It's been a busy week here at Indie Games Ichiban, between attending PAX and breaking news stories about Stabyourself and Playdead Studios, that there's been relatively little time for some honest, good old-fashioned game playing. But time was made and here are two excellent indie games of varying age and platform with two very different themes.
Last year, Hasbro unveiled Scrabble Flash, an electronic version of the popular word game which consists of five SmartLink letter tiles that can communicate with one another using near field communication (NFC) to spell and score words. It's an interesting (and fun) way to build your Scrabble vocabulary for words ranging from two to five letters, but that's about it.
Yes, I'm one of those annoying people who sign up just to promote their own game. I'll be brief. I turn famous novels into games. The latest is the Count of Monte Cristo, the classic story of revenge. Visit EnterTheStory.com for video, demo, screenshots, all the usual stuff.
If you follow indie games at all, you've probably heard of Bastion. During its development, it took home numerous Best in Show prizes from E3 and other game conventions while building up an incredible amount of buzz in the games press. Part of what is intriguing about Bastion is its cool art design, which in the last couple months, peaked my interest more so than the gameplay or the much-ballyhooed narration.
Game demos are unfortunately a dying breed. While broadband has made it easier than ever to distribute demos to PC and console gamers, they've become more expensive and risky to make. They seldom come out before the full game, especially for AAA games. Developers realize their games are crud and that a demo is just going to make people not want to buy it.
Three years ago, Double Fine productions held an in-house event called the Amnesia Fortnight. The company was split into four teams, each of which set out to spend two weeks developing an idea for a small game and present it to the other groups at the end of the duration. All of the ideas turned out to be winners, and founder/owner Tim Schafer secured publishing deals for all four games to be released on a combination of XBLA and PSN. In honor of the excellent Trenched becoming the third game...
Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is one of the best multiplayer games of all time. It took nine years to make, and the developers have supported it with more post-release free updates than any other game ever. Four years after its release in 2007, it is still immensely popular, and although its price has gone down, Valve has managed to continue making a massive profit by introducing the first successful microtransaction model in a mainstream American shooter. That model has been so successful that it lo...
Nope, it’s not the McDonalds menu, but close enough. Jim Blackhurst has mapped 11 million deaths onto a 3-dimensional point cloud for video game Just Cause 2. The result is an amazing virtual heat map of a world where every white dot represents a death on impact: The millions of deaths formulate a detailed outline of major structures and roads in the game, visually mapping "extractions" at every square inch. In most traditional games, this would not be possible—players more often than not sta...
Dinosaur games & dinosaur games at awesome arcade phase the latest 2011 wonderful and thrilling site you could do not ever stop enjoying inside them for hours fun, have fun with grand arcade phase joya enjoying.
Are you familiar with Studio Ghibli? It's the dreamy Japanese animation studio responsible for anime classics Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Howl's Moving Castle. Regarded as highly inventive, serene, and spooky, Studio Ghibli puts out internationally renown films, loaded with magic, monsters and lovable creatures, such as Totoro (pictured to the right, and above).
Funny video, sort of like the Jay Leno street questions segment. IGN asks regular people in San Francisco what they think a game is about based on the box art. They showed people different games and they gave really frank answers.
About a decade ago, Deus Ex came out to rave reviews. Except this guy Tom Chick hated it. And said so, in a pretty blunt manner.
Nutritionist, Chrissy Thums, discuss proper nutritional content snack choices on and off the field, in between games and post game.
From Pixel Prospector. Most of them are platformers/puzzle games. They explain why. Hey JD weren't you making a game? How's that coming along?
Name your price for 5 indie games!http://www.wolfire.com/humble This event will run for a week and the money raised will go towards two charities. The Humble Indie bundle is a collection of five indie games where you can set your price! Want to buy the whole package (worth $80 retail) for $10, $5, $1, or even a penny? sure, go ahead, you can pay as much or as little as you want. Some have payed over a hundred for the bundle, but the average is around $7-$8 dollars.The games:
Kiss Ass Game First Impressions Review of the game next week. Here are some quick impressions of the game and the first level
Arcade gaming just got about a million times cooler. VirtuSphere offers an interface that captures the players movements in 360 degrees, and then translates these movements into a video game. Rumors of the technology first emerged back in 2006, but the real life application has only recently just surfaced.
More than 1,200 students and staff from the University of Alberta set a Guinness World Record for the world's largest dodgeball game in early February. The group nearly tripled the former record of a 450-person game. Awesome aerial footage of the event below.
In this video you will learn how to play burned ps1 (Playstation) games on a non-modded ps2 (Playstation 2). Play burned PS1 games on a PS2 without a modchip.
