By Quintin Smith on June 24th, 2011 at 3:44 pm.
Pay-what-you-want absurdo-pretty ball racing game Proun has been released!
You can get it now! You can pay what you want! You probably want to buy this one, and for those of you who can’t remember why, I’m going to post the amazing trailer again.
UPDATE: OK I’ve posted my capsule review of Proun after the jump.
Wot I Think: Proun
I am a leaf on the wind ball on a pipe – watch how I soar.
Buy Proun.
What a wonderful trailer.
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It’s a wonderful game. I got it for free, but now realise the foolishness of this and will pay some monies towards the game.
Yes. I dropped the ball on this one.
It’s funny because the balls don’t drop no matter what you do.
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It’s a beautiful trailer of a beautiful game. And with a pay-what-you-want policy too, it’s the icing on the cake.
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I would like this to be my mode of transport thoughout the world, instead of cars etc. just hop in a ball thing and roll there. I know it’s stupid but the game is amazing.
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Brilliant capsule review, paid £% for it myself, just did the first championship race thing. I was terrible, but this game is sooo gooood.
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They seriously need to remove “donation” wording from their shop, right now. They’re going to get screwed if Paypal catch on, just like every other indie game does when they put “donation” in the payment description. You’re purchasing a product, it’s not a donation, even if it is “pay what you want”.
If they don’t I give it a week before they’re crying in public about it. Lessons are never learned.
Also game looks awesome :D
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Really? Care to give details? I hadn’t heard of any problems with PayPal because of ‘donation’ wording …
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He’s referring to the Project Zomboid thing – but that was totally different.
In that case they were ‘selling’ a pre-order and giving nothing immediately – this is the excuse PayPal made for ditching them (it was really “give us money and you might get something later” which is slightly dodgy),
I’ve run sites with ‘donationware’ available using PayPal for over 5 years and we’ve been suspended and reviewed ONCE in that time (site was back inside 5 days) – so long as you make it CLEAR what people are paying for/that they’re making a genuine ‘donation’ – you’ll be fine (mostly).
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It was Google Checkout. Not Paypal. Paypal doesn’t have such a clause in their user agreement.
A 2 minute Google search can illuminate most things so one does not need to speculate or assume.
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About the only way to get Paypal to do a ‘pay what you want’ button is to set it up as a donation, which their payment system explicitly has controls for. Shouldn’t be a problem.
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Notice the torrent in the official page, so you don’t have to use their stupid store if you want to download it for free.
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I bought this yesterday. It’s incredibly pretty, smooth , it has great picture quality (some games have jaggies even with AA), it runs great and supports my Xbox pad right of the bat.
This is how you do it people.
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Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone could help me out.
Quinn’s enthusiasm has compelled me to Proun’s website, but as I am located in China the download page is completely impenetrable to me. Could someone tell me what they are asking for in each of the fields?
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If it’s this page you mean:
https://sites.fastspring.com/oogst3d/order/customer
… it’s asking for:
First and Last Name
Email Address
Mailing Address (drop down)
Town / City
Address
County
Postcode
Is this what you mean?
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You, good sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.
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Great game, great dev – a really nice showing for the Ogre crowd :)
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Wait a minute… This is a game made with the Open Source OGRE engine/toolset?
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Torchlight and some other well known games do, as I recall, but the specifics escape me. OGRE is a reeeally nice engine and toolset, and I’m absolutely amazed that it’s not used more often. To be honest, I’d love to see them do a web plugin a la Unity3D, as perhaps that way it’d really take off. (I feel that OGRE is every bit as good as Unity if the whole web browser thing is taken out of the equation.)
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Out of curiosity, those of you who are paying for it, how much did you value it at? I was looking at the £6.99 mark.
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Personally I tossed 5€ (plus 1€ in taxes) their way since I was buying it blind (so, about 5£/8$). Based on the amount of content the game has, this seems about right.
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I paid £2. There are only 5 tracks at the moment (4 if you don’t pay), but there should be some user made ones available soon, £2 really is quite low. Also, the paid for track is easily the best. Managed to set the top speed on Sonic speed :D
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Wow, they’re not kidding when they say Pay What You Want. Even a torrent for free, if you feel like it.
