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Weekly Freeplay is a new 1UP feature that attempts to dethrone Gamespy's Download This (discontinued since December 2006) as the best regular column about indie games in general. And off to a very good start, I must add.
I really like the fact that more and more mainstream editors and journalists are turning to indie games even when there are a large number of commercial stuff to write about.
De Blob five minute gameplay video, an early 2008 release for the Nintendo Wii. Get the original PC version here. [direct download link, IGN preview]
The Four Color Problem is a new puzzler by GameDesign. The game involves grabbing as much land as possible in turns, though any adjacent areas captured should be of different colours.
Grey and black are assigned to the player, while green and orange belong to the computer AI. Bars and numbers at the bottom of the screen shows the conquest status of both generals, with a small vertical line indicating the winning position that either players should achieve for.
An online high score table is provided.
Name: The Four Color Problem
Developer: GameDesign
Category: Strategy
Type: Browser
There's a very special feature on the best of indie games over at the GGE site, written by Skaldicpoet9.
Matt Thorson's (Jumper series) An Untitled Story will be released as shareware.
Coptron Game Studios will release King Solomon's Treasures in late August.
Yes, you can play as cactus himself in the game!
The SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Awards is an annual event organized to honor the best SourceForge projects, with the latest to be held during OSCON (Open Source Convention) at Portland on the 26th of July 2007.
A list of finalists for each category was recently made public to facilitate the final voting phase. Some notable nominess in the Games category include:
- FreeCol (open source Colonization)
- Tremulous (FPS)
- UFO: Alien Invasion (turn-based strategy game, Quake 2 engine)
- ScummVM
Incidentally ScummVM was also nominated for the Best Project category.
Read more
Much like Line Rider, the basic concept of Coaster Rider is to draw a set of tracks for the cars to travel on. The Pegasus is based on an actual attraction found in Europa-Park.
Each level can only be completed by collecting all stars before reaching the flag. Accelerators can be used to speed the train up, and the control panel allows a player to tweak or change a track at their leisure.
Hold the right mouse button to move your view around. Coaster Rider also allows a track to be saved for the purpose of resuming a game at a later date.
Ten playable levels and an editor is included, plus each stage may take up to half an hour to solve. Impressive effort from a twenty year old.
Name: Coaster Rider
Developer: Sascha Swiercy
Category: Puzzle
Type: Freeware
Size: 10MB
Uchuforce 2 updated with several new changes. Lasers wil now overheat after prolonged use and requires a short period of inactivity to cool down. [review]
The new Super Mogura Tennis video showcases several characters' special moves (known as 'Technical Counter') - wholook
Paul Cunningham's Doppelganger is a new Defender remake with split screen action and single button area switch. The project was completed in less than two months, hence the lack of features such as those found in Alien Abduction.
Press the A key to change sides and hold the D key to shoot.
Name: Doppelganger
Developer: Pumpkin Games
Category: Shooter
Type: Freeware
Size: 30MB
Marippy is a Mappy remake by yu-ki with characters from the Touhou Project universe. The Z key can be used to open or close doors, and touching one of the enemies will result in the loss of a life.
A trampoline breaks when it is jumped on by the player three times successively. Slam a door at an opponent to knock them out temporarily, and collect all items to complete a level. Timing your jump and landing is important as three misses in a row miss could result in a bad fall when the trampoline under you is broken.
A faithful adaptation of the source material, though this means that it's audience would be limited to players who played the original as well. Set the image quality to low to reduce slowdown.
Name: Marippy
Developer: yu-ki
Category: Action
Type: Browser
Barbarian is a sword-fighting game that pits one barbarian against other barbarians to free a beautiful Princess captured by the Evil sorcerer Drax. The game offers sword combat in various locales.
There are several kinds of hits, and some hits take off half a point while others take off a whole point. Each player has six of these 'power points'. They also have a unique move called 'death sword' which decapitates your opponent, killing him with one fell swoop.
Name: Barbarian
Developer: Luxregina
Category: Action
Type: Browser
Smila is working on a remake of the C64 horizontal shooter entitled IO.
- IO development journal
- Retro Remakes preview
- We Make the Cops article
Update: Gameplay videos from the original C64 IO added. Click here for the entire playlist of all four levels. Current development status: 50 percent completed.
News levels from all four Xmas Lemmings were recently added to the Lemmings DS project, a port of Lemmings for the Nintendo DS.
This means the level count total is now close to 300, featuring:
- 120 levels from the original Amiga Lemmings
- 100 levels from Oh-No! More Lemmings
- 72 levels from Xmas Lemmings '91, '92, '93 and '94
Download Lemmings DS here.
[thanks to Heavy Stylus]
Download The Infinity String.
