The Crypts of Despair is a new release from the creator of Death Worm, though with a lot less action than it's famous counterpart.

The X key can be used to open a chest, collect items or rest in an alcove to restore energy. A food unit is consumed for every move, but can be replenished by collecting meat found in the crypt. Arrows can be used for range attacks if a bow is bought from the shop. Press the C key to enter the aim mode.

Fans of roguelike games will enjoy this tiny little dungeon romp quite a bit. There are thirty levels to explore in total.

Name: The Crypts of Despair
Developer: JTR
Category: RPG
Type: Freeware
Size: 1MB

Joakim Sandberg (Chalk, Noitu Love) interviewed by Skaldicpoet9. [Chalk review, konjak.org]

Fraxy updated with new version, dated 13th of July 2007. [Fraxy review]

An XBox360 version for Paul Cunningham's Doppelganger is now available. [Doppelganger review]

Yakouga 4 released. [mature content]

Another Everyday Shooter gameplay video - part of an indie game coverage by the 1UP show. Invalid Tangram on the DS was featured in it as well.

According to a recent Siliconera article written by Spencer, the original Tumiki Fighters is an unlockable game within the upcoming Budcat's Wii production, Blast Works.

"As the conversation continued he (Budcat representative) explained that Budcat is working on bringing more of Kenta Cho’s shmups into Blast Works as unlockables. rRootage is going to be included for sure. Gunroar and Torus Trooper are possible additions."

- Read more
- Blast Works preview
- download Tumiki Fighters

Major spoilers! Try and beat Rose and Camellia at the hardest difficulty first, as the easter egg awarded at the end is worth all the effort. Plus it's no fun watching when you can play the game yourself.

There's a PC version of Everyday Shooter! Pictured right, an official trailer from E3. Extra: GameZombie interviews Jonathan Mak.

In Rose and Camellia, the player steps into the high heels of an aristocrat, working her way up the social ladder and earning respect among her peers. This is achieved by engaging them in an age-old tradition of slapping each other in the cheeks until one succumbs to her opponent.

The roses shown at the bottom of the screen indicates each combatant's strength. To attack, simply move the mouse from the bottom right of the screen to the upper left. The slap will be successfully executed if the line drawn crosses her cheek. Click on the evasion button to avoid your opponent's attacks, then launch your own counter attack quickly with a similar move. Move the cursor from the bottom left of the screen to the bottom right to sidestep a slap.

The gauge at the top left of the screen indicates the current player's turn, while the number of roses shown at the top right represents the selected difficulty setting.

Name: Rose and Camellia
Developer: Nigoro
Category: Action
Type: Browser
Demonstration movie: click here

The MarkUp magazine is a PDF-download publication created for the game development community, specifically GM users. Officially endorsed by YoYo Games, it contains a variety of articles ranging from tutorials to reviews of notable Game Maker creations.

For an official magazine, they do seem to cover most of the bases but certain new releases were strangely ignored to accomodate reviews of games with ripped sprites or music. Some of the new writers they have brought on board seems to be kids who are fresh out of school as well, but overall the quality is decent enough and having room to improve is always a good sign.

Read more

Several entries from Dream-Build-Play (A Microsoft XNA Game Studio Contest) are already available from other sources, though the best twenty finalists will only be made public and posted for download from the competition site on the 23rd of July 2007.

Bound Bear gets a new, but rather bland Quest Mode; Telltale interviewed.

The fan-made adventure game, Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth, is still an awfully long way from completion. Don't hold your breath.

There's a couple of XBox360 student projects (several with PC versions) made available for download by the Technische University in Berlin.

Retro Remakes has a really nice list of freeware stuff that they calling 'games you might have missed' over in this forum thread.

Wilfred, the Hero was recently featured on VH1 Game Break. [web site]

GameTunnel has recently published a rather noteworthy list consisting of the top hundred indie games reviewed on their site for the past three years. The list is extremely comprehensive and doesn't end up looking like a top ten bestselling title on any of the casual game portals - so credits to Russell and his team of hardworking reviewers for doing a brilliant job of summarizing the scene into one page.

