By John Walker on January 30th, 2009 at 9:33 am.
Or AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity to give it its full title. If you want to be certain RPS will cover your game, you need a name like Robokill, or AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity.
This one, from Dejobaan Games (who brought us the lovely The Wonderful End Of The World), gets further points for me, since it features the primary reason I play many games: jumping off buildings.
It’s a base jumping simulator, with what they call “some imaginative physics”. The idea is to fall through targets very close to buildings, without slamming into them entirely. Extra points can be scored by offering thumbs up to people as you fall past them, or of course for flipping them off. This is all best demonstrated by the videos, below.
So there’s stunts, parachutes, leaping off buildings, flipping people off… yes please. No release date beyond “Q3 2009″ at this point.
30/01/2009 at 09:35 cliffski says:
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Q3 2009 is far too far away. This is an awesome idea for a game.
30/01/2009 at 09:51 Eamo says:
Isn’t this basically just a port of those crappy mobile phone parachute games that came on really early phones? [No, obviously not - Ed]
30/01/2009 at 09:55 Diogo Ribeiro says:
Who knew something like Pilotwing’s parachute stages crossed with elder harassment would please John’s virtua-suicidal persona?
30/01/2009 at 09:56 Albides says:
This is great! I can’t wait to play it!
Oh, and it’s worth sparing a word or two for what else these people have on their website! Like Blurst, they make me remember why I adore the PC so much. Mad and unadulterated brilliance.
30/01/2009 at 09:56 qrter says:
Really liked The Wonderful End Of The World, so I’ll have to keep an eye on this one.
30/01/2009 at 10:00 Mr Pink says:
I think that may be my favourite name for a game ever.
30/01/2009 at 10:01 Ian says:
This looks like a giggle.
And I need to have a look at “The Wonderful End Of The World” as I don’t remember hearing anything about it.
30/01/2009 at 10:03 pepper says:
We need more games concerning skydiving!
30/01/2009 at 10:09 Schtee says:
Dejobaan Games are such lovely, fun, crazy people. I look forward to giving this a once-twice-three-times-a-lady-over.
30/01/2009 at 10:13 Tei says:
On guy created a map for Quake1 with a building 1310720 stories tall (slighty larget than the real earth).
Check here:
http://telejano.berlios.de/option/bigevermap1.png
30/01/2009 at 10:19 mickiscoole says:
Or pilotwings. But this seems so much cooler.
30/01/2009 at 10:30 Schmung says:
This looks like a great laugh. Lovely.
I remember that mobile phone parachute game. Wonder if anyones updated it as I now have a an urge to play it – despite the fact that I’m pretty sure it’s crap.
30/01/2009 at 10:42 Ben Abraham says:
Quick! Somebody throw buckets of money at these people to make sure this game is birthed healthy and covered with delicious placenta!
30/01/2009 at 10:44 Five says:
is what comes to mind when I think of Base jumping.
Tei: what is that map called? I wanna see how long it takes to reach earth.
30/01/2009 at 11:03 Bassem B. says:
Dejobaan Games have been a favourite of mine, ever since Inago Rage blew me away with its simplicity and utterloads of fun. I also remember Epidemic Groove (especially the very pretty young lady within.)
Plus they’re wacky.
30/01/2009 at 11:05 Tei says:
@Five: here is the src map file.
http://urre.quakedev.com/stuff/spcscr.map
The binary version is something like “spcscr_test1.pk3″, but I failed to locate a valid download url.
30/01/2009 at 11:05 phuzz says:
I kinda remember an old Amiga base jumping game, where the first half was a platformer as you climbed up the building (with standard platform game stuff), then at the top you jumped of and had to avoid stuff on the way down, and as a multiplayer game you had to shove each other out the way etc. (great fun against brothers), last person to open their parachute at the end being the winner (assuming you didn’t splat of course), great times, does anyone else remember it?
Mooning people on the way down is made of win however, and I just imagine this with the graphics from Mirror’s Edge for some reason.
30/01/2009 at 11:16 Laco says:
I’ve gotta say I didn’t think much of TWEOTW – cool name, but it’s just too much of a Katamari clone.
I’ve loved Dejobaan since their Indie Superstar review show though, and AaaaaAAaa looks brilliant! Seems much more suited to the tone of the show too.
