John D. Moore (thesycophant), creator of freeware gem Caverns of Khron and steady contributor to Glorious Trainwrecks, has released a new game called Super Stone Ball, and it's won me over with its effortless mix of cleverness and charm. It's a small game, in screen resolution and in length, and it's the perfect size in which to thoroughly explore its central gameplay mechanic: turning to stone.

This was originally posted on my personal blog. The opinions expressed are my own and do not represent the opinions or values of my employer or their publishing partners.

One year ago, I released You Have to Win the Game. I thought it would be fun to take a look back at the development of that game and everything else I’ve been up to since then. Fair warning: this is going to be really self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, self-serving, self-etc. I’m also going to discuss ending spoilers. You’ve been (fairly) warned.

Mr. Rescue is a freeware arcade action game centered around evacuating (throwing) civilians from burning buildings. Players must avoid overheating and decide quickly if extinguishing fires are worth depleting slowly regenerative water resources. While regeneration sounds like it simplifies things, some fires will aggressively pursue you. The flames may look cute, but they can get you to game over in a flash.

The following is a distilled version of Naramura-san's talk at GDC 2013, accompanied by his own hand-drawn slides from the presentation. Naramura-san’s presentation starts with a very interesting slide.

After Phil Fish's harsh criticism of Japanese gaming last year, Naramura decided to try and address it himself. The answer he came up was perhaps not what others expected: "Well said."

Innovation for innovation's sake is a most tiring concept, though many still believe that anything new is by definition great and exciting. Well, Nazis were pretty new back in the 1930s and we all know where that went... Anyway. Point is I usually prefer the subtle kind of innovation that doesn't scream new game mechanic and instead decides to focus on refining concepts and ideas, and apparently that's exactly what Cheap Drunk Games are trying to achieve with Alone In The Park. It will, you see, be a most intriguing text/graphic-adventure hybrid starring a misanthropic gamer forced to embark on a real life quest and I'm definitely (deeply too) excited. Must have been that brilliantly sarcastic song in the trailer.

Alone In The Park will be released on the 15th of June for iPad, Mac, Windows and Linux.

Ludum Dare 26 entry Fragments of Him is a point and click experience that I didn't expect to move me as much as it did. The playable man character tries to cope with losing his lover in a car accident by removing everything from his life that is reminiscent of him. The yellow bar shortens as the player click-erases those painful memory-triggering items.

In my exploration of the entries for the Ludum Dare 26 competition I've run into a number of rather innovative little games. Zip by developer Chronodrax is definitely among them. This short browser game tasks players with navigating through a world of multicolored platforms by stealing the color of whatever one you're currently standing on, which in turn allows you to fall through it. The premise sounds simple, but since the game features some clever level design there's a decent challenge to it - and by the end I was hoping for more!

[By Enrique Dryere]

Valve hosted a developer chat today, which brought a whirlwind of ideas and discussion. Here are some of the biggest points that were covered throughout the 1 hour chat in condensed form. This information was compiled from both developers and Valve employees:

On the topic of whether developers could gain access to the Steamworks API prior to being greenlit:

This seems to be one of the focuses for Steam and Greenlight as it moves forward. Although there is "no timeframe yet," TomB [Valve] has stated they are actively looking into it. He reiterated that Gabe Newell has talked about moving towards an open platform.

Although developers may be able to use Steamworks, whether or not their games will only show up in Greenlight, through searches, or on the main page is still not decided. Alden [Valve] said "There's a lot of unknowns and a bunch of work to get there, so we'll see the systems evolve over time as we iterate and make progress in that direction."

João Brant emailed to tip us off about his Ludum Dare 26 competition entry, My Peculiar Car. The name didn't grab me, but the game certainly did. My Peculiar Car is an extremely clever little puzzle-driving game (is that a genre?) The central mechanic is one I've never seen before: Using the arrow keys (or WASD), you control the steering and the gear shifting at the same time. Can you get to the city fast enough to save your best friend?

It's not often that we see a video game in which a classical instrument is the controller -- but then Cello Fortress is quite unlike any game we've seen before.