video was captured), Buckenham’s provided full instructions and source code for putting together your own custard punching showdowns here, apron not included.
One last holiday-appropriate teaser should round everything out nicely, I think, this time, the lastest trailer for Victoriana horror adventure Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, a semi-sequel to Frictional’s IGF-winning first-person horror Amnesia: The Dark Descent, by most accounts, one of the most successful attempts at indie horror yet produced.
This time the devs are joined by Dear Esther creators thechineseroom, whose contribution to the effort seem to become more clear right at the end of the video at top, but who remain as evasive as ever about actual storyline & gameplay details, only adding that the game takes place 60 years after The Dark Descent with industrialist Oswald Mandus awakening from a nightmare laden coma into the world of the game.
A new ‘All Hallows’ teaser from Bumpy Road & Beat Sneak Bandit creators for Year Walk, their previously-featured Swedish folklore horror adventure, due in the new year for iPhone and iPad.
Simogo have also used the trailer to give a bit more background to the game itself, explaining that the game is a “different kind of first person adventure that blurs the line between two and three dimensions as well as reality and the supernatural.”
They add:
Venture out into the dark woods where strange creatures roam, in a vision quest set in 19th century Sweden. Control and interact with the world, objects and creatures in every way you can think of in your search to bend the rules of the universe and open the rift that separates our world and what lies beyond it.
Mysteries and clues awaits everywhere in Year Walk, but to fully understand the events that took place on that cold New Year’s Eve, players will have to delve deeper than the adventure and lose themselves between fact and fiction.