30/01/2009 at 11:16 FunkyB says:
@Five:
Base Jumpers! That game was pure gold. Leaping off a building wearing a Fez whilst it announces that one of you has underpants packed instead of a parachute.
30/01/2009 at 11:39 Markoff Chaney says:
The whole game looks fun and geared towards optimizers, which could lead for a good community. I like the different stances as they seem to change how you are falling and allow for more control.
Also, judging from prior outings, we should get a map editor which does wonders for the community as well. Galaxy Rage looks quite enjoyable too. I’ve been looking forward to that one as well… “It’s an open-ended first-person rock opera about the search for cultural identity in a post-Singularity future. It’s about action, music, civil rights, algorithmic worlds, and surrealism. And it’s about your friend Azad, the talking jellyfish.”
30/01/2009 at 13:00 Rob says:
I’m almost sure that the scream in the third video is taken from the Dark Mistress’s sound files in Dungeon Keeper. Not that I’m saying Dungeon Keeper did it before any other source, it’s just the first place I heard it.
30/01/2009 at 14:02 Doug F says:
Rob: Now I have this sudden urge to work the Wilhelm scream into any game I make.
30/01/2009 at 15:04 bansama says:
If this turns up on Steam like TWEotW did, I’m pretty sure Dejobaan will be getting more of money faster than I can scream, “AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! There goes my pay cheque. Again.”
30/01/2009 at 15:28 jonfitt says:
This looks like fun. Moving on from the prototype I’d like to see them adopt a strong art style grounded some way in future reality.
The floating building pieces don’t say “building” to me despite the textures, I see them as “generic racing obstacle blocks”. Think Mirror’s edge, but probably waaay further in the future so you can have kilometre high buildings. Perhaps a Taiwan/Bladerunner type aesthetic?
30/01/2009 at 15:44 AndrewC says:
I’m not sure what being grounded in a future reality means exactly, but i’d like them to base the art style around jumping off of Knickerbocker Glories. I won’t mind if the desserts are big, or if the person is small, because it will be the future.
30/01/2009 at 16:19 James Allen says:
Q3? Darn previews making me want things I can’t have.
30/01/2009 at 16:35 lumpi says:
That Katamari rip-off of theirs was pretty embarrassing, creatively. It was the first time I heard of that studio, so it left a certain aftertaste.
This looks promising, though.
30/01/2009 at 16:41 James Allen says:
The Wonderful End of the World was the low point for Dejobaan (low enough that I didn’t even bother requesting a review copy once I played the demo). Their previous two games (Inago Rage and Epidemic Groove) were much better, so I have higher hopes for this one.
30/01/2009 at 16:42 Rob says:
@Doug F
Heh, indeed. I remember the first time I realised that one of the combat noises in Civilization II was taken from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
30/01/2009 at 16:57 Rohit Shenoy (Dejobaan Games) says:
I opened my mailbox this morning and screamed AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! We were blown away by the overwhelmingly positive response and we are also taking the feedback very seriously, since we are only in alpha. Improving the graphics (Artists…) is #1 but we also have a few more tricks ;-) up our sleeves.
30/01/2009 at 16:58 Tei says:
The level where you was collecting words and letter was good ^H^H^H full of “win”.
30/01/2009 at 18:07 MacBeth says:
Rohit, I take it you’ve seen this video
Third person view would be cool, especially for various free-flying positions, and post-jump camera recordings that you can edit together much like in the linked video…
30/01/2009 at 18:20 Oddtwang of Dork says:
There’s an explosion from HL which I swear showed up on about 8 different TV adverts in around ’99 or something – kept driving me mad :)
30/01/2009 at 18:24 cyrenic says:
Kotaku’s article on this game stands as a humorously stark contrast to Kieron’s article: http://kotaku.com/5142870/dejobaan-games-announces-aaaaa-+-im-not-typing-that-out
30/01/2009 at 19:15 abase says:
You should check the game Vangers. It is old game from russian game dev company kdlab. developers of perimetr afaik. http://www.kdlab.com/vangers/eng/
31/01/2009 at 04:57 Greyface says:
Tei, you play WAR?
31/01/2009 at 05:00 Rohit Shenoy (Dejobaan Games) says:
Check out the Dejobaan blog where we will keep you updated as we work on graphics, gameplay, your ideas, and the playable beta! http://dejobaan.com/blog/
31/01/2010 at 14:47 Lilo says:
This is an awesome idea for a game.