It's possible to double-click on an exit to leave a room quickly.
There are two possible endings to the game. A reminder to save at the crucial point is noted in the walkthrough.
Download Earl Mansin: The Breakout.
"The solution for several puzzles have been changed for the latest version. Instead of finding the rag at the bottom of the bin, you must cut it off the bed sheet, bed sheets or the makeshift rope. Instead of cutting up the bed sheets to get the rope, you now have to use the bed sheet with the bed sheets." - Adrian
I'm Jamie Sanders, the guy who made vNES, the classic Nintendo Entertainment System emulator. I started work on vNES after realizing that I had nothing to do for the summer, and as a side-effect of my love of Nintendo and emulation. The original vNES website was created a few days before June 1, 2006 and was hosted at vnes.thatsanderskid.com. vNES was actually a small mistake, all my other ideas I was toying with at the time turned out to be remarkably bad. Before vNES, I was toying with making a web-based GUI, an RPG (which occasionally gets worked on still), a proxy server and a GPL flash preloader that is supposed to detect eBaum's World and then halt, playing "Suicide Is Painless" instead of a real movie.
Since all of those other pursuits were either futile or impossible for me to improve upon, I started reading technical documents on the NES, spend a good two weeks implementing stuff and reworking the mappers, and wound up with vNES. On October 1, 2006, vNES managed to get on the front page of Digg, and that's when my popularity skyrocketed. I found myself being mentioned in the most mainstream to the most unlikely of places, from college radio, Iraqi military bases, all the way down to the India Times.
To this day, people still don't believe that I'm 15. Mostly, because I inherited my NES from my older brother, who was alive when the NES was very popular. My style of writing also seems to throw people off, as I you don't run across many teenagers that bother to find the shift key. Or for that matter, can actually spell "teenagers that bother to find the shift key."
My original host got really angry about the traffic on the site, and continued to claim that I was abusing the server. What they didn't tell me is that the entire problem arose from my inadvertently deleting the favicon.ico file, and that was making the server return a 404 way too much of the time, which isn't really good for ther server. So, I decided to move vNES to Dreamhost. Dreamhost then promptly decided to shut me down, under the perception that my enabling the online emulation of the NES is illegal. I've been mistaken before, but I'm really sure that piracy denotes the downloading of files without the consent of the copyright holder. Technically, this isn't downloading anyway.
Dreamhost felt they could suspend my site without giving me a particular reason, initially. I don't know what it is with server farms and doing this, as it happened a few months later. I then re-enabled my site, and they kicked me off for good. If you're going to shut me down while I'm getting around one million hits a day, give me no actual reason, and then make me wait in support queue for twelve hours and think I'm not going to re-enable my site, you've probably been hit in the head one too many times.
It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so remarkably and incredibly uncooperative. Not only that, but at the time I had received around $200 in donations from the users of vNES. Dreamhost continued to refuse to give me those funds back until I was about a minute away from sending papers to them, as I finally got them to at least return the money to the donators. If you're reading this, never buy your hosting at Dreamhost (or GoDaddy, but that's obvious - you don't want a content Nazi to be your host).
William Burns, the Chief Technology Officer of VR5 (a company that was using vNES for their Virtual Reality program) really came to my rescue dealing with Dreamhost, writing one of the best open letters I've ever had the pleasure to read. It was sent to Dreamhost and posted on www.virtualnes.com for the world to read. It was one of those New Radicals moments, the underdogs doing a reasonably good job of making the establishment seem incompetent and ostensibly obsolete.
At that point, I moved vNES around donated servers for about 48 hours before moving to my current host (of this site, anyway). Thanks to another site linking to me, the server overloaded and crashed. They decided to lock it until I could guarantee that I won't crash the server anymore. That was the birth of Public Terminal Mode, which allowed people to link to the Coral Content Distribution Network to play games on vNES. Problem is, if you were on a public computer, such as a Library or School workstation, Coral CDN was probably blocked. So, I kept a way to access the main server directly. Hence the name "Public Terminal Mode."
Around April 14, I was told that another website was using the vNES applet. At the time, I was rather opposed to the idea. I got a bit angry, only to find out that numerous other websites were also doing the same thing, but they weren't publishing it quite like Nintendo8 was. After a few days of struggling, I came to the conclusion that the frustration isn't worth popping back up in 20 years as a brain tumor, and released it under the GPL on April 22nd. On July 1st, the entire website was redesigned from the ground up to make it easier to use.A mini site was created in anticipation for the release of Nigoro's Rose and Camellia - due out very soon. [visit information page, basic translation]
Title screen
Slap each other silly
Kyle Gabler (Tower of Goo) has recently started up a development journal to record his thoughts and share sneak peeks of his upcoming game, World of Goo.
