While I’ve been killing time nitpicking my way through the IGF Student Showcase finalists, Eurogamer have gone the full length and powered their way through the entire IGF list.
Jim Rossignol from Eurogamer has posted a full roundup, explaining what he thinks about all the contenders. It would appear that he has a favourite in Dyson (screenshot above), which you can try for yourself over at the Dyson site.
Go read it now – it’s interesting stuff.
That’s right, folks, it’s time for the Jan09 indie game roundup!
I’ve been bringing you the latest independent gaming news for one whole month now and I’ve enjoyed every second – hopefully you have too. Of course, I’d love to know what exactly you guys like and don’t like about what I’m doing. Is there anything you’d like to see more of? Less of? Drop me a comment and I’ll listen to what you have to say.
So… onto the Jan09 news! Here’s the main topics that littered the indie headlines this month:
Indeed, January was a rather busy month in the indie gaming world. Again, if you have any comments about the work I’m doing, whether it be good or bad, please feel free to leave me a comment – I’d love to hear from you.
Bring on February!
Not only is it full of striking colours and small, fluffy-looking creatures, it’s also extremely odd.
This is ‘Where Is My Heart?’, work of Bernhard Schulenburg another of the IGF Student Showcase winners for 2009. A platformer at heart (ooh good one!), WIMH features some of the oddest yet coolest gameplay I’ve seen in a while and I love it.
Taking control of 3 little tykes by pressing 1, 2 or 3 to correspond to each, it’s all about collecting the hearts scattered around the level. Hearts can be released from the blocks in which they are contained by doing an upside-down Mario. That is, slamming your head on the top of a brick. Releasing hearts opens up new areas to explore. Simple as.
Or is it? With the 3 different characters comes the ability to make them work co-operatively, be it to stack on top of each other in order to reach higher areas, or to combine the 3 to create some kind of strange antler creature. Oh yes.
Then there’s other crazy goings-on. Certain head-butted blocks will give special abilities. One allows a creature to see hidden ledges which are normally inaccessable, and then allow both him and his friends to jump to areas they couldn’t before. Oh, there’s also a big tree which feeds on love.
It’s some crazy stuff. I know where my heart will be when Bernhard finally releases the full version. For now, you can grab the demo from his site.
I was planning on simply having a quick look into Tag as I have been doing with the other games in the IGF Student Showcase Category, but after giving it my time, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Such a beast of a game is surely worth more than a few paragraphs. So here goes my full-blown ‘Why You Should Play Tag: The Power of Paint’ wordathon.
Tag: The Power of Paint is a first-person paint-shooter (or FPPS for short… ok, I made that up). Armed with a paint gun, players can find and load three different colours of paint into their weapon and each colour has a different effect on the sprayable surfaces of the levels. The objective of the game is to reach the huge glowing orb of paint at the end of each progressing level.
Each level begins pretty much barren of colour – of course, you can change all that. Paint sprayed onto any monochrome surface will stick and remain there until level completion – even if you manage to drop off one of the games many high-rise rooftops to your death void of colour, your artwork will stay exactly how you dealt it out. I found myself spending a considerable amount of time just colouring entire levels in to see the kind of mess I could create. It’s quite simply excellent fun.
And that’s not even the game yet – that’s just the nice ’side-effect’ of the gameplay. As mentioned before, each different colour has it’s own power. Stepping onto a green surface will cause your played to spring up into the air, keeping the previous sideways momentum, making for some awesome building jumps. Incredibly, spraying green paint on the sides of objects has the same effect, only in a horizontal direction. You begin to see how endless the possibilities are. Mirror’s Edge, eat your heart out.
The red paint causes your speed to increase tenfold, allowing for some brilliant velocity-driven flights through the air. Combining the green and red paint… well, set sail for the other side of the landscape.
Finally, the blue paint adds a whole extra dimension to play – stepping on a blue surface causes a player to stick to the platform. While this might not make much sense on a floor, firing a gun full of blue paint at a wall or ceiling… it’s an incredible idea and works so beautifully. Stick to a wall and the camera will turn on it’s side; With a ceiling the camera turns upside down. It’s all very Spiderman and is just fantastic to play. Puzzles combining the blue paint with both red and green will keep your mouth dropped in awe.
I say that with all honesty – I may have said the word ‘wow’ a good dozen times throughout my run and I laughed out loud at the intensity of some of the puzzles – ingenious doesn’t even begin to describe some of the leaps and dives I had to perform to reach my goal. It’s not exactly a difficult game and checkpoints placed throughout the longer levels keep it flowing, but you will savour every moment.
The screenshots show how nicely the scenery is cel-shaded and the style mixed with the techno-style soundtrack all work perfectly together. Ironically the paint splodges that eventually splatter every wall make you realise how bland it was before, and it makes you want to spray even more. It’ll give about half-an-hour’s worth of play to see the end but, like me, you may want to give it another go just to make sure that it really was that good.
I cannot recommend Tag enough. It’s beautiful, it’s so clever, it’s perfectly designed and it well and truly deserves to be nominated for the aforementioned award. Hell, I’d go as far to say that it’s got a great chance of winning it. Pick it up from the official Tag site now and spend the good part of an hour with my mouth hanging low.