Read more

In IMA, the player's objective is to collect pulsating stars by guiding a multicolored ball towards it. This is achieved by hovering the circle around any of the selectable objects. Your ball will then float towards it at a high speed, and with a little practice the velocity from a swing can even be used to reach stars at isolated locations.

A chosen object will glow differently, and no mouse clicks are ever required. A work in progress.

Name: IMA
Developer: maxmoosa
Category: Action
Type: Freeware
Size: 5MB

Metroid Cubed is an almost complete web-based version of the original NES Metroid, but using pre-rendered voxels based objects.

The website is also home to many other Nintendo-inspired demos.

Requires Shockwave.

Name: Metroid Cubed
Developer: Qubed Studios
Category: Platformer
Type: Browser

"In the 1990s, your humble correspondent spent some time working as Development Manager for legendary multi-platform game developers Sensible Software. During that time, Sensible created a game called Sensible Trainspotting, a fun simulation of the bizarre anorak's pastime to be given away for free on the coverdisk of games magazine Amiga Power. It was Sensible's last original game, and was intended as a little thank-you farewell gift to the company's many fans.

In 2003, a company called Demon Star released a game called Train Tracking. As a tribute, Train Tracking would be charming. It is, in every gameplay design and mechanical sense, a clear and exact copy of Sensible Trainspotting - only the graphics and presentation style have been altered. Sadly, however, Demon Star have no intention of paying any tribute to the game they're reprised. Their website presents the game as their own original work, going so far as to offer up a detailed story of how the game came into existence."

Read more

(Thank to Retro Remakes for this story)

According to a Gamasutra article written by Brandon Boyer, PopCap has recently acquired the Chicago-based developer Retro64. Founded by Mike Boeh in 2001, this creative development studio has produced Cosmic Bugs, Water Bugs and the recent PopCap hit Venice.

Mike Boeh is also heavily involved in the independent games industry, hosting both the popular IndieGamer forums and GameTunnel as well.

- Gamasutra article

In this Android remake, your robotic friend has been sent to shut down a nuclear reactor which is going to explode. You have to battle and blast your way through a myriad of mutant monsters, and when you reach the reactor to shut it down, you've got to make your way back to the screen where you started from.

The original game is absolutely awful, though, with ridiculously simple graphics and sound effects, and it's also too hard.

Name: Android
Developer: DevlSoft
Category: Action
Type: Freeware
Size: 3MB

Blazing Wings is a remake of the classic Atari shooter Wings of Death, and has been updated by Aligarion to version 0.6.1. The new version features a sixth playable level.

Aligarion reminds us to download the level six remixed music, by Nils Schneider, as well.

Name: Blazing Wings
Developer: Aligarion
Category: Shooter
Type: Freeware
Size: 5.6 MB (+ 40 MB for Music)

Sony Computer Entertainment has acquired rights to publish the IGF award-winning entry Everyday Shooter on the Playstation Network, due out very soon. The new version will run at 1080p and a consistent rate of 60 frames per second. According to Newsweek:

EveryDay Shooter is a twin-stick shooter. You steer your ship with the left analog stick and fire in whichever direction you push the right analog stick. You can simply shoot down all your enemies and collect the pixels they leave behind for points, but the most efficient way to take them out is to shoot the objects that trigger chain explosions. But each level not only looks completely different from the level that came before, it also has its own rules as to how its explosive chains work.

Best of all, the surreal graphics are vector-based, which means that they're created from mathematical equations; and every enemy you destroy plays a musical note or a riff which is layered on top of the default musical theme for the level. The whole thing adds up to a unique experience that requires your complete attention at the start of each level as you try to figure out its rules, then zone out once you know what you're doing.

- Read more
- Queasy Games web site
- Everyday Shooter preview
- Update: new Jonathan Mak interview

Raigan has confirmed it's awesomeness as well!

Chris Crawford's epic project to create a new type of computer entertainment which would be to games as food is to candy (to paraphrase him) is one step closer to fruition: Storytron has gone beta. Even if it's still a bit buggy...