There are even several Flash prototypes and music posted in some of his entries. One example is Human Brain Cloud, described as a massively multiplayer word association game which basically stores every single contribution by users and displays them as a network of clouds.
- 2D Boy dev. journal
- Play Tower of Goo
Edge Magazine have recently published yet another of those ever wonderful gaming lists that allege to cover the best games ever made. Ignoring the fact that once again we're being asked to hand over ten of your English pounds in exchange for a list of games which you could write on the back of a beermat without opening the magazine itself... I'm left wondering just how accurate these lists really are.
Is it still the case that as good as it is, Ocarina Of Time is The Best Game Ever Made or is it just so terminally dull and predictable a choice that it ends up there because, well, thats just how these lists work? No thought, no imagination, no heart and no soul.
Colour me unconvinced that if the readers of this blog were to vote on their best games we'd see such a tired and predictable list. So, putting the arguments of how useless lists like this are - I reckon we should show them how a real list would look.
How about you fire me over your top 10 best ever games, and by that - they can be freeware, commercial, shareware, remakes, public domain, console games, arcade games... whatever your list would actually contain and in a few weeks I'll collate all the info together, add them all up and post them onto the internet for everyone to pick over? Don't just throw something in because you feel duty bound that it should be there, put it in because you believe wholeheartedly that this is one of the best games you've ever played.
Drop me a mail at remakes100 AT gmail DOT com and lets set this place on fire...
Original remakes forum thread / Retro Remakes News Post
In The Infinity String, you assume the role of a scientist named Yerik Elnar. The year is 2009, and mysterious ruins have been discovered in Antartica by Russian explorers. One year later a complete research base was built to study the findings. You arrive on the scene to provide assistance to the first research team stationed there but only to discover that the entire crew has disappeared.
Left click to walk or interact with objects and right click to examine them. Double click on an exit to leave a room quickly.
There are two possible endings to the game.
Name: The Infinity String
Developer: Sektor 13
Category: Adventure
Type: Freeware
Size: 30MB
Uchuforce 2 is perhaps the most accessible shooter by Babarageo after his memorable STG Banner, supposedly inspired by the classic Star Soldier series. Collect the letters to spell the title and earn an extra ship plus weapon upgrades. Losing a ship means a weapon downgrade.
Hold the left mouse button to shoot or press the P key to pause. Sound isn't implemented yet but the author has promised that it will be sorted out in a matter of days.
Name: Uchuforce 2
Developer: Babarageo
Category: Shooter
Type: Browser
Warning: Strong language and graphic scenes.
In Earl Mansin: The Breakout, the objective of the game is to help the titular character escape from his imprisonment. A convicted serial killer who has been in prison for the last twenty-seven years, your first task is naturally to find a way out of your current confinement.
This release comes with full speech and accompanying soundtrack, hence contributing to the large file download size.
Name: Earl Mansin: The Breakout
Developer: Adrian Bernstein
Category: Adventure
Type: Freeware
Size: 160MB
Walkthrough: Click here
Set in a madmax style world, Darkwind is a turn-based MMOG which fills the niche created by Steve Jackson's board-game Carwars back in the heady days of the 1980s.
The player hires a gang of characters who can unleash death and destruction from behind the wheel of a car. Vehicles include tricked-out muscle cars, armoured sports cars and hearses with mounted flamethrowers - plus motorcycles and character movement on foot will be available soon as well.
Hired characters must be fed and paid. Money can be earned in races, deathrace leagues, via jobs from NPCs or from scouting for pirates in the wastelands between cities, alone or in squads with other gangs.
The game advances in real time; travel, healing, training and car modification takes time to complete, giving rise to a sense of realism often not often found in other games. Gameplay is split between a browser for gang management/world movement and a Torque-based game engine with physics simulations for playing out events.
Other interesting features include psionic powers, performance enhancing drugs with side-effects, player ownership of production facilities and camps.
Name: Darkwind
Developer: Sam Redfern
Category: Strategy
Type: Demo
Size: 80MB
The videos just keep coming... who is this cecille anyway?
A comment by Gil over at the Capcom Digital site:
The person doing the new sprites is a tracer and nothing more. The following statement...
"he looked like a giant troll. That’s why the head was moved up and made a little smaller."
...is certainly misleading. It suggests the head was redrawn from scratch.
In fact the head was probably altered because it seems it was more convenient for the guy who's doing those terrible new sprites to TRACE the portrait of T-Hawk from an artwork for Street Fighter 2 - Turbo Revival (GBA). [picture]
The artwork was drawn by Capcom's Edayan. Why not mention this? If all you do is what seems to be TRACING Edayan's art why not hire HIM to do the job?