Verdict: An incredibly unique puzzler which will keep you stunned in awe from start to finish. The greatest use of paint ever conceived.
The 2nd of 10 winners from the ‘Student Showcase’ shortlist for IGF 2009 that I’m giving the check out and compared to City Rain – the first I gave a go – there really is no contest.
A mod for Half-Life 2: Episode One, the big hype-worthy point about Dish Washington is the fact that each of the parts which make up the game (e.g. the music, the graphics, the ’storyline’) were developed by a different person from a different place in the world. Altogether 9 different people – collectively Dadiu – contributed to this extremely odd offering and it makes me wonder whether, separately, each submitted piece is technically nicely done… is it just putting them all together that made such a wtf situation of a game?
I mean, I get humour. Haha, funny funny, chuckle chuckle etc. In Dish Washington players assume the role of a dragon-cum-crocodile who likes to rhyme and shout random words while boogying to the same piece of music over and over and OVER again. Gameplay revolves around taking dirty dishes, scrubing them to the beat, racking them up for drying, and repeat… and it’s apparently a PARTY.
The rhyming dragon-thing didn’t tickle my funny bone, nor did washing dishes. Maybe it’s just late at night and in the morning I’ll find it hilarious – I’ll update you if this is the case. But honestly, how this made the top ten submitted is beyond me. Graphically it’s pretty average, the music isn’t anything special and it lasts the whole of 5 minutes.
Now please, leave me while I attempt to scrub all remnants from my hard drive.
The ‘Student Showcase’ award at the Independent Gaming Festival always plays host to a nice selection of student-developed indie games from that year and, while not all can win the grand prize, for all the student winners it must be quite an honour.
Indeed, while Mayhem Intergalactic did not scoop the grand prize in 2008, sole creator Chris Pelling aka Inventive Dingo definitely must have felt proud. Now, more than a year after his space-based strategy game was released, it’s still proving to have plenty of life left in it, with a release on Steam this week.
I don’t know if this says something about myself or the usual layout of games in general, but the main thing I noticed after booting Mayhem Intergalactic up was the distinct lack of a Campaign Mode, or any ‘main’ mode for that matter. The game simply offers a single player a choice of either a ‘Quick Game’ or a ‘Custom Game’, and it doesn’t take a gaming god to guess what each of these entail. I let it slide though – it’s the gameplay I’m interested in.
And the gameplay is interesting indeed. What at first seems like quite a daunting task quickly shows itself to be one of the simplest setups I’ve seen in a while for a strategy game. A turn-based saga (much like how the Civilization series works), the action all happens at the end of the turn.
The game begins with a mad rush to grab as many surrounding planets as possible and then, once borders with other players have been established, it’s time to decide whether to build those borders up or go in for the kill and try to take more planets. Each planet owned will provide extra ships each round, and battles to take planets take the course of a ‘Risk’ style conflict – attacking a planet which has 10 ships defending it with your own fleet of 15 ships will most likely result in a win – although it’s not a certainty, as the 10 might get some lucky shots in. Yes, it’s completely down to luck (and hidden mathematics) but if you stick a considerable amount of attacking power to the enemy, your chance of prevailing will be greatly heightened.
And this is pretty much the entire game explained. There are other minor points – for example players can set up convoys so that planets which are never in use can have their ships moved automatically to more useful areas – but the basic concept really is that… basic. While the simplicity in gameplay is great for beginners and casual strategists, more hardcore players will find MI really isn’t for them – there really is just not enough there to justify paying for it, especially compared to the majority of other games in the genre.
I did keep playing for quite some time, however, for the simple reason that I just cannot resist achievements. Mayhem Intergalactic has 21 of its own and attempting to make them your own is, of course, extremely addictive.
So while the simplicity of Mayhem Intergalactic is a huge plus for beginners to the strategy world and casual gamers, it’s also its biggest downfall as far as ‘real’ gamers are concerned. If you can grab a couple of friends and get some rounds of multiplayer action going, you’ll have a blast, but it will most likely be only the few times. Hats off to Chris Pelling for the inventive idea, but personally for me there just isn’t enough depth to keep me playing.
Verdict: Casual gamers will have a blast annihilating their friends in space, but more hardcore strategists won’t find much here to interest them.
Inventive Dingo’s IGF 08 Student Showcase Winner ‘Mayhem Intergalactic’ has now found its way onto Steam, and for the first week it’s half price! Light-speed awaaaay!
With the winners of this year’s student award recently announced, it’s nice to see one of the past winners blasting into areas a-new. Mayhem Intergalactic is a space strategy game in which players can battle against the CPU or play against friends. It also apparently has ‘a stirring dynamic soundtrack’, ‘interesting and varied tactical situations’ and ‘an alien wearing a monocle’. Yeah, you know you’re interested.
Get it half price from the good ol’ Steam store or maybe head on over to the official Inventive Dingo site and read up on it first. The choice, as always, yours. Oh – there’s also a demo too.
