Traces of Death Race and Cannon Fodder permeate what appears to be a you vs. zombie horde game from the ever-prolific and re-inventive Cactus, and I sincerely hope that map view is showing the blood-smeared/cleared areas where you’ve totally eliminated the threat.
Geekologie is apparently having a hell of a time tracking down the original creator of this pair of very smart wares, and even a TinEye search didn’t help. If you or someone you know can track down the designer, please let us know, as we’d like to help hook them up with a manufacturer toot sweet. [via GamOvr]
I have a favourite new gaming peripheral. It’s 16 bits of mounting card, 48 four-square bits of Lego, the men from 14 games of Ludo, 100 tiddly-winks, three marker pens, some wipe-clean grids, a laptop, 280 pounds of human flesh and a roll of kitchen towel.
This peripheral is otherwise known as ‘playing the board-game prototype of Quarrel with Gary and David from Denki’. Denki you ought to know from the majestic Denki Blocks, and Gary Penn and David Thomson (pictured top, L to R) lead the team there who are currently turning that prototype into the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade version of the same, which you may well have first read about on this fine website.
The most reductive way to explain it is as a cross between Dice Wars and Scrabble: up to four players compete to dominate a map divided into a dozen or so different territories. Each player’s men are randomly scattered in squads across the map, occupying a share of the territories. Each turn, a player can have a squad attack any adjacent territory, triggering a two-player battle – against the clock – to find the highest scoring word within the same eight-letter anagram.
What makes this harder is that the total number of letters you can use is the number of men you have on that territory: so if you’ve had your squad of four attack a neighbouring squad of six, your opponent has two more letters and hundreds of thousands of more potential words to play with. It’s a highly narcotic mix of sleek strategy and good wordplay, as I found out when I spent a very happy day doing a spot of consultancy on it at the Denki studio last week.
But although I was supposed to be spending the day thinking about Quarrel, I ended up spending a lot of it thinking about the value of physical prototyping. On one of my own projects at the moment – a two-player online co-op confection – we’re at the paper prototyping stage. Paper prototyping online co-op, I can exclusively reveal, involves a great deal of running up and down corridors with post-it notes stuck to your chest. So arriving at Denki and discovering they had board-game prototyped Quarrel got me thinking, and rapidly got us playing. (more…)
The best part of the recent Team Fortress 2 Guard Dog class mystery — in which this entirely convincing but not-Valve-hosted website emerged, followed by this official and also amazing TF2 blog post riposte — is that the Valve team have become so adept at both fast community awareness and response and opaque meta-updates that from now on it’s honestly kind of impossible to tell who’s snowjobbing who.
New master of games-related custom shoes Kyozo Kicks returns with his latest Okami-la-den (get it?) sneaks, quite possibly the finest he’s turned out to date. Purchase them, or any other in-stock sets here. [via SuperPunch]
Over forty artists have collaborated for the longest magic mile stretch of re-imagined Mario Kart riders that will ever be produced. Above is a scrap of a detail: see the original via The Autumn Society to get the full scope.
Now basically fully recovered from the week of Indie Insanity that took place during and after this year’s debut GDC Austin Indie Games Summit, I present (below the fold) a longer look inside the Summit with photos courtesy official Offworld photographer Rebekah Saltsman.
As I somewhat made mention of during this year’s main GDC, the Indie Summit is quickly becoming an essential part of the convention, perhaps less so for the material covered (which is still nearly always incisive and inspiring), but for the opportunity to meet the people behind the games, and to experience the deep sense of community that’s taken root and strengthened over the past several years.
In any industry, even outside games, it’s hard to find a quarter so uncompetitive, so supportive, and so bound by a sense of collective creative drive under the quite literal strains of basic survival without otherwise gainful employment, and it’s hard to come away without feeling like it’s something that the world could use more of.
So, all that said, behind the fold you’ll find photos of the people behind nearly all the Indie Summit talks, with more available directly from Saltsman’s official Flickr stream — though none un/fortunately, from our Saturday trip to Austin’s Eagle Peak firing range, where Cortex Command creator Dan Tabar led an expedition to give what must have looked like the motliest of indoor-kid crews their first-ish non-digital/simulated rounds on a variety of handguns and assault rifles. Maybe we’ll save that one for another day. (more…)
Morning chores by uber-prolific illustrator Jessica Bradley (aka Squid Bits), whose Haunted DS was also recently featured on ilikecharacters.
LittleBigRevenge creators Seakitten Collective return with an epic 20 minute movie mashing Left 4 Dead, Mario, Silent Hill, F-Zero, and like just about everything else you can imagine into one low-budget/high-concept live-action Cloverfield horror. Part two below the fold. [via James Kochalka]
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