For those not familiar with Chris Crawford, he founded the GDC, wrote the first book on game design, and created successful games for early personal computers, the Atari 2600, and the Mac, only to eventually leave game development for the more experimental enterprise of interactive storytelling.

Storytron may be difficult to understand. And, lacking a significantly sized demo storyworld it's hard for the casual observer to see what makes this engine any different from real-time multiple choice games like Masq, but I think it's something to keep an eye on or even play around with.

Entries for the GBAX 2007 Coding Competition are now available to download. This homebrew competition is in it's fifth year, and is proving the most fruitful. One can expect to find all sorts of homebrew games, applications, emulators and demos among the 60 entries developed with the DS, PSP and GP2X consoles in mind.

Some notable submissions include several remakes (e.g. Knight Lore, Ruck-Man, Blocked, Boomshine, Blast Riot), Sudoku clone (NDS), a tower defense game (Sqdef), a couple of scrolling shooters and even a Polarium remake (UNICOLOR, GP2X). For DS owners, there's a fully-working Genesis emulator which runs at 60fps and a TrueType eBook reader with anti-aliasing as well.

Breaking: EA Chief Executive John Riccitiello bluntly admits to the Wall Street Journal that the games his company and its major competitors make are boring people to death; he also says that those mainstream games are now less interesting than iPods and Facebook.

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble is an extremely unique game by Mousechief, who also made The Witch's Yarn. Set in the 1920s in a high school in the U.S. (with excellent writing in the style of that era).

You take control of a gang of girls and run around taunting, fibbing, flirting, and exposing secrets (each with a corresponding mini-game). This world of high school girls is not as easy a world as you'd think. The writing is excellent and the visual style is unique, one of the more creative and idiosyncratic games I've played this year.

The game is still in production, but due to be released soon.

The recently announced Cave Story PSP port is now playable from start to end, though the author of the project has stated that small bugs do exist due to the portable console's wider screen size.

Your PSP has to be capable of running homebrew to play this port. Supported firmware versions and known script bugs can be found in this handy readme file.

[download mirrors: Rapidshare, Mediafire, Filefront, original PC version]

Bound Bear is a small action game which resembles Mike Kasprzak's PuffBOMB, but with simplified game mechanics. In it, the player is required to guide a young bear towards it's larger brethen located on the other side of the screen. Use the left mouse button to set the direction and launch power, but beware as later levels will have destructible blocks which obstructs your direct path towards completion.

Collect a white bear with a square face to increase your life count by two. Both difficulty settings contain ten levels each. Extra lives do not appear as often in hard mode, while white blocks will generate after a short while as well.

Name: Bound Bear
Developer: GamePure
Category: Action
Type: Browser

Sound Energy is another action game by GamePure, creator of the Speed Cluster series and several other notable Flash releases. Click on the left mouse button to change the color of your circle, then collect the corresponding objects on screen to build your combo count. Energy is lost whenever your circle collides with an object that is of a different color.

A combo box appears when you have several combos going. Switching colors when your circles is hovering above any of these boxes will cause a variety of effects, dependent on your current combo count. Grey objects tend to chase after your circle. Blue circles float horizontally and red ones move vertically.

Name: Sound Energy
Developer: GamePure
Category: Action
Type: Browser

A couple of projects that may or may not see the light of day.

- Untitled Dash 'n Mash
- Dreams: Essenses of Life



Another teaser image from Lazrael pictured below. [web site]



Orange-Juice's Junpyon was retitled to A Diary of Little Aviator. This new vertical shooter by the creator of Suguri uses cel-shaded graphics, much like Karous and Radilgy.

WIP screenshots of a remake of Phoenix in development by Minion.

Shooters

Pug Fugly's Return to Sector 9 will be released next week.



More screenshots from X-0ut's horizontal shooter posted, recently confirmed as the sequel to Prototype. [download Prototype]



Reincarnation updated to version 0.3. [download page, instructions, review]

Remakes

Millenipede updated to version 1.1.0. [change list]

Two new screenshots from the upcoming Spindizzy remake posted.

On the left is a gameplay video from smila's IO remake, while the video pictured right is from the original C64 version. [IO remake preview]