I have a feeling that this game will have wonderful speedruns on Youtube soon
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It looks like the kind of game where I’ll play it blurry eyed and occasionally incredibly pleased with myself for pulling something off, heart pounding and relief shining in my eyes.
Slung ‘em some notes, why not, more of this kind of stuff, ta games industry.
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I might buy it just for the music.
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I shall play this with wide fevered eyes, blurry from concentration, yet occasionally I shall feel bursts of relieved achievement as I wheel past some tricky obstruction.
Slung ‘em some money, why not, more of this kind of thing, ta
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More of this please <3 thx u devs :D
Will pay for more maps.
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Is anyone else reminded of F-Zero X on the N64?
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YOU GOT BOOST POWER
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For me, it’s reminiscent of Ballistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistics_(video_game)), but on the tunnel instead of inside it.
Really loved that game, it was incredibly FAST.
I haven’t unlocked super high speeds in Proun, anyone knows if it reaches that kind of speeds?
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It makes me think of a 3d version of Uniracers actually. The visual design seems kinda similar.
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Uniracers was exactly what I was thinking of, but I couldn’t remember the name. Thanks for that!
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Is that the trailer music emblematic of the actual in-game music? Because if so that’s a definite plus.
Really like that trailer … it’s got style.
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That is actual in-game music.
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Oh I’m sold.
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So a free download representing a large portion of a commercial product? Someone oughta come up with a word for that.
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It’s like shareware++. It’s shareware, but better.
—
Also, large portion is slightly misleading. It’s 80% of the entire game, which is a lot more than shareware has ever offered. The standard for shareware has always been somewhere between 20 and 40% of a game but never more than that. And I have fond memories of that era and played so much shareware.
What’s funnier is that some of the demos of that era were even bigger than the shareware chunks. Albion had a massive demo. Demos these days tend to be about 5% of the game or less.
So… shareware++.
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It seems like the difference is just a single track.
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Added in the wrong place! Deleted!
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Recommendation: Use the torrent as a demo. I like the art style, I like the music, I like the distribution model, I liked the trailer, but the game itself doesn’t do much for me.
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This is a fantastic job application.
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He has a job. This was apparently a pet project he worked on independently of that, though.
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So where is the pr0n?
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Downloaded it for free, played one race, bought it for $5.
I love how beautiful the game looks on maximum settings and I especially love how my 5 year old laptop can run it on maximum settings with great FPS. Looking forward to playing some races against my friends using xbox controllers.
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lll buy it just for that Firefly reference.
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At the *very* great risk of sounding like a right grump….. I don’t like it. I mean, I appreciate the technical skill involved in it’s creation (by god I appreciate that) but it just doesn’t tick my box. It doesn’t really do much for my box at all really.
To put it another way, the original PS1 Wipeout, yes it had an entire team behind it, yes it undoubtedly had gazzilion dollar budgets, but it was out SIXTEEN YEARS ago – which is basically the Jurassic period – and I still think it plays infinitely better than this.
Could I do better? Nope. Like I say, the skill and dedication involved is not in the slightest bit lost on me. Part of me just thinks – how did this get beyond the “freebie throwaway Flash game” stage?
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As a massive WipEout fan… I… kind of fail… really… to see how this can be compared to WipEout. Not that this is better or that WipEout is worse, but it’s chalk and cheese. It’s sort of like comparing Mario to Sonic. Yeah, sure, there are similarities, but can you directly compare 2D Mario to 2D Sonic?
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Everyone! Play this in 3D! It’s amazing! Even the menus are incredible.
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It’s a great game, but you have to practice a lot in order to get good at it.
I don’t know about you guys, but smacking on a wall and coming to a complete stop is like a mental tick in my brain. My lack of skill irritates me!
At least in wipeout, you can glance off the walls without having to come to a complete stop.
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Not only do you come to a complete stop, but you also lose all the turbo that had been charging. So the turbo doesn’t even work as a catch-up mechanism if you make a mistake.
That, and the fact that the levels don’t tie into the music rhythmically (imagine if they did, like Audiosurf only prettier!) together convinced me not to get it. It’s an uninspired racing game mechanically, with its main selling point–the pretty, abstract visuals–not enough to redeem it.
