By Jim Rossignol on December 9th, 2009 at 4:54 pm.
Having spotted this over on the almighty TIGSource I thought “looks interesting.” Having played it, I can now upgrade that to “is awesome.” Igneous is a kind of rock, which is interesting because Igenous rocks. Sorry. It’s actually a kind of Wipeout-with-a-jumping-head-meets-Sonic 3D. Something like that. It’s not easy, and you will plunge into magma. Oh, just go and play it, because everyone should. This fiery fruit of the Digipen Institute is 115mb, and can be obtained here.
Wipeout was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this screen shot. Certainly going to try this one when I get home.
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1st?! [No, and please do not do that here - RPS]
Looks cool. Downloading now :D
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Oh no first :S
But yeah, I did kinda like wipeout. Hope it takes the best bits and improves upon them.
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This game is just like escaping from a real vulcano: its dangerously exicting but incredible hard and frustating.
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I tried to download this the other day after LewieP mentioned it on his Twitter, but the download seems completely borked.
On Firefox, it just goes ‘unknown time remaining’ for the whole time, then finally comes up with a corrupted installer. What am I doing wrong?
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I played it a few months ago when it first came out though maybe it’s been updated since then.
I like the graphics and physics, but I found it to be rather frustrating. Especially towards the end it seemed like chance played a rather large role.
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I can see the ‘dangerously exciting but hard’ side of the similarity, but frustrating? I imagine the moment you spend having time to get frustrated in your magma-fleeing perambulation is a moment better spent NOT DYING.
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I caught this a couple months ago and thought it was really awesome, but pretty damn hard in quite a few spots. Addictive to a point, though it did eventually get frustrating.
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Since the download doesn’t really work, here is a downloak link I found on Destructoid: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=U1G3L6WR
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ok, now that was a short game :D
Played it on normal, because everyone said that it’s so hard, but only died once in the last level. Maybe it was easier because i used an xbox controller.
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Thank you! Can’t wait to give it a try.
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Holy hell, I can’t get past the bridge. After a while it gets so hectic I can’t even see my totem amid all the debris and explosions and always end up jumping straight into a hole or getting knocked out to the side.
Reminds me a bit of the hoverbike level in Battletoads, which is both good and bad.
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I also found the game to be incredibly difficulty and frustrating, in a “this is pretty unfair” way.
That’s before I realized that there’s a bug that sets the difficulty to “Impossible” after you make any kind of changes (screen resolution etc.)
So before you start complaining, make sure you’re not playing it on “Impossible,” because, well, it is.
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Thanks for the article Jim!
“That’s before I realized that there’s a bug that sets the difficulty to “Impossible” after you make any kind of changes (screen resolution etc.)”
Indeed, we’ve had a fixed build ready since like the day after the game was released, but DigiPen has yet to put it up =\
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Any plans to expand this into a full-fledged game? If this was a demo I’d have purchased the full version in a heartbeat after playing it.
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I really don’t understand why people complain about it being hard. At least not on normal difficulty (didn’t try impossible, since I wasn’t that excited about the gameplay). I finished it in about 15 minutes (and I don’t think I’m that good at games). The only thing needed is to retry until you finish it.
How easy do you want a game? Impossible to fail?
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because of the “impossible bug” mentioned above? ;-)
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I loved the visual style of this game. The actual GAMEPLAY was soooo simplistic, but man… those purty graphics and sense of speed! Very cool tech demo!
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OK, that is completely freaking awesome in every respect but one:
“Xbox 360 controller preferred”
Bad, BAD game developers. No cookie for you. Especially since it won’t even acknowledge the existence of my Logitech controller, so I’m left playing with the damned keyboard.
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Does this mean it’s made in XNA?
What’s with the recent trend that ONLY xbox360 controllers work in games? For decades we’ve been able to use any old serial/usb controller in dos/windows games… why are we suddenly unable to use them?
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I’m starting to think I should add “doesn’t respect my choice of controller” to the list of developer sins that prevent me from supporting a game. I really dislike this trend.
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Awesome! I mean, there’s a real danger of getting RSI because of the frantic space-bar usage and there’s bonus points for it being freely available with the other main negative being the ‘death’-thingie (is it possible to space-bar ones way through it? I admit I haven’t tried what with my wrist being rather abused by the game proper).
Difficult, yes, but it’s also challenging and not impossible. I also really like that, most of the time, you can see what’s happening and react to it (the bridge being a very good example what with the falling blocks and balls of fiery doom).
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Funny…I stopped playing when i died eight times in a row because a stone or laserray blocked my view.
Nonetheless ,all in all, a good Effort.
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I have two things to say about this game:
1) YOP
2) YUP
Impossible mode is hyperbole, but not by much. The bridge level was mostly luck on impossible.
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this is a really bad game.
which is, you know, to be expected for people going to school for this sort of thing. I especially enjoy the GIANT LETTERS explaining that this is a REAL GAME made by MEN who know how to CODE rather than gits working with middleware. Good job, boys. Now to find someone on campus with some design sensibilities.
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This was a fucking awesome experience.
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So glad you finally caught this. I put this up there with ‘Narbacular Drop’ as far as the potential it has to be turned into a masterpiece. The feeling of fight and flight is unparalleled. It felt like playing inside the very best parts of a hollywood blockbuster disaster movie but without the baggage of a lame duck story.
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fantastic that was, give it some time, add a few more stages and sell it…I’d happily buy it. And add different view filters, i.e. negative vision, inverted vision, that sort of thing, could be psychedelic!
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Fun little game. It seems very tough initially but once you get the hang of it, it’s not that tricky. Although admittedly a lot of that is learning the routes. I think it has potential for a 5- 10 quid game if the content was there.
The game gets a lot easier when you realise you can jump out of most deaths.
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That’s entirely up to who wants to pay us to do it ;)
We’d love to make a full game around this concept, but it’s all going to depend on what kind of opportunities come our way.
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Man, I’d pay for it.
That was a blast.
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That was crazy – I advise playing through on normal and then impossible, or just impossible until you can’t get any further and switch to normal. I did the latter, because of the bug which sets it to impossible after you change video settings.
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anyone else get the error dialog “Failure to it graphics: CheckDeviceType() has failed!” when trying to run the game? me = sad 8(
i’m running a fairly recent machine that can play Modern Warfare 2 a good fps with no problems. It has Windows XP, Intel Core Duo 2 2ghz, 2gb ram, gforce 9700 gt 512mb.
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That was a whole lot of fun. The sound design especially stood out for me. That coupled with the sense of velocity made for an exhilarating experience. And it felt FRESH. I really hope this gets developed into a fully fledged game, probably priced at 5-10$ as others mentioned, I’m sold on the concept and execution.
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Yeah, I would pay for it too. It was just so excitiong to play those 3 levels. For ~5 h game I definately would pay $10
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What would really be awesome is if this game had a Trackmania-style replay cam after each level. Especially one that would look backwards to show the lava gaining on you from behind.
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“What would really be awesome is if this game had a Trackmania-style replay cam after each level. Especially one that would look backwards to show the lava gaining on you from behind.”
We wanted to do this but unfortunately didn’t have time. I started work on it at one point but had to change my priorities =(
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I had to actually downgrade my NVIDIA drivers for my gforce 9600GT. I was running the most recent version (December): 195.62. I downgraded to the next lower version (October): 191.07. Now the game loads!
The game is one of the most polished, fun, exciting indy games i have ever played. Great job!
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GOOD GAME ! ! ! ! ! ! ! The Graphics is NICE ! ! ! !
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