Potatoes are delicious. We all love potatoes. Some more than others. I have six potatoes. I plan on using them in a delicious meal. Maybe with some cavefish. Cavefish is delicious, but only if cooked. You’ll mess it up bad, well let’s leave it at that. I’ve eaten whenever, whatever I’ve hooked. I’d kill for the thrill of a meal with some fat.
Indie developer Swing Swing Submarine (makers of Tetris/Mario mashup Tuper Tario Tros) recently unveiled the first footage of their upcoming Minecraft, Tetris, Boulder Dash concoction labeled Blocks That Matter.
You play as a driller robot who can break blocks apart, pick them up, and reuse them. If you complete a line of blocks, the line gets destroyed a la Tetris.
Our intention is exactly the same than the one we had when we created Tuper Tario Tros. We want to create a unique game experience mixing games elements and mechanics.
The mash-up concept is a popular genre and that’s something we really like because it allows players to see how games that seem different at first can share the same DNA.
- Guillaume Martin and William David, founders of Swing Swing Submarine.
Blocks That Matter will be coming to Xbox LIVE Indie Games in April, followed by a PC/Mac/Linux release shortly thereafter. Expect pricing to be less than $5.
Sometimes you just gotta slow down.
Video games don’t always have to be fast paced. You don’t always have to have bullets constantly flying or several hundred explosions going off in the space of about ten seconds, and even multiplayer shooters featuring squads of soldiers armed to the teeth with enough ordinance to erase a medium sized country from the face of modern civilisation don’t always need to be twitch-controlled fragfests. And though I do love sprinting across the Fields of Battle or being Called to Duty with groups of my friends online, I am here today to tell you about a game that takes the exact opposite approach to player-versus-player modern combat.
While watching the gameplay trailers for Capcom’s upcoming iPhone game MaXplosion, it looks like it should be a fun little game. There’s this neat exploding mechanic, you see, which your character can do 3 times in a row before needing a recharge. You use this mechanic to traverse standard platforming levels, blowing apart enemies foolish enough to stand in your way.
Of course there’s just this one niggling little problem. This game, a game wrapped entirely around one mechanic, was released in the summer of ’09.
To say this game resembles Twisted Pixel’s wildly popular and frenetically paced ‘Splosion Man is an understatement… there is no way the planning meeting for this game did not include the phrase “Just go make ‘Splosion Man.”
It gets worse too, as Twisted Pixel CEO Michael Wilford responded on his twitter page:
Best part is, we originally pitched @Splosion_Man to Capcom and they said no.
It’s rare to see anything truly original in modern gaming. Games borrow from one another all the time, and when something works it’s bound to get copied in some capacity. But it is rare to see a major developer unapologetically ripping off a well-known indie game in this way. Hopefully it sells well, and Twisted Pixel nets all the profits when the inevitable lawsuit is resolved.
UPDATE: Guess that lawsuit may not be so inevitable after all. Michael Wilford spoke with Joystiq this evening and shrugged off the idea of filing suit against Capcom:
“While I think the similarities are pretty nauseating, we’re too small to take on a company like Capcom,” said Wilford.
That, and we owe them one for inventing Mega Man, so we’ll let them slide. I just hope they’re not counting on the fact that indies can’t fight back. In general, anything that would take our focus off of making games would be a bad decision, I think. We just need to keep our heads down making the next thing so that Capcom has something to steal next year.”
Sometimes it feels like modern games coddle players. There was a time when beating a game meant sitting down and battling through it in one sitting. If you were lucky the developer employed a password system that would bring you back to the start of whatever level you were on. Now we have checkpoints after every minor battle and constant autosave systems. We have unlimited lives and omnipresent hint systems. Gamers today often find their only challenge in competitive multiplayer; someone on the other end creates a challenge where the developers couldn’t.
I mention this because Super Meat Boy is hard as hell. I had every intention to finish the game before reviewing it, but I couldn’t. This isn’t to say I can’t beat this game or that I won’t; god help me I will finish this game. However my conquest has eluded me due to a perfect storm of tortuously difficult levels and sheer content overload.
Super Meat Boy is, on the surface, a simple platformer where you lead a skinless flesh bag through a carnival of dangers with the elemental power of wall jumping. Dig deeper and you will begin to notice how tight the controls are. With practice you’ll find yourself recreating the exact same jump time and time again. You’ll start to feel how button press duration affects your trajectory and how a running start affects your momentum.
And then you will die, a lot, and eventually you’ll grow to accept that too.
This week we have an interview with Team Meat (Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes) developers of the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game Super Meat Boy. (Transcript here.) We talk about indie developers’ role in gaming and they dish tons of info on their pending release. The gang also talks about Bayonetta, a little more Minecraft, and way too much about Twitter.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Comic Jumper is out now!
Check out the free ringtone from the game!
Follow the Characters on Twitter!
The second episode of the freeware fan-made King’s Quest little-series-that-could was released to the interwebs today. Entitled “Two Households”, this episode continues to follow King Graham as he searches to free his children from a magically imposed slumber.
The Silver Lining has been praised widely, but perhaps most impressively it was endorsed by Roberta Williams herself as a true to the series continuation. You can download both the first two episodes for free at the official website.
Today the positively hilarious guys over at Zombie Cow Studios released their latest game, which features a crack squad of contraceptive-capped marines delving deep into people’s most disturbing orifices, blowing up all kinds of nasty naughty diseases.
It also happens to be free, so you can go grab it right now and not have to pay a penny!
Limbo launched today on XBL from Playdead Games and I was thrilled to have a chance to sit down with it. Almost everyone I know has had at least one eye on this gem since it was shown off at E3 last month. It’s been compared (much to its credit) to Braid, the former darling of indie gamers everywhere. After several hours of play I feel fairly confident I’ve seen what this game has to offer, and anyone with a passing interest in visually stunning puzzle-platformers is doing themselves a grave disservice if they haven’t plunked down the 1200 MS Points yet.
It’s hard to go too in depth with this game without spoiling much of what makes it so affecting. You play as a nameless and more or less faceless boy who awakens in the woods on the wrong end of some very scary business. The game does an amazing job of building tension, a rare trait in a game where death happens often and with little to no repercussions. You genuinely don’t want to see your little character chopped in half by a bear trap or smashed by a piston, even if the game autosaves at almost every intersection. You rarely lose any progress due to death, but it’s something you develop a healthy fear of nonetheless.
The biggest concern voiced thus far with Limbo is its length and replay value. Most of the puzzles in the game are fairly simple once you uncover the trick, and so subsequent playthroughs seem unlikely. Couple that with reports of a scant four hours of gameplay and its price tag becomes questionable. But if you’re looking for a game with a unique charm that brings flashbacks of games like Braid and Out of this World, you’re not going to regret your time spent in Limbo.
Rating: 
(4.5/5)
| 
| 
| 
| 
| | | | 
| | | 
| | | | 
Recent Episodes