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freeloaded it… It’s got a lovely graphical style but i cant see myself playing it much unless i can find a local lsd dealer.
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why – is he into co-op racing stuff???
or are you feeding drugs to Norman Wisdom again…
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A proper game requiring practice and skill to get the best out of it. Just like … Wipeout.
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Hurrah! I’m finally able to purchase this!
Music is fantastic.
Edit:
Oh my word, this game makes me absurdly angry.
Maybe angry isn’t the right word. Passionate would probably be more accurate.
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That really is most excellent, such that words are insufficient to express the joy. Thank you RPS for the wonders you deliver unto us.
However: how the bloody hell has someone done the 2nd track in 0:22. That’s just what I don’t even
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My wife never plays computer games. I just raced my wife for half an hour in split screen and we had a blast.
Off to send some €s the dev’s way.
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It’s Prune, right? Just struck me it could be Prown. Or even Prone. Prawn? It should definitely be Prune.
I quite like it, but Vinraith’s right – probably best tried for nothing rather than bought because it’s pretty and has an easy listening soundtrack. It’s incredibly slight by design, so it’s not going to amuse you for long unless you’re into shaving hundredths off your best time while pushing to the back of your mind any thought that it’d be quicker just to write a macro to play it perfectly for you.
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Definitely paid some money (€3) for it. Kept me entertained for an hour already, even if it falls flat now … money well spent.
Looking forward to local co-op with some friends.
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Boughtboughtbought. I typically give much more for pay-what-you-want games than I actually value them, because I really want to encourage usage of the system. Devs: Piracy exists, and it’s stronger than you. Pay-what-you-want gives convenience and real value to your product.
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Proun is fun but it’s not as compelling as Lattice 200EC7 which, sadly, no-one else in the world will have heard of. Except Proun’s developers, it seems…
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gonna try it, i do hope it gets on steam so i can give them my money
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It’s clearly visible how many people have paid. For most tracks there are in the thousands of high scores. For the bonus track only a couple of hundred.
A shame, in my opinion. It’s clearly solid enough to be worth paying for.. at least the very minimum (two euros).
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I feel shame I only paid the minimum amount. Ok, it’s not a massive amount of content, but already I can see me playing this for quite a while, at least until I throw the pad away in disgust at my reaction times. I am actually wondering how hard creating new tracks will be though.
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I am bad at this game because I go “oh look at that pretty thing racing towards me ouch” a lot.
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I’m glad they included a torrent because I see no reason why I have to give them my name, number, address, city, region and postal code just to buy something I can just download. Such a shame, that.
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This game…. is art. Poetry is the best way to review it.
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leaf on the wind…. leaf on the wind…
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Norton AntiVirus deleted proun.exe when I tried to run it, saying it was acting suspiciously. Didn’t give me any choice in the matter. Anyone else had a similar problem?
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The fact that it was an unfamiliar app and goes online to check hi-scores probably set the AV off.
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There’s already a quite-good user-made track available to download from his site. I can see modders making some amazing tracks for this.
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Pro…noun?
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The website is being absoutely annihilated right now, so here’s a magnet link to the torrent.
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High score server is down anyway, so you can only play one track before the game stops working..
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Yeah, that’s a massive failing in the game. The worldwide high score thing is really not a big deal for me anyway (I know I’m not the best in the world at something I’ve played one race of) but even if it was I still want to be able to play locally until the server comes back.
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I wish every game with a global high-score-list would steal Space Chem’s idea of showing you it as a bar-graph. It feels so much more meaningful than just saying “You’re the 82,635,843,791th best player in the world”.
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Agreed – there’s really no excuse for having the game break when the high score server is down. I mean, unless he intends to keep that thing running forever, that basically means the game was designed with some unknown expiration date beyond which nobody can play it. Hopefully he’ll patch around that soon.
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Just tell your firewall not to let the game talk to the internet and you’ll have no problems other than not being able to compare your high score with the rest of the world.
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Chromadrome is another fun little sphere-racing game that’s a little bit like Proun.
http://www.alpha72.com/Chromadrome2/chromadrome_2.htm
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It’s pretty fun, but I think the visuals are more interesting than the game really.
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