HOUSECLEANING: OFFWORLD RSS FEED NO LONGER AN UNINTERRUPTED JUMBLE OF WORDS
Unless it’s my own over-dense prose, that is. As you may or may not have been experiencing, since launch our RSS feed has had a bit of a rough time properly converting line breaks, resulting in a single, near-unreadable mashed-up paragraph.
But no more: our own resident renaissance man Rob has finally kicked out the last of the feed gremlins and restored order, so you can now (re-)subscribe with confidence. Thanks to everyone who stuck that out.
I’ve also been getting an increasing number of emails and anonymous comments that some of you are having problems logging in to leave comments — we’re currently working on issues there and will let you know when those wrinkles have been ironed.
Let me know if you’re experiencing any other issues putting a damper on your stay here via the comments (you know, if you can) or that send-a-tip email at top right.
See more posts about: Meta, Offworld Originals
FIELDRUNNERS, EDGE TOP 2009 IGF MOBILE FINALISTS
In its final spin-off awards announcement, the Independent Games Festival has named its finalists in the IGF Mobile competition, covering the best in games for the DS, mobile phones and, in partnership with oft-blogged publisher ngmoco, the iPhone.
The list, happily, reads like a who’s-who of some of Offworld’s favorites over the past several months (and indeed I took an earlier look at the full list of entrants in December): iPhone tower defense hit Fieldrunners, musical lover’s quarrel art-piece Ruben and Lullaby, Secret Exit’s rope-tied Zen Bound, and recent Offworld favorite cubist platformer Edge.
The Mobile competition this year is offering $30,000 in prize money, and the winners, as with its sister competitions, will be announced at the awards ceremony this March 25th (with a special Mobile conference awards show the night prior) during the 2009 Game Developers Conference.
Hit the jump for the full list of finalists and links to our previous coverage on the entrants. (more…)
See more posts about: IGF, Offworld Originals
LISTEN: PAUSE OFFERS FREE INDIE GAME SOUNDTRACK DOWNLOADS
New musical awesomeness spotted via ‘Dong’s excellent EngRish Games blog: Pause, the “music label and community with a focus on unorthodox forms of 8-bit music yet prone to various other styles,” has started a separate section called +PLUS, dedicated solely to releasing free soundtracks from a variety of indie games.
The five-strong list includes not only ‘Dong’s own soundtrack to his excellent abstract freeware shooter Nanosmiles, but an orchestral album for Studio Eres’ similarly abstract tower defense game Immortal Defense (one of my favorites of the genre), EMH Soft’s Endgame: Singularity, Arue’s Another Bound Neo, and, best of all, Disasterpeace’s short EP for Offworld favorite Rescue: The Beagles.
All are top quality releases well worth a download, as is most of the rest of the Pause catalog, which together should tide you over for a good long while.
+PLUS [Pause, via EngRish Games]
Previously:
Gimme Indie Game: Rescue: The Beagles – Offworld
Listen: 2D Boy's free World of Goo soundtrack – Offworld
Listen: Pixelmod Records' Merry Pixmas Compilation – Offworld
Listen: Bizarre give us 46860 Choices – Offworld
Listen: Leeni's 8-bit kabuki 'Underworld' – Offworld
Listen: The Doyouinvert's 'A Happy New Gear' – Offworld
See more posts about: Listen, Music, Offworld Originals
PIKILIPITA’S ULTRA-HYPNOTIC PLAYSTATION 2, GAME BOY ADVANCE VJ KITS
My shameful admission: I have wasted more time today than I’ll willingly fess up to watching this video on repeat, completely transfixed by nothing more than: pulsing circle, moving checkerboard, strobing Hello Kitty, shifting rainbow bar, strobing Hello Kitty backward, file browser, sunburst heart. And again, and again.
The video is a 2-player live demo of Clément ‘Pikilipita’ Cordier’s PS24VJ, a custom-coded homebrew kit for ‘video jockeys’ to import their own graphics and video via a USB stick, and cut and manipulate from each to each using the standard DualShock controller, and — in the hands of its creator, at least — it’s way more mesmerizing than it should be.
Interestingly, PS24VJ is the third iteration of Cordier’s tools that span back to both a Game Boy Advance version, where you’re limited to his built-in graphics but freed up by its pocket size, and Pikix, a later version for the Linux-based Korean handheld GP2X.