This is the Windows OS counterpart to my tutorial on how to burn the new XDG3 formatted games on Xbox 360. Microsoft invented a new disc format system to trump piracy, it's called XDG3. XDG3's standard is to burn a whole extra gigabyte of data to the disc, to allow more content, but more importantly for stopping piracy. This extra gigabyte of data makes it impossible to burn or rip a game the traditional way. So how on earth can we burn our fully-legal back-ups that we should rightfully be ab...
Gamers who have their Xbox 360's firmware flashed may have recently noticed an inability to play backups, or even make backups of newer games that have come out, such as Gears of War 3 and Dead Island, to name a few.
In the world of developers, a "sandbox game" is video game where players are free to "roam a virtual world and change any factor at will"; these types of games demand creativity on the player's part, with no linear/"correct" way to play.
Gamers who haven't already gotten tickets to PAX Prime, there is sad news. Three-day passes for the event are officially sold out, three full months before it starts. That is a Coachella-like ticket sale speed for such a large event.
Video games and art have somewhat of a sticky relationship. Many video games have large teams of talented artists doing amazingly creative work, and yet the art community is only just beginning to utilize video games as art (sometimes). Perhaps if video games were shown not just as a medium of expression, but as a means of creating great art as well, the art community would be forced to consider it differently. The third part in the Hacked Kinect series will focus on the artistic possibilitie...
Japanese people are into many things Americans find weird—like YouTube's beloved canine-hosted cooking show or Daito Manabe's light up LED grills or even more insane, a vending machine that distributes live crabs. In light of these cultural oddities, the Japanese phenomenon of visual novels (NVL, or bijuaru noberu), seems relatively normal. A meeting place of books and video games, visual novels are a sort of "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" for the new generation.
Now girls need to take up gaming, seriously. According to a new research, girls who played the games with a parent got a lot of benefits.
A demonstration of Ubisoft's Your Shape: Fitness Evolved for the Xbox 360's Kinect. This was probably the best demonstration for Kinect out of the whole conference. The game will come out around the same time of the launch of Kinect in November.
April NPD Video Game Sales Every month around the second thursday the sales chart for video games and consoles are released for the previous month. They are released by the NPD group, the main company tracking video games sales in the US. Here are the top twenty games in the month of april (courtesy of Gamasutra http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=28566 ):
I have to say, the Xbox 360 controller is the best controller ever created. When I first held it back in 2005, I swore that the dudes working at Microsoft came over and took a molding of my hands because of how great it felt. The thing felt like it was born there.
Game piece from Sorry! Used Decim8, Superimpose, And Phonto for the words.
For those of you who love soundtracks (like me!), you're in for a treat. If you ever wanted to own or listen to C418's Minecraft soundtrack songs, it's now part of a bundle called the Indie Game Music Bundle! The bundle includes 10 DRM-free albums from indie game composers, including Minecraft! What could be better? Well, you get to decide how much you want to pay! Yes, really! As little as a buck.
Check out this truly incredible redstone mechanism by Users Rezz and Psycho_ewt! It's an automated redstone game with a twist. You control the interactive screen using a retro NES controller. Let us know what you think or if you'd like to see us reverse engineer it. This build contains:
The battle between first-person shooters is officially underway with the release of Battlefield 3 today. Who will win? Most experts are already declaring Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 the champ of the holiday retail clash between EA and Activision, despite MW3 not coming out until November 8th.
Achievement Hunter is an awesome segment from the Rooster Teeth guys and it's a great way to find out about unlocking achievements. This video goes over unlocking the "Bushman," "Close and Personal," and "Adrenaline Seeker" achievements in the Xbox 360 version of Cabela's Big Game Hunter 2012.
The United Kingdom has long been known as an international hub of yellow tabloid journalism. The News Of The World, one of the nation's largest tabloids, is famously in court right now because of the deplorable methods it used to acquire salacious information about interesting people. It appears, given their recent string of video game related reportage, that daily newspaper Metro has also had its fair share of morally dubious reporters on staff.
Epic is sponsoring a 48-hour Unreal Engine development jam at University of Bedforhsire starting November 4th. The event will be a great chance for anyone with the means of attending to practice learning to use the biggest engine in game development with help from the people who made it. Click through to read the details and register.
Instagram Challenge: Here is a pic from my vintage PC game collection!
The Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move might be fun to play with, but people do not look very cool while they're doing it. Air guitar is not particularly flattering (even if done on stage), and neither is air-anything else, as pleasurable as it might be. This is why I find it strange that a group of admen somewhere in the world think these kinds of commercials would appeal to anyone.
I'm not sure where I got this, but I thought I'd share it with everyone. I've had it forever!
Hungarian developer Nemesys Games is best known for making the lighthearted Fortix series, a pair of casual tower defense variants available on Steam. For their latest project, they've decided to expand their horizons, going beyond downloadable sawbuck games. It's called Rocket Bullet Storm, a chaotic old-school shmup similar to the surprising number of others to come out in the last year. The difference is that this one is huge—30 feet tall—and consumes 250 square meters of floorspace, which...
