With less than 48 hours remaining on his Kickstarter campaign, London designer Darren ‘Wallzo‘ Wall has just put together the above awesome pixel-animation to remind people that the time is nigh to order a copy of his Swiss-minimal ‘definitive biography’ of foundational UK indies Sensible Software, featuring a guest appearance by company co-founder Jon Hare.
If you missed it the first time around, the previously-featured campaign — which has since managed to get the necessary funding to move forward — includes backer rewards starting from a copy of the limited-run book itself serving as a visual history of the Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder developers, as well as a 12-inch EP featuring studio recordings of songs from the above. See more about all of the above at the project’s Kickstarter page.
If you find yourself with a 841×594mm space on your wall that needs filling, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive fan site megadrive.me has just released an ultra limited hand-screened print that pays minimalist homage to the system, designed by Dan ‘everythingyoutouch‘ Clarke (who I’ve had a secret design-crush on since 2010).
One of the iPad games I’ve been dying to get my hands on for nearly a year now, Semi-Secret’s Hundreds has officially been announced with this awesomely designed new website, following a quick blip appearance during last year’s IGF (where it managed to land an honorable mention in the mobile category).
Based on an original concept from Solipskier and Gasketball designer Greg Wohlwend, Canabalt & Capsule developer Adam Saltsman has been vastly expanding on the concept, and the pair have brought in Scott Morgan, better known as local-favorite ambient musician Loscil (who you also heard contributing tracks for Osmos), turning an ultra-minimalist design into a gorgeously & mysteriously presented package.
The conceit is as simple as it can be: flat-colored circles slowly meander across the single-screen stages, harmlessly bouncing off one other, each with a digit in its center. Touching each circle inflates it, and each stage is complete when the added total of all digits equals 100.
The trick? No circle can touch another while it’s being inflated, meaning you’re forced to find perfectly timed moments to inflate when there’s no danger of a collision, something that’s clearly harder to do as the circles grow larger.
You can try a very early concept of the game Wohlwend submitted in 2010 at Newgrounds, but bear in mind that the game’s grown a hundred times more complex in the two years since, with Saltsman adding some truly devious wrenches into the works, as well as a layer of opaqueness that hints at a deeper narrative happening within the game, as seen above.
The game’s making its public debut at IndieCade this weekend — LA locals should make a beeline to it in anticipation of its release in coming months.
My original writeup on Teknopants’ brilliant upcoming brawler Samurai Gunn managed to drum up quite a bit of the attention it so richly deserves, with a number of people commenting that they very much wanted more video. And so, presented here is ten-ish more minutes of the other matches held at the game’s first ever official tournament at this year’s Fantastic Arcade.
Above you can see how the action expands as the number of players increases to three, with some more 2-4 player matches included below the fold. As before, click the ‘gear’ at the bottom of the player to up the resolution to 720 or 1080p for the best pixel clarity, and enjoy the ongoing commentary by Karakasa Games‘ Wiley Wiggins & Vlambeer‘s Rami Ismail.
Officially — and easily — the best thing I’ve played today, from seemingly out of nowhere comes Guilded Youth, from writer and designer Jim Munroe and illustrator Matt Hammill (known best for his gorgeously illustrated puzzler Gesundheit). Originally conceived of at Toronto’s TOJam, Youth is another in Munroe’s series of interactive-fiction-plus type games that combine text-adventure tradition with illustrated & sound enhancements, like his excellent & understated 2008 suburban adventure Everybody Dies.
Guided Youth is brief enough that delving too far into its story & structure would give away the ghost, so suffice it to say that it’s one of the most evocative portrayals of our collective disaffected BBS-enhanced adolescence I’ve experience in a game, effortlessly giving surprisingly rounded life to characters you only know briefly via a few descriptive lines and Hammill’s skilled caricature.
This Friday, Philadelphia art gallery Little Berlin will be hosting the opening of their Punk Arcade exhibition, a new “alternative arcade” initiative meant to travel and expose a number of locales to the new underground of indie game creators.
In addition to the arcade opening, starting Friday, October 5th, from 6PM to midnight at Little Berlin’s 2430 Coral Street location (continuing each subsequent Saturday to the end of the month), the gallery will also be hosting a Glorious Trainwrecks workshop on October 20th from 2-4PM, where attendees can make their first games in under two hours using MIT’s game-maker Scratch.
Now in its second year, the GameCity Prize is meant to do for the videogame world what British institution Tate does for the art world with their Turner Prize, by choosing a shortlist of “the most brilliant, interesting and meaningful” games from the prior year and having them judged by “cultural commentators” from outside the games industry — to give the broader world a perspective on what’s happening in games somewhat underneath the surface.
This year, the just-announced shortlist includes a number of familiar faces, including Polytron’s Fez, Ed Key & David Kanaga’s Proteus (at top), thatgamecompany’s Journey (above), and Die Gute Fabrik’s Johann Sebastian Joust, up alongside more mainstream entries like Catherine, Super Mario 3D Land, and Mass Effect 3.
This year the top prize will be chosen from the list by a jury chaired by the film maker Lord Puttnam and including Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway, comic artist David Gibbons, UK designer Wayne Hemingway, BBC journalist Samira Ahmed, writer Ekow Eshun, actress Louise Brealey, actor Charlie Higson and BBC Radio DJ Jo Whiley.
Coming the same day as Nicalis has released a revamped downloadable Nintendo 3DS version of Pixel’s indie classic Cave Story (now, honestly, the most essential version of the game, don’t hesitate to pick it up), Nintendo has kept the good news rolling with a breakdown of the games coming to the 3DS’s e-Shop throughout the rest of the year.
Most notable among them is NightSky, the ambient dream-like platformer from Knytt creator Nifflas, long-loved around these parts. The game will be published, like Cave Story, by Nicalis, and is due for release in just three weeks time.
Nintendo has also, somewhat surprisingly, announced that the three of the four minigames known collectively as Guild01 will be released separately as individual downloads, one per month, much in the same way that they broke up Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton into its constituant pieces.
Originally released in Japan this past Spring as a retail cartridge, the Guild01 collection contains minigames created by a number of big-name designers: Killer7 & No More Heroes producer Suda 51 has contributed the shooter Liberation Maiden, SimTower & Seaman creator has put together the luggage-sorter Aero Porter, and Yasumi Matsuno — best known as a designer on Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story has created the RPG “short story” Crimson Shroud.
Missing from the bunch, somewhat unfortunately, is Omasse’s Rental Weapon Shop from comedian Yoshiyuki Hirai: a rhythm-forger meant to tell the side-story of all the weapon shop owners you encounter in any given RPG.
The games will be joining 3D puzzler Pushmo sequel Crashmo, Virtual Console releases of Zelda II, Wario Land II and Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels as well as demos of WayForward’s Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why’d you steal our garbage?!! throughout October, November & December.
