ONE SHOT: STREETPONG, THE FIRST
A gorgeous night shot by one of indie gaming’s leading renaissance men, Vincent Diamante (also: thatgamecompany’s Cloud and Flower composer), used to illustrate Chris Dahlen’s similarly wonderful Edge piece on Diamante’s own Mobile Gamer 1: a street-ready version of Pong that you play by physically rolling the cabinet on its casters.
See more posts about: Arcade, Offworld Originals, One Shot, pong
INSIDE THE BLACK BOX: SKATE 2 TEAM’S TOP 10 USER VIDEOS
I don’t have much to add to this highlight reel of Skate 2 dev EA Black Box’s favorite user-created videos, other than it works better with the sound turned down, the number one video is as amazing as it ever was, and I’ve been neglecting to return to this game for far too long.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Xbox 360
GOOFEBERRY VINEGAR: TEAM FORTRESS 2 UPDATE ADDS NO CLASS
The latest round of updates for Team Fortress 2 have just started to leak from Valve HQ, and they’re more interesting than first meets the eye. Though they’ve made public their promise to keep this update classless — that is, not updating mechanics for individual classes, instead focusing on bringing a new community-built map and, err, a collection of hats, to each — it’s the hidden updates that are the most intriguing.
Spread across four pages, the gentlemanly updates tease with turn-of-the-century ads and excerpts on child labor, ‘enigmatical’ zeppelins, social divides based on hat ownership, and pugilistic hat bartering.
Your guess truly is as good as mine, and I’m interested to hear what those guesses might be: already it’s being bandied, based on the last of those pages, that hats could be rewards for pre-game bets on the outcome, but the rest are coming up truly blank.
Previously:
- One shot: the Dynamic Tension of Team Fortress 2's Sniper update …
- Here come 'da Scout: Valve unveiling new abilities for Team …
- Team Fortress Tees: the Sniper and the Spy
- Red vs. Blue: Valve's latest Team Fortress master-short, Meet the …
- Shadowplay: SaltyandSweet's Team Fortress mobile
- One shot: Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, 'naut-i-cized
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
ONE SHOT: A MUSHROOM KINGDOM HIT AND RUN
Speed kills, red Koopa shells kill with impunity: a Threadless T-shirt (available in very low stock) by Brock Davis, whose work I’d coincidentally just found via this fantastic glow-in-the-dark gag shirt a few days before.
Previously:
See more posts about: Fashion, Offworld Originals, One Shot
ONE SHOT: 9 0 0 0, THE MOTIVATIONAL NINJA EDITION
The latest in resident favorite artist 9 0 0 0’s rustic pixels, with a meditation on goal-reaching from Ninja Gaiden‘s Ryu Hayabusa. 9 0 0 0’s alluded to his main flickr gallery being cut short in the near future, though a donated Pro account may have delayed that decision: either way, it may be time to privately archive your favorite of his Plan 9.002 updates, though stealing them to sell low-res prints on eBay is obviously strongly discouraged.
Previously:
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, One Shot
BLOOD CHICKPEAS: THE PAPER PROTOTYPE OF JASON ROHRER’S CONFLICT DIAMOND DS GAME
And the last good indie-get of the day: TIGSource’s fellow-Brandon McCartin uses the hard-nose journalistic tactic of, err, asking nicely, and scores the image at right (which, click through to see the actual full version, since he deserves all credit here): the paper prototype of Passage creator Jason Rohrer’s newly revealed conflict diamond DS game.
Rohrer doesn’t give away much with the chickpea, penny, and Go-stone prototype: you can see dueling maps of Angola (where, curiously, a new study of their mining operations has just yesterday been released), and, get hints of presumably, a struggle for both resources and territorial control.
In the meantime, Rohrer has been posting some frankly fantastic reading on the history and marketing of diamonds (specifically, artificially inflating perceptions of rarity/scarcity and therefore value, and concocting wholesale the image of diamonds as the ultimate symbol of marriage), all of which isn’t required reading to understand the game, but has surely colored my perceptions toward it for the better.
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PATHOS PUZZLER: THE FIRST LOOK AT EDMUND MCMILLEN’S TIME UFCK
I’ve watched this video a few times over — the first look at Edmund McMillen, William Good and Justin Karpel’s Time Ufck, described now as “a game about perspective, growth and self reflection” — and I’ve still got frustratingly little idea of how it’s all going to work.