Cordier is selling PS24VJ as donation-ware (contact him with an offer), and custom-flashed GBA carts appear to still be available alongside standalone ROM files (Pikix is available as a free download), and, just as I’d hoped, he notes that he’s eager to work on an iPhone version with networking capabilities for multiple VJs to mix at once.
PS24VJ: VJ software for Playstation 2 [PIKILIPITA, via Digital Tools, the best blog I’ve discovered in weeks]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
SUPER MARIO LAND: THE DRUNKEN EDITION
This is how I picture it: it’s 3:30am and you’ve just got off the express train back to your cramped flat after a long drunken night at a secret Kiiiiiii show or Delaware exhibi+ion, where you down a few more beers to keep the buzz alive, and that’s when your friend, er, ‘Steve’ (apparently) breaks out the Super Game Boy.
Knowing full well that his grasp of English is even more tenuous than yours with Japanese, he gives you the full play-by-play anyway, because he knows that’s what makes it so funny, and it is.
I have to imagine it this way because it’s almost impossible to get your head around otherwise. I still don’t understand why the Goomba broke the house windows to bite the pizza.
Possibly drunk japanese guy rambles over Mario Land (in English) [sp0rsk’s niconico re-upload, same guy/same schtick to Super Ghouls’n Ghosts in Japanese]
Previously:
Revolvingdork's Super Mario Land etched Eee PC – Offworld
See more posts about: Meta, Offworld Originals
CHAMPION OF GUITARS: TEXT ADVENTURE GUITAR HERO GETS REAL
The current management of this rather seedy venue doesn’t much care about appearances, apparently. Nonetheless, it’s become one of the hottest spots in the area, attracting surly alcoholics from all around. A variety of local acts, the vast majority unrelentingly terrible, play here every Tuesday night. Coincidentally, it’s Tuesday night.
A host of unsavory-looking people makes up your audience for the night. They’re all staring at you expectantly.
A fake plastic guitar lies on the ground in front of you.
Bolted to the wall is a television screen, dark and foreboding.
I take back everything I said: moments after after clicking my tongue at the internet for not turning ianwarren’s Guitar Hero 1.0 concept into a playable text adventure, real ultimate hero Bill Meltsner emailed to let me know that his Champion of Guitars is, in fact, playable online.
It’s everything I’d hoped it would be, particularly its wry version of the audience enthusiasm/performance meter, and though I haven’t had the time yet to make it all the way through my first gig, Meltsner says the game does let you play the song to completion. He also hints that there are other audience-related and item manipulation easter eggs that I’ve yet to discover: let us know what you find via the comments below.
Play Champion of Guitars online, or grab his Zcode here for use in any interpreter — create the most fumbly version of an iPhone Rock Band imaginable!
Image via DeGraeve’s IMG2TXT.
See more posts about: Meta, Offworld Originals
METAL GEAR AC!D COMING TO MOBILE PHONES
When Metal Gear makers Kojima Productions threw together their December teaser for a new game in the franchise, speculation ran rampant and hit about every possible outcome, but among the most logical was that the team might port its strategy card-game spinoff Metal Gear Ac!d to the iPhone.
In the end, while Kojima did make a move to the iPhone, it was instead with an original game based on the latest PS3 chapter in the franchise. But, Pocket Gamer are reporting, Ac!d still is going mobile with a new port by mobile games giant Glu, along with a new graphic re-design.
This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise — the franchise recently made a move onto Nokia’s N-Gage service, and a port of Ac!d is probably not too far behind. Whether this also means — based on the performance of fellow iPhone versions of Dance Dance Revolution and Silent Hill — that an iPhone update is on the way as well is anyone’s guess, but its gameplay would be perfectly serviced by a touch interface, and it remains high on our crossed-finger list.
Metal Gear Acid 2 snaking its way toward the mobile [Pocket Gamer]
Previously:
A Metal Gear you can touch – Offworld
Metal Gear's December Surprise – Offworld
See more posts about: N-Gage, Offworld Originals
DSI GETTING MORE DOWNLOADABLE ART STYLE, TETRIS ATTACK
As I mentioned earlier last month, one of the highlights of this Christmas was Nintendo dropping a free 1000 points on every DSi owner as they debuted Japan’s selection of downloadable DS games.
As predicted, I ended up picking up DSi animation app UgokuMemoChou, Utsusu Made in Wario (which I admittedly found a bit incomprehensible [I blame my bedroom’s poor lighting]), and Art Style: Aquario — the latest in developer Skip’s Offworld-favorite series of low-bit art games that’s extended back to the GBA’s bit Generations series as well as onto the Wii. As I’d hoped, Aquario duly delivered on the series’ promise of fantastically obtuse puzzling mixed with gorgeous plinging/acoustic music.
Now Nintendo has revealed the newest batch of DSiWare coming this Wednesday, and Tiny Cartridge does an excellent job rounding up the selection. Again it’s an Art Style game that’s singing its siren song, this time PiCOPiCT (seen above), a curious mix of classic Nintendo imagery and block/pixel puzzling vaguely reminiscent of Konami’s Quarth.
I’m not 100 percent sold on its mechanics: the seemingly staccato rhythm of the first bits looks like it’ll preclude falling into any kind of proper puzzle flow, but the Bowser boss (?) stage at the end seems to make up for it, and, best of all, music’s being provided by effortlessly charming chiptune group YMCK (who, coincidentally, have just released their latest album in Japan, Family Cooking).
Elsewhere, the service is getting a lite versions of Tetris Attack/Planet Puzzle League, and various other puzzle games, Solitaire, a metro/train map pack for a number of Japan’s major cities, and a cheap alarm clock that displays slide shows of your locally stored photos, which you can browse via the link below.
Full DSiWare catalog [Nintendo.jp, via Tiny Cartridge]
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
GIMME INDIE GAME: KONJAK’S LEGEND OF PRINCESS
There’s been one game tearing breakneck across the blogs throughout the day, and it’s for very good reason. Joakim ‘Konjak‘ Sandberg, the indie dev whose creations have consistently hit that sweet spot of “retro with modern processing power,” has dropped PC freeware Legend of Princess, his take on where Legend of Zelda could have gone, “for no reason but being a big damn nerd.”
Like his earlier games, notably his 2008 IGF grand prize finalist Noitu Love 2 [YouTube trailer], a beat-em-up shooter which is almost more Treasure than a good number of that developer’s own games, Princess does Zelda by way of Capcom’s cult action arcade title Magic Sword and the deep-impact of Treasure’s rock-solid melee mechanics [YouTube].
As such, it feels like the parallel-universe Zelda we never got — the game Miyamoto might’ve made if he hadn’t cold-feet reversed his move after sidescrolling with Zelda II, and had given the SNES’s all to an action game. And, to our pleasant surprise, it feels brilliant: Konjak’s interpreted all of the series’ best enemy tactics and the best of Link’s item-bag of tricks to 2D, and topped it off with as memorable a boss fight as has come from Nintendo’s own.
The hitch: it’s not a full game by any means (done “to take a break from having little motivation with Solar Plexus“), but Sandberg’s added depth by making your two secondary items selectable from the start, each set making the game more challenging than the original — expect speed-run videos to invade YouTube in short order.
If you don’t mind spoiling some of its best kept secrets (and for non-PC users burning to have a look), IndieGames’ playthrough video showcases the game well, otherwise grab the game directly here, and give us your best Zora-thrashing tactics via the comments below.
home of stuff by Joakim Sandberg [via IndieGames]
Previously:
Gimme Indie Game: Gravity Bone – Offworld
Gimme Indie Game: Minotaur China Shop, happiness in shattery …
Gimme Indie Game: Daniel Benmergui's I wish I were the Moon – Offworld
Gimme Indie Game: Derek Yu's Spelunky – Offworld
Gimme Indie Game: I Fell In Love With The Majesty Of Colors – Offworld
Gimme Indie Game: Rescue: The Beagles – Offworld
See more posts about: Gimme Indie Game, Offworld Originals
PAC-MAN, THE TEXT ADVENTURE
The air is painfully infused with a whizzing sound as the ghost comes down on
you. The last you feel, are the ghost’s sharp teeth in your neck. As you regain
consciousness you are in the exact place, where you entered the maze first.
Even older (but more playable) than the similar Pac-TXT, but due for a resurgence in this post-Guitar Hero 1.0 world (which to my knowledge still isn’t playable — you disappoint me, internet) is mass:werk’s Pac-Man Dungeons, mixing all the thrills of a breakneck ghost chase with the joy of typing ‘e’ repeatedly.
Pac-Man Dungeons [mass:werk, via InfiniteLives]
Previously:
Guitar Hero 1.0 begging for real-life remake – Offworld
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
