In the category of games you should definitely not play with a bad eye infection is Beat Hazard. It’s a completely insane shoot’em up in the vein of Geometry Wars but the levels are in fact MP3 tracks from your computer. As the intensity of the music increases so too does the firepower of your ship and the amount of enemies. There is a free demo on Steam but the full game is only £6.99 and seems well worth it!
I can strongly recommend
Cochise – Audioslave (the bit where they guitars kick in at the start is just awesome)
Waters of Nazareth – Justice (this is really hard because of the fast beat all the way through)
Welcome Home – Coheed and Cambria (Very long and challenging – lots of tempo changes keeps it fresh)
Technologic – Daft Punk (nice build up, gets harder and harder as it goes on)
Jolls is a physics-puzzler that has you placing the given Jolls on the level in such a way as to collect all the like color Jolls trapped in bubbles. Some of the later levels get kind of tricky, but there are really only a few options, so you can usually work out the order / where you have to place things to beat the level.
This post certainly has the potential to be hilarious as I am a) 7 pints in and b) on a train typing on my iPhone.
Angry Birds on the iphine is great!! I downloaded it thanks to iTunes suggesting it wa s one of the most downloaded it and it really doesn’t ddisapoint. It’s very similar to ( one might even say a rip off of) crash the Castle a flash and iPhone game in which you must time the launch of rocks from a trebuchet to inglict massive damge on an array of increasingly tough castles.
Angry Birds tasks you with killing pigs surrounded by fortresses by launching birds at them with a catapult.
It’s totally addictive and thanks to the graphics and sound it’s hilarious and charming too!
You can it now on the iPhone app store fr a mere 59p or you can play Crash the Castle for free on kongregate.
Om nom nom nom! This little flash game is probably the cutest I’ve ever played! It’s very similar to Peggle both in terms of it’s mechanics and it’s addictiveness!
Just a quick note to say that Scrap Metal the Micromachinesesque top down racer from the developer of the superb N+ has been released on XBLA. As a big fan of the genre, I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. I’ll update with impressions when I’ve had a chance to play it!
I’m also very aware that the XBLA tag in the tag cloud seems to be growing much faster than all the others…
I often find myself whining about “new games”, it normally goes something along the lines of why don’t they concentrate on gameplay as opposed to high end graphics, of course I am basically referring to in my mind “the golden age of gaming”- the Megadrive and Snes era. Perhaps it’s me reminiscing wildly about my childhood but I can still happily sit down and play through Earthworm Jim or Streets Of Rage 2 of an evening and feel gleefully fulfilled. No over the top cutscenes, no fancy lighting effects and dynamic 3dee just good old fashioned gameplay.
Then, something happened on XBLA. 4 magical knights arrived on the scene, in the form of Castle Crashers.
Seriously go check out the trailer, it’s amazing – the music and graphics are just out of this world no wonder it’s been nominated for Exellence in Visual Art by the IGF.
Wow that’s a lot of links!
Owlboy is due for release on XBLA and PC at some point…
Oh wow! This new trailer for Shank is just awesome. It seems to combine Steets of Rage with Earthworm Jim and … well I’ll let the trailer talk for itself! Good work Klei and congrats on signing with EA Partners.
Greed Corp is a hex based turn based strategy game out now for download on XBLA and PSN and coming soon to Windows PC. The game supports up to 4 players locally or online and features AI players if you don’t have any (or enough!) friends.
While at a first glance Greed Corp appears to be fairly simple (compared to other games in it’s genre) with a limited number of units and fairly small maps, a closer inspection reveals a ton of hidden depth. The objective of each game is to be the last man standing and this is no small task as a result of a very interesting and unique gameplay mechanic that means the battlefield is constantly shrinking through the course of the battle.
In what seems to be a very noble cause a number of Indie game creating veterans, including World of Goo creators Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler and Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, have started up a new project called Indie Fund. The project “aim’s to support the growth of games as a medium by helping indie developers get financially independent and stay financially independent.”
Apparently they are already funding an undisclosed number of projects and will be announcing more information at GDC.
It certainly sounds like something that could potentially be very good for indie games as a whole although you have to wonder – once you have an organisation offering funding at what point does an independent lose it’s independence.