Previously hinted at as being “about finding logic in irrelevance, it’s a 1+1=2 formula that will ask more from you after you leave it alone, it’s a community experience about communication with people who you don’t like,” its actual underlying mechanics seem traditional enough, with traces of gravity and possibly color-layer switching.
But what rings through clearly is the perfect pixel pathos of its star, and that single “I think I’m in the same room as you, can you see me?” line at 00:20 is haunting me more than it should be. As per the video, the game is due for release on September the first.
See more posts about: Offworld Originals
RED 7: THE FIRST PROTOTYPE SCREENSHOT OF DIE GUTE FABRIK’S SWAMP-OPERA MUTATIONE
It’s been a good day for early looks at indie games that have been a bit off the radar, and next is Mutatione, the adventure game from Nils ‘Die Gute Fabrik‘ Deneken, whose original concept image (embedded again below) surprisingly but rightly received a lot of positive attention on its first posting.
While there’s still not much more to glean from the image above, Deneken leaves the following comments on the game, and is very much precisely speaking my language with its outside inspirations, and introduces its new heroine:
The game mechanics remind me a lot of the 2D Prince of Persia, Flashback or the polygon classic Another World. I just love those games. Anyways, for Mutatione we try to have a stronger focus on the story and the mood of the game, especially when it comes to sound and music.
The team, now six-strong and already plugging away for the past two months, is looking for more funding for future development — Deneken will only say that much of the “development speed of the game” rests solely on that, and that he “hopes to work on Mutatione a lot more…”
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See more posts about: Die Gute Fabrik, Nils Deneken, Offworld Originals
THE RIGHT BOBBLE: TAITO REVEAL FIRST IPHONE PUZZLE BOBBLE VIDEO
So I was apparently, and embarrassingly, wrong on two counts: first in originally presuming that Taito’s next iPhone game teaser was meant to be Bubble, not Puzzle, Bobble, and second, in assuming that when Puzzle Bobble did inevitably arrive, that it’d come in tilt-to-aim form.
I suppose the latter hasn’t necessarily been entirely disproven yet, but above, Taito shows off the first video of the game and its first two control schemes, a Must Eat Birds-ish slingshot mode, and a somewhat more precise tap-to-aim, tap-to-fire mode.
Still no word on how far away the app is from submission, but it’s thus far looking like a quietly essential take on a long-running classic.
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TOUCH ME I’M SLICK: THE SILKY SLEUTHING OF TIGER STYLE’S SPIDER: THE SECRET OF BRYCE MANOR
Say what you will about all the advances and unique opportunities iPhone gaming has brought with it — indie dev accessibility, previously unimagined levels of direct touch-control — but one area that’s still essentially untread is story: an engrossing narrative behind all our quick-burst prods, flicks and pokes.
At first glance, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [App Store link] — the debut game from Tiger Style, a collective co-founded by former Thief designer Randy Smith and Midway/Ubisoft/Ion Storm developer David Kalina — follows suit. But just first glance.
At its core, Spider is the game you’d expect from any led by an arachnid star. As you start your micro-epic journey through the titular Manor — one that takes you from its front porch, though its foyer, down into the bowels of its plumbing and up, finally, through its attic and out — you’ll be doing what it is spiders do: ridding the long-since abandoned house of its insect infestation by building cohesive shapes out of your finger-flicked threads.
Three or more interconnected silk strings linked around — or in the path of — the bugs will snap a web into place, where they’ll be caught and ready to be eaten and converted into more silk in your bank to spin further webs.
Taken just on this level, the game’s an absolute success: Tiger Style have managed to make simply moving through and exploring its environment fun in and of itself, and to make a rewarding skill out of building tight, precise shapes from the hooks each room gives (or denies) you.
But it’s in the course of this very simple pleasure that you — if you’re paying attention, anyway — begin to realize that the house was abandoned perhaps more quickly than you’d originally thought, and that its inhabitants left behind the story of a lifetime, literally: clues to who they were through the generations, and why, perhaps, they left. (more…)
See more posts about: Offworld Originals, Tiger Style, Touch Me I'm Slick