If the persons involved with this project are as big Street Fighter fans as they pretend to be they should at least give credit to the original Capcom artists when they trace their stuff. The whole matter is very disrespectful towards the original creators of the Street Fighter series.
If you guys TRACE over existing artworks at least mention which ones you are tracing and give them credit in your blog updates.
I'm still looking forward to this project but hope you will change the artist who is in charge of the sprites. [NeoGAF, Pixelation discussion]
Here's an unfinished proof of concept by Helm, and some words from the artist himself: 
"Hello, I am Helm. Since this is a public project on the internet, I assume that criticism, no matter how harsh it might appear, is welcome. Here are some thoughts:
First of all my art is not finished (no, not even the parts that look finished. It would take more smoothing, more range and some overpainting to call it done) so I'm a bit ashamed anyone would link to it. I had to stop working on it for a period of time and when I returned to it my incandescent zest to go through with this had all but evaporated. I did some minor touchups and thought 'why am I still doing this? This is a stupid way to do game art. Should I spend another hour proving a fanboy point?' and posted what I had and hoped that would be the end of it. I don't think my take is particularily breath-taking, but I do think it's more pleasing than that's going on.
Some people will say 'HE CHANGED THE STYLE!' when they see this. I'd like those people to go back to the SFII art and notice something: It doesn't look like anime. It's intentionally more westernized by the capcom art direction. The portraits aren't all angular-jaws-dark-eye-shadows-huge-hips like the newer SF stuff so I say my attempt is more in keeping with the vanilla SFII art than the Udon art.
There's many problems with how Udon is doing this. The biggest and most glaring problem is that whoever is in charge does not have the anatomical knowledge of the capcom staff that made SFII. And SFII isn't exactly the wonder of anatomy (nor is my attempt). The second problem is that they're mixing styles. They take a t-hawk head from an illustration, put it on a turbo sprite... it doesn't work like this. If you're getting paid to do a remake of a very well-loved game, you might want to invest some thought in coherent aesthetics and art direction. Finally the people working on this are pillow-shading. Sprites are sprites, when you're doing illustration work (this isn't animation work as it should be, really) then you shouldn't just go with a silly 'darker around the edges, lighter towards the middle' mindset. It comes down to this: when you REMAKE something, you make sure to hire people who can do it BETTER than the original crew.
All this screams for me, at tiny budget. How many people are doing the art here? I estimate that I could do about 3 frames in a workday if I were under contract to work on this, given I'd have some time to get my methodology streamlined. SFII has how many frames of animation? 1200? How fast does the team have to work to get through those? What are they expecting? Seems like a bad plan. I expect this to get cancelled soon.
If I can put a single comment on the actual remaster idea it'd be: it'll look awful, even with the greatest HD art in the world, without more inbetween frames. Bigger resolution = bigger spatial gaps between frames. It'll look like a Monty Python animation."
Graham reviews Hurrican. Excerpt:
Hurrican is Turrican Megamix essentially, and I can't think of a more fitting tribute to the series. I don't think I've seen many remakes which have lavished such care and attention on updating an old game while remaining true to its roots.
Although the basic exploratory gameplay shines through - and has even been bettered thanks to signs pointing the way to the exit - there is a problem, in that more doesn't necessarily mean better. Hurrican boasts no less than 5 different fire buttons, one for a switchable main weapon, one for a rotatable beam weapon and three more for various limited resource weapons. And some of these can even be combined with other buttons to activate secondary functions. It's just too much, they should have just picked a single one of the extra weapons and got rid of the others for the sake of simplicity.
Read more
"The rise of quick pick-up-and-play games is an important development, and Flash games mirror their rise in mainstream gaming," says John Bardinelli, contributor too casual gaming site Jayisgames.com. And because most web browsers can use Flash, playing a game through them is an effortless pleasure: "In the same way that short-form viral videos have taken off, I think we're seeing the same things for web games," says Jim Greer, founder of Kongregate.com.
"Digg has a section devoted to them, and 90 per cent are Flash. When one gets to the front page, the hits rocket - games three years ago never achieved the same levels of audience awareness."
Such popularity is beginning to earn the game makers money. Newgrounds, which receives around 500,000 visitors a day with 200 game and animation submissions, each month awards the top ten contributors, as voted by users, $250. Kongregate, which was launched in December 2006, gives its game-makers a cut up to 50 per cent of the ad revenue their games generate.
Meanwhile, companies like Crazy Monkey Games and Armor Games have begun to sponsor games in return for them featuring their logos and linking to their sites - both Flash game portals that earn money on advertising revenues. It's in both parties' interest that the games are featured on as many other websites as possible.
[source: gaming